It’s a fine story. But it may be nothing more than that. A story. A colorful story.

And here is how it goes: My siblings and I … all direct descendants of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A Founding Father. A fun “fact”.

The story has been repeated since I was a child. But is it true?

After decades of wondering, I think I have an answer.

This line of descent, if it is one, extends back through my mother’s father, one Edward Lewis Smoot.

My uncle has a box of old family letters and documents. While visiting him and my aunt in California for most of week in the summer of 2011, I studied all the papers in their possession.

Tracing backwards into history, it looks like this:

My mother and her brother were the only children of Edward Lewis Smoot. and Natalie Drinkard.

The former grew up in the Virginia/Maryland area around the turn of the 19th century, before the whole family moved to Southern California in the first decade of the 20th century. They may have moved to SoCal for health reasons; a sister died young from the disease and around 1900 it was believed that a warm, dry climate was better for tuberculosis patients. Inland Southern California fills the bill.

They first went to Imperial County, a swath of desert on the border of Mexico. Edward Lewis Smoot (not to be confused with his father, Edward Louis Smoot) seems to have spent his time in the area up till World War I, when he and two of his brothers were cavalry men in the Army, from 1917-18.  But it is not known if they saw any action or even shipped out for France, where the war was being decided.

The family father was the aforementioned Edward Louis Smoot, who was born in 1857, and his wife was one of several children (and apparently the only daughter, Alice) of a Samuel Magruder, born in 1836.

Samuel Magruder is a bit notorious because he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1861, when 11 southern states seceded from the Union, touching off the Civil War.

In April of that year, Magruder resigned his commission as an officer in the U.S. Army (this document is in my uncle’s possession) to join up with the Virginia militia, eventually serving in the Army of Northern Virginia commanded by Robert E. Lee.

This Magruder may have risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army. That is the story, but I have not seen documentation for it. He survived the war but died in 1870, when he would have been no more than 34 years old.

His father was Fielder Magruder, who was born in 1798, and this is where it gets interesting, in terms of Founding Fathers.

Fielder Magruder had married a Carroll, a daughter of the most prominent Maryland family, who could trace their origins to Ireland.

(The Carrolls were Roman Catholics, and Charles Carroll was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.)

The Carroll who married Fielder Magruder was the daughter of one Patrick Carroll, a member of the extended Carroll/Maryland clan headed by Charles Carroll, one of the richest men in America during the Revolutionary War.

The Smoots were a fairly large family by the 1800s, according to letters written by descendants early in the 20th century. One branch of the family became Mormons and went to Utah. One of them was elected to the U.S. Senate and became co-author of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, still studied in U.S. history.

Now we are at the crucial point in the narrative, because Patrick Carroll is only one generation removed from Charles Carroll, the Declaration signer.

However, it appears that Patrick Carroll is the only son of Thomas Carroll, no doubt a prominent guy in his day, but only the brother of Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The documents seem clear to me. And, not claiming direct descent from Charles Carroll, but from his brother, seems the sort of “to tell the truth” detail that makes the whole story more likely.

Thus, my siblings and I … related to, but not descended from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland.

So close!

Tracing these sorts of things can be very interesting, as you get a sense of families’ fortunes rising and ebbing.

Were the Magruders really important people in the 1800s, along with the Carrolls? Or did Fielder Magruder make a social jump by marrying the grand niece of Charles Carroll? (The latter, by the way, was the last living signer of the Declaration. He died in 1832, at the age of 95.)

We can be fairly certain, two generations later, that Edward Louis Smoot climbed a bit socially when he married the daughter of Samuel Magruder, who in the 1870 census was adjudged to own land worth $20,000 — a significant amount of money, in 1870.

One of their sons, my grandfather, was an interesting and semi-mysterious (to me) character. He died in 1972, but I never met him.

I had never seen a photo of him until last August, when my uncle produced two. In each of them, my grandfather is holding my uncle, who is quite young. That would place the photos in the late 1930s or early 1940, and by then my grandfather — former World War I cavalryman, former ranch hand, former tractor driver, former sheep rancher — would have been approaching ago 40 and my grandmother (a Georgia native whose family moved to California during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was no more than 18.

In the late 1930s, my grandfather and a partner were running a tungsten mine in or near the Mojave-desert town of Randsville. They may have owned it. They may have employed 25-30 miners.

At any rate, there was an explosion in the mine, and my mother, who was six at the time, said she still remembers a siren wailing at the mine, across the road from their house.

My grandfather survived, but he sustained serious brain injuries, and a few years later was committed to a veterans hospital in California.

My uncle often visited him, and said his father seemed happy enough, though he didn’t really recognize him. Edward Lewis Smoot spent the last 32 years of his life institutionalized and, my uncle said, “somehow seemed to live on Coke and chocolate.”

A side note. My grandfather on my father’s side was in the U.S. navy during World War I, and was stationed in the Seattle area. In 1918 or 1919, he came down with the Spanish flu, which was sweeping the globe, and became badly ill.

The story told had been that my maternal grandfather was a male nurse in the Washington hospital at that time, when my paternal grandfather would have been a patient there. (“Small world,” was the sort of comment made in the past half-century.)

However, according to my uncle, it was one of Edward Lewis Smoot’s brothers, who was a nurse in the military hospital.  (Another near-miss in family oral history.)

In the two photos of my maternal grandfather, he appears to be a slight, wiry man. Someone who could be imagined in the cavalry.

In one photo he looks a bit like Will Rogers. In the other, he looks a bit like Lee Harvey Oswald.

In either case, he was almost the great-great-great grandson of Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Making my generation almost the great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland.