Exceptional The Sides family has it's root in Germany Pioneers of My People : A Jewish/German Connection by BethShelby

Sarah Elizabeth Sides was my mother's great-grandmother, but Mother only knew of her through her father, who told her there was Jewish blood in the family. Sarah was born in what is now Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1811. She was the daughter of James Sides. Back then much of Louisiana was considered Spanish West Florida. I wish I could sum up how this came to be, but I'm not sure I understand it myself. Thomas Jefferson had hoped he was buying the New Orleans and Baton Rouge Areas when in 1802, he purchased from France 827,000 sq. miles of land West of the Mississippi River reaching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada in what was known as the Louisiana Purchase. Borders were uncertain, and Louis and Clark needed time to survey and map the newly acquired US territory. It was found that a large part of the area remained under the control of Spain, including, West Florida, Mobile, Natchez and good portions of Louisiana and Texas. When Sarah was two, her grandfather, Peter Sides, was 62 years old. Peter, who was born in North Carolina in 1752, had moved his family into the Spanish territory where they now lived. He had a large tract of land in Terrebonne Parrish on which he operated a plantation with slave labor. I visualize Peter as a strong-willed, hot-headed man who often acted without having a firm plan in mind. Peter had fought in the American Revolution and in several other wars, and he considered himself a military leader. When he learned Spanish forces were advancing into the area around the Alamo, Peter headed to Texas to lead troops against the advancing forces. Around 1,400 men had joined him with the intention of going up against the better trained 1,800 soldiers led by the Spanish military leaders. The armies met near the Medina River about 20 miles from San Antonio in August of 1813. Peter's poorly trained troops were no match for the Spanish Army. The battle was over in four hours. Only about a 100 of Peter's men were left alive. Peter lost his own life, as well. The Spanish Army only lost 55 men. The Battle of Medina was the bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil. The Spanish government refused to allow the men's bodies to be retrieved. They lay on the field where they died for nine years. Peter Sides was no hero. He had gone to battle at age 63 without the support of his family. Neither his family, nor the state of Texas ever wanted to talk about what happened on that battlefield. In 1819, after years of negotiations, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved a diplomatic coup with the signing of the Florida Purchase Treaty, which officially put the lands known as Spanish West Florida into U.S. hands. If you are wondering about the Jewish blood mentioned earlier in this story, we need to go back to the early roots of this family as far back as 1500s in the Palatinate part of what is now Germany. Although I'm not sure exactly when the Seitz family first entered Germany, I believe they were Jewish at the time of their arrival. The Seitz family name was changed to Sides to sound more English after the family had been in America for a while. There had been Jewish people in Germany since the year 321. Persecution of the Jews began with the first crusades in 1096 and continued throughout the years. While the Seitz nationality is of Jewish origins, apparently the family no longer held to the Jewish traditions. When Johann Peter Seitz, born in 1684, came to America in 1727, he was part of a group of German immigrants brought from Rotterdam on the ship, William and Sarah. He and his wife were among 400 members of a German Reform Church led by George Michael Weiss making the journey. They left the Palatinate to escape persecution. Not only was there religious persecution, but Germany was trying to rid the country of all full blooded Jews. Weiss brought the group into Pennsylvania where he organized a Dutch Reform church at Shippack in Montgomery County. Johann Peter Seitz and his wife, Anna Christina Reinhardt were the grandparents of the Peter Sides who lost his life in the Battle of Medina in Texas. Peter's granddaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Sides, who I mentioned earlier, was the daughter of James Sides and Dorothea Key. James and Dorothea only had two girls. Sarah's sister, Mary Polly Sides was a year younger than Sarah. The family left the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana and moved into Mississippi where Sarah met Louis Bruce McClendon, a 22-year man of Scottish decent. She was only 15 when they married. The two of them had 10 children. One of Sarah's daughters, Nancy McClendon, married Lewis Simpson Lay, and they were my great-grandparents and the parents of my grandfather, Robert Lay. Mary Polly, Sarah's younger sister, married a man named James Shelton when she was 17. She died young when their only child, a daughter, was a year old. Dorothea and James Sides, her grandparents were granted custody of the child and raised her. The girl, Susannah Shelton, married into the Simmons side of my genealogy. If you live in the South, your heritage can become a bit complicated. Sarah and Lewis McClendon became charter members of the Bethel Baptist church in Newton, Mississippi, the town where I grew up. Until I did some research on this family, I often wondered why someone who claimed to be Jewish was okay with joining a Baptist church. I now understand her family was Jewish in ethnicity only. The religious and traditional parts of their heritage were several generations in the past.

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