About Faith
Meet Faith’s family ~ my son Todd, my eldest daughter Shawn, my late
husband Richard, me, and my youngest daughter Holly
Our 50th Wedding Anniversary
Personal and professional background:
Publications BIRTH September 2011 – A Time-traveler’s Perspective on Normal Childbirth: BIRTH-PracPerspective_MyArticle_Sept11_2011
Professional background:
Former Labor & Delivery and ER Nurse, mother of 3, professional midwife, grandmother of 2, birth educator, long-time advocate for normalizing childbirth, web-wife, aspiring harpist, licensed hang-glider pilot, Chair of the Midwifery Advisory Council, California Medical Board (2007-2010). Resigned from the Council on March 15, 2013 to devote myself to the legislative effort of restoring the legacy practice of midwifery to its traditionally independent status.
Personal, Family and religious Background:
One side of our family are Mennonites from Switzerland by the last name of Shantz (originally spelled Tschantz) on my mother’s side. My father’s side of the family came from English Quakers. My great-grand mother Frances married Charles Wesley Boone, who was direct descendant of one of Daniel Boone’s many brothers.
My maternal ancestors (Shantz) are Mennonites going back to the 16th century in the area of Bern, Switzerland. Because of religious persecution they migrated to Holland (which is a providence in the Netherlands) in 1723. During this dark period of history, anyone who refused to attend mass every Sunday, profess allegiance to the Pope, and tithe to the Roman Catholic Church risk torture and death and having his entire families were killed.
Fifteen years later 20 “co-religionists”, including my 8th grandfather Joseph Shantz, emigrated to America to escape religious persecution. by crossing the stormy Atlantic aboard a ship named the Townshead, landing in Philadelphia the summer of 1737. They settled in Montgomery Country, Pennsylvania in 1759.
As pacifists who declined to fight in the Revolutionary War, there was a lot of prejudice against them, as many of their neighbors thought they were English sympathizers and considered them to be traitors . So in the early 1800s, my ancestor made arrangements to purchase land in what was then called “Upper Canada“, the part now known Ontario.
In 1806, the Shantz’s became on of five ‘pioneer’ families that negotiating a treaty to buy land in Canada from the native indian inhabitants (First Nation) in the area that become the Waterloo and Woolwich townships.
These five pioneer families traveled by Conestoga wagons over the Allegheny Mountains, a trip of 500 miles that took approximately 3 months. While traveling thru American Indian country in a mountainous area, one of their 3-old little boys became lost. Everyone looked for him for several days, with the men and older boys combing the hills around their encampment.
Unfortunately, no trace of the child was ever found and the wagon train had to move on without knowing if the lost son had been kidnapped by indians, or merely wondered off to either fall victim to wild animals or die slowly of exposure and starvation.
After arriving in this area of Upper Canada, they settle the farming area around the modern-day city of Kitchner (called Berlin until the WWI) and Waterloo. Our Canadian Mennonite relatives have lived in that of part of Ontario for 207 years.
Faith Gibson – 1992; Mennonite plain dress and traditional head covering,
Family History continued:
My paternal ancestors (Boone) immigrated from England in to the US in the mid-1700s. My great grandfather (Charles Wesley Boone) was a direct descendent of Daniel Boone’s brother Charles. In the late 1800s, they lived in the Maysville area of Kentucky.
In 1899 my great-grandmother, Frances Martha Boone, was suddenly widowed while pregnant with her 5th child. She found herself penniless and responsible for feeding and housing herself and four children and so entered into a ‘marriage of convenience‘.
She and the children all lived with an older man who own and ran a boarding house. In return for providing room and board for her, the four older children and the new baby (my grandmother), she and the kids cooked for the boarders and kept up the rooming house.
Shortly before my grandmother’s birth in 1900, my great grandmother mother attended a presidential campaign rally where Teddy Roosevelt spoke. She was so impressed, that she named my grandmother ‘Roosevelt’, but like the president, she was always called Teddy.
😉 Work-n-progress 😉 April 29, 2013
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