Frances Arnold Family History

North Carolina.  James Lee Arnold was born in North Carolina, probably in Craven county, around 1794.  He was the son of James and Dorcas Arnold.

His grandfather Arthur Arnold had fought in the Revolutionary War and then been killed in a skirmish near Charlotte in 1784.  It looks likely that this Arthur was descended from the well-known Arnolds of Rhode Island.

Tennessee.  James the father – orphaned after his father had died – brought his family to Rutherford county in mid-Tennessee around 1804.  He died there in 1808.  His son James Lee fought in the War of 1812 and married Malinda (Milly) Gilliland, also from North Carolina,  in 1815.

According to Milly’s widow’s pension documents for James Lee’s service in the War of 1812, James and Milly “lived in Rutherford county two years; in Maury county about 20 years; in Weakley county two years and then in Gibson county” to the then present time of 1879.  Milly who died in 1884 in fact outlived her husband James by forty-seven years.

From James and Milly, Frances’s Arnold line in Tennessee went as follows:

• Martin Brown Arnold (1824-1882)
• William Joel Arnold (1850-1895)
• and Luther Coleman Arnold (1875-1956)

Not much is known about these Arnolds.  They settled in northwest Tennessee, in either Weakley or Gibson county.  These counties, once Indian territory and forested, began to be cleared for cotton, fruit and corn growing in the early 1800’s.  The Gibson County Fair was first held at Trenton in 1856.

Martin and William Arnold both outlived their first wives and had second wives.  Luther and his wife Lockie left Tennessee in the 1940’s and retired in Mobile, Alabama.  Their sons William and Asa had long since left Tennessee.

Later Arnolds

The US Army.  Luther’s son William, born in Tennessee in 1901, attended the US Military Academy at West Point and thus had a military career in front of him.  In 1928 he graduated from the Infantry Officer Course and was posted first to Hawaii and then to China.

In 1938 he graduated from the Command and General Staff College.  During World War Two William was promoted to Major General in 1944 and assigned to command the 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division.  He led them during their combat operations in the Philippines and In August 1945 accepted the surrender of the Japanese occupying Cebu Island.

After the war in 1955 William was named as the Commander of the Chicago-based 5th United States Army.  He retired at the age of sixty in 1961 and died in Chicago in 1976.  He had died of a broken heart only weeks after his beloved wife Elizabeth had succumbed to breast cancer.  Their children Joe, Howard and Elizabeth attended his funeral.

Son Joe also had a career with the US Army.  In 1976 when his father died, he was to be found at the US Military Academy at West Point.

Howard, Frances’s Father.  However, his other son Howard undertook a different career direction.

Howard had been an Army brat, accustomed to relocating where his father’s army career took the family.  His father in fact advised him to become an engineer – which he felt better suited Howard’s temperament than the military.

Instead Howard became an experimental physicist.  At the age of twenty-four he received his PhD from Princeton University.  Upon graduation in 1955 he set aside academics to work for Westinghouse in the nascent nuclear industry.  He helped design the pressurized water reactor technology that was needed to make the dream of nuclear energy come true.

When at home, as Frances recalled, he loved to build houses or model airplanes, listen to classical music, read, and work on his coin and stamp collections.  In 1964 he and his wife Jodie purchased a lot on the shore of Lake Michigan.  He designed and built a cottage on the lot in 1965, expanded it in 1984, and it subsequently became their permanent home.

And the Routheaus

Frances’s maternal line was the Routheaus.  Jean Jacques Routheau from Belgium had come to America with his family around 1870 and settled in Wisconsin.  The line from him went as follows:

• Isadore Routheau (1846-1927), born in Belgium
• Querin Routheau (1875-1955), born in Wisconsin
• Edward Routheau (1901-1999), born in Wisconsin

Colonel Edward Routheau was Frances’s grandfather.  He was a 1920 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  He went on to serve thirty-three years in the US Army.  During World War Two he served as assistant Chief of Staff in the tactical plans division of U.S. Army Forces Headquarters in the Pacific.

He retired from the Army in 1953 and joined the faculty of Columbian Preparatory School as a mathematics instructor.  He later became the school’s dean.  He died in 1999 at the grand age of ninety-eight.

He and Josephine, his wife of sixty-eight years, lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  They were Catholic.  Their daughter Josephine, better known as Jodie, was Frances’s mother.  Frances recalled her maternal grandparents taking her and her older brother Bill off on a grand tour of Europe in 1973 when she was seventeen.

Frances Arnold’s Family Tree