Lost and Found
The great-great granddaughters of Woodbridge and Helen Ferris
By Anne Hogenson
Director of Marketing
In September 2016, two leather-clad female motorcyclists parked their bikes outside of Ferris State University’s Timme Center for Student Services, rode the elevator to its third floor, and presented the front desk attendant for President David Eisler’s office with a package of Ferris family memorabilia.
Who were these unexpected visitors, and how did they come to have never-before-seen letters and mementos of the university’s founding family? The women themselves had needed to answer these questions in order to connect to each other and the university. For, though Julie Ferris and Tammy Smith had grown up only a few miles apart in St. Louis, Missouri, they did so completely unaware of the family ties that bound them to each other.
Tammy Smith
As a child, Tammy had noticed physical differences between herself and the rest of her family; she was blonde and had a fair complexion while her father and other siblings all had dark complexions and hair. For years, she wrote it off as a fluke of genetics. It wasn’t until she narrowly survived an accident as a teenager that her mother, Nancy, revealed a family secret: Tammy had a different biological father than the rest of her siblings.
Tammy wanted to know more about him, but Nancy didn’t want to give any more details. At that point, out of respect for the feelings of her mother and adoptive father, Tammy let it go. They were, after all, the only family she had ever known. She figured that there would be a “right time” to ask her mother someday.
However, tragedy struck in the following year when Nancy was killed in a motor vehicle accident. Smith’s sadness was compounded by the fact that, in losing her mother, she lost her best chance to learn more about her biological father and his family. But, as she coped with the loss of her mother, that fact only made her more determined to try to find them.
In old family documents, Tammy found vague references to people with the surname “Ferris,” which she remembered having seen in writing on the back of a man’s photograph at her childhood home.
“I had found a photo with ‘Woodbridge Ferris’ written on it, hidden in my mother’s things when I was growing up,” Tammy explained.
With that memory in mind, she supposed that the photo might have been of her biological father. She started simply by looking in a local phone book and was surprised to find an entry for “Woodbridge Ferris.” In time, she worked up the courage to call the number.
The man who answered was wary but did acknowledge that he was Woodbridge Ferris III and was her biological father. Tammy spoke to him a few times, but he never offered any information on his family. Figuring that she had learned as much as she ever would, she let it go once more.
It wasn’t until many years later, with the rise in popularity of online genealogy research, that she decided to search for more information about her ancestry. She had since moved across the country to California but thought that one of the online ancestry databases would make quick work of it. However, her Web searches mostly returned results for a Michigan politician and the university he founded—and she dismissed those results as a coincidence.
“I saw a Wikipedia page with ‘Ferris State University founder,’ ‘governor’ and ‘U.S. Senator,’ and I just assumed it didn’t have anything to do with my family,” Smith said. “I thought that, if I was related to anyone well known, I would already be aware of it.”
Julie Ferris
Julie Ferris, on the other hand, had grown up well aware of her connections to Ferris State University founder Woodbridge N. Ferris and of his educational and political legacy in Michigan. She knew her father was his great-grandson, Woodbridge Ferris III.
“When I graduated from high school, my father suggested that I should look into going to Ferris State, but I just thought that it would be like being in a fish bowl, to go to a school where I was related to the founder,” said Julie. “I was young and didn’t want that pressure.”
Julie also knew that her father had been married to another woman before her mother, but she didn’t know that he had a daughter. Her parents, like Tammy’s, had not wanted to discuss the past. From her childhood, she remembers sometimes seeing Tammy from a distance, as Tammy often rode her horse along the road by her home, but the girls had never met or spoken.
“I sometimes saw her, out riding her horse, if we happened to pass her on the road,” said Ferris. “But I never thought anything of it and never would have known we had anything to do with each other.”
Woodbridge Ferris III passed away in 1999, never having told Julie that the girl riding the horse was her own half-sister. Julie later learned that the name of her father’s first wife was Nancy and saw Tammy’s birth name, Tammra Ann Ferris, in some of her fathers’ old papers, but at the time, she didn’t know who Tammy was or how they were connected.
When her younger sister, Christine, passed away in 2011, Julie found herself missing a sense of connection to family. The tragic loss of her sister, however, ultimately brought Julie and Tammy together. It was in an online obituary for Christine that Tammy, who was still searching the Internet for clues, found a reference to Woodbridge Ferris III as father to Christine and a surviving sister, Julie Ferris.
“When I put that name into Facebook, the first thing it showed me was a ‘Julie Ferris’ who was about my age and lived in St. Louis,” said Tammy.
As she looked at Julie’s profile page, it sunk in that this could be a long-lost family member. She took a chance and sent her a message:
“Hi,” it read. “I think we might be related.”
Family ties
Julie couldn’t believe her eyes when the message flashed across the screen of her phone. It had been an especially hard day, and she was missing Christine. Tammy’s profile picture reminded her of her paternal grandmother. Julie asked what Tammy’s mother’s name was.
“Nancy,” Tammy replied.
In that moment, it all came together for Julie.
“Yep, we are related,” she wrote back.
In minutes, the missing pieces of a decades-old puzzle had come into view. Over the following days, Julie and Tammy communicated regularly and pieced together the rest of their family history.
Older family members of both families had disapproved of the match between Woodbridge and Nancy, who nevertheless eloped. They separated before Tammy was born. Both remarried—Woodbridge III, to Julie’s mother. The social pressures of their parents’ time and misgivings between the families had hidden Tammy and Julie’s biological connection so well that the half-sisters, despite growing up in the same city, had been lost to one another for more than 40 years.
But they had finally found each other, and, in Spring 2015, Tammy flew back to St. Louis to finally meet Julie face-to-face. They made up for lost time and discovered that they had much in common despite their separate upbringings. Julie even picked up Tammy’s love for motorcycling.
“I teased Julie until she got her motorcycle license because I knew she would love it, and it would be something we could do together,” Tammy said.
They joined a women’s motorcycling club and began meeting at Tammy’s Michigan home to participate in a long-distance motorcycle ride across the state each fall. Together, they also decided that the best place to preserve many of the documents that Julie had inherited from her father was in the archives of the university that their great-great-grandfather had founded. Their planned motorcycle ride across Michigan was approaching, so they decided to stop at the Ferris campus along their journey.
When they walked into the President’s office on that September afternoon in 2016, the staff who received them were stunned to the point of disbelief. They hadn’t been aware that there even were surviving Ferris descendants, and certainly hadn’t expected them to appear that day, in full motorcycling gear, with a donation of family historical materials in hand.
Staff from University Archives, including professor Melinda Isler and archivist Mary Gallagher-Eustace, promptly came to meet with Julie and Tammy to review the memorabilia and their lineage.
“It really caught us by surprise that there were descendants of Mr. and Mrs. Ferris but we didn’t know about them,” said Isler. “When we reviewed their lineage, we were able to verify that their paternal grandfather, Woodbridge Ferris II, was indeed the son of Phelps Ferris.”
As with the sisters’ connection, family conflict also had obscured this line of descent from university records. The son of founder Woodbridge N. Ferris, Phelps Fitch Ferris became estranged from his family when he and his wife separated, and she moved across the country with their children, including Woodbridge II. Details about the lives and descendants of their children after that point were lost, until Julie and Tammy’s unexpected appearance at the university that fall day in 2016.
At the end of that first visit, the sisters left with a standing invitation to return, directly from President Eisler. It launched a new family tradition: Each year for Ferris State’s Founders Day, they repeat their original trip by motorcycle to campus, in celebration of the family ties that connect them—to Ferris State University and each other.
