Jillaine Smith

Descendant of PGM migrant Thomas Tobey.

Descendant of PGM migrant Thomas Mayhew.

Descendant of PGM migrant William Swift.

Biography

Jillaine spends way too much time on WikiTree

Jillaine Smith was born at the tail end of the baby boom, youngest of four children of John L. Smith and Miriam Esther Sess.^[1] Raised in California, she moved to Washington DC in the mid 1990s to marry PDB . Jillaine and PDB are members of the Bethesda Friends Meeting.

Jillaine is a Friend (Quaker)

She has made her career supporting the nonprofit sector, and since August 2011 has been one of three co-founders of Fourth Quadrant Partners, LLC. The firm closed in 2022 to make way for the nonprofit, the Emergent Learning Community Project. Jillaine retired in November 2025.

Jillaine started researching her family in 1998. She also maintains a set of (now archival) genealogy pages at RootsWeb.

Her research areas include:

• Colonial New England (post Mayflower); she published an article in the NEHGS Register about the two Richard Taylors of Yarmouth, MA.
• Southwest Germany (including the ability to decipher old German church records); in particular, she is documenting the town of Schwenningen (now part of current-day Schwenningen-Villingen), especially the 1847 town-subsidized emigration of the poor.

Previously, she conducted research professionally, and was a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, New England Historic Genealogical Society and National Genealogy Society; she is a graduate/survivor of Elizabeth Shown Mill's Course 4 at IGHR.

Roles on WikiTree include (as of 19 Dec 2025):

• Project Leader (after a five year hiatus) - Native Americans Project (especially myths and legends); Quakers Project; California Project
• Member, WikiTree's US Black Heritage Project-- namely its 1880 Census campaign and monthly Connectors Challenges.
• Member, Massachusetts Project

Why was I researching the Sizemores?

While project coordinator of WikiTree's Native Americans project, I co-lead an effort to help document Native American relationships on WikiTree. There are several theories about the Native origins of early Sizemores of colonial America. I was pulled into this family line related to these early claims. Shortly afterwards, I discovered that a very bad merge had been done in late 2019, conflating two separate George Sizemore branches. After failing to identify volunteers willing to help restore the separate lines (I don't blame anyone, it was a mess), I started working on it myself in 2022. While the two Georges (Sizemore-29 and Sizemore-1198) have been detangled from each other, I continued to work (with others) through the subsequent generations to ensure they are appropriately assigned to the right family. However, this surfaced the fact that -- beyond the bad merge done in 2019 -- there is MUCH controversy about the different Sizemore branches. I worked for a few years with a number of Sizemore descendant/researchers to tease out the different theories. As of December 2025, I've stepped back from this effort and am leaving ongoing Sizemore research to those most familiar with Sizemore records.

Wikitree Free Space Pages

• Jillaine's Dream Source Help Page - Started out as what I'd like to see replace the numerous different help pages concerning sources and citations; I removed all that but retained an editorial of sorts warning not to try to over simplify source definitions.

Wiki-Will for Digital Afterlife

In the event of my death or incapacity for more than 90 days, I give the following permission:

• I would like all of the profiles for people not living, and which I alone manage, to be changed to Open. This is up to and including my own profile.
• Space pages which I have created for projects should be assigned to the project accounts of those projects (if not already done)
• Other space pages can all be changed to Open.

Should these profiles / pages not be accessed within 180 days from my demise, the Wikitree staff shall have full and total access to manage said space and profiles in any way they see fit, up to and including assigning them to any willing Profile Manger, orphaning them, or deleting them.

Sources

1. ↑ "California Birth Index, 1905-1995," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V2BJ-4QN : 27 November 2014), Jillaine S Smith, 21 Jan 1959; citing Los Angeles, California, United States, Department of Health Services, Vital Statistics Department, Sacramento.

• Birth: Birth certificate of Jillaine S. Smith, details withheld for privacy purposes
• Marriage: Marriage Certificate - PDB and Jillaine S. Smith, Ithaca, New York, June 1995. Details withheld for privacy purposes.

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