The story
This is the family's one New England stream, and it may open at Plymouth. Susanna Soule was a daughter of George Soule, who crossed on the Mayflower in 1620. About 1661 she married Francis West, and by 1680 the couple had moved down to Kingstown, Rhode Island. For years this looked like the kind of wishful Mayflower claim that gets tacked onto a family tree, and the plan was to cut it out. The research went the other way.
George Soule's own will of 1677 names a daughter Susannah — so she certainly existed. Whom she married comes from a single remarkable document: a memorandum book kept by a great-grandson in 1802, recording that his great-grandfather Francis West married a young lady “by the name of Sole, daughter of Mr George Sole,” by whom he had seven sons and two daughters — exactly the nine children the records show. A Mayflower scholar published that page in 1924, and the Mayflower Society has since printed Susanna's descendants as a numbered line in its own George Soule volumes, which is the Society's way of saying it accepts her. Strong, and institutionally backed — though the old man writing 140 years after the wedding gets a detail wrong in the same sentence, and the honest grade stays shy of proven.
Their great-grandson Francis West married Mary Lawton at Westerly, Rhode Island, on 17 February 1757 — a civil ceremony in Sabbatarian Baptist country. Mary's family is known for certain because her father's will names her: Joseph Lawton of Hopkinton, 1765, leaving to his daughter “Mary West,” with the estate receipts signed the next year by “Francis and Mary West.” In the 1790s they joined the great Yankee migration into New York and settled at Grafton, where Francis died in 1803 with “Esquire” cut on his stone, in a burying ground still called the Francis West Cemetery.
Two more generations worked west across New York to Brant, in Erie County. Matthew West lies there in Huson Cemetery, a Quaker family burying ground, dead in July 1852; the probate that followed names his six heirs, and it is how the next link is proven — the son who in an 1854 deed called Mathew West “my Father.” The shakier link in the Mayflower descent is not back at Plymouth at all: it is here, one rung up, where George West's fatherhood of Matthew rests on where people lived rather than on a document that says so.
Then the leap. Wilbur D. West went out to Kansas Territory in 1854, at twenty-two — the very year the territory opened and the fighting over slavery began. His 1918 obituary says he “became at once identified with the anti-slavery element” and was in Kansas through all the border warfare. He married at Lane in 1855, joined the 11th Kansas in 1862, and named a son born in 1871 Elmer Ellsworth, after the first Union officer killed in the war. It should be said in the same breath: the regiment he rode with later fought the Sioux and Cheyenne on the Powder River. The man who went to Kansas to stand against slavery also rode in the army that broke the Plains nations. Both are in the same obituary. He died at Dodge City in 1918 with thirty-two grandchildren.
His grandson Hugh Othal West, born at Dodge City in 1903, had the branch's strangest résumé: Houston by seventeen; a 1927 ship's crew list recording him at New York off a voyage that had touched Batavia, Singapore, Penang, Port Said and Aden; then back to the oil business — Sun Oil out of Beaumont, posted to the Chacahoula field in the Louisiana swamps. The family remembered him dying in an oilfield accident, and the memory was half right: his death certificate says he finished as an engineer at a recycling plant at Bammel, where on the morning of 24 May 1945 he was overcome by heat on the job. He was forty-one. His daughter Chloye was thirteen.