Medford Ross KELLUM senior

Medford Senior was considered as a man of wealth, most of his fortune coming from sound investment in Florida real estate. His wife, Elizabeth Lauder (D.1930), will become one of the richest young women in the United States, whose huge fortune originated of her oncle, Andrew Carnegie. http://www.kellumvalleyfarm.com/history/

In 1924, the couple outfitted a four masted barkantine, the Kaimiloa, for a five-year scientific expedition to many of the then inaccessible spots of the Pacific. Under the auspices of the Bishop Museum, a group of Hawaiian scientists joined the ship: Gerrit P. Wilder, botanist; Mrs. Wilder, historian; Kenneth Emory, ethnologist; Dr. Armstrong Sperry, writer and illustrator; and Dr. Stanley Ball.[internal LINK “EXPEDITION]

Family Ancestry 

Medford Ross Kellum is the son of Edward Marten Kellum (1836-1881) and Almira Pitt Hitch (1838-1884).

The name family KELLUM descends from Robert Kilham whose first wife and all his children died in Bury St. Edmunds (Suffolk), England in 1630. At the age 40, he crossed the Atlantic and settled in southern Connecticut (Norwalk & Long Island) in the New Haven Colony.   

Among the first recorded settlers of Bedford (NY), in 1641 he married a Wappinger native American. The couple had one child, Robert Kilham Jr. 

The name family HITCH was involved with The Virginia Company of London in its early days of the settlement of America. The Virginia Company founded the first permanent settlement in America, Jamestown, in 1607. From an initial population of about 100, many of which died in the first two years, the Virginia Company sent thousands of people to Jamestown annually through the middle 1600s.