Kellyn's paternal line: Ashkenazi Jewish and Scottish roots, a Levite patronymic carved in Hebrew on a sailor's stone, and two generations of Navy service discovered a hundred years apart.
Irving N. Leveton (1916–1997), Kellyn's grandfather — yearbook portrait, New Haven.
Two families stand at the head of this branch, and for a generation they had no connection to one another at all. Abraham Leveton — his birth date now lost to the record — married Ella Leveton, born in 1859. Abraham died on 18 June 1908 in New Britain, Connecticut; Ella outlived him by fourteen years, dying in 1922. Their son Samuel carries the story forward.
Abraham's birth date unknownThe second line belongs to Herman Israel, born in 1859, and his wife Fannie Israel, born in 1861. They raised two children: a daughter, Sarah I Leveton (1890–1965), and a son, Arthur Joshua Israel, born in Connecticut on Christmas Day 1893. Arthur lived until 17 January 1962, dying in Bridgeport, and left behind one small, vivid trace of his young adulthood — a surviving yearbook photograph from a “Modern Language Club.” Sarah's married surname gives away where the story goes next: in the following generation, these two immigrant families become one.
Samuel Leveton was born 25 April 1886 — at least according to his own headstone; FindAGrave's data field says the 29th, one of those minor discrepancies that genealogy simply learns to note and move past. He died 13 August 1955 in New Haven, Connecticut, and it is his grave that turned out to hold this branch's quietest and best discovery. Samuel rests beneath a bilingual Hebrew and English military headstone marking his service as a Fireman First Class in the United States Navy. But the stone does more than record his rank: in Hebrew, it names him son of Abraham HaLevi Leveton — the patronymic marking Levite lineage, the priestly-caste tradition of Judaism. No other record on file says this about Abraham. A single carved stone in a New Haven cemetery added something to his father's story that nothing else had preserved.
Bilingual military headstone
In 1915, Samuel married Sarah I Leveton, the daughter of Herman and Fannie Israel — the marriage that joined the two immigrant lines of the previous section. They had two children, both of whom left surviving yearbook portraits: Irving N Leveton, born 4 August 1916 in New Haven, who died there 30 January 1997, and Eleanor E Leveton (1922–1993), later known as Eleanor Markman.
In 1943, Irving N Leveton married Alice C McAlister, and with her the branch's Scottish line arrives. Alice was born 7 January 1921 in Donora, Washington County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of John H McAlister (1903–1965) and Mary L McCune — born in 1903, though one record in the file says 1902, a one-year variant that remains unresolved. Alice died 25 February 2010 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Mary L. McCune's birth year: 1902 vs. 1903
Irving and Alice's son, Philip John Leveton, was born 3 February 1946 in New Haven and died 24 April 2005 in Vero Beach, Indian River County, Florida. He was a Captain in the United States Navy and a veteran of the Vietnam War — which means this family sent two generations to sea in the Navy: Samuel, the Fireman First Class of the previous section, and Philip, the Captain, his grandson. No family paper had ever set the two men's service side by side; the records do.
Philip married Maria Russo Leveton, whose own family's story is told on the Russo family page of this archive. Their children are Travis Leveton, Ian Leveton, Paige Barnett, Dane Leveton, and Kellyn S Leveton — who married Ian Hall, and whose son is Townes Minor Hall, the boy this entire archive was made for. This is the line that carries the Levetons, the Israels, the McAlisters, and the McCunes down to the present day.
Military headstoneDirect line to Townes Minor Hall
Two Navy veterans, three yearbook portraits, and the family monuments that anchor this branch in New Haven and Milford, Connecticut.
