Bill was born on September 2, 1945, in Nottingham, England, to Kenneth Spurgeon Lachlan Smith, who was serving with US forces in Europe, and Margaret (Allen) Smith of Nottingham. The day of his birth fell on the last official day of hostilities in the Second World War, a fact that always pleased him. After moving to the United States as a child, Bill’s family lived for several years in New York before settling in Chicago, where he lived the rest of his life. He graduated from Roosevelt University with a BA in history, with a bachelor’s thesis focused on the portrayal of women in the novels of 19th century Russian author Ivan Turgenev. He later completed an MA in history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he wrote his master's thesis on Huguenot migrations into Puritan New England, inspired by his discovery that his own ancestors had been among the Huguenots.
He married Jeanne Marie Lauer in January 1972, when the couple eloped in San Francisco. Together they had two daughters, Nicole and Jennifer. Bill was a devoted husband and a father who showed his daughters the sweetest and most dedicated love, attention, and intellectual companionship.
Bill was a passionate and intensely interested scholar of history, genealogy, and world events, with an extensive library on subjects ranging from Aztec history; Native American history; American Revolutionary War history; European history from all periods; genealogy; and languages and linguistics, with a special love for Japanese, Mayan, and Old Norse languages.
The work Bill did throughout the years was varied and gave him considerable insight into life, people, and human nature. The job he always said he enjoyed the most was changing the printing presses at the Chicago Tribune in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, he managed a number of professional schools in Chicago, including Illinois Medical, Wilford Beauty School, American Business Institute, and Career Academy. The years of work of which he felt proudest were as school principal and history teacher at Cosmopolitan Preparatory High School in Chicago, where he taught from 1992–1999. For the last 20 years, up until the time of his death, he worked in the Trust Department at Devon Bank, where he regaled his coworkers with all the fascinating and incredible stories he had accumulated from his decades of vast experiences and learning.
Conversations with his uncle in the 1990s spurred Bill’s interest in genealogy. He spent decades unraveling his family’s genealogy, as well as researching the family trees of his wife and other relatives. One of his proudest achievements was tracing his father’s ancestry back solidly more than 20 generations, finding ancient ancestors among the Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Norse.
Bill was predeceased by his parents and his younger brother, Andrew Earnest Allen Smith. He is survived by his wife, Jeanne Marie (Lauer) Smith, Chicago, IL, and their daughters Ann-Nicole Marie Smith, Germany, and Jennifer Grace Smith (Kári Thór Jóhannsson), Iceland. Bill was cremated, and his ashes will travel the world.
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