Smith family were of Irish descent originally. Smith carried the Y-DNA marker R-M222, a subclade of Haplogroup R1b found almost entirely in people of Northwestern Irish descent today. The Smiths were a middling farm family, but suffered a fateful loss when Smith Sr., after speculating in ginseng and being cheated by a business associate, was financially ruined. After he sold the family farm to pay his debts, the Smiths "crossed the boundary dividing independent ownership from tenancy and day labor." In the next fourteen years, the Smiths moved seven times. Despite the moves and the financial woes, Lucy Smith remembered the period of Joseph Smith's early childhood as "perfectly comfortable both for food and raiment as well as that which is necessary to a respectable appearance in society." Then during the winter of 1812–1813, typhoid fever struck along the Connecticut Valley, including the area around Lebanon, New Hampshire, where the Smiths had recently moved. A number of family members fell ill, and Joseph experienced a common complication whereby typhoid bacteria infected bone, in Smith's case, the shin bone. Lucy later claimed that she had refused to permit her son's leg to be amputated; in fact, the Smiths had chanced on one of New England's most respected physicians, Nathan Smith, who "probably alone in American medicine at this time" advocated removal of the dead portion of the bone rather than amputation of the leg. After the typically horrific early nineteenth-century surgery without either anesthetic or antiseptic, Smith eventually recovered, though he used crutches for several years and had a slight limp for the remainder of his life. In 1814 the Smiths moved back across the Connecticut River to Norwich, Vermont, where they suffered three seasons of crop failures, the last the result of the Year Without a Summer. The extended Smith clan had already moved west to New York, and in 1817, Joseph Smith Sr. traveled alone to Palmyra, New York, followed shortly by the rest of his family—although not before Lucy Smith was forced to settle with some last-minute creditors. In Palmyra village, Smith Sr. and his oldest sons hired themselves out as common laborers, ran a "cake and beer shop," and peddled refreshments from a cart; Lucy painted cloth coverings for tables and stands. When Smith was fourteen, he was apparently shot at, while returning home from an errand, but was not injured. The bullet missed him, hitting a