Do you have a well-documented pedigree? Are you from high quality stock? Maybe you descend from kings or royalty… I think there are plenty of skeletons in our closets and if we knew how bad they were, maybe we would take a different approach to people. Maybe we would be more accepting but we pride ourselves of our prized pedigree building walls between those who we believe are of lesser importance when we should open our arms and welcome them.
I have spent years doing genealogy research—some on my family lines and much about others. I have learned a great deal about people in general and I have learned much more than a history book could ever teach. Some people seek pedigrees that others will marvel at. I remember back when I thought about joining the Daughters of the American Revolution…I have several ancestors who fought in the war that broke our chains from the mother country. I was doing it for my daughters’ benefit more than anything else. I wanted to leave some sort of ties to their legacy on my side of the family since there is no real family to help them when they get interested in my family’s part of history. I eventually declined the invitation in the end because I was living too much in the past and I wanted to live in the present and future. That sounds awful but here is a part of my past and why I cannot judge anyone due to race. 🙂
Much of my dad’s family was fairly easy to trace. His paternal line came out of North Carolina and the surnames are all related. Looking at historical records, it is believed that there was a single progenitor who settled here in North America but from where he came is of question. Many believe he came from England before 1700. Oh, again, I don’t know of any ancestors coming to America after 1800. There is more about this line but I won’t proceed right now.
Emotions get caught up in the tales for me because I like to experience and see through each person’s eyes and speaking of eyes…my eyes are bluish greenish with brown spots. My mom’s were darker blue with brown spots and my dad’s eyes were lighter blue—almost silver with brown spots. You would never know that I have Native American blood—actually from both parents. Weird to me. Most of my dad’s family line hails from the British Isles…Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England but there is one family who has been traced to Germany. The Hillis family—my dad’s maternal line and the line that owned the farm on which I grew up were from Ireland but before 1785. I really wish I could get them back across the sea but there are no records of detail that have been found in Ireland and to my knowledge they were not Catholic so I think I am out of luck.
As for my mom’s family…before they settled in Alabama, they mostly came from Virginia through Tennessee. Most were US Revolutionary soldiers or descendants so many of them have left a mark in the historical records such as land grants, etc. I had good times (and bad) locating family ties—connecting with long distance cousins and talking with people. My grandfather—let’s get him out of the way—his line is the most problematic. There is a DNA surname project that is ongoing but his line of DNA markers show his haplogrouping belongs to that of the Nordic tribes while most of the surnames are connected (not his) and they are not Nordic. That would be par for my grandfather. He also had French ancestry that has been hard to prove because I cannot establish who the woman’s father was due to missing records. I cannot establish the validity to the Native American ancestor in his line nor if it is true that there was also at least one African American but odds are good that both are part of my heritage. I laugh at this because my mother’s mom was really racist and she had absolutely no reason to be. Sad. Really sad.
My mom’s mother’s line is the one I know most about. She had a Native American ancestor so I have nothing but mixed blood all around…lol. This same line is where the Huguenots tie in. My maternal matriarch—as far back through the female line as I can go with any certainty—married a third generation Huguenot descendant. You want to talk about religious persecution…the family that came over in 1700 were trying to escape so that they could build new lives here. They were first uprooted out of France into other parts of Europe as they sought freedom but when the influx of refugees disturbed the status quo, they were sent to America–not totally of their own free will.
Four generations of my female line–Mom, me, my grandmother and my great-grandmother.
😀
There is a lot I know about my mother’s maternal line and I have had to fight over it because I was told I didn’t descend from the very line I descend from—even though I had things passed down to me from the 1800s. In fact, the person who told me this made me caused me to dig that much harder to prove what I thought I knew but I filled in a lot of blanks and documented much of the information with historical records that were not in my possession. He even published a book with the wrong facts which he still makes money from. I was kind to him and tried to offer to share what I had not because I knew I was right but because I wanted to share (he had posted a note asking for help–if that doesn’t beat all) and his last response to me was that he felt sorry for me. Please. He was extremely disrespectful. I thought he wanted to know the truth. My mom would have loved to set him straight and she might have known him—I don’t know. He is probably distantly related. See…we don’t get to choose who we are related to.
There is a mindset that tells people they are right and they believe it even when the differing facts stare them in the face. In the case of the person who told me I didn’t belong, the proof was in my family’s cemetery lot–believe it or not. You see, my family always took care of one another. After a sister’s husband died and she was not able to care for herself, my ancestor took her sister in to care for her. The sisters in this generation were very close and remained close no matter how many miles apart.
It turned out that the sister who was taken in outlived the one who took care of her and she is buried in the family plot in Alabama. I had visited it many times but I didn’t know all of the story until several years ago. I was disowned by extended family and believed the guy who failed to do his research because of his title–he is a bigshot genealogist. Her grave and the historical records are there that show what is truth. Census data, pictures, etc. I cannot make him believe it is true–he holds onto another belief and he doesn’t accept me. Is that how we are to treat family? I don’t think so.
What does this say about who we are? Don’t hide behind someone. Don’t hide behind your beliefs. Reach out to those who need. Accept others with love in your heart.
May your gardens grow with great beauty and tenderness! 🙂
A variation of this post has been waiting since last year to be posted…I might catch up one day. 😀
We had a neighbor who was obsessed with tracing his family’s genealogy. He’d constantly be bragging about the famous people who were his ancestors. Then he decided to go back even further. At a neighborhood picnic, he went on and on about how he only needed one more piece in order to trace his family all the way back to Adam and Eve. My daughter looked up and said, “I thought everybody could do that…”
Hahahaha! That is hilarious! Don’t you love it when your children put things in perspective for others? I know I do. Thanks for the laugh. That was great! Take care! 🙂
Genealogy is fun, but it’s not easy tracing ancestors if the job isn’t already done for you on something like Ancestry.com. Most of our information came from newspapers, tombstones, maps, old letters, and census records. Fortunately, my third cousin twice removed in Wisconsin and another cousin in England helped in tracing some of our mutual ancestors. My father joined Ancestry.com and found almost nothing. He contributed a lot of information for them, and they thanked him by refusing to let him copy what he sent.
I learned of our superiority to everyone else with the discovery that most of my ancestors were farmers establishing their homesteads. Going back 2 to 4 generations on my father’s side, most of the family ran saloons — except for my grandfather who was a teetotaler and went into accounting and eventually founded a couple lumber and veneer companies. My great grandfather on that side killed a kid for stealing an apple. “Thou shalt not steal”, or something like that.
My wife’s great grandmother was an orphan, and thanks to the U.S. Army and Andrew Jackson, her parents were killed on the Trail of Tears during the Cherokee “relocation”. She was adopted by a preacher in Alabama, but we’ve been unable to trace her clan. My youngest son just missed the cut-off date that would have allowed him to join the Cherokee Nation. He plays a mean Cherokee flute, and the tribe has recorded his renditions and sells the music. (He also plays the Navaho flute, tin whistle, pan pipes, bass didgeridoo, tuba, transverse flute, hurdy gurdy, and a few others). He was in the cast of “Unto these Hills” and among several of his roles, he represented the panther (blue) clan. (http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/Culture/General/CherokeeClans.aspx.)
I really enjoyed reading your latest post, but you’ve got to admit saloon-keeping trumps royalty and DAR any day. Now my nose is stuck up in the air, having demonstrated my superiority, and it’s your fault.
Lol! I don’t know. I love doing the footwork. I really enjoy reading county documents like probate files…and land grants, etc. and visiting cemeteries. Anything on ancestry I consider suspect. There is a lot on there that is inaccurate and incomplete. I’m not saying everything is but some family lines were based on someone’s assumptions in a book that have since been proven unfounded.. just wrong.
People get all bothered and believe you can copyright genealogy and while some stuff can be copyrighted, facts cannot be and that’s where I have run into problems. I would give credit where the information came from but many people would not and that was ancestry’s doing by allowing people to download family gedcoms giving no credit from where it came. And I have been burned several times by sharing my information but they wouldn’t share anything they had. Then they wrote books even quoted me but didn’t give me credit. It’s a mess how people want something for nothing and then give you no credit. Then others do give credit and there are still things on the internet people have put out there that have my name on it because I gave them things no one will ever find in a records’ office like letters and pictures and bible records.
I don’t know how your grandfather was a tea-totaler with so much salooning going on. 😀 At least they were on the right side of the law. I have a 2nd great grandfather who died in prison for moonshining two months before he was to be released. A distant cousin thought she needed to call me and tell me before she sent me some information. He was my bigoted g-ma’s grandfather…lol!
Thanks for sharing that info about your son. You have mentioned him playing the tin whistle. What a great legacy for him. My children still haven’t gotten interested in their family history in any way. I think it was all the cemeteries I took (dragged) them to when they were younger.
Your wife’s line sounds interesting. I wonder what preacher and where in Alabama that happened. Those brick walls are like a bone sometimes where you can’t let go. 🙂 Don’t trip while walking around with your nose in the air-lol. Thanks for the laughs as always! Take care!
I need to stop sending comments in the wee hours of the morning. In defense of my great grandfather, the lower branches of my great grandmother’s favorite apple tree were always picked clean before she could get to them. They were sure it was the “tramps or gypsies”, so he set a booby trap with a shotgun and a trip cord. He used bird shot to avoid killing them. A couple days later a 16 year-old boy from down the road crawled through the fence to get an apple, and he hit the trip cord. He was injured and required medical attention to get the bird shot out. Seven months later, he died from infection caused by the bird shot, and my great grandfather spent 7 years in prison for manslaughter.
Other than that, my nose is still out of joint.
I just realized, I never answered your question. The preacher was on the Parker side of my wife’s family and they lived on a farm in the hills just outside Courtland, Alabama. One of the routes to Indian Territory went past there.