The hard parts of genealogy

[flea]

While one knows, intellectually, that one's Puritan ancestors were involved both directly and indirectly in nasty relations with the native peoples of New England, and that anyone living on the frontier in Pennsylvania and going on military missions to Detroit probably also involved unsavory dealings, there's nothing like coming up against slave-owning ancestors to give a nice white liberal Yankee girl pause. Yet here we are: http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Nathaniel_Irish_%283%29 (This link is fascinating in its own right, with transcriptions of original documents and good citations to the historical record, and Nathaniel Irish, who was my, lemme see, 9-generations-back direct ancestor, certainly lived an interesting life. And left a fellow human being to his daughter in his will.)

It would be nice to go back to the yeoman farmer-schoolteachers of New Hampshire, but on I must press.

Comments

[veejane]

D. has told you surely about the Smith about 5 generations back who did that side of the family's tree back to the Revolution (in order to join the Sons of Whoseywatsis, of course)? He was an immigrant to Maryland, having grown up in the 1870s-80s in Brazil, where his parents were missionaries. Why had his parents gone missionary, and why there?

Because they'd been Marylanders who couldn't bear the idea of Maryland without slavery. They hadn't even owned any slaves that I know of, but they emigrated all the same. To the last country in this hemisphere to disallow chattel slavery (1888). I kinda like how history bit them in the ass: no, you will not find a place on this earth that's going to stay okay with slavery forever.

(I think Smith the Younger above was the grandfather of Billy and Porter; I'm not sure, though. I remember the story, though!)

[flea]

Billy and Porter's father was born and raised in Buenos Aires and only came to the US for college. But I have not begun with the Smiths yet. I know Mother has some files, and who *really* wants to start genealogy with people named Bill and Mary Smith, yo? You start with the funky names.

[veejane]

Of course, I am thinking of the misplaced pride with which Billy told me that we're something like 5th cousins twice removed from Ralph Waldo Emerson (the which he told me last time I saw him, 3-4 years ago). As if you couldn't swing a cat in Middlesex County without hitting ten people of the same heritage.

Probably, Billy is not the source of the Smith the Younger story. (As I recall, D.'s records come primarily from Ormon Bassett's collection, so if he collected Smith materials, it was later-on in his life.)

[flea]

I think mother got photocopies of Smith stuff after her grandfather died; I remember looking at them as a teenager at about the right time frame. Billy probably also has a copy. I did once look up Mother's grandfather and have a vague sense his father was born in Tennessee and emigrated to South America after the war, so I don't think you're wrong about that aspect. (It may say on Mother's grandfather's passport, come to think of it.) There are lots of bizarre stories of Southerners in adventure in South America; I ran across this fellow whom I think you will enjoy recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_%28filibuster%29

As for Sam's people, they are New England through and through. Nobody in that line was born outside Massachusetts between 1621 and Sam's mother. And I am pretty sure his mother's people were Puritan migrants to MA who left for Nova Scotia only when their team lost the Revolutionary War.

[veejane]

Yes, also did some of her own research during her master's thesis, and came home with colonial maps of Bridgewater with the name Bassett all over them. Kind of funny.

(I do know who William Walker was! One needn't even go as far as South America; honestly, what was the Alamo if not a series of southern shenanigans enacted in an ex-Spanish colony?)