Myoneandonly's crazy genealogy journey

[yo soy el mejor]

i got told my last name was changed somewhere along the way 'cause a family member killed someone and adopted a different one. also heard i was related to pancho villa. i didn't find any of that to be true, but i still can't rule it out.

[yo soy el mejor]

Originally Posted by ilikeplanets

womxn

[topleybird]

I learned I'm related to Mr. Peanut, but what's fucked up is I only found out after he died and I never got to know him

[yo soy el mejor]

that's fire

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by ilikeplanets

How much time do you devote to this? I'm slightly inspired but can't put long hours into piecing together a puzzle rn

I pick away at it on my laptop every week when I have a few minutes here and there.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by yo soy el mejor

i got told my last name was changed somewhere along the way 'cause a family member killed someone and adopted a different one. also heard i was related to pancho villa. i didn't find any of that to be true, but i still can't rule it out.

my "english" grandmother told me growing up "your ancestors came here on the mayflower!" And "you're related to the Wright Brothers!". She never had any evidence for this. But she said it all the time.

I found out through genealogy that she was actually German.

It turns out that I do have ancestors from the Mayflower and I am (barely) related to the Wright Brothers. But not through her.

30+ Million americans have Mayflower ancestors. So it's not really a big deal.

Originally Posted by yo soy el mejor

white privilege

it is white privilege. but Western Europe isn't the only culture that keeps genealogy records. The largest family tree in the world is Chinese, and it goes back 2000 years.

For thousands of years Scandinavian culture and history was spoken. All the poems and sagas and religious stories were written down later by christians. My pre christian ancestors had their own written language and alphabet, but only used it on monuments and some household objects, even though most scandinavians could read and write Runes. They didn't write books, or keep records with it. From what I've heard, Heathens would pass their genealogy verbally, by memorizing it. The christian church came and mostly kept farmers illiterate, memorizing ancestry ended, and the church kept all the records.


as much as I hate Christianity, it does give me all this documentation. At least after the point when the church destroyed a thousand years of memory

[redbreegull]

some of these colonial ships have fancy suit and tie societies for the descendants. I once was "lucky" enough to attend a meeting of the descendants of the voyagers on the Ark and Dove. It is funny because the people on the ships were mostly criminals or religious nuts and these people are like HO HUM WE ARE SO IMPORTANT IN SOCIETY LOOK AT OUR OYSTER BAR

Also the guy who presented was a cop whose last name was Crook.

[buzzard]

This is all a bit like how past lives so often seem to come complete with Wikipedia pages, titles, land, feats of heroism, etc.

It's just so disappointing to think that I may end up being the least famous person in my own tree of genes and/or soul fragments or however that works.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Tonight i found a 400 year old murder!!

In 1657 my 11th great grandfather Jon Elofsson was murdered by Sigfrid Jakobsson in Backa, Sweden. I'm not sure how or why he was murdered. This is the only bit i've managed to translate is below. 400 year old gothic Swedish is hard to read.

Pär Larsson and Håkan Larsson in Skymnäs have captured Sigfrid Jakobsson in Arnsjön at Fryksände redoubt, who killed Jan Elofsson in Backa

[yo soy el mejor]

i come from a long line of laborers including farm hands, landscapers, and construction people. it wasn't easy find stories and things about them outside of census papers and registration cards. it appears we've always lived in texas, though, and someone had land stolen from them by whites. so dumb that they were recorded as whites by other whites when they definitely did not get the white treatment.

[yo soy el mejor]

Originally Posted by buzzard

This is all a bit like how past lives so often seem to come complete with Wikipedia pages, titles, land, feats of heroism, etc.

It's just so disappointing to think that I may end up being the least famous person in my own tree of genes and/or soul fragments or however that works.

i like to think about the last time my name will ever be muttered by anymore

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by yo soy el mejor

i like to think about the last time my name will ever be muttered by anymore

That's kind of frightening to think about. At least metaphorically it is another type of death.

In the tradition of Norse Paganism we cannot finish the journey to the afterlife and cross the bridge Gjöll unless the living who knew us sing our names. If we are not sung to the afterlife we may be trapped on the wrong size of the bridge, and left to wander between life and death (Midgard and Hel).

Singing the dead to Hel is a ritual that acknowledges they are remembered and their memory will be protected. This isn't unique to my ancestors' Pagan history. This is a consistent theme in countless indigenous spiritual traditions. I think there is a universality to it. People understand that our memory with the living is fundamental.

Nothing like this really exists in Christianity. Yeah, people sing at funerals or funeral mass. But it's not fundamental in any way to the afterlife, which is ruled completely by blind obedience to the Christ God and nothing else.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by yo soy el mejor

i come from a long line of laborers including farm hands, landscapers, and construction people. it wasn't easy find stories and things about them outside of census papers and registration cards. it appears we've always lived in texas, though, and someone had land stolen from them by whites. so dumb that they were recorded as whites by other whites when they definitely did not get the white treatment.

most white people think that life in North America started at whatever year the state they live in was added to the United States.

[MyOneAndOnly]

My 4th Great Grandfather, Barzillia Wright. And below his photo is his wife, my 4th Great Grandmother, Christiania Charity Swindell and their Daughter, Nancy. Christiania died in 1865. She was 51 years old. But Barzilli, or Zillie as people called him, lived to be 93 and died in 1911. Nancy was their last child. Christiania gave birth to Nancy when she was 44. They had 13 children.

[wHATcOLOR]

snakenborg

[MyOneAndOnly]

I am reading tonight about my 8th Great Gradfather, Benoni Jones and my grandmother Hester Ingersoll.. they met a grizzly end. I am descended from Benoni and Hester's son Benjamin, who escaped the attack.

You can tell they were rabid protestants, cause an account from the time notes that my grandmother Hester died after being tortured by French Priests:

Benoni - lived at Pascommuck, north end of Mt. Tom, Northampton, after they were married.

The family lived in a cluster of houses known as Pascommuch lying at the foot of Mt. Tom, now within the ciy limits of Eastampton, Mass. The Benoni Jones house was the only house in the area that was fortified.

At the age of twelve, Benoni was indentured to William Clarke of Northampton, until he came of age. It was stipulated that Clarke should "learn him to read and write and give him five pounds at the end of his term with sufficient clothig such as servants usually have and at the end of his time two suits of apparel". He and four others resided in Pascommuck, now Easthampton, settled about 1699. His farm was about four miles from Northampton center and was the garrison house during Indian hostilities.

On May 13, 1704, the French and Indians made a descent upon Pascommuck and killed Benoni Jones and his two youngest children. His wife, Hester Ingersoll, was captured and was taken to Canada as a prisoner, where she died later in the year. The wife of Benjamin Janes, a neighbor and relative, was taken to the top of Pomeroy Mountain, scalped and left for dead, but she recovered. Benjamin moved to Coventry, Connecticut. Samuel Janes was slain during the same attack.

There is a monument in memory of this raid standing in Easthampton today

Here is another account of the massacre from History of the Janes-Peek Family By Dr. Reba Neighbors-Collins

In May of 1704, a band of Indians attacked the little five-family village of Puokhumuck or Pascomac, later part of Southampton. It was just before daylight when they set fire to the pickets surrounding the home of Benoni Jones. A young women named Patience Webb looked out the window to see what was happening and was shot in the head. The rest of the village surrendered.

Nineteen persons were killed-Samuel Janes, his wife and three children (He was the first born of William Janes and Hanna Broughton), Benoni Jones and his two children, Miss Webb, Moses Hutchinson and one child, and the four children of Benjamin Janes (grandchildren of William and Hanna). John Searl, husband of Ruth Janes, was also killed as were three of their children. Ruth was severely wounded, but was rescued and later recovered. The son Elisha, age 9, was taken to Canada where he remained a captive of the Indians for many years.

As the prisoners were being marched and dragged away from the burning village, Benjamin managed to drop back, then slip away from his captors. Darting down a creek, hidden by bushes, he found a skiff and headed for Northampton to alert the town.

Hastily aroused men of the town sped after the Indians. On the top of Pomeroy's mountain the found Benjamin's wife Hannah. She had been knocked on the head, scalped and left for dead. Amazingly, after many months, she recovered and lived to be 80 years old.

This plaque is on the site of the massacre

[MyOneAndOnly]

Another ancestor killed by indigenous people ...

Henry Andrews is my 9th Great Grandfather. According to this history book, he was killed by Indians during the summer of 1676

[MyOneAndOnly]

All of these English fuckers are on my tree through my one English grandparent.

[topleybird]

1. Barzilla is a fucking amazing name and I'm now reconsidering having kids just to name mine that
2. How on earth, in the early 1700s, does one "recover" from having the top of one's skull exposed, like I'm picturing a series of beaver pelts crudely sutured onto her head until they rot, over and over, for decades, the surrounding skin just becoming more and more necrotic until the line of destroyed flesh is down around her ears and she spends her last 30 years screaming from the moment she sits bolt upright in bed until the moment the two bottles of moonshine she chugs each night finally puts her down

[MyOneAndOnly]

I've had surgery on my head, and even with stitches it took months for the scar to heal properly. I have no fucking idea how someone survives that, unless maybe their scalp isn't removed... maybe it's just cut? It's horrifying to think about.

Then again. They stole the land. WTF did they think was gonna happen?

[MyOneAndOnly]

These incidents were common during the 1600s. Between 1620 and 1640 approximately 80,000 immigrants came over from the UK to the East Coast of North America. I've seen estimates that by 1700 as many as a Million had come over from the UK. A significant number were bonded (indentured). By 1700 27,000 African Slaves had already been dragged to the English Colonies. It was a massive number of people. They overwhelmed and slaughtered and stole from the Indigenous Nations.

While stories like my ancestors' are very personal, it's worth remembering that the colonies were literally owned and administered by For Profit corporations, which had no interest in living in harmony with anyone who had prior claims to the areas they colonized. They made huge fortunes by stealing land, selling it, or putting slaves and bonded people on the land to produce crops to ship to England. People like my ancestors were either granted land by the company at the end of their contracted indenture, or they purchased the land from the company with their own money (although that was much more rare). These companies lied to immigrants, and usually did not give them a clear picture of what the situation was in North America before they sailed from England.

[topleybird]

Okay, so, fuck, apparently there were a fair few cases of people surviving a scalping, but I had a hard time finding an explanation of how in any of the particularly famous instances. I did eventually find cases where the exposed skull was worked over with a rasp or boring tools to roughen it up, because skin apparently won't regrow over a totally smooth surface. And eventually the skin did grow back for most of the lucky folks having this good and cool procedure done.

But for the famous people in that first link, they just lived with their skull exposed for a really long time, and it's not clear to me how that's possible. In the majority of cases, the exposed bone would necrotize, break open, and your brain would eventually be exposed and you'd die.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by topleybird

Okay, so, fuck, apparently there were a fair few cases of people surviving a scalping, but I had a hard time finding an explanation of how in any of the particularly famous instances. I did eventually find cases where the exposed skull was worked over with a rasp or boring tools to roughen it up, because skin apparently won't regrow over a totally smooth surface. And eventually the skin did grow back for most of the lucky folks having this good and cool procedure done.

But for the famous people in that first link, they just lived with their skull exposed for a really long time, and it's not clear to me how that's possible. In the majority of cases, the exposed bone would necrotize, break open, and your brain would eventually be exposed and you'd die.

FTR white people scalped more Indigenous people than vise versa. Throughout colonization white governments would pay people for scalps. Colonists made money from murdering native peoples.

[redbreegull]

This has me thinking, is there an accurate or at least roughly accurate way to estimate the native population in North America/or THE Americas before the late 15th century? I've seen figures anywhere between a few million and a hundred million and both seem extreme and I've never seen satisfactory methodology behind such estimates, but I'm curious about the actual human-to-human displacement rate, and tangentially, how many people did the colonists actually kill w/ violence, dislocation, and disease between Columbus and the completion of American annexation?

I think in a lot of cases anthropologists can estimate a population's past size by their public works, e.g. we know that the Bible is lying about ancient Jerusalem being a huge sprawling rich highly urbanized metropolis with hundreds of thousands of citizens because there literally is not enough infrastructure from that period to support such a population. But I guess with people who were living less sedentary, urbanized lives that's super difficult

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

I think in a lot of cases anthropologists can estimate a population's past size by their public works, e.g. we know that the Bible is lying about ancient Jerusalem being a huge sprawling rich highly urbanized metropolis with hundreds of thousands of citizens because there literally is not enough infrastructure from that period to support such a population. But I guess with people who were living less sedentary, urbanized lives that's super difficult

technically, European colonists killed OR displaced 100% of the native population. Any that didn't die, were displaced by the start of the 20th century.

I think the current thinking is that there were 60 million people living in North America prior to 1492. By 1600 there were less than 6 million.

When the English showed up in Massachusetts in the early 1600s, most of the indigenous people had been wiped out by plague, which was brought to the continent by the Spanish.



https://www.businessinsider.com/clim...ericans-2019-2

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

I think in a lot of cases anthropologists can estimate a population's past size by their public works, e.g. we know that the Bible is lying about ancient Jerusalem being a huge sprawling rich highly urbanized metropolis with hundreds of thousands of citizens because there literally is not enough infrastructure from that period to support such a population. But I guess with people who were living less sedentary, urbanized lives that's super difficult

When I was a kid i used to love documentaries that showed old grey haired men searching for Noahs Ark on top of mountains.

My favorite is people tying themselves in knots to explain why there's no other record of all the Jews being held as slaves in Egypt.... cause they weren't. It's a myth.

Or the tower of Babble.

Don't even get me started on the Yeshua stories. Christians can't even get the name right. I'm supposed to believe the guy is his own father who killed himself, but is immortal?

Sorry, but Odin hung himself for 9 days, took a spear through his chest, and walked away from it. Way more entertaining story IMO

[MyOneAndOnly]

I prefer Old Norse mythology. It's more interesting and a way less sanctimonious

[ovary]

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

These incidents were common during the 1600s. Between 1620 and 1640 approximately 80,000 immigrants came over from the UK to the East Coast of North America. I've seen estimates that by 1700 as many as a Million had come over from the UK. A significant number were bonded (indentured). By 1700 27,000 African Slaves had already been dragged to the English Colonies. It was a massive number of people. They overwhelmed and slaughtered and stole from the Indigenous Nations.

While stories like my ancestors' are very personal, it's worth remembering that the colonies were literally owned and administered by For Profit corporations, which had no interest in living in harmony with anyone who had prior claims to the areas they colonized. They made huge fortunes by stealing land, selling it, or putting slaves and bonded people on the land to produce crops to ship to England. People like my ancestors were either granted land by the company at the end of their contracted indenture, or they purchased the land from the company with their own money (although that was much more rare). These companies lied to immigrants, and usually did not give them a clear picture of what the situation was in North America before they sailed from England.

a lot of this is inaccurate. none of the colonies were "literally owned and administered by for profit corporations." many of the colonies had no/little corporate involvement, but were just tracts of land given to rich guys/nobles as favors or to pay off debts or whatever... maryland, pennsylvania, etc. these often operated under more of a feudal model than a corporate one. and even the company colonies like mass bay or virginia had a lot of royal involvement... the companies were granted charters by the crown which appointed the governor and expected to/did retain influence over administration.

it's also not true to say settler orgs "had no interest in living in harmony with the indians." it wasn't a total military genocide from day 1. indian and white communities were heavily interlinked through trade and military treaties/alliances for centuries. there was a lot of interest in cooperation and a lot of cooperation.

[ovary]

Originally Posted by MyOneAndOnly

I am reading tonight about my 8th Great Gradfather, Benoni Jones and my grandmother Hester Ingersoll.. they met a grizzly end. I am descended from Benoni and Hester's son Benjamin, who escaped the attack.

You can tell they were rabid protestants, cause an account from the time notes that my grandmother Hester died after being tortured by French Priests:






This plaque is on the site of the massacre

from what i can tell this was the basic tactic of the new england indian wars. both sides would just take turns surrounding villages at dawn and then massacre everybody. pretty brutal.

[MyOneAndOnly]

Originally Posted by cystic ovary

a lot of this is inaccurate. none of the colonies were "literally owned and administered by for profit corporations." many of the colonies had no/little corporate involvement, but were just tracts of land given to rich guys/nobles as favors or to pay off debts or whatever... maryland, pennsylvania, etc. these often operated under more of a feudal model than a corporate one. and even the company colonies like mass bay or virginia had a lot of royal involvement... the companies were granted charters by the crown which appointed the governor and expected to/did retain influence over administration.

I am not saying that the colonies were all run forever by companies. But settlements were overwhelmingly designed to turn a profit. Groups like the Massachusetts bay company were granted charters by the crown for the purposes of establishing settlements and industry. But they were run as for profit enterprises. All land charters from the crown were intended to make a small number of people fabulously rich. All of it was done to make money, and to send taxes to London. (You could maybe make an argument for Pennsylvania as an outlier.) Settlements like Jamestown were corporate enterprises. And they had a huge influence over who the initial governors or officials were. Whether it's a company or a rich AF English second son with 500 slaves on his plantation, the colonies were set up to make money. And they did that via genocide and slavery. If you want to argue about whether a 10k acre tobacco plantation in maryland worked by countless slaves "isn't a company" go ahead. LOL. It's a stupid argument.

The English did not send indentured servants or religious extremists to New England because they wanted to create a democracy or foster liberty. The crown didn't give a shit about that. All of it was to make the English aristocracy and business class rich.

Originally Posted by cystic ovary

it's also not true to say settler orgs "had no interest in living in harmony with the indians." it wasn't a total military genocide from day 1. indian and white communities were heavily interlinked through trade and military treaties/alliances for centuries. there was a lot of interest in cooperation and a lot of cooperation.

I don't know where you got those quotes from. But you're not quoting me. I didn't say that. I said it led to hundreds of years of war and genocide.

your comments remind me of people who say that the English brought civilization to India. LOL