…with the insipid offerings on Discovery, such as the Story of Us and The Revolutionary War.
You know I do genealogy. And you know I’m American. It has not gone unnoticed by me that my ancestors were a mixed bag…and that in the minds of many we weren’t so much rebelling from England (the view King George took of the event) as dissenting from the way the English government was working. In effect, we weren’t fighting the English. Many of us were English.
And insipid programs that rehearse the same old children’s stories about the Pilgrims and the Indians and the horrid British, as if we were something else at the time…rather bother me.
So on this 4th of July, let me salute some of my ancestors who weren’t English: they were Dutch, who lived peacefully in New York, and who changed hands when the English and Dutch had a war: New York was ceded as part of the peace treaty.
Others of my ancestors belonged to the Powhatan tribe, who were getting along quite nicely before a band of fairly well-behaved Englishmen decided to land a boat on their shores. The Englishmen claimed the Powhatans’ land, but at least had the grace to marry their way into the community—before they claimed the rest of the continent.
Then there were the Quakers from Devon. Some of mine were part of the Quakers, who weren’t so much here for religious freedom as to avoid the gruesome fate of other people the Puritans ruling England from time to time were persecuting that week (it was Catholic v Protestant, and some who thought themselves holier than either—with really gruesome fates for the loser du jour: disemboweling alive, burning alive that sort of thing: what nice people! all in the name of their piousness)—
Our Pilgrim fathers—read Puritans—I had a few of those, too, named things like Temperance, mostly in Massachusetts—and thank goodness they had the good taste to take a hike from Salem during the witch trials. Or maybe they had had a feud with one of those bratty children who started it…who knows?
I had families half of which were in England and half in the colonies in 1776…and what were they to do?
I had a great-great-grandfather or two fighting on this and that side of the English Civil wars I and II, I had people running from the shelling of Gloucester; and I had people fighting in the various wars: the French and Indian Wars; Queen Anne’s War; the Revolutionary War; you name it.
I had people on both sides of the American Civil War, one of whom, yes, was a slaveholder who freed all his slaves and built them houses for their families at his own expense, and hired them thereafter for wages, because he had thought twice about the situation, and this was years before the Civil War. His son, my third-great grandfather, was a spy for the Confederacy.
I had people who wanted no part of the Civil War, and took the newly invented railroad out to Ohio and Missouri and hiked the rest of the way to get away from other people who wanted to kill civilians over politics.
My people in general ALL had relatives on this side and on that of every issue so nicely glossed over in these programs, and the issues, as always happens in real life, had a lot of fine print about who was involved on what side and why.
So let us celebrate the 4th, but let’s not hate anybody. You just never know who you’ll find out you’re related to.
1776 is not available in Europe. 8(
It is worth getting. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in between some very biting politics, and is probably more accurate in spirit than any reverential documentary.
BTW, CJ, a big hug to you for working on the pond, trying to get ahead of the algae, and I hope you give Savio a good reason to be embarrassed. (just thought I’d throw that in.)
{{{{BIG HUGS}}}}….not only for the pond problems, but for all you do above and beyond writing. Guess we won’t be buying Savio when we need equipment!
The equipment has been good—except for the exploding light fixture, which would have melted the skimmer and effectively taken down the pond if we hadn’t been right at hand when it went.
Pondliner.com has been good, and I have no hesitation recommending them: I note that they are offering other brands ahead of Savio these days, and I begin to understand why. Too many hoops to go through to get satisfaction, and equipment which in this one area has been downright dangerous.
This light, however, was the only electrical thing of Savio that the pond has: the pump is Japanese-built, a Shinmaya, I think, and very good, and there are no other moving parts.
I will get this fixed. We will be able to see the fishes again, if I have to drain the pond down to half a foot of water and re-water it. I think, however, that a decent UV filter will solve it, and I am going to pursue that today.
Heh. Good points, Carolyn. But it makes an underlying assumption I don’t hold: my relatives and ancestors do not define me. As Seven of Nine would say, “It’s irrelevant.” 🙂
Let’s put it this way: if we took the average of my known relatives’ opinions they probably would add up to ‘let’s invade Chicago, pillage and burn’…Thank goodness there’s been a progression of ambitions in my family.
Now we’re just after Mars.
I’m totally English on Mum’s side; all from East Anglia, generally Norfolk. Dad’s is English and Scots with my GGG grandfather probably French. GG grandfather was supposedly born in England but his name is French and he was born in one of the major ports on the east coast of England.
I wonder sometimes if we won’t have wars here on Earth over resources on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere, if retrieving those resources ever becomes economically practical. Or maybe prime orbital space? Dumping space debris? I’m *not* worried about a new land grab from the “natives”! 😉
I have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower (one of whom almost blew it up…). I’m sure someone in my line fought in the French & Indian war, though I don’t know for sure on that one. We know of ancestors who have fought in every war since then though, including the civil war, even though most of my ancestors were no longer in the country then (Many on my father’s side by then were Mormons and had been kicked out of the country into the unsettled west, my mother’s side hadn’t immigrated over yet). I, too, get frustrated when any program depicting a war or conflict depicts one side as wholly virtuous and demonizes the other. To quote a line from the WWII movie Saints and Soldiers, in reference to the German troops, “I think they’re guys just like us. They’re just wearing a different uniform.” It’s a natural human instinct to characterize ourselves and/or the group we belong to as “good” and everyone else as “less good.” But we’re all people, the vast majority trying to live our lives the best we can.
I had the most remarkable supper, once upon a time—
Due to a set of circumstances, like running out of money and riding a bus with a goat to get to Thebes, in Greece, we (my friend and I) ended up the only 2 Americans in miles about, and an object of curiosity for the secret police (it was the junta, at the time). Two lonely male British schoolteachers, one in his 60’s, one in his 20’s, ran into us down at the restaurant, and waved over another diner, who was a German with a U shaped dent in his shaven head. Well, long story short, two of the gentlemen and my companion, aged 60, ended up trading war stories, literally. The older guy had been RAF, the German had been a muleskinner for the artillery on the Germans’ Russian campaign, which was where he got the dent in his skull—he had a strong hatred of mules and cold weather, and hadn’t wanted to be invading anywhere; and my companion had corresponded with her former students who were on the beach in Italy, and who had been pushing through France. And there we sat—listening to reasonably ordinary people, who’d been in places neither the young Brit and I could see in our heads the way our companions could…and all of us sharing supper in a Greek restaurant under an old tree which had probably seen the Napoleonic wars, in a town Alexander the Great had razed to the ground.
Wars, wars, wars. And it comes down to three people comparing experiences over a glass of wine and wondering if their paths had ever come close before, while two young people listen and wonder about the histories they learned in school.
There’s an good cartoon about the way history is remembered at Abstruse Goose. It makes the point about how history is tidied up and glorified.
http://abstrusegoose.com/282
Scroll down to see the second panel.
I always think that the only way to get a real feel for any period of history is to read the words of the people who were actually there – preferably ordinary people without strong political or religious views, but also the movers and shakers of great events.
I am still moved every time I read Julius Caesar’s ‘Gaul is divided into three parts’ to think that his own actual words are still as fresh as the moment they left his stylus – frozen in time, as it were. Or Josephus saying “I myself was a priest at the Temple in Jerusalem”, and giving his vivid eye-witness account of the fall of the city in 70AD. Or Pliny describing the eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii. Or Apuleius, who was a priest of Isis, speaking about those ancient rites as a living religion, and carefully omitting the secret parts which could not be told to profane ears.
It’s the same with Jean de Froissart in the 14th and early 15th century, saying things like ‘I spoke to a knight who was present at the battle and he told me such-and-such’, or giving the story of how he was introduced to Richard II, or remembering the Earl of Douglas as lively young boy whom he once met at his father’s castle.
Or the collected letters of Queen Elizabeth I, or the personal experiences of soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars, or… I could go on and on.
Reading history books written by modern writers doesn’t do justice to any period of history. It never gives you the real flavor of the times. You can only get that from reading the actual writings of the people who lived it.
It’s amazing to listen to people tell their stories first-person. We’re losing that to a degree, I believe, especially as those people pass away. Unless those stories have been recorded somewhere, all of that is lost when the storyteller is gone.
Totally off-topic, but thought I would pass this along to you good ladies: Traumeel seems to do an amazing job on healing up bruising. I’ve been using it on Trink’s post-surgery bruises, which were pretty large, and I can see a difference from application to application. Just an fyi: this is a homeopathic ointment, with arnica as one of the main ingredients, and I obviously did not do a controlled trial, but the change is remarkable to me. Since you two seem to get bruised up with some regularity, you may want to try it.
Ah, thanks, Philospher!
Joe, the amount of writing the internet can hold is one of the best things about the internet. I’m the rememberer for my family—I heard the stories, and suddenly I realize all these young folk in my family have never heard about St. Elmo’s fire settling on the herd, or my great-grandmother surviving the flatboat accident, or the day my grandfather died: I remember, but they never heard; so I’m writing everything down.
More, some of these stories are worth it even if there ARE no kids to hear them: eyewitness accounts, like the German soldier who got kicked by a mule while trying to free a wheel that had bogged to the axle in freezing mud; it’s an I-was-there that matters.
And that’s where the internet comes in. So you weren’t in Dallas when the president was shot, but you were in a Kress’s 5&10 when the music stopped and the radio report went out over the loudspeakers, and everybody in the store stopped what they were doing…. or being in a London train station when Lord Mountbatten was shot, and seeing a woman old enough to have lived through the Blitz sitting on a bench with the newspaper headlines in her lap, crying quietly, as people went up and down the platform.
There are so, so many things worth telling, because they talk about people, experiencing history. . I’ve thought about putting our family account (without the pieces that refer personally to living people) online so anybody can get it; it’s important, I think, for people to be inspired to write down what they know, and to get the texture of past lives before the texture is lost.
Carolyn, I can think of no one better to do it than YOU. Fascinating stuff — you make it come to life as well as put it into context.
One of these days we’re going to have to chase down those Bushnell? relatives of yours. You get a free week on Ancestry, whether only for the American end of things or whether you get Europe as well, I don’t know; but getting all your ducks in a row means having every single detail and rumor and date you can possibly collect NOT being online, and then settling in for a few days of really hitting the database and seeing if it rustles up details. If you are finding something worth chasing, you can then join for a few months, and see what THAT turned up. The problem is if you get sincerely involved, you’re in it, and it’s hard to say stop.
I feel a real connection with a great uncle of mine, four or five generations removed, who, being a teacher, and a single man, took it on himself to keep the history of his immigrant family, both where they had come from, and all the many children and descendants that branched out where they were. He didn’t slight the less flattering things; he was an honest recorder; and he instilled the notion that those records were to be kept, and the stories passed without sugarcoating. It held the records together, and made details recoverable. More than one family owes him, bigtime.
I wonder what events will be our generation’s “Where were you when…”?
The Challenger explosion?
The WTC falling?
The opening of the Chunnel?
Other things that Americans overlook, because they didn’t directly affect us?
My side of the family was mostly Central European farmers and small craftsmen. DH has a slightly more exalted lineage, including one martyr (burned at the stake for saying Christianity was a nifty thing), and a navigator for the ship following the Mayflower. He apparently was a poor navigator, however, and got the ship significantly off course, landing a good 200 miles away from where he was supposed to be.
I have a relative who was, I recall, one of the ‘away party’ for the Mayflower or one of the other ships, one of the redshirts, as I recall.
“Beam me up, cap’n—!”
I have a feeling that the Mayflower and her ilk were not easy to steer in an iffy wind…so there may have been some excuse. They did not have the sleek directability of the clippers, by a long shot.
What really upset me when Lord Mountbatten was killed by the IRA, was that he was a very quiet man, was not pretentious, and was a model for the way the royal family (i.e., Edward, Andrew, and Charles) should act. I was stationed about the USS Albany in July 1978 when Lord Mountbatten visited the ship to present us with the first award of the Lord Louis Mountbatten Cup for excellence in naval operations. 45 days later, he’s dead, and I had no idea why the IRA would have targeted this man, other than he is a distant relative of the royal family. I can say I was fortunate to have seen him and heard him speak before he died.
In my travels around the globe, I’ve seen a lot of things that may not interest other people, but they’re my memories, I try to hold on to them, and perhaps writing about them would be good. I really never got a chance to know my paternal grandparents, and my maternal grandparents were divorced and didn’t live nearby, anyway. So, I rely on the stories of the people I know, my friends, relatives, etc., to hear things I would never have learned anywhere else.
I do urge you to write them down if the writing gives you pleasure: and post them online; and know that there are many people, maybe relatives in the 23rd degree you have no idea you have, who would want to know those things; or their kids will—because the internet is somewhat immortal, in terms of things getting into records somewhere, and being a witness to history means you may know some detail that will matter to someone somewhere. There may be, somewhere, the son of a sailor who knows there was an English lord who visited his father’s ship, but not know why or what, and there you are—you have the detail that would make everything clear to him. You just never know how useful these items can turn out to be, when somebody else has another piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
The Bushnell’s are amazingly well documented, thanks to George B. in the 1930s who documented everything by HAND using file cards. Despite this, I had no idea what a prominent family I came from until visiting Connecticut’s oldest cemetery and finding the place overrun with ’em…and also what the ladies at City Hall told me.
Yoo hoo, WWAS gang: are there any other Bushnell’s among us? If so, it is almost certain we are related as I know the family genealogy in detail for over 500 years…as well as some family history even before that, including the RL iron Bushnell signet ring (“Loyal a la Mort”), awarded by King Henry of Navarre to our branch.
It’s the paternal side of my family where the really big mysteries are.
Lol. We’ve all got ’em. One of these days I’m going to have to drive 2000 miles down to Oilton, Oklahoma, to the once abandoned and now newly repossessed cemetary and go looking at gravestones to get some data on my maternal grandmother, who was a mystery nobody would talk about…assuming they could afford a stone. There may not be one. But somewhere there has to be a burial record, and Creek County would have it.
Since my life sounds like a pack of lies to me, I don’t expect posterity
to have a better opinion of it.
I just assume everybody else has the same problem…GRIN
One of the most amazing things in my life are reading the short autobiographies of my grandmother and my great-great-grandmother. My great-great-grandmother immigrated to the US when she was 17, with her 15-year-old sister, just the two of them, because they were the only two her family could afford to send (the rest joined her later).
My 3-greats grandfather (on my father’s side) crossed the plains from Illinois to Utah in a Mormon handcart company and his journal is main record for that company. He talks about the miles walked and hunting and keeping track of the cows. Nothing spectacular, but those every day experiences are what matter.
I think people don’t appreciate how amazing journals can be. I think “my life is boring,” but reading over these “boring” records of my ancestors gives me a sense of who they are and therefore a greater sense of who I am. But I am still a terrible journal keeper. Except when I was pregnant with my first baby that I lost, and that journal I read over myself to remind myself of things forgotten. I hope one day my children and grandchildren will read through that and get to know their sister/aunt in the way I do.
All these experiences are valuable, and they connect us as family in special ways. I could hear my mother talk about her experience (she was very small) having her horse throw her on the way home from school, and being so small she could not get back on…or get hold of that cantankerous horse—and I knew that red dirt road with the high sandstone sides: my cousins and I walked it often, and it has become scenery in books. Though the one-room school where she witnessed the last real cattle drive in Oklahoma is long since gone, I appreciate her story about the fierce dust storm and dismissing class for everybody to run out and make sure their horses were secure and as sheltered as possible. I want my niece to know about that. I want her to feel that sense of connection with the homestead, and the sense that though what is now is not what always was, and not what will always be—those intangibles of human experience and feeling do connect us, even across centuries. The least of us…matters.
1776 is one of my favorite movies! It came out when I was in Junior High School (well, renamed Middle School by then). Our entire grade 8 (maybe 100 kids) walked downtown to the local movie theatre and watched it. I got a bit of a crush on John Adams and that summer went and found an abridged publication of his and Abigail’s letters to each other. Absolutely fascinating first hand observations of what they too knew would be history, as well as the personal intimacies and affections of their lives. A fascinating relationship. The book ended, not with another letter, but a passage from of their children’s diaries when John finally returned home (from France, I think). The child wrote to the effect that “I came in the house and saw father’s black hat on the stair post. I ran upstairs to see him.”
One of my passions in history is feeling the daily life of the time and recognizing the humanity we all share. Dropping clothes on convenient surfaces lying around, recognizing a family member’s hat, and knowing that therefore your father was upstairs talking with your mother, and you were eager to see him too: all that is timeless.
We arrived back in the UK on July 4 … only to have the pilot say, “they celebrate this as Independence Day in the US. Over here we call it Thanksgiving.” Yeah. Joyous welcome to the UK after an overnight flight from Washington, D.C.
😆 One of my early experiences in British/American politics came of having a Brit in my 10th grade American History class. His name was Clinkscales, and he was (besides good-looking) a very good student of British history, and gave us all such a valuable insight into the British side of the events.