After just over two months of looking into my family's ancestry, what are my most salient impressions? These.
1. How quickly you go far back into history. Ten generations back from my mother takes one into the 1600s. Which brings up--
2. How much is forgotten! We remember almost nothing about our forbears three generations back, and after a dozen generations almost nothing is known. There are old stories that are distorted or wholly untrue and that is all.
3. How early my ancestors settled in America. When I started, I expected to find immigrants from the 1800s. I've found none. All so far came in the 1600s and 1700s. [Wrong! The Barrons immigrated to Virginia from Ireland probably after 1800.] I was surprised to find such early settlers in Virginia, in Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. (As to Massachusetts one must remember that from 1628-1640 there was a veritable flood of Puritan immigrants from England, so much so that Boston harbor was one of the busiest seaports of the world, and then in the time of Cromwell there was a mini-flood of aristocrats to Virginia. And in England, some villages were left half empty by the migration.)
4. I had heard of ancestors in Mississippi, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Fulton, Kentucky. And Tennessee. But most lines were in North Carolina for at least a generation. And a surprising number from Virginia. I heard no stories about NC or VA. NC, VA and TN were the "hub" states for my ancestry. Other states include South Carolina (the Pools) New York (Starnes), Rhode Island (Bordens) and New Jersey (Bordens).
5. The states that are not represented are interesting. It is like the way air circulates around the earth; north and south hemispheres have little intermingling of ari masses. Those who settled in the North tended to stay in the North, those in the South tended to stay in the South, except when migrating westward. Or in my case, from the South westward and southerly. Some of the direction of migration was dictated by geography. The mountains and rivers of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina run northeast to southwest, and that deflected the flow of migrants from those states toward Arkansas, Alabama and, ultimately, Texas, and not to Missouri or Ohio.
6. I would love to discover Indian, black, and Jewish ancestry. There probably are American Indians in the genealogy and there are rumored to be, but it is not absolutely proven. Jewish ancestry is possible, and there are many names that are commonly Jewish; however, they are not exclusively Jewish, and so I don't really know; no Cohens or Levys but there are Goulds, Goldschmitts, Goldmans, Guthmans, Eisenmanns, Bachmanns, and so on, often coupled with Patriarchal given names. Black is definitely unproven, but any are welcome if they turn up.
7. 40 years ago I read a sci-fi story about a rich man who commissioned a team of genealogists to look into his ancestry. In the end he achieved distinction for being the only person whose ancestors did absolutely nothing memorable and among whom there was nobody remotely famous. That's not really the case here. Some have been well-to-do or rich and some while poorer were clearly in the vortices of history. There have been no generals or presidents, but I wasn't looking for those. Frederick Starnes being killed by Shawnee right near a settlement begun by Daniel Boone and his father Frederick, Sr., being wounded in his fields a decade earlier is entirely satisfying to me. I will as soon take a craftsman as a politician, a frontiersman as a military officer. I wanted local color, and found some. My disappointments are from not knowing more about the lives those names represent.
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