Two forgotten incidents of history have always been special to me. They are Wat Tyler's Rebellion in England in 1381 and the Jacquerie in France. Wat Tyler was far ahead of his time, resembling nothing as much as the French Revolution 400 years later, promoting ideas of equality that are still not practiced in the UK. He sought to curb the accumulation of land and wealth by the church and to end the influence of the nobility. He died for it, being run through by the lord mayor of London as he tried to dictate terms to Henry VI.
(We think of the Magna Carta as "guaranteeing the rights of Englishmen" and so on, but it didn't. The Magna Carta confirmed the power of the nobility versus the king and little more. Most Englishmen were in effect slaves.)
There were other rebellions, even less well known. My dabbling in genealogy has unearthed several touching my forebears.
The Borden family of Kent, England, may have participated in Jack Cade's Rebellion in 1450. Henry VI pardoned Cade and other leaders, then as the rebellion died down revoked the pardons and apprehended and executed Cade; royal prerogative. There was more to it than that; see http://www.warsoftheroses.co.uk/chapter_39.htm for a good discussion.
In 1645 in certain villages on Lake Zurich including Richterswil where the Bachmanns lived there occurred the Wädenswiler Steueraufstand, a tax revolt. One Rudolf Goldschmid who led the movement was executed. Was he related to the Anna Goldschmitt born 1655 who was the mother of Heinrich Bachmann?
In 1676 there was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. An uprising of indentured servants, the landless, and those unprotected on the frontier against the landed interests in power in the colony. Bacon himself cheated the hangman's rope by dying of malaria, but others were hanged.
From 1765-1771 in the western counties of North Carolina there occurred the War of the Regulation, a political and economic revolt against colonial officeholders and the wealthy families in the east, that presaged the American Revoluton.. Anson County was the heart of the movement. Quite a few of my ancestors were in North Carolina, in Anson, Mecklenburg, and Cabarrus counties around that time. That revolt ended in a mini-massacre as a trained militia fired on farmers and townsmen. And with the hanging of about 20 leaders.
It is a thesis of mine that the American Revolution was in part a revolt of class against class, or the poor and unenfranchised against the wealthy; an Occupy Wall Street movement with teeth. A broad generalization but there is truth in it.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Virginia Connections...
A casual bid at a book auction last October got me a first edition set of Douglas Southall Freeman's bio of George Washington, 7 vols. for $45. 5 of the 7 are first printings as well as being in excellent condition. Not a bad buy as it turned out.
Actually I was the only bidder, at the minimum bid, and to confess I bid only to prime the pump. It's happened before, my getting a phone call on Sunday notifying me that I had bought something I had forgotten about bidding on. Not knocking my Norman Rockwell folios or the tiny print OED, but this was the best yet. The best deal yet too.
Among other chapters, I've been reading about the Fairfax Proprietary. Freeman wrote an appendix of over 100 pages on the Proprietary besides some information within the text itself. Besides hundreds of pages on Virginia colony in the 1700s, its government, culture and history. Great stuff, especially when you've just learned that you had ancestors in Virginia around that time, which brings it all to life: what was it like then?
Well, early this week, I resumed genealogizing to the extent of googling a couple of names I had neglected before. One name was Heinrich Bachmann and the other was Benjamin Borden.
Heinrich Bachmann immigrated to the colonies about 1738 or '39 from Richterswil, Zurich Canton, Switzerland. My first Swiss! And that's not all. After spending about 20 years in the Shanandoah Valley of Virginia, he shows up in the records as the buyer of 257 acres in the Shenandoah of Frederick County, VA, from the Fairfax Proprietary and he died there about 20 years later.
Heinrich's mother had the name Dagan, which sources say is Hebraic. His father's mother was a Goldschmidt. Were they Jewish? If so, not for long.
Another Fairfax nexus or near nexus came up with Ben Borden, Jr. His grandfather was a Quaker and immigrated to the new colony of Rhode Island in the late 1630s, not as a founder but an early colonist. His son Benjamin moved to New Jersey, where his son Benjamin Borden, Jr., was born. All the Bordens had a knack for acquiring land, and that was a special calling for Ben Borden, Jr., who bought and sold thousands of acres in what is now New Jersey. Then Ben Borden, Jr., went to Virginia, perhaps after a spot of trouble over opposition to the hanging of a suspected pirate.
Somehow through persuasion or wheeling and dealing Borden obtained a patent on 91,000 acres in Rockbridge County, Virginia, near present day Lexington. Some say he was nicknamed "Fairfax Ben" because he was an agent of the Fairfax Proprietary. I think it was because with his control over 91,000 acres he was set up as a sort of mini Lord Fairfax with 1/50th the land and minus the titles.
He didn't lose the land through poor judgment the way a number of prominent Virginia plantation owners did. He left his daughters 5,000 acres each and his sons considerably more. His estate was inventoried for probate at some 120,000 acres, and litigation over claims to it was said to have continued for 154 years!
His granddaughter, Margaret Borden, married Nichodemus Keith in Bedford County, Va, the county just to the south of the Borden landholdings. After several children were born, Margaret and Nichodemus and it seems her father John Borden then migrated to Tennessee.
Why did John Borden, who ought to have been prosperous thanks to Ben Borden's will, leave Virginia for greater hardship and risk out on the frontier? That is one mystery. The usual reasons to migrate to Tennessee were economic: a quest for land or for more land away from the established economic hieratchy in the East.
Another mystery is where Nichodemus Keith came from. On the internet one finds various nonsense about him, that he was born in Tennessee in 1755 or that he lived in Tennessee before his marriage to Margaret. There are claims that he served in the Revolution: undocumented, plus his family grew so fast during the Revolution years that he surely stayed nearby. There are claims he was the son of Sir William Keith of Scotland, but the dates don't quite jibe. Others say he was the son of a William Butler Keith of Ireland.
Tennessee was a wild and wooly place before 1790. The British established a settlement at Ft. Loudon in 1757. It was under continual Indian attack and was abandoned three years later. Finally a group of settlers acted outside the law and treaties and established a community complete with its own constitution--the Wautaga Association. To be followed by efforts to create the new State of Franklin. Following the close of the Revolutionary War, there was significant immigration to Tennessee, which grew explosively in the1790s; after 1800, Tennessee was becoming settled and civilized. There is no way Nichodemus would have been born in Tennessee in 1755 or 1760, and no way he would have been married in Tennessee in 1776 as some would have it.
One might wish to connect Nichodemus Keith with the famous line of Keiths in Scotland, a 500+ year old line of marischals and earl-marischals of Scotland extending over 500 years from the late 1100s until 1716, when the clan head and marischal was outlawed and his titles and lands were confiscated by the Crown for supporting a Stuart claimant to the throne, some Keiths being descended from the Stuart king James I, king of Scotland 1406-1437, and some associated with the affairs of later Stuarts including Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James I, king of England, Scotland, and Wales for whom the "King James Bible" was named. [Or Queen James, which I call him to offend Christian fundamentalist homophobes who claim divine inspiration for the KJV.]
Most likely, Nichodemus Keith was Scots-Irish, meaning that he was descended from those impoverished Scots who were settled for a time in Ireland as colonists/buffers for the British Crown who then moved from Ireland to the colonies, and was not part of that famous line, at least not for some generations back. But it is not known.
Statements are made about Margaret Borden, that she was a poet and a Baptist preacher. Where did that come from? There was a book written about Nichodemus & Margaret Keith and their descendants that I have not seen; are these stories contained in that book? Were there female Baptist preachers in the 1700s? Seems a little early to me.
Was Nichodemus Keith descended from a settler on a tract of Ben Borden's land? Was he a neighbor of the Bordens? Don't know. Was he a grandson of wandering Baptist preacher Cornelius Keith who roamed the Virginia and North Carolina mountains in a wagon around 1715? A relative of George Keith, who was a Quaker associated with William Penn but who split with Penn and formed his own Quakerish sect called Keithians? Unknown, captain.
Why did a grandaughter of a major landowner marry Nichodemus? Don't know.
Why was Nichodemus referred to as "Judge" Nichodemus Keith in one record? Don't know.
Why did they all pull up stakes and go to Tennessee, including John Borden Margaret's father? Unknown.
So here is the state of my ancestors in Virginia:
(1) Bullock. William Bullock settled near Jamestown/Williamsburg about 1624 and died at Warwick, VA in 1650. His father Hugh, "master and owner of the Endeavor" and other ships, was a sometime resident of Virginia from the 1620s but primarily lived in London though he was a member of the House of Burgesses in 1631 by virtue of owning 2600 acres of Virginia land. Nevertheless, descent from Hugh qualfies one for membership in the Jamestown Society. In the late 1700s, Agnes Bullock born in North Carolina would marry into the Pool family of North Carolina and their daughter would be born in Georgia in 1800 and would marry a Smith and later die at the Smith enclave in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
(2) Mayes. The Mayes were in Virginia before moving to Kentucky in the 1800s. They lived in Halifax and Pittsylvania, Virginia in the 1700s and earlier. By some genealogies they trace back to Rev. William Mease who arrived in Virginia in 1610. In terms of early colonial ancestry Rev. Mease is paydirt. However, one must be cautious because some facts about Rev. Mease and his descendants are not certain. Descent appears to trace as follows: Rev, William Mease (1584-1636?) --> John Mays (1611-1673) --> William Mayes + ___ Newcombe --> William Mayes + Mary Mattox --> William Mayes (d. 1752) + Eliz. Gardiner --> William Mays (1724-1794) + Sarah Latham --> Drury Mays (1773-1820) --> Thomas David Mayes (1799-1852) + --> David N. Mayes (1831 TN-1886) + Martha Cloyes [who brings in Massachusetts Puritan ancestry] --> Ida Emma Eudora Frances Mayes (1858-1926) who married John Bachman Downing, my great-grandfather. 12 generations in all, some in Virginia.
(3) Brumbelow. Edward Brumbelow was born in Warsaw, Virginia, about 1675 and was the carpenter who built the Richmond County courthouse around 1706. A son or grandson was a local judge in Virginia. A descendant, Lewis Brumbelow, would migrate from Virginia to Tennessee, and his daughter, Elizabeth Brumbelow, would marry a later Nichodemus Keith and die in Texas in 1895; her mother was reputed to be Cherokee but this is unproven.
(4) Borden. Quaker and real estate wheeler-dealer Benjamin Borden, Jr., moved to Virginia from New Jersey about 1734 and then settled on his 91,000 acre tract in Rockbridge County where he died in 1743 near Winchester right after being appointed to a judgeship. It is told that Borden was wandering in the wilderness in western Virginia trying to find his land specified in the patent when he stopped for the night at a little cabin; John McDowell, the son of the family living there just happened to be trained as a surveyor, and Borden offered him a thousand acres to survey and stake out Borden's land and begin settling it; it was quickly surveyed though McDowell had to sue Borden to get his choice of land, which preserved the incident and the contract between te men. Here is more information and a transcription of the written agreement between Borden and McDowell dated 1737: http://leomcdowell.tripod.com/id28.htm
(5) Starnes. Frederick Starnes, Jr., migrated from New York to Pennsylvania and settled on the South Fork of the Holston River near present day Abington, Virginia, possibly before 1750, the Holston being a jump-off point for explorations of the Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness and an epicenter for "the longhunters" who were the first white explorers of Tennessee and Kentucky; Frederick was a constable and former militiaman, and while on a scouting expedition past Boonesborough, Kentucky, that Frederick and relatives undertook in 1779, was killed along with his brother and son-in-law by Shawnee stirred up by the British. It was reported that the son-in-law was a big man, and that his heart was missing when the bodies were found. A son and nephew were among settlers of Boonesborough and another son, "Capt. John," was killed in the Revolutionary War. His father, Frederick Starnes, Sr., also had moved to Virginia and was wounded by Indians while working in his field.
(6) Bachmann. In 1762 Heinrich Bachmann bought 257 acres of Fairfax Proprietary land in the Shanandoah Valley and some of his descendants lived on that tract in Virginia at least until the 1850s. At some point, a Bachmann -- or Bachman or Baughman -- would move on to Tennessee, where a daughter would marry a James Downing and give birth to a son, John Bachman Downing, who as a teenager out on his own would seek work in North Carolina, marry Ida Mayes, and move on to Dallas, Texas, in the 1870s.
(7) Keith. Margaret Borden and Nichodemus Keith married in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1776 and lived there for a few years as some of their children were born before moving to Tennessee by the 1790s along with John Borden. One of their daughters would marry Samuel Cowan in Tennessee where Cowan was a commissioner of Knox County, and then some descendants, Cowans and Keiths both, would migrate to Texas in the late 1830s.
Actually I was the only bidder, at the minimum bid, and to confess I bid only to prime the pump. It's happened before, my getting a phone call on Sunday notifying me that I had bought something I had forgotten about bidding on. Not knocking my Norman Rockwell folios or the tiny print OED, but this was the best yet. The best deal yet too.
Among other chapters, I've been reading about the Fairfax Proprietary. Freeman wrote an appendix of over 100 pages on the Proprietary besides some information within the text itself. Besides hundreds of pages on Virginia colony in the 1700s, its government, culture and history. Great stuff, especially when you've just learned that you had ancestors in Virginia around that time, which brings it all to life: what was it like then?
Well, early this week, I resumed genealogizing to the extent of googling a couple of names I had neglected before. One name was Heinrich Bachmann and the other was Benjamin Borden.
Heinrich Bachmann immigrated to the colonies about 1738 or '39 from Richterswil, Zurich Canton, Switzerland. My first Swiss! And that's not all. After spending about 20 years in the Shanandoah Valley of Virginia, he shows up in the records as the buyer of 257 acres in the Shenandoah of Frederick County, VA, from the Fairfax Proprietary and he died there about 20 years later.
Heinrich's mother had the name Dagan, which sources say is Hebraic. His father's mother was a Goldschmidt. Were they Jewish? If so, not for long.
Another Fairfax nexus or near nexus came up with Ben Borden, Jr. His grandfather was a Quaker and immigrated to the new colony of Rhode Island in the late 1630s, not as a founder but an early colonist. His son Benjamin moved to New Jersey, where his son Benjamin Borden, Jr., was born. All the Bordens had a knack for acquiring land, and that was a special calling for Ben Borden, Jr., who bought and sold thousands of acres in what is now New Jersey. Then Ben Borden, Jr., went to Virginia, perhaps after a spot of trouble over opposition to the hanging of a suspected pirate.
Somehow through persuasion or wheeling and dealing Borden obtained a patent on 91,000 acres in Rockbridge County, Virginia, near present day Lexington. Some say he was nicknamed "Fairfax Ben" because he was an agent of the Fairfax Proprietary. I think it was because with his control over 91,000 acres he was set up as a sort of mini Lord Fairfax with 1/50th the land and minus the titles.
He didn't lose the land through poor judgment the way a number of prominent Virginia plantation owners did. He left his daughters 5,000 acres each and his sons considerably more. His estate was inventoried for probate at some 120,000 acres, and litigation over claims to it was said to have continued for 154 years!
His granddaughter, Margaret Borden, married Nichodemus Keith in Bedford County, Va, the county just to the south of the Borden landholdings. After several children were born, Margaret and Nichodemus and it seems her father John Borden then migrated to Tennessee.
Why did John Borden, who ought to have been prosperous thanks to Ben Borden's will, leave Virginia for greater hardship and risk out on the frontier? That is one mystery. The usual reasons to migrate to Tennessee were economic: a quest for land or for more land away from the established economic hieratchy in the East.
Another mystery is where Nichodemus Keith came from. On the internet one finds various nonsense about him, that he was born in Tennessee in 1755 or that he lived in Tennessee before his marriage to Margaret. There are claims that he served in the Revolution: undocumented, plus his family grew so fast during the Revolution years that he surely stayed nearby. There are claims he was the son of Sir William Keith of Scotland, but the dates don't quite jibe. Others say he was the son of a William Butler Keith of Ireland.
Tennessee was a wild and wooly place before 1790. The British established a settlement at Ft. Loudon in 1757. It was under continual Indian attack and was abandoned three years later. Finally a group of settlers acted outside the law and treaties and established a community complete with its own constitution--the Wautaga Association. To be followed by efforts to create the new State of Franklin. Following the close of the Revolutionary War, there was significant immigration to Tennessee, which grew explosively in the1790s; after 1800, Tennessee was becoming settled and civilized. There is no way Nichodemus would have been born in Tennessee in 1755 or 1760, and no way he would have been married in Tennessee in 1776 as some would have it.
One might wish to connect Nichodemus Keith with the famous line of Keiths in Scotland, a 500+ year old line of marischals and earl-marischals of Scotland extending over 500 years from the late 1100s until 1716, when the clan head and marischal was outlawed and his titles and lands were confiscated by the Crown for supporting a Stuart claimant to the throne, some Keiths being descended from the Stuart king James I, king of Scotland 1406-1437, and some associated with the affairs of later Stuarts including Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James I, king of England, Scotland, and Wales for whom the "King James Bible" was named. [Or Queen James, which I call him to offend Christian fundamentalist homophobes who claim divine inspiration for the KJV.]
Most likely, Nichodemus Keith was Scots-Irish, meaning that he was descended from those impoverished Scots who were settled for a time in Ireland as colonists/buffers for the British Crown who then moved from Ireland to the colonies, and was not part of that famous line, at least not for some generations back. But it is not known.
Statements are made about Margaret Borden, that she was a poet and a Baptist preacher. Where did that come from? There was a book written about Nichodemus & Margaret Keith and their descendants that I have not seen; are these stories contained in that book? Were there female Baptist preachers in the 1700s? Seems a little early to me.
Was Nichodemus Keith descended from a settler on a tract of Ben Borden's land? Was he a neighbor of the Bordens? Don't know. Was he a grandson of wandering Baptist preacher Cornelius Keith who roamed the Virginia and North Carolina mountains in a wagon around 1715? A relative of George Keith, who was a Quaker associated with William Penn but who split with Penn and formed his own Quakerish sect called Keithians? Unknown, captain.
Why did a grandaughter of a major landowner marry Nichodemus? Don't know.
Why was Nichodemus referred to as "Judge" Nichodemus Keith in one record? Don't know.
Why did they all pull up stakes and go to Tennessee, including John Borden Margaret's father? Unknown.
So here is the state of my ancestors in Virginia:
(1) Bullock. William Bullock settled near Jamestown/Williamsburg about 1624 and died at Warwick, VA in 1650. His father Hugh, "master and owner of the Endeavor" and other ships, was a sometime resident of Virginia from the 1620s but primarily lived in London though he was a member of the House of Burgesses in 1631 by virtue of owning 2600 acres of Virginia land. Nevertheless, descent from Hugh qualfies one for membership in the Jamestown Society. In the late 1700s, Agnes Bullock born in North Carolina would marry into the Pool family of North Carolina and their daughter would be born in Georgia in 1800 and would marry a Smith and later die at the Smith enclave in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
(2) Mayes. The Mayes were in Virginia before moving to Kentucky in the 1800s. They lived in Halifax and Pittsylvania, Virginia in the 1700s and earlier. By some genealogies they trace back to Rev. William Mease who arrived in Virginia in 1610. In terms of early colonial ancestry Rev. Mease is paydirt. However, one must be cautious because some facts about Rev. Mease and his descendants are not certain. Descent appears to trace as follows: Rev, William Mease (1584-1636?) --> John Mays (1611-1673) --> William Mayes + ___ Newcombe --> William Mayes + Mary Mattox --> William Mayes (d. 1752) + Eliz. Gardiner --> William Mays (1724-1794) + Sarah Latham --> Drury Mays (1773-1820) --> Thomas David Mayes (1799-1852) + --> David N. Mayes (1831 TN-1886) + Martha Cloyes [who brings in Massachusetts Puritan ancestry] --> Ida Emma Eudora Frances Mayes (1858-1926) who married John Bachman Downing, my great-grandfather. 12 generations in all, some in Virginia.
(3) Brumbelow. Edward Brumbelow was born in Warsaw, Virginia, about 1675 and was the carpenter who built the Richmond County courthouse around 1706. A son or grandson was a local judge in Virginia. A descendant, Lewis Brumbelow, would migrate from Virginia to Tennessee, and his daughter, Elizabeth Brumbelow, would marry a later Nichodemus Keith and die in Texas in 1895; her mother was reputed to be Cherokee but this is unproven.
(4) Borden. Quaker and real estate wheeler-dealer Benjamin Borden, Jr., moved to Virginia from New Jersey about 1734 and then settled on his 91,000 acre tract in Rockbridge County where he died in 1743 near Winchester right after being appointed to a judgeship. It is told that Borden was wandering in the wilderness in western Virginia trying to find his land specified in the patent when he stopped for the night at a little cabin; John McDowell, the son of the family living there just happened to be trained as a surveyor, and Borden offered him a thousand acres to survey and stake out Borden's land and begin settling it; it was quickly surveyed though McDowell had to sue Borden to get his choice of land, which preserved the incident and the contract between te men. Here is more information and a transcription of the written agreement between Borden and McDowell dated 1737: http://leomcdowell.tripod.com/id28.htm
(5) Starnes. Frederick Starnes, Jr., migrated from New York to Pennsylvania and settled on the South Fork of the Holston River near present day Abington, Virginia, possibly before 1750, the Holston being a jump-off point for explorations of the Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness and an epicenter for "the longhunters" who were the first white explorers of Tennessee and Kentucky; Frederick was a constable and former militiaman, and while on a scouting expedition past Boonesborough, Kentucky, that Frederick and relatives undertook in 1779, was killed along with his brother and son-in-law by Shawnee stirred up by the British. It was reported that the son-in-law was a big man, and that his heart was missing when the bodies were found. A son and nephew were among settlers of Boonesborough and another son, "Capt. John," was killed in the Revolutionary War. His father, Frederick Starnes, Sr., also had moved to Virginia and was wounded by Indians while working in his field.
(6) Bachmann. In 1762 Heinrich Bachmann bought 257 acres of Fairfax Proprietary land in the Shanandoah Valley and some of his descendants lived on that tract in Virginia at least until the 1850s. At some point, a Bachmann -- or Bachman or Baughman -- would move on to Tennessee, where a daughter would marry a James Downing and give birth to a son, John Bachman Downing, who as a teenager out on his own would seek work in North Carolina, marry Ida Mayes, and move on to Dallas, Texas, in the 1870s.
(7) Keith. Margaret Borden and Nichodemus Keith married in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1776 and lived there for a few years as some of their children were born before moving to Tennessee by the 1790s along with John Borden. One of their daughters would marry Samuel Cowan in Tennessee where Cowan was a commissioner of Knox County, and then some descendants, Cowans and Keiths both, would migrate to Texas in the late 1830s.
Monday, February 20, 2012
What's in a Name?
I noted in an earlier post that the middle name of my great grandfather John Downing was Bachman and that the name had transmuted from Baughman to Bachman.
H. L. Mencken had it otherwise in his book, The American Language, chapter about proper names. He quoted an article by Howard Barker, who wrote: "Bachmann was first 'improved' as Baughmann, promptly misunderstood as Boughman (pronounced to rhyme with ploughman), and then more easily spelled Bowman, which made possible one more shift in pronumciation." [The American Language, P. 479.]
This goes contrary to what I first learned of what the Bachmans/Boughmans in my family did sometime around 1800, as Johannes Baughman son of Heinrich Baughmann had a son born 1783 who called himself Daniel Bachman. On the other hand, some genealogies show only a change from Bachmann to Bachman and ignore the "Baughman" http://mykindred.com/cloud/TX/getperson.php?personID=I89290&tree=mykindred01 In that case, my sources have it wrong. But there is the pronunciation: my mother learned from John Bachman Downing (d. 1944) pronounced the name "Bawkman," not "Bockman."
The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Hanks and Hodges considers Bachman at least to be a variant of Bach, meaning perhaps, "baker" or possibly "one who lives by a river." But according to the genealogy I linked to above, the name was Bachmann at least as far back as the early 1600s in Richterswig Canton, Zurich, Switzerland, from whence the Bachmann's came to America and bought land in Virginia from the Fairfax Proprietary.
"Carriker" did come from "Karcher." Likely they are pronounced the same.
Changing gears. I have been accused of having two first names. This accusation shows a lack of history, because my last name dates from the late 1100s and was first used as a given name no more than 150 years ago. The name itself probably is taken from Gaelic meaning "woods" or even"wind" depending on which dictionary you look it up in.
Like many surnames it likely came from a location, in this case the grant of a barony and lands by King Malcolm to the family in recognition for fighting Danes (there is the usual story about the ancestor killing the Danish chieftain in single combat). There is a town in Scotland of that name, dating back to the time of Malcolm or earlier, which may mark the location of those lands. By this theory then, the place gave rise to the name.
But there was a charming story about how the family name originated, that it comes from the Germanic tribe known as the Catti, a poor tribe whose name may be preserved today in one of the poorer regions of Germany known as Hesse. The Catti were among the allied tribes who destroyed the three legions of Varus about 2003 years ago. ["My legions." moaned Augustus, in shock over the disaster, "Varus! Bring me back my legions!"] At some point, so the story goes, a number of the Catti in escaping from the soldiers of Tiberius (about the year 4) or those of Germanicus (about 20 years later when he wreaked a fearful vengeance over the loss of 20,000 of Varus' men) fled for their lives in boats across the North Sea to the coast of Scotland, where they were permitted to settle. My surname, so goes the story, comes straight from the tribal name Catti.
Now in fact at one point the family battle flag did feature a cat on it, but this may have been beause the story was then current and believed. It is said that the Catti flag was carried into the battle of Flodden Field in 1513, and that despite the death of a number of family members the flag was recovered and preserved.
This tale suggests that a tribal name came first, then a place name and a family name. Historically fascinating, even if not believed today.
Changing gears again: variations on "Gold." One branch (I think it is the Cloyes or the Gates or somebody back in the Mayes line but don't remember) is traced back to a Solomon Gould in England who had sons named Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, and so on. Was he Jewish? Who knows? The first Starnes to grow up in America married an Ann Goldman who like him came to New York in 1710. The mother of Heinrich Bachman who emigrated to the colonies from Switzerland was named Goldschmidt. Interesting.
H. L. Mencken had it otherwise in his book, The American Language, chapter about proper names. He quoted an article by Howard Barker, who wrote: "Bachmann was first 'improved' as Baughmann, promptly misunderstood as Boughman (pronounced to rhyme with ploughman), and then more easily spelled Bowman, which made possible one more shift in pronumciation." [The American Language, P. 479.]
This goes contrary to what I first learned of what the Bachmans/Boughmans in my family did sometime around 1800, as Johannes Baughman son of Heinrich Baughmann had a son born 1783 who called himself Daniel Bachman. On the other hand, some genealogies show only a change from Bachmann to Bachman and ignore the "Baughman" http://mykindred.com/cloud/TX/getperson.php?personID=I89290&tree=mykindred01 In that case, my sources have it wrong. But there is the pronunciation: my mother learned from John Bachman Downing (d. 1944) pronounced the name "Bawkman," not "Bockman."
The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Hanks and Hodges considers Bachman at least to be a variant of Bach, meaning perhaps, "baker" or possibly "one who lives by a river." But according to the genealogy I linked to above, the name was Bachmann at least as far back as the early 1600s in Richterswig Canton, Zurich, Switzerland, from whence the Bachmann's came to America and bought land in Virginia from the Fairfax Proprietary.
"Carriker" did come from "Karcher." Likely they are pronounced the same.
Changing gears. I have been accused of having two first names. This accusation shows a lack of history, because my last name dates from the late 1100s and was first used as a given name no more than 150 years ago. The name itself probably is taken from Gaelic meaning "woods" or even"wind" depending on which dictionary you look it up in.
Like many surnames it likely came from a location, in this case the grant of a barony and lands by King Malcolm to the family in recognition for fighting Danes (there is the usual story about the ancestor killing the Danish chieftain in single combat). There is a town in Scotland of that name, dating back to the time of Malcolm or earlier, which may mark the location of those lands. By this theory then, the place gave rise to the name.
But there was a charming story about how the family name originated, that it comes from the Germanic tribe known as the Catti, a poor tribe whose name may be preserved today in one of the poorer regions of Germany known as Hesse. The Catti were among the allied tribes who destroyed the three legions of Varus about 2003 years ago. ["My legions." moaned Augustus, in shock over the disaster, "Varus! Bring me back my legions!"] At some point, so the story goes, a number of the Catti in escaping from the soldiers of Tiberius (about the year 4) or those of Germanicus (about 20 years later when he wreaked a fearful vengeance over the loss of 20,000 of Varus' men) fled for their lives in boats across the North Sea to the coast of Scotland, where they were permitted to settle. My surname, so goes the story, comes straight from the tribal name Catti.
Now in fact at one point the family battle flag did feature a cat on it, but this may have been beause the story was then current and believed. It is said that the Catti flag was carried into the battle of Flodden Field in 1513, and that despite the death of a number of family members the flag was recovered and preserved.
This tale suggests that a tribal name came first, then a place name and a family name. Historically fascinating, even if not believed today.
Changing gears again: variations on "Gold." One branch (I think it is the Cloyes or the Gates or somebody back in the Mayes line but don't remember) is traced back to a Solomon Gould in England who had sons named Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, and so on. Was he Jewish? Who knows? The first Starnes to grow up in America married an Ann Goldman who like him came to New York in 1710. The mother of Heinrich Bachman who emigrated to the colonies from Switzerland was named Goldschmidt. Interesting.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Pulling Up the Family Tree to Look at the Roots
Two days before xmas I finished up some work and kicked back on the internet to relax as is my wont of late. Decided to look up some dates on an ancestor. When I googled the name, I spotted information about that person I never heard before.
"That person" was my father btw, whom I had not seen since 1961, whose birth and death dates I wanted to verify. The information I found was about his family. I knew they lived in in New Mexico for much of the 20th century but the stories I heard had them moving there from Alabama, that my father was born in Alabama, on an Indian reservation, it was said. Not so. His family had been in Texas since possibly before 1840, moving from what would become Titus County to Hunt County to Erath County, then to Oklahoma where his father married, and then on, by covered wagon, to Quay County, NM.
I visited his father's place in NM in the 1950s for a family reunion and saw an old wagon there with hoops for a canvas cover. We played on that wagon, and on an old motorcycle rusting nearby; rode a horse too. (Who was that fetching young lady who got me to climb up on the horse behind her? She would be 60-70 now.)
The genealogy bug bit. I was off and running. I spent the rest of the evening putting together a chart from info found on the internet. What I did was to find the name of a known ancestor on somebody else's genealogical chart which I would then plagiarize. Genealogizing on the quick and dirty.
There were more surprises.
A big surprise was this: my mother's sister had married a Cowan. I was astonished to find that 200 years ago a Cowan had married the daughter of the first identified ancestor in America to bear my father's name and that that very Cowan was the ancestor of the Cowans to whom I was related by my aunt's marriage.
More than that; both families had moved from Tennessee to Texas at about the same time, and lived in the same counties in Texas in the same sequence. The father of the Cowan who married my mother's sister was born in the same county as my father's father. And of course sons of each family married sisters then living in another county-- my mother and aunt. And nobody realized the connection!
Seems that sort of migration, of extended families together, was common. Not like today, when a nuclear family or individual moves alone from coast to coast. (Well, there was John Downing who in the late 1850s left his family in Tennessee in order, it was claimed, to dig for gold in California; he was not seen again.)
That movement, the migration, the patterns of it, and how it ties into history is most interesting. I am much more conscious of being a product of history than before. Reading about colonial and frontier times has distinctly more personal significance than before.
Some oddities. Several times, in different family lines over generations, the same name would crop up in marriages. In my father's family, his mother was a Crane and so was his great grandmother born in 1800. My mother's grandmother was a Carriker, but so was her greatgrandmother whose daughter married a Carriker. My mother's other grandmother's antecedents had a daughter who married a Cloyse in Massachusetts, and then 2-3 generations down the line of ancestry runs through other Cloyes.
The Smiths and Cloyes' were interrelated in NY long before a Smith married the daughter of a woman descended from Cloyses. And the Smiths those Cloyes were peripherally related to included one Joseph Smith, who would go on to found the Mormon faith. These were probably not related to the Smith who was my grandfather, mind you. Different lines.
I grew up being told that I was part Indian, that my father was born on a reservation in Alabama; well, there were of course Indians in Alabama, though no reservations. Later I would learn that Indian ancestry was looked on with disapproval. (My mother said years later that if she knew that about my father she would not have married him. She was, and is, quite racist despite having black friends.)
My father was it seems actually born in Oklahoma in Indian Territory, and while there are some candidates for Indian descent among his forbears (Brumbelow and/or Uzzel and/or Crane), it seems very likely on my mother's side. I note that on her mother's side, a Downing married a Mayes. Well, both Downing and Mayes were the names of Cherokee chiefs in Oklahoma in the late 1800s. Quite possibly there was intermarriage in my family with Indians while they were in Tennessee or North Carolina. The most likely candidate for Indianhood was on my mother's father's side, where internet sources say a bride known only as "Neoma Naomi" is thought to have been Cherokee.
Names change over time. Starring becomes Stearnes or Starns or even Stern. Karcher becomes Carriker. Baughman becomes Bachman. (It is interesting that my mother pronounces "Bachman" as "Bawkman." This is probably how you would have pronounced Baughman. She of course knew her grandfather John Bachman Downing (1856-1944), who told her of being raised by his grandparents in Tennessee after his father left, and having gone to North Carolina to work when he was in his mid-teens, then marrying and traveling to Dallas with the Board family.) Gerlach becomes Carlock. Guthmann becomes Gutmann or Goodman. Cloyes is variously Cloyse or even Clayes. Some forms are artifacts of genealogists; for example you see the name listed as "Clayes-Cloyes," which is actually stating alternate forms; it is possible that the name given as "Neoma Naomi" is like that.
Why do the names change? On reason is that some ancestors were illiterate and knew pronunciations but not spellings. Another is that spelling rules were less fixed than today. Another was the anglicization of names.
Some interesting names crop up in my ancestry. I didn't know about Eisenmann or Goodman or Goldman or Gould or Yerton. Some of these may have been Jewish. An ancestral Gould in England had sons named Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph. A Solomon Carriker married a Rachel Yerton. But if any were Jewish it did not last, which casts doubt on my hypothesis; surely Jews would not be marrying not-Jews and dropping their faith so often. [Added: more interesting names have cropped up, for example Goldschmidt and Dagon in the Bachman/Bachmann ancestry in Switzerland.]
A Veare in old England was likely of Normon origin. Paschal cropped up in one line. There was a Jonson in England; could there be a relationship to rare Ben Jonson?
I had heard about forebears in Georgia and Pennsylvania and Mississippi, but never about Massachusetts or New York or Virginia. Nor North Carolina, where along with Tennessee nearly all branches of the family lived at one time or another, sometimes within miles of other families they would marry into generations later in other states. I can't recall how many ancestors lived in Mecklinberg County or Cabarrus County or Anson County from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s. Or in eastern Tennessee. [Added: Ruchard Borden was an early settler in Rhode Island before 1640; his son Benjamin moved on to New Jersey in the late 1600s. And there were at least a half dozen ancestral lines in Virginia from 1610-1800.]
Several lived in the Shenandoah Valley or Clinch Mountain region, some of the prettiest landscapes in the USA! Why they moved on, to Texas of all places, is a mystery to me. The change from eastern Tennessee to the barren near desert landscape of Quay County, NM, is quite a step down, scenically at least, from the Blue Ridge or Shenandoah or Eastern Tennessee.
I recently saw the 1992 movie "Last of the Mohicans" for the first time. While the movie was set in New York it was filmed in North Carolina, amid the Blue Ridge mountains. I was on the edge of my seat when I learned that; my ancestors, I thought with shock, moved from that to this? I came out with the short end of the stick!
I was surprised how many ancestors were in the colonies early, but none as far as I've found were original Jamestown settlers or passengers on the Mayflower. 1624 in Virginia is the oldest immigrant to the New World so far, that being Willam Bullock.
I am only about 2/3 finished. There are what look like dead ends. Who knows where a John Smith came from; he is lost among many of that name in the Piedmont. Smiths, Downings, Cranes, Sams, Lewis, Guthrie, all peter out in the early 1800s. The Pools in the 1700s. Either their names were too common or they immigrated late or they were too poor or were illiterate and left no clear traces. For a Miss Uzzell, one doesn't know which Uzzell in early Texas the lass was descended from. And so on. Except for skinning and tanning of hides, the hunt for ancestors is pretty much over.
On literacy, I found on the internet a transcription of a probated will signed with marks. They apprently had a not insubstantial estate, but could not sign their names. If I recall correctly, they were Paschels.
The lines traceable back into the 1500s or earlier in Britain are the Bordens, the Cloyes, and others.
No famous people so far. No generals, presidents, or senators were an ancestor. For most of the names in my chart there is no indication of what they did or of how they spent their lives, only hints of their movements or lack of movement revealed in places of birth and death. Sometimes deeds or lawsuits or wills are described or transcribed on the internet. Occasionally a bit of history comes through.
For example, an ancestral Brumbelow is said to have been a carpenter on the Richmond county courthouse about 1700. Lawsuit records and other court information about that Brumbelow has been found.
A Brumbelow in the early 1700s is referred to as "judge" as was a Nichodemus Keith around the time of the Revolution. No support for the proposition that Nichodemus was a real judge; could be a mistake or a form of respectful address.
Nichodemus' origin btw is unknown; there are suppositions that he came from Scotland; a little more support for his emigrating from Ireland; a hint from genealogical savant Larry Keith who wrote books on that family that Nichodemus may have had a brother and sister in Virginia and might have been Irish and that is all. His father may have been a William Butler Keith who was born in Ireland. That family may have been among the many Scots who emigrated to Ireland and lived there as Scots-Irish fighting with the native Irish then emigrated to the colonies in the 1700s where they fought with Indians.
An ancestral Smith in Georgia married a Pool whose mother was a Bullock. She was descended from Hugh Bullock born in the 1500s who was a prosperous Englishman and owner of a small fleet of ships that supplied the Virginia colony in the 1620s. Hugh's son William settled in Virginia in 1624, right about the time when the charter was cancelled and Virginia became a Crown colony. Hugh was a big landowner and in the House of Burgesses in 1631. Did he acquire lands through the "hundreds" grants under the charter before 1624, bringing over people as well as supplies?
The Starnes (Stearnes) have a most interesting frontier nexus. The family was Palatine German, coming to New York on British ships in 1710. The second and third generations moved to Pennsylvania then to Western Virginia. One family patriarch, Frederick Stearnes, Jr., was killed by Shawnee along with his brother and son-in-law a short distance from Boonesborough while exploring for new land in Kentucky. ne account says the son-in-law's heart was removed. A couple of Frederick's sons lived at Boonesborough prior to 1779 and may have helped Daniel Boone build the fort. Another, a Capt. John Stearnes, may have been killed in 1780 when Gen. Gates was routed by the British at Camden.
Frederick Starnes, Jr., seems to have been rather prosperous, a constable, and was involved in supplying the Virginia militia with beef. There was an officer in the militia around that time named Lt. Col. George Washington; did they ever meet? Who knows?
Frederick Starnes, Jr., last settled near the Holston River in Washington County, Virginia. That locale around the branches of the Holston that led into Tennessee and to the location where Knoxville would be founded was known for being the jumping off point of men who were called "The Longhunters." While Frederick was not one, two witnesses of his 1778 will, Bird and Bounds, may have been longhunters.
Most immigrants were poor, and had to work off their passage in ways not dissimilar to the Chinese illegals working in sweat shops in New York City basements. I don't know how many in the family tree were indentured servants. (The following person, though he was 37 when he and his large family took passage to Massachusetts, may have had to work to pay off the costs of transport which kept him in one place for the better part of 10 years before he was free to move on to another location.)
Another surprising nexus with history. William Towne, Puritan, born 1599 and a resident of the port town of Yarmouth, England, immigrated to Massachusetts in 1637 with his wife and six children. For a time they lived in Salem, then moved onto a farm in an adjoining county. Two daughters had married and stayed behind in Salem. A third moved with the family to a place called Topfield. The daughters were Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Estey and Sarah Towne Cloyse.
In 1692, some years after their father's death in or about 1685, all three were accused of witchcraft. Rebecca (who was elderly and an invalid) and Mary were hanged, while Sarah, who stormed out of a church service when the minister declared there was a devil in the congregation, was imprisoned. A thing of pride that they did not confess and attempt to throw blame on others to save their lives; if they had confessed they would have lived. I am not a descendant of any of these women but of their brother Jacob, 9 or 10 generations back. For those who have not read Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" based closely on records of the time or Alexander Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (he has a chapter on the witch mania) there is a lot of information on the internet includng transcriptions of the trials themselves.
By coincidence, when I was a pre-adolescent, I read and enjoyed a children's book called "Tinker's Tim and the Witches" that was set in Salem during the witch mania period. "Tinker's Tim" like "The Crucible" was written at a time when America was embarking on other witch-hunts. "Tinker's Tim" has been a great influence on me, turning me into the contarian anti-religious cuss that I am.
Here's a review of "Tinker's Tim and the Witches" by, one presumes, an evangelical concerned about the liberal content of the modern school curriculum. http://homeschoolblogger.com/homeschoolbookreview/757301/ While I agree that whitewashing the past to remove objectionable content is a dispicable practice and turns school books into bland pablum, my own opinion is that "Tinker's Tim" is quite timely and that all around us there are imaginary witches being subjected to persecution, including minorities, aliens, Muslims, atheists, and gays. The spirit of 1692 Salem is alive and well in America. The whips and stocks and gibbit are oiled and ready and waiting, for us.
"That person" was my father btw, whom I had not seen since 1961, whose birth and death dates I wanted to verify. The information I found was about his family. I knew they lived in in New Mexico for much of the 20th century but the stories I heard had them moving there from Alabama, that my father was born in Alabama, on an Indian reservation, it was said. Not so. His family had been in Texas since possibly before 1840, moving from what would become Titus County to Hunt County to Erath County, then to Oklahoma where his father married, and then on, by covered wagon, to Quay County, NM.
I visited his father's place in NM in the 1950s for a family reunion and saw an old wagon there with hoops for a canvas cover. We played on that wagon, and on an old motorcycle rusting nearby; rode a horse too. (Who was that fetching young lady who got me to climb up on the horse behind her? She would be 60-70 now.)
The genealogy bug bit. I was off and running. I spent the rest of the evening putting together a chart from info found on the internet. What I did was to find the name of a known ancestor on somebody else's genealogical chart which I would then plagiarize. Genealogizing on the quick and dirty.
There were more surprises.
A big surprise was this: my mother's sister had married a Cowan. I was astonished to find that 200 years ago a Cowan had married the daughter of the first identified ancestor in America to bear my father's name and that that very Cowan was the ancestor of the Cowans to whom I was related by my aunt's marriage.
More than that; both families had moved from Tennessee to Texas at about the same time, and lived in the same counties in Texas in the same sequence. The father of the Cowan who married my mother's sister was born in the same county as my father's father. And of course sons of each family married sisters then living in another county-- my mother and aunt. And nobody realized the connection!
Seems that sort of migration, of extended families together, was common. Not like today, when a nuclear family or individual moves alone from coast to coast. (Well, there was John Downing who in the late 1850s left his family in Tennessee in order, it was claimed, to dig for gold in California; he was not seen again.)
That movement, the migration, the patterns of it, and how it ties into history is most interesting. I am much more conscious of being a product of history than before. Reading about colonial and frontier times has distinctly more personal significance than before.
Some oddities. Several times, in different family lines over generations, the same name would crop up in marriages. In my father's family, his mother was a Crane and so was his great grandmother born in 1800. My mother's grandmother was a Carriker, but so was her greatgrandmother whose daughter married a Carriker. My mother's other grandmother's antecedents had a daughter who married a Cloyse in Massachusetts, and then 2-3 generations down the line of ancestry runs through other Cloyes.
The Smiths and Cloyes' were interrelated in NY long before a Smith married the daughter of a woman descended from Cloyses. And the Smiths those Cloyes were peripherally related to included one Joseph Smith, who would go on to found the Mormon faith. These were probably not related to the Smith who was my grandfather, mind you. Different lines.
I grew up being told that I was part Indian, that my father was born on a reservation in Alabama; well, there were of course Indians in Alabama, though no reservations. Later I would learn that Indian ancestry was looked on with disapproval. (My mother said years later that if she knew that about my father she would not have married him. She was, and is, quite racist despite having black friends.)
My father was it seems actually born in Oklahoma in Indian Territory, and while there are some candidates for Indian descent among his forbears (Brumbelow and/or Uzzel and/or Crane), it seems very likely on my mother's side. I note that on her mother's side, a Downing married a Mayes. Well, both Downing and Mayes were the names of Cherokee chiefs in Oklahoma in the late 1800s. Quite possibly there was intermarriage in my family with Indians while they were in Tennessee or North Carolina. The most likely candidate for Indianhood was on my mother's father's side, where internet sources say a bride known only as "Neoma Naomi" is thought to have been Cherokee.
Names change over time. Starring becomes Stearnes or Starns or even Stern. Karcher becomes Carriker. Baughman becomes Bachman. (It is interesting that my mother pronounces "Bachman" as "Bawkman." This is probably how you would have pronounced Baughman. She of course knew her grandfather John Bachman Downing (1856-1944), who told her of being raised by his grandparents in Tennessee after his father left, and having gone to North Carolina to work when he was in his mid-teens, then marrying and traveling to Dallas with the Board family.) Gerlach becomes Carlock. Guthmann becomes Gutmann or Goodman. Cloyes is variously Cloyse or even Clayes. Some forms are artifacts of genealogists; for example you see the name listed as "Clayes-Cloyes," which is actually stating alternate forms; it is possible that the name given as "Neoma Naomi" is like that.
Why do the names change? On reason is that some ancestors were illiterate and knew pronunciations but not spellings. Another is that spelling rules were less fixed than today. Another was the anglicization of names.
Some interesting names crop up in my ancestry. I didn't know about Eisenmann or Goodman or Goldman or Gould or Yerton. Some of these may have been Jewish. An ancestral Gould in England had sons named Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph. A Solomon Carriker married a Rachel Yerton. But if any were Jewish it did not last, which casts doubt on my hypothesis; surely Jews would not be marrying not-Jews and dropping their faith so often. [Added: more interesting names have cropped up, for example Goldschmidt and Dagon in the Bachman/Bachmann ancestry in Switzerland.]
A Veare in old England was likely of Normon origin. Paschal cropped up in one line. There was a Jonson in England; could there be a relationship to rare Ben Jonson?
I had heard about forebears in Georgia and Pennsylvania and Mississippi, but never about Massachusetts or New York or Virginia. Nor North Carolina, where along with Tennessee nearly all branches of the family lived at one time or another, sometimes within miles of other families they would marry into generations later in other states. I can't recall how many ancestors lived in Mecklinberg County or Cabarrus County or Anson County from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s. Or in eastern Tennessee. [Added: Ruchard Borden was an early settler in Rhode Island before 1640; his son Benjamin moved on to New Jersey in the late 1600s. And there were at least a half dozen ancestral lines in Virginia from 1610-1800.]
Several lived in the Shenandoah Valley or Clinch Mountain region, some of the prettiest landscapes in the USA! Why they moved on, to Texas of all places, is a mystery to me. The change from eastern Tennessee to the barren near desert landscape of Quay County, NM, is quite a step down, scenically at least, from the Blue Ridge or Shenandoah or Eastern Tennessee.
I recently saw the 1992 movie "Last of the Mohicans" for the first time. While the movie was set in New York it was filmed in North Carolina, amid the Blue Ridge mountains. I was on the edge of my seat when I learned that; my ancestors, I thought with shock, moved from that to this? I came out with the short end of the stick!
I was surprised how many ancestors were in the colonies early, but none as far as I've found were original Jamestown settlers or passengers on the Mayflower. 1624 in Virginia is the oldest immigrant to the New World so far, that being Willam Bullock.
I am only about 2/3 finished. There are what look like dead ends. Who knows where a John Smith came from; he is lost among many of that name in the Piedmont. Smiths, Downings, Cranes, Sams, Lewis, Guthrie, all peter out in the early 1800s. The Pools in the 1700s. Either their names were too common or they immigrated late or they were too poor or were illiterate and left no clear traces. For a Miss Uzzell, one doesn't know which Uzzell in early Texas the lass was descended from. And so on. Except for skinning and tanning of hides, the hunt for ancestors is pretty much over.
On literacy, I found on the internet a transcription of a probated will signed with marks. They apprently had a not insubstantial estate, but could not sign their names. If I recall correctly, they were Paschels.
The lines traceable back into the 1500s or earlier in Britain are the Bordens, the Cloyes, and others.
No famous people so far. No generals, presidents, or senators were an ancestor. For most of the names in my chart there is no indication of what they did or of how they spent their lives, only hints of their movements or lack of movement revealed in places of birth and death. Sometimes deeds or lawsuits or wills are described or transcribed on the internet. Occasionally a bit of history comes through.
For example, an ancestral Brumbelow is said to have been a carpenter on the Richmond county courthouse about 1700. Lawsuit records and other court information about that Brumbelow has been found.
A Brumbelow in the early 1700s is referred to as "judge" as was a Nichodemus Keith around the time of the Revolution. No support for the proposition that Nichodemus was a real judge; could be a mistake or a form of respectful address.
Nichodemus' origin btw is unknown; there are suppositions that he came from Scotland; a little more support for his emigrating from Ireland; a hint from genealogical savant Larry Keith who wrote books on that family that Nichodemus may have had a brother and sister in Virginia and might have been Irish and that is all. His father may have been a William Butler Keith who was born in Ireland. That family may have been among the many Scots who emigrated to Ireland and lived there as Scots-Irish fighting with the native Irish then emigrated to the colonies in the 1700s where they fought with Indians.
An ancestral Smith in Georgia married a Pool whose mother was a Bullock. She was descended from Hugh Bullock born in the 1500s who was a prosperous Englishman and owner of a small fleet of ships that supplied the Virginia colony in the 1620s. Hugh's son William settled in Virginia in 1624, right about the time when the charter was cancelled and Virginia became a Crown colony. Hugh was a big landowner and in the House of Burgesses in 1631. Did he acquire lands through the "hundreds" grants under the charter before 1624, bringing over people as well as supplies?
The Starnes (Stearnes) have a most interesting frontier nexus. The family was Palatine German, coming to New York on British ships in 1710. The second and third generations moved to Pennsylvania then to Western Virginia. One family patriarch, Frederick Stearnes, Jr., was killed by Shawnee along with his brother and son-in-law a short distance from Boonesborough while exploring for new land in Kentucky. ne account says the son-in-law's heart was removed. A couple of Frederick's sons lived at Boonesborough prior to 1779 and may have helped Daniel Boone build the fort. Another, a Capt. John Stearnes, may have been killed in 1780 when Gen. Gates was routed by the British at Camden.
Frederick Starnes, Jr., seems to have been rather prosperous, a constable, and was involved in supplying the Virginia militia with beef. There was an officer in the militia around that time named Lt. Col. George Washington; did they ever meet? Who knows?
Frederick Starnes, Jr., last settled near the Holston River in Washington County, Virginia. That locale around the branches of the Holston that led into Tennessee and to the location where Knoxville would be founded was known for being the jumping off point of men who were called "The Longhunters." While Frederick was not one, two witnesses of his 1778 will, Bird and Bounds, may have been longhunters.
Most immigrants were poor, and had to work off their passage in ways not dissimilar to the Chinese illegals working in sweat shops in New York City basements. I don't know how many in the family tree were indentured servants. (The following person, though he was 37 when he and his large family took passage to Massachusetts, may have had to work to pay off the costs of transport which kept him in one place for the better part of 10 years before he was free to move on to another location.)
Another surprising nexus with history. William Towne, Puritan, born 1599 and a resident of the port town of Yarmouth, England, immigrated to Massachusetts in 1637 with his wife and six children. For a time they lived in Salem, then moved onto a farm in an adjoining county. Two daughters had married and stayed behind in Salem. A third moved with the family to a place called Topfield. The daughters were Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Estey and Sarah Towne Cloyse.
In 1692, some years after their father's death in or about 1685, all three were accused of witchcraft. Rebecca (who was elderly and an invalid) and Mary were hanged, while Sarah, who stormed out of a church service when the minister declared there was a devil in the congregation, was imprisoned. A thing of pride that they did not confess and attempt to throw blame on others to save their lives; if they had confessed they would have lived. I am not a descendant of any of these women but of their brother Jacob, 9 or 10 generations back. For those who have not read Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" based closely on records of the time or Alexander Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (he has a chapter on the witch mania) there is a lot of information on the internet includng transcriptions of the trials themselves.
By coincidence, when I was a pre-adolescent, I read and enjoyed a children's book called "Tinker's Tim and the Witches" that was set in Salem during the witch mania period. "Tinker's Tim" like "The Crucible" was written at a time when America was embarking on other witch-hunts. "Tinker's Tim" has been a great influence on me, turning me into the contarian anti-religious cuss that I am.
Here's a review of "Tinker's Tim and the Witches" by, one presumes, an evangelical concerned about the liberal content of the modern school curriculum. http://homeschoolblogger.com/homeschoolbookreview/757301/ While I agree that whitewashing the past to remove objectionable content is a dispicable practice and turns school books into bland pablum, my own opinion is that "Tinker's Tim" is quite timely and that all around us there are imaginary witches being subjected to persecution, including minorities, aliens, Muslims, atheists, and gays. The spirit of 1692 Salem is alive and well in America. The whips and stocks and gibbit are oiled and ready and waiting, for us.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Alien V, or Homosolecism
Today I was skimming through a short article telling how common planets seem to be around the universe. The article mentioned "alien worlds." That got me thinking.
Visualizations followed. "Who you callin' an alien?" an angry E.T. shouts at a mob of earthlings? Or a yoda like being sittign cross-legged comments "Me an alien? Why, am I not a resident of the same universe that you are?"
It's our tendency to think and verbalize in those terms: US versus THEM. Whoever THEM are.
So our close neighbors to the south are ALIENS! Or ILLEGAL ALIENS! "Look ma, there's an ALIEN walking in the street!" Somebody get the roach spray. Or an assault rifle. Or call the Border Patrol.
It's easy to forget we are of the same species and are nearby residents of the same hemisphere on a little planet we call earth. Divided when it comes down to that by mostly imaginary and somewhat meaningless lines called "borders."
Not too different really from the way we used to make maps, with our city, or nation, or continent at the center of the world map. WE, whoever WE are, call ourselves ":the People," while all other humans are "Barbarians" or "Others, or "Them," or "Hey You!" Or ALIENS.
We didn't stop there. We believed the sun circled the earth; how could it be otherwise when WE are so important? So crushing to the ego to learn that our earth circles an incredibly large sun, and is only one of nine or so planets, and not the biggest one either!
Neither is our sun located at the center of the universe, but out on one arm of an ordinary galaxy that is one of millions of galaxies. Sort of like living in a cardboard shack in Podunk, Appalachia, with an outhouse in back.
I guess if there is a point to this, it is to observe that truth has a way of defeating inflated self importance. That humility is a law that nature teaches, while self-grandiosity is a law of human nature. Science advances, but himan nature is still with us.
Visualizations followed. "Who you callin' an alien?" an angry E.T. shouts at a mob of earthlings? Or a yoda like being sittign cross-legged comments "Me an alien? Why, am I not a resident of the same universe that you are?"
It's our tendency to think and verbalize in those terms: US versus THEM. Whoever THEM are.
So our close neighbors to the south are ALIENS! Or ILLEGAL ALIENS! "Look ma, there's an ALIEN walking in the street!" Somebody get the roach spray. Or an assault rifle. Or call the Border Patrol.
It's easy to forget we are of the same species and are nearby residents of the same hemisphere on a little planet we call earth. Divided when it comes down to that by mostly imaginary and somewhat meaningless lines called "borders."
Not too different really from the way we used to make maps, with our city, or nation, or continent at the center of the world map. WE, whoever WE are, call ourselves ":the People," while all other humans are "Barbarians" or "Others, or "Them," or "Hey You!" Or ALIENS.
We didn't stop there. We believed the sun circled the earth; how could it be otherwise when WE are so important? So crushing to the ego to learn that our earth circles an incredibly large sun, and is only one of nine or so planets, and not the biggest one either!
Neither is our sun located at the center of the universe, but out on one arm of an ordinary galaxy that is one of millions of galaxies. Sort of like living in a cardboard shack in Podunk, Appalachia, with an outhouse in back.
I guess if there is a point to this, it is to observe that truth has a way of defeating inflated self importance. That humility is a law that nature teaches, while self-grandiosity is a law of human nature. Science advances, but himan nature is still with us.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Hottest Actresses
Of course the list changes. But currently it is Holly Hunter, Frances McDormond, Sandra Bullock, and Helen Mirren. Hunter's southern accent is most fetching.
Second tier and currently out of favor are Julia Ormond, Judy Davis, Kate Beckinsale, and Linda Hamilton.
Past faves were Whitney Blake, Carol Lynley, and Kim Novak.
Fav from an early era is Jean Arthur.
Second tier and currently out of favor are Julia Ormond, Judy Davis, Kate Beckinsale, and Linda Hamilton.
Past faves were Whitney Blake, Carol Lynley, and Kim Novak.
Fav from an early era is Jean Arthur.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Crystal Persuasion
In the future, politics and religion will be pharmaceutically alterable.
Which will have all kinds of amusing consequences. For example, if you don't like your spouse's ideology, you just obtain a pill on the black market and slip it into his/her OJ. Imagine if you will, an unhappy couple each dosing the other at the same time with a drug that changes one's religious/political ideology. They wake up with positions reversed and still incompatible!
Instead of political advertising, campaign managers will have spray planes flying overhead on election day, misting atomized drugs down on the populace. Complications arising when the same voters are engulfed by pharmaceuticals from competing candidates.
Same for evangelism. Evangelical churches will be using atomized mist on the streets, and trying to sneak their own chemical brew into the water supply.
Better living through chemistry!
Which will have all kinds of amusing consequences. For example, if you don't like your spouse's ideology, you just obtain a pill on the black market and slip it into his/her OJ. Imagine if you will, an unhappy couple each dosing the other at the same time with a drug that changes one's religious/political ideology. They wake up with positions reversed and still incompatible!
Instead of political advertising, campaign managers will have spray planes flying overhead on election day, misting atomized drugs down on the populace. Complications arising when the same voters are engulfed by pharmaceuticals from competing candidates.
Same for evangelism. Evangelical churches will be using atomized mist on the streets, and trying to sneak their own chemical brew into the water supply.
Better living through chemistry!
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