Posted on 07/16/2022 2:53:26 PM PDT by nickcarraway
In March 2008, I was 13 when my dad and I watched the TV miniseries “Roots,” which follows the fictional story of a man born in 18th century Gambia who is sold as a slave in America, and the many generations who come after him.
It inspired me to ask questions about my own family’s past. Suddenly I started searching online, interviewing older relatives, and exploring libraries and archives. Surprisingly, more than half of Americans can’t name all four of their own grandparents, and over 20% of black Americans have never looked into their family tree. But, as a result of my research, not only can I name all of mine, I can trace my family tree straight back to the 1790s.
SNIP
Huldah’s children also illustrate the importance of self-reliance and entrepreneurship in my family. Her son Edward B. Merritt, born in 1871, worked in real estate at a time when the majority of blacks in much of the nation labored as farmers or domestics. His son, John Sherman Merritt, was a homeowner in Greenwich, Conn., who worked four jobs to support his young family. John’s daughter, Adele Matilda Merritt, enjoyed a privileged Greenwich childhood complete with charm school, a penchant for photography, and later- international travel. And Adele’s daughter — my grandmother, Joyce Marie Watkins — was a small business owner who settled in Yonkers, NY.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The yeomen/socmen/freeholders were a consequence of the drastic depopulation during and after the Black Death. Their labor was at a premium and they seized the advantage.
They demanded emancipation from serfdom and the right to own land for themselves and their descendants. And they got it.
And that really was the foundation of England as a constitutional monarchy, the barons never could have put the screws to John without the support of the independent landowning class. Also, England's victories in Europe were a consequence of those freeholding soldiers of the independent companies. Great books, read all about it:
Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes to make money, but he wrote these for love. And his history is well researched.
Not a word about the fact that most black slaves first became slaves because they or one of their black ancestors was sold into slavery by fellow black Africans.
Or that the first American to own a life-long slave (as opposed to a bondsman or time-limited indentured servant) was himself black.
Or that the freeing of the slaves under with the mantle of the Emancipation Proclamation (or at the point of a yankee bayonet) was a strict violation of the rights enumerated in the 4th Amendment to the US constitution, confirmed by SCOTUS in Dred Scott v. Sandford (which was prevailing case law until December of 1865).
Not to nitpick but it’s officially called the Republic of the Gambia.
I mean if you’re going to nitpick....
:)
And it’s the smallest mainland African country.
Correct.
Bump
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Thanks for posting that Dave.
Are people allowed to suggest that maybe some slaves WEREN’T horribly abused, all the time?
I used to debate how happy slaves would (logically) make much better workers than angry, rebellious ones, but nobody listens. Too many people subscribe to the “All Whips All The Time” theory of slavery.
Slavery is wrong, across the board, but so is inhumanity.
Really not convincing when the crux of the issue was slaves were not free to leave those who owned them and were treated as property in a legal sense.
Re: 31 - If slaves were not free to leave on their own and were treated as property, they were still… slaves.
Bump
Thanks for this great tidbit and info:
Thank you.
There are often a lot unasked questions aka previous statements until DNA enters with some fairly good genealogy.
With my wife, we/I basically have 3-4 generations without her DNA. I have some 11th and 12 generation grandparents.
One of her cousins has basically a book on her two ancestral lines back to the early history of this company. No one in her current family is interested.
She did say that she wasn’t that interested and nor are her adult clan members, however, I could buy a DNA kit for her.
Right now with the 1950 census, I’m finding new relatives back to 10th plus generation. There is a lot of genealogy waste with 19th cousins cited. Basically, I draw the line past 4th generation cousins. With just under 30,000 documentations, I don’t want data on anyone past 4th cousins nor have the time to enter, document and post.
thanks for this link, too!
Hey you know, Gullah women use natural grasses annd such in weaving baskets. Their basketry is known worldwide and I believe examples of these baskets can be found in The Smithsonian.
I did some genealogy research together with a daughter of a cousin of mine, and three others who have one of our great, great, great grandparents in common.
In one line, and one line only, the efforts made it all the way back to one person born in Switzerland in 1633.
Most of that was on my mom’s side.
I then persued my dad’s side as far as I could, finding births, deaths and marriages back to great, great grandparents, and got many printed records from the relevant counties.
I then built some “family tree” images of it all.
I then made copies of everything, including the family trees I made, and shared them all with my seven siblings.
NOT a dam word from any of them.
Every now and then, I go back and do some more searching - but when you reach dead ends you have to take a break and come back to it, or you’d have no time for anything else.
But I no longer share any of it with my sibilings.
Then again, I am of a mind that our character is mostly built in our lifetime and was not handed down in our DNA, so “who am I am” is more than the DNA; that I get. I guess I just don’t get the total lack of curiosity about our genealogy, by some people.
“But I no longer share any of it with my siblings.”
My sibling and my wife’s siblings and their spouses could care less. One of my nieces works on our genealogy and zero nieces/nephews from my wife’s side could care.
My mother’s family on both sides is very interesting, and our niece above has helped a lot. One cousin in our family has got hot and cold over the decades. His brothers could care less.
This niece paid for my membership and DNA testing at Ancestry, and in less than 5 years we are closing in on just over 30,000 documented personal histories.
When my Dad died, he had basically been an orphan and only had one family member on his side who was interested. She was a first cousin of Dad’s. and she copied some pages from her mother’s bible/my Dad’s aunt, my great aunt, and gave them to me.
Then, she sent copies to my home address. I had taken early retirement for a year and got into my genealogy on both sides and even volunteered at the local LDS and county genealogy libraries.
My family runs from plain John/Janes and to Mayflower families, vets in both rev. wars, civil wars to present days.
My niece and I will exceed 30,000 documented ancestors in a short time. We limit the cousins and other relatives to 3rd to 4th generation relatives.
That is a growing problem with Ancestor.com and the 1950 census. We are getting tons of people listed and they are often 12th or more cousins or married to a distant relative. I’m spending a few hours each day deleting the tons of people,often with zero DNA relationship at this time.
We had a bible from my maternal grandmother that had a lot of her family tree recorded in the back of the bible, and dupliczated on a large paper sheet. It was a great aid in the early part of our genealogy research.
A funny and interesting thing I discovered during some of the genealogy searches on line was that my maternal grandmother had committed herself to a sort of family lie.
What her information shared was from her maternal great grandfather and forward from him - just sort of. It had him and all 13 of his children in the lines from him and his first wife, from whom my maternal grandmother was related.
It totally left out that great grandfather’s descendents (another 13 children) sired with his second wife after his first wife died.
While on an online ancestry blog site I found an entry from someone else doing searches on the great great grandfather of my mother’s great grandfather. She was a descendent from that whole second family who my maternal grandmother had left out entirely.
That other researcher knew about our “first” family from my maternal grandmother’s great grandfather, but they had not until then run into any of us in this current generation. To her it was a “Eureka” moment.
She aslo had achieved a ton of information going back in that great, great grandfathers past all the way to his ancestor family who migrated from Virginia to southern Illinois in the late 1700s (by covered wagon).
Those kinds of coincidents in genealogy research are little gems.
Part of the info from that distant relative was information and letters from the civil war era, among my maternal grandmother’s grandfather’s family. It included some of the young men in the family who joined the troops being formed up by Grant in Illinois, including one who died in the infamous Confederate prison camp - Andersonville - and that included a heart wrenching letter from him written shortly before he died, and why he chose the path of death he did - suicide by intentionally crossing a line that guaranteed the guards would shoot him.
The whole story of that young man running away from home in the middle of the night, lying about his age to Grant’s officers in Springfield, the trail of battles he was in, his capture during the great battle at Chickamauga, his imprisonment at Andersonville, his life and death there - and maybe just because of our distant family relationship - it all made me cry.
We know 3 women, who were in their 50’s and due to Ancestry.com., each one discovered at least one unknown sister with up to 4 unknown sisters in 3 previously unknown families.
They all get along great.
Another woman’s mother refused to meet with the other woman’s parents for years.
One of my wife’s uncles out of 9, just disappeared after the Korean war.
He assumed another identity in a neighboring state got married to another woman and had 1 child/a son with that union. He had 4 other children and a wife whom he had abandoned.
The woman married illegally to him, hired lawyers to keep anyone from notifying her son about the second and illegal marriage her son came from. Her two timer husband died during that process.
There was a Judge in the SW, who was not the man, he claimed he was. This Judge threatened people with legal action and apparently destroyed some records, when he was about to outed. After he died, one of his daughters aborted/stopped any contact with recently identified cousins.
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