Posted on 09/25/2002 7:58:25 AM PDT by NYer
DALLAS (AP) _ The tearful testimonial Madelyne Gorman Toogood gave in front of glaring TV cameras after she was videotaped beating her daughter was starkly uncharacteristic of the reclusive, media-shy Irish Travelers culture to which she belongs, experts say. Toogood, who was caught beating her 4-year-old daughter, Martha, in a department store parking lot, said she is a member of the clannish, nomadic culture of Irish descendants, most of whom came to the United States as refugees during the potato famine in the 1840s. ``By nature, they're very reclusive people,'' said Joe Livingston, a South Carolina state investigator who has been tracking Travelers for nearly two decades. ``They tend to shy away from publicity.''
Some law enforcement experts who have studied the culture paint it as a secret society, fond of material wealth evidenced by gaudy jewelry and new vehicles. Police often associate Travelers with scams involving fraudulent home repair that target the elderly. They tend to use aliases, carry bogus identification cards, and avoid contact with non-Travelers, whom they call ``country folk,'' authorities said.
But professors and academics said the reclusiveness is a defense mechanism against stereotypes and the ancient persecution that has haunted nomadic peoples throughout history. Travelers, who may be Irish, English, or Scottish, have no more criminals among them than any other ethnic culture, experts said. ``If there were, they could not sustain their living,'' said Larry Otway, who began studying Irish Travelers in 1977 and has worked as a paralegal and adviser on court cases involving Scottish travelers. What the clans in the culture do share, Otway said, is a nomadic lifestyle, a language called ``Scelta'' with roots in Gaelic and Romani, an almost ``pathologic'' devotion to Catholicism, and an anti-bureaucratic form of self government that he describes as a ``consensus democracy.''
The largest Traveler settlement is a group of 3,000 in Murphy Village, S.C., experts said. Toogood is believed to belong to the Greenhorn Carrolls, a Traveler group in the Fort Worth area. Estimates of the U.S. Traveler population vary from 20,000 to 100,000. Ian F. Hancock, a professor at the University of Texas who wrote the Irish Travelers entry for the Encyclopedia of the South, said a distraught Toogood called him Thursday seeking advice. ``She was scared to turn herself in because she knows very well how the police feel about the Irish Travelers,'' said Hancock, who has a reputation as a sympathizer of the group. ``She didn't think she'd get a fair shake and she knew she'd been rough with the child.''
Toogood, who also has two young sons, remains free on a $5,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 7. If convicted, she faces up to three years in prison. She was scheduled to have a 90-minute supervised meeting with her daughter on Tuesday but the child, who is in foster care, was sick. An attorney for the state said Toogood would be allowed to see Martha on Wednesday if the girl has recovered from the flu.
Hancock and other academics said they believe Toogood's case has been sensationalized by the media because of her ethnicity. ``As bad as what she did, and it's inexcusable, I still think there's an awful lot of profiling going on,'' Hancock said. ``Very much is being made of her ethnic background. If she were German American or Italian American, would that even be an issue?''
AP-ES-09-25-02 0610EDT
Base on this, (from the link in post 40) they are not our ethnic kin after all.
MEDA ZINGADA
gypsy shit
sorry thats all i think of when i see that toogood face.
Similar wagons and borrowed words would definitely indicate that Travellers and Gypsies/Roma have met, somewhere in their history, but that doesn't prove that they're ethnically akin at all.
After all, American and Afrikaaner settlers both used similar-looking covered wagons in their respective treks, yet one isn't necessarily descended from the other.
As for language -- according to what I've read on the net, there are some Roma loan-words in Shelta (the Traveller language), but most of the roots are Gaelic. There are also Greek and Hebrew borrowings which suggest that some of the founders of the Travellers must have been hightly educated people - perhaps the last survivors of the ancient bards of Ireland. Go back to post 40, scroll way down past the first round of references, and read the discussion of Shelta.
I heard elsewhere, that the Travellers supposedly have a higher percentage of red hair, than Ireland at large. That would strongly suggest a native insular-Celtic origin followed by genetic drift in a small, mostly closed breeding pool.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Base on this, (from the link in post 40) they are not our ethnic kin after all.
Most of what I found on the net suggests that the Travellers are indeed a subgroup of the Irish who split off, who knows how long ago, and formed a separate parallel culture and language. That fits the definition of separate ethnic group quite nicely.
If they go to Mass on Sunday maybe it is to steal from the collection plate as they pass it around.
I've never heard about this group before, but I wonder how long they have been in the US.
I would like to second, third, your motion to put the screw to them. I am a single mother and I recently have encountered one of them. He became a friend (so I thought). Make a long story short he ends up cleaning me out of anything of value of mine. But small enough to were I wouldn’t notice right away so he could make his escape. Now he did not hide that he was an Irish Traveller, but I didn’t know what the extent of his culture was. He is scottish and myself being of scottish decent he encouraged me to dig in to my roots. Now my great grandmother was born in Haddington Scotland and I’m proud of that and I would never claim this clan as any kin folk of mine. This man is also related to the toogood lady.
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