Genealogy as a Weapon in the Fight for Truth
Genealogy is often treated like the red-headed stepchild of historical research.
Stated as simply as possible, genealogists tend to sift through data at a more granular level than historians.
An historian is mostly concerned with whether a source is primary or secondary – that is to say, “Was a written document written by a direct witness to events?”, or “Was this document written by someone repeating something already said or written elsewhere?”.
A good historian usually places more value on primary sources, while taking context, bias, etc. into account.
After a few years involved in amateur genealogy, I began to notice certain discrepancies between the narratives written by many professional historians, and the details of various individual lives as revealed through genealogical investigations.
I’ll offer one example:
Most historians of the colonial and frontier eras have, at some stage, made fairly broad statements about the ethnic make-up of the settler/colonizers of the Indigenous lands which would eventually become the USA.
It is important to remember that most of the books containing these statements were researched and written before the astonishing increase in the digitalization of records this century.
And most of the books containing these statements were also researched and written before the equally astonishing growth in personal DNA analysis and genetic genealogy.
Determining the ethnicity of various individuals, families, groups, and communities – without access to such an array of information – was often little more than an educated guess.
Historians had to examine records in multiple repositories in places often geographically distant from one another, and then attempt to collate them into a coherent story, like imagining how a finished jigsaw puzzle would look if 90% of the pieces weren’t missing .
An historian might have noted the number of ships departing Ireland during the 1700s. They will have read documents (letters, ships’ manifests, land transfers, marriage records, etc.) and identified areas where the people off these ships often settled – places like Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
Historians might have pored over census and tax records, assigning a provisional ethnicity to a community based on a prevalence of Irish or Scottish sounding surnames in their particular area.
Yet it is often very hard to prove that a person bearing a “classic” Scottish or Ulster Scots surname like “Davidson” (for example), is actually descended from Scottish or Ulster immigrants when this surname pops-up in mid-1800s Southern Appalachia.
Not everyone left a will. Many marriages were “common law” in nature. “Illegitimacy”, infidelity, bigamy, rape, incest and straight-up “fornication” were not uncommon. Longhunters and mountain men often had multiple partners, wives, or consorts from different ethnic groups.
Literacy was uncommon among the underclasses, and good Bible records recording births and deaths were the exception in these frontier communities.
In other words, a clear paper trail from “Mary Davidson” born in 1850, leading back via wills, Bible records, land transfers, marriage bonds, etc. to someone boarding a ship in Belfast in 1710 is an extremely rare occurrence.
This is also how we find a “John Davidson” as head of a household of free persons of color in Burke County, North Carolina in 1790. Almost all of his descendants would eventually pass over into “whiteness”.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the ethnicity of various “Davidsons” and their communities, many historians have put 2 and 2 together, and come up with 5.
Non-scholars – especially those with an “agenda” – put 2 and 2 together and arrive at 10.
*****
If a ship arrived in a city like Philadelphia from a port in Ulster (the northernmost province in Ireland), the tendency has been to lump such arrivals together under the term “Scots-Irish”, without going into granular detail.
Granular detail means asking complex questions:
Were they actually Scottish people who took a ferry from Scotland to Belfast in order to catch a ship to America? Stranraer to Belfast is a mere 59 miles, or a journey of less than a day in good sailing weather (today it takes just two hours).
Were they actually indigenous Irish (Gaels) from Ulster or other Irish provinces?
Were they Scottish Protestants who had been in Northern Ireland since the 1600s Plantation of Ulster, or were they recent Scottish Catholic laborers arrived in Ulster to escape war and famine?
How many were Welsh speakers, French Huguenots or Palatine Germans who Anglicized their surnames, translated their surnames, or simply “borrowed” an English, Scottish or Irish surname from their neighbors?
How many “Powells”, for example, are Welsh families who Anglicized their “ap Hywel” surname?
What about the strange transformation of the German surname “Meckendorf” into “McInturff“?
As settler/colonizers moved into the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas and began to push into Appalachia and beyond, another situation arose.
At the exact same time that the backcountry and Appalachia proper were being settled and fought over, places like Virginia (with large populations of free people of color) were passing ever more stringent and punitive “race laws”.
This meant that up to 1 in 5 people from Virginia and the Carolinas – free people of color – also began to head into Appalachia to escape this legislation.
These FPC were drawn from disparate ethnic groups, often intermixed with one another.
Black Angolans. Malagasy people. Displaced Tuscarora, Catawba, Saponi (to name only a few Indigenous tribes). Transported Romani. South American and Caribbean Jews and their mixed-ethnic families. French Acadian refugees who were often Métis. Arabs and Turks. South Asian Lascars. “Portuguese” Lançados.
Only rarely did such people hang onto a surname reflecting their true ancestry.
And we haven’t even mentioned various “Maroon” families and communities – Indigenous, Black, and mixed-ethnic escapees from slavery.
In the face of constant racism, violence, warfare, and disease, with fragmented communities and tribal structures breaking down, many were forced to assimilate into “white Christian” culture just to survive.
In order to even begin their assimilation, they almost always had to take a “white” name.
In US history, some scholars call this “genocide by paperwork”.
Another example:
An Indigenous woman becomes consort to a frontier settler or wealthy planter.
She is given a “Christian” name – maybe that of a neighbor or local preacher.
Her husband/partner calls her “white” in census records to protect the rights of his mixed-ethnic children.
Later historians scan records, see the surname “Campbell“, and note the entire household enumerated as “white”.
And just like that, another piece of Cherokee, Pamunkey, Catawba, Tuscarora, Choctaw, or Shawnee history is “disappeared”, tallied as yet another “white Scots-Irish pioneer woman” of the American frontier.
Most Americans today have no comprehension of the society-induced shame and self-loathing which led generations of people to destroy photos attesting to their “non-white” family’s past.
Unambiguous, testifying photos are treasures, scarce as hen’s teeth.
Jeanette Campbell – no Scots-Irishwoman
Loss of language and customs, changing of name and religion, inaccurate census descriptions, destruction of photographs, and non-inclusion in the official story of “white” settlers.
Genocide by paperwork is real.
This is where the granular detail of genealogy and genetic genealogy can tell us far more about the ethnic background of certain families and communities than conventional historical research.
In doing so, we can also begin to unpick a truer history of the American people.
Always, always remember – SURNAMES IN AMERICA ARE UNRELIABLE NARRATORS OF ETHNIC HISTORY.
*****
“White” as the dominant social caste is deeply, deeply ingrained in the American consciousness.
So much so that the ethnically-mixed nature of the USA – especially in rural or “heartland” regions – is rarely considered, let alone openly acknowledged.
Too many Americans – especially Appalachians – still insist they are primarily “Scots-Irish” by descent, even when this is demonstrably not the case.
Heritage centers and museums and internet search engines will likewise insist on throwing a “Scots-Irish” cultural blanket over Southern Appalachia.
Yet after 20 years of intense research, this writer has never found a single county in Appalachia, during any time period, in which the so-called “Scots-Irish” formed a majority of the population.
Whereas German settlers were just as numerous as so-called “Scots-Irish” and tended to marry among one another for two or three generations after moving to frontier regions, people with roots in Ulster were among the quickest to “marry-out” into other communities along these same frontiers.
This includes intermarrying with people from the mixed-ethnic communities which included “free people of color”.
But vanishingly few people self-identifying as “white” (or just as “American”) today ever mention this.
This is why the current vice president, who is deeply allied with a creepy and resurgent “white nationalism” movement, has claimed a “Scots-Irish” hillbilly identity for himself – an identity to which he is not even remotely entitled.
The common ancestor he shares with Barack Obama – a shared Black ancestor – remains conspicuously “unclaimed”.
I’ll repeat that in case those at the back of the room missed it.
Leaving aside the possibility of “non-paternal events” or undocumented adoption, J. D. Vance HAS NO PROVEN SCOTS-IRISH ANCESTRY.
None.
What J. D. Vance DOES have is documented Black ancestry.
Vance is either ignorant, or a liar. One suspects both.
Vance was plucked from obscurity by a spooky Tech Bro named Peter Thiel, then groomed and financed to be the “living story” which he and Thiel then sold to gullible Americans only too happy to buy their particular brand of snake oil.
Trump and Vance‘s voter base needs to believe that poor “white people” can all become multi-millionaires – if they could just put their back into the effort to lift those bootstraps.
For the Trump/Vance/Thiel “story” to work its magic, Vance must be “white” and “Christian”.
No one should know or be told that Vance‘s current wealth was generated from Thiel‘s seed capital – the story arc requires a “hard working white hillbilly” going from rags-to-riches all by himself.
*****
But Vance is a fraud in other ways, too.
He “wrote” a product endorsement and called it a “memoir”, claiming to be a hillbilly. He is not a hillbilly.
He was raised in a suburban environment.
Nor is he “Scots-Irish”. Not by ancestry, not by culture.
He got taxpayer-funded grants to attend an Ivy League college, but is attempting to tear down public education.
He got tapped-up while at Yale (or even before) to perform a role for a Silicon Valley multi-billionaire with an agenda.
Vance, like all Americans with deep roots in the colonial and frontier eras of ethnic cleansing and Manifest Destiny, is profoundly interrelated with “Brown People” from many ethnic backgrounds, whether he (and the white nationalist base he cultivates) likes it or not.
There are no “racially pure” humans, least of all in America.
Of course nothing in the current administration’s campaign demonizing Brown and Black people in the USA is new.
White supremacy has always been at the heart of US policy, whether dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands, or annexing nearly half of New Spain/Mexico in a blatantly orchestrated imperialist war during the mid-1800s.
The largest group of “unauthorized” Brown people in the USA are Mexicans – people with a far greater ancestral claim to California, Nevada, Colorado, parts of Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas than most “white” Americans.
Mexicans are made to feel like criminal interlopers in the land their ancestors still occupied and governed only 175 years ago, while the USA spends billions every year to support the “right of return” of European, American, and Russian Jews to a land they lost to the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago…
The bulk of other unauthorized immigration numbers to the USA comes from various dysfunctional Latin American countries, whose “dysfunction” stems in large part from US colonialist interference.
The internet and digitized records, along with expert genealogical investigation and genetic genealogy, allow truthseekers to counter the lies of people like Vance – a man who would bring down US democracy by peddling a fake autobiography and fake history to an already shockingly propagandized base of voters.
The sooner the bigots and racists are called to account for their racialist fabrications, and the more all of us work to expose the lies at the heart of “racialism”, the sooner these morally bereft opportunists might finally be forced to let go of the tattered security blanket of “whiteness” and “white superiority”.
And let the rest of us get on with getting on with one another.
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