Hiram Keith with wife Elizabeth Ashby
As a kid growing up in 1960s and 1970s Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona, there was always a deep ambivalence in my family regarding “book learning”.
Book learning was great if it led to a good job or a roof over one’s head.
Where book learning became less welcome was the point at which it mentioned things like slavery. Or the theory of evolution.
Too much book learning was seen as a sign of thinking you might be better than less-educated people.
“Ten dollar words” were not only frowned upon – they were greeted with derision and outright hostility.
Now, on one level I understand these folks. No book is going to make a person a good mechanic, carpenter, sailor, or parent. A book might help here and there, but some things are only learned properly by DOING. Fair enough.
No one wants to be lectured by a “theoretical farmer” straight out of agricultural college when your family has been managing the same piece of ground for generations.
But some things ARE only found in books. Especially history books, because once we are dead, we are, literally, history.
And because living families carefully curate their stories, there is often a visceral fear of books. Because once someone is dead, especially long dead, all that remains are folk stories – and books, and documents.
History is the delicate dance between documents, and the living who must try to interpret those documents.
And when these interpretations don’t match the carefully curated family folklore, when these interpretations don’t match the carefully curated national folklore, certain bad things can happen.
Like culture wars. Like the banning of certain books.
My recent post on the overstated impact of the “Scots-Irish” on Appalachian culture got quite a few responses and shares. That’s great. It’s the reason writers write.
One gentleman suggested my views were off the mark, and that in his region, there were at least three “Scots-Irish” families for every family of English or German descent – let alone people of “non-white” ancestry.
He further suggested that West Virginia might have less “Scots-Irish” due to the historical influx of immigrant mine-workers.
This blog and podcast rarely concerns itself with late 19th century industrial immigration.
What we are interested in are the earliest origins of what is often called “heartland America”, those people with families stretching right back to pre-Revolutionary times, the people who were on the bleeding edge of the earliest frontiers.
I’m going to share what I know about one small part of Breathitt County, Kentucky. The town of Jackson, a small place, so not too hard to cast a glance over.
Here is a small cross-section of families present in Jackson, Breathitt County, KY during the 1800s. I have intentionally left out “Johnny-come-lately” immigrants, that is to say, families arriving in America during the mid-to-late 1800s. Because the bulk of “Scots-Irish” immigration occurred during the first three-quarters of the 1700s, they are of course included where present.
Here are some surnames “A” to “K”. If there is any interest, I can post the second half of the alphabet later this week. Remember! Having a surname which sounds of a particular ethnic background means very little in early American history. People of ALL backgrounds “borrowed” surnames from the British Isles – indigenous people, people of African ancestry, Jewish people, Romani people, Portuguese people, German people…
This list is neither highly-selective, nor does it claim to be comprehensive. It is merely based on my own research into multi-ethnic America. If anyone out there can share the surnames of documentable “Scots-Irish” families of Jackson, Breathitt County, KY, please do! The population today is still just over 2,200, so we should be able to find them.
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Adkins (earliest assumed ancestor – William Vortimer Adkin, born 1689 VA) “Scots-Irish”? NO.
Aikman (origins unclear – most genealogies claim Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster) No evidence of Scots-Irish ancestry at hand.
Allen (origins unclear – earliest known ancestors from 1600s Tidewater Virginia) “Scots-Irish”? NO.
Back (origins unclear – descended from apparently German “Bachs” of colonial Virginia, possibly Sinti)
Baker (origins unclear – related to early Bakers who intermarried with multi-ethnic Bolling families) No evidence of “Scots-Irish” ancestry at hand
Barnett (origins unclear – no records prior to 1820, with one “Joshua Barnett” head of household in Ohio County, KY including people of color)
Black (descended from a Scot or Ulster Scot, but family heavily intermarried with Germans, and indeed, French and some Portuguese)
Blanton (origins unclear due to apparent “non-paternal event” involving Bakers. Other Blantons in Harlan County, KY fought with Bunch‘s Regiment. Some Blanton men of dark complexion nicknamed “Gip” – origins of these Blantons also unclear)
Bryant (origins unclear, although most genealogies suggest Welsh ancestry. Earliest proven ancestor “William Bryant“, slaveholder and friend of non-Scots-Irishman Daniel Boone)
Burton (origins unclear, earliest documented ancestors found in 18th century Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Many Burtons of Wales and Somerset, England carry Romani DNA haplo)
Campbell (origins unclear – most genealogies claim Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster. Heavily intermarried with German Eversole and French Fugate families)
Clarkston (earliest documented ancestors George Clarkston b.1745 and George’s son Thomas Clarkston b.1787. Thomas apparently married to Nellie Feathers, woman with haplotype most common in Balkan region and southern France)
Collins (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestor William Collins b.1809 in Tennessee, who may have been son or nephew of Melungeon Valentine Collins.)
Conley (Connolly) (although an apparently Irish surname, earliest known ancestor Henry Connolly is referred-to in legal documents as a “Dutchman” with poor English??!!)
Combs (Coombs) (earliest documented ancestors from early 1700s Virginia. Notables included the Tory soldier, slaveholder, and killer Nicholas Combs)
Cornett (earliest likely ancestor John Cornett b. 1702 Henrico County, VA. Cornetts of Kentucky deeply multi-ethnic, with no sign of “Scots-Irish” ancestry)
Counts (slaveholders and descendants of Fort Germanna settlements – family lore refers to Counts people as “Black Dutch“, i.e. mixed or possibly German Romani ancestry)
Deaton (slaveholders, earliest documented ancestor Thomas Deaton of Henrico County, VA, whose son William Deaton also fought on the Tory side)
Evans (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in 1700s VA and NC. Surname is Welsh, and family intermarried with Welsh Bryants)
Francis (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in 1700s VA and KY. Intermarried with aforementioned Coombs and Fugate families.)
Fugate (well-known multi-ethnic Appalachian family of ultimately French origins. Famous for rare genetic condition which once rendered family members blue in color.)
Gaye (origins unclear, but likely connected in some way to Gaye and Bolling families of early Henrico County, VA.)
Gibson (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in mid-1700s NC. See Melungeon Gibsons for possible connections)
Gose (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors such as “Dutch John Gose” appear in mid-1700s NC. Many Gose people of Breathitt County enumerated as “mulattos“, and intermarried with multi-ethnic Nichols/Nickell/Knuckles families.)
Harris (origins extremely murky – some Harris people of Breathitt descendants of Benjamin Harris, b.1795. Little more is known.)
Hensley (earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors such as slaveholder Henry Hensley appear in mid-1700s VA. His childrens’ households included “free people of color”, and intermarried with “Angels” and “Howards“.)
Hogg (slaveholders; earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors include Thomas Hogg b. 1740 VA. Most genealogies suggest Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster)
Hoskins (origins extremely murky – earliest documented ancestor probably the killer John Hoskinson of Maryland who changed/shortened his name and moved to Ohio Country, his sons moving down into KY. Name very common among the English Romani.)
Hounshell (earliest known ancestor Johann “John Hounshell” Hauenschild who died 1810 in VA., presumably of German extraction. All sons were slaveholders.)
Howard (earliest documented ancestor John Howard, born NC early 1700s. Sons and grandsons apparently intermarried with both indigenous and Melungeon Mullins women)
Joseph (earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors from mid-1700s Delaware and Maryland, intermarried with multi-ethnic Salyers, Huffs, and Arnetts of Magoffin County, KY. No “Scots-Irish” here.)
Keith (origins extremely murky – earliest documented ancestor William Keith, whose dirt poor “preacher” son Hugh Daniel Keith abandoned family to run away with a young girl – but not before fathering other children by a slave consort. Hence the many “Keith” people once enumerated as “mulatto“.)
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #ScotsIrish #appalachia #genealogy
When Women Kill
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinThree women from Wise County, Virginia charged with murder [1934]
Any American with deep, pre-Revolutionary War roots in British colonial times must understand that their surname may bear only a tangential relation to their actual ethnic history.
While it is obvious that many African-Americans carry assumed “Anglo” surnames, there are many other non-Anglo peoples who did the same.
Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, French, Basques, Welsh, Scottish and Irish Gaelic speakers, South Asians, Jews, Romani, and of course, indigenous peoples.
It is important to cross-reference genealogical records such as birth certificates and census data with documentation found in court records, photographs, descendants’ DNA, newspapers, etc. if we are to gain a proper understanding of any ancestor’s ethnic background.
#AmericanHistory #OriginOfSurnames #AmericanEthnicities #genealogy
History, Heroes, and Dentures
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinGeorge Washington’s dentures
Friends and other people often ask me “What’s this thing with you and history?”
As if history is for fusty old geeks or weirdos – something to lump alongside stamp collecting, or being a Goth after the age of 50 (no offence intended to philatelists or middle-aged fans of The Cure).
When I was about 14 years old, my junior high school had try-outs for the annual school play.
That year, the play was a musical called “Let George Do It“, a typical piece of heartland American fluff purporting to tell the life of the first President of the USA, George Washington.
I went to the try-outs, and got “first stand-by”, or understudy.
My older brother got the actual part. Any middle-kid with an older, more senior sibling will know how that felt…
Our school was in Phoenix, Arizona, and our school productions always went on the road. That year, we were going to perform in a most unusual place.
The Hopi Indian Reservation in NE Arizona.
The distance between 1978 and 2022 is huge, and only the wisdom of age eventually made me look back with a combination of shame and horror at what American kids were indoctrinated, trained and employed to do back in the day.
Like some insane scene from a David Lynch film, we children were dispatched to impoverished Indian reservations as an all-singing, all-dancing propaganda corps for telling the vanquished all about the wonderfulness of their conquerors.
A breathtaking level of coarse and arrogant hubris, utterly impervious to irony.
George Washington was notorious for suffering from bad teeth. By the age of 57 he was left with only a single tooth – a tooth which was removed to make way for the dentures which he wore for most of his latter years.
American schoolchildren of my generation took it as a cultural touchstone or piece of historical iconography that George Washington had wooden teeth. This “factoid” was as true as the story of Pocahontas‘ deep infatuation with Captain Smith…
This is the weakness, the failure, of pseudo-history and foundational mythology. By being so specific in their construction of a false history, the bluffers inadvertently reveal their hand.
The only reason American schoolchildren were taught about “wooden dentures”, was because the reality was too brutish and nasty for “The Father of a Nation”.
You see, George Washington wore dentures made from teeth extracted from animals and the mouths of his slaves – living and dead.
Unlike the purveyors of the “wooden teeth” story, historians rely on documentary evidence when constructing biographies.
And it’s all still there, in the letters and accounts of Mr. Washington himself.
May 8, 1784:
[paid 6 pounds 2 shillings to]
“Negroes for 9 Teeth, on acc[oun]t of the French Dentis [sic] Doctr Lemay [sic].”
Of course, this sort of living cannibalism practiced by the wealthy upon the poor and disempowered is still with us today – whether it be the black market in organs, or the use of “surrogacy farms” in poorer countries, where young women are paid a relative pittance to carry and bear children for wealthy westerners.
A certain type of people need gods and heroes. And it is those people who are most likely to bend facts and commit violence in defence of what they believe their gods and heroes represent.
In reality, gods and heroes are simply reflections of how some people wish to see themselves, and how they wish the world worked.
Ideologies always cause more pain and death than facts.
This is why facts matter, and it is the reason I “do” history.
©2020, revised 2022
#BeforeWeWereWhite #GeorgeWashington #slavery #dentures
The Forgotten History of the Oregon Trail
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinMulti-ethnic family including Kalapuya, Oregon, circa late 1800s
Perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of America’s past is the history of westward migration.
Who exactly rode west in those wagons?
There was almost no colonisation effort on the western American frontier which didn’t begin with squatters and “outsiders”.
Squatting was a tricky game – people had to squat lands not yet formally claimed or controlled by the British (and later USA) establishment, but these same lands had to lie in borderlands and contested areas where indigenous control had been sufficiently weakened to make successful attacks on squatters and intruders less likely.
By “outsiders”, we might mean people who actively wanted to remove themselves from mainstream society or traditional political structures of government.
Such outsiders were often part of non-mainstream religious communities such as the Moravians, “Dunkards“, Primitive Baptists, Quakers, Mormons. and many others.
Such religious groups sometimes had money, sometimes not, depending on the particular situation. Sometimes they purchased land, sometimes they squatted land.
Sometimes they married amongst their own, sometimes they took partners from other ethnic groups.
Another more common category of “outsiders” were those people not driven by religion, but families and groups simply too poor to purchase officially surveyed or officially “claimed” land, people who saw land-squatting as a way to improve their lot in life. These people had not always rejected “respectable” or “elite” society – more usually, it had rejected them.
This mostly impoverished group of outsiders often included various free but “non-white” communities who felt unsafe as color-based slavery began to be enforced under the law in more developed areas with functioning judicial systems.
The borderlands, badlands, swamps, forests, mountains, and hollers of the frontier became the province of these people, along with sundry renegades, former Tories, outlaws, runaway servants and slaves.
These “free people of color” have traditionally been construed by American historians and anthropologists as “bi-racial” or “tri-racial” groups, because slavery based on “race” or skin color demanded that people should slot into one of just three or four legal categories of “color” or “race”.
American historians and anthropologists have thus been co-opted into playing along with the intrinsic absurdity of clear racial categories. If a term is widely used for long enough – especially in law and legalese – people act as if a “white race” or “black race” actually exists in reality.
But what did people call a brown person with a half-Scottish, half-Cherokee father, and a half-Jewish, half African-American mother?
Were they “bi-racial”? “tri-racial”? or even “quadri-racial”?
And how did they fit into America’s mostly binary legal system? Were they “white” or “black”?
This is not some random imaginary scenario – such complex intermarriages were common on the early American frontier.
A single “outsider” family in a place like Hawkins County, Tennessee, or Cumberland County, Kentucky in the 1790s might have ancestors from five continents, of ten or more ethnicities. Children in this one family might range from red-haired and blue-eyed, to black-haired and black-eyed, with a range of skin tones.
Spare a thought for the child born into such a family, who took-after the “wrong” grandparent…
*****
But there are another couple of “outsider” groups who squatted and colonised the leading edge of the American frontier – and they are almost never mentioned.
These two groups were:
1) Dispossessed Eastern Indians, and
2) Old communities of Métis – groups formed by centuries of interaction between Spanish, French, German, Jewish, Romani, African, and Scottish/Irish/Welsh/English frontier trappers, prospectors, traders, miners, longhunters, and indigenous Americans from Canada to Mexico.
Many eastern tribes had been on the move west (and to points north and south) ever since the first colonisers arrived in the 1500s and 1600s. These migrations were too many and too complicated to go into here, but some were large enough to have a real impact on the demographic make-up of entire regions. Many of the earliest “pioneers” of the Ozark Mountains of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas were in fact Lenape (Delaware Indian) families from back east.
As for Métis communities, I would highly recommend that readers search the internet for the terms “Métis” and “Half-Breed Tracts“, in order to understand just how common these mixed-ethnic communities actually were.
Anyone who listened to our recent podcast episode “Sun Bonnets and Bootstraps“ will have learned a little about these groups, and their interaction with Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s family in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
In a way, these so-called “half-breeds” and Métis were really just a specific, but related branch of the free people of color already discussed above.
Which brings us finally to the point of this post – The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which was intended to open-up the Oregon Territory for settlement, and led directly to the famed “Oregon Trail” which started-off in Missouri.
“Settlement” is a more slippery word than “colonisation”, because it allows the user to sidestep the implications of colonialism – the violent dispossession of land from its rightful inhabitants.
The earliest “American” settlers in Oregon arrived mainly as squatter “outsiders” in advance of the Distribution – Preemption Act of 1841. This was followed by the Organic Act and Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which was the most generous “homesteading” act in American history, running for five years from 1850 to 1855. At its inception, earlier squatter and claimant families which included a man and a wife were entitled to claim and gain legal title to a full square mile of surveyed land – a claim equivalating to 640 acres. Even women and widows were allowed to become registered land owners in those otherwise patriarchal times – and in their own name! Individuals were entitled to claim half this amount of land – 320 acres.
There can be little doubt that this federal “generosity” was intended to encourage a land rush which would overwhelm the local indigenous population, essentially sparing the US government the need for direct (and expensive) military intervention.
As always in America’s past, the land-hungry underclasses would be used as “shock troops” in frontier regions, and a blind eye would be turned to wholesale massacres by well-armed (but not well-regulated) local militias.
I invite anyone to read about the Willamette Valley and The Rogue River Wars – if you can stomach stories of outright depravity against innocent men, women and children.
Only once the underclasses had done the “dirty work” and cleared the land of natives, did the bigshots arrive from back east – the lumber and land speculators, with the non-indigenous population of Oregon Territory increasing by around 10,000 each year between 1850 and 1855.
Fidgeters and sceptics might at this point be wondering what land grants in Oregon have to do with non-white “outsider” communities farther east?
Let’s read the eligibility requirements for the actual Donation Land Claim Act of 1850:
[each claim be] “granted to every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included, above the age of 18 years, being a citizen of the United States, or having made a declaration according to law of his intention to become a citizen.”
Let that sink in. “American half-breed Indians included…”
Such a clear legal provision can mean only a few things:
1) Loads of American “pioneers” in Oregon arriving from Appalachian, Southern, and Midwestern states during the 1830s and 1840s were not seen as “white”.
2) The American government was trying to encourage its undesirable and “expendable” multi-ethnic underclasses to remove to points farther west, weakening tribal structures by incorporating them into the landholding, tax-paying mainstream “white citizenry”.
3) The American government was letting its less desirable and more “expendable” multi-ethnic underclasses do the dirty work of ethnic cleansing in the name of Manifest Destiny.
There will of course be people who argue that this was a case of the American government becoming “progressive” and color-blind in its land acquisition and distribution policies.
Yeah, right.
Tell that to the ethnic groups explicitly excluded from availing of 19th century Oregon land grants, such as free (but clearly African) people, or Hawaiians.
Most of all, tell that to people such as the Kalapuya of Oregon.
Never heard of them?
Of course we never heard about them.
People ban certain kinds of history books from American schools.
And that is exactly how Truth, “Bad Things”, and the story of entire peoples are made to disappear into the distant fog of our silence or ignorance.
And our own conjured reality remains safe, for a time…
#BeforeWeWereWhite #OregonHistory #Métis #Kalapuya
Covid, Cotton Mather, and Cultural Cross-Pollination
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinCotton Mather, Puritan minister and pioneer of smallpox inoculation
Regular followers of this blog will know that as a history geek, I never neglect an opportunity to frame today’s events through an historical lens.
Which is why, upon the occasion of receiving a Covid-19 booster vaccine, my mind wandered back to the 17th century…
*****
Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister in late 17th and early 18th century colonial New England.
He was also a mover behind the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
In hindsight, we might be tempted to judge harshly, and call him a superstitious fool.
But Mather was operating largely within the knowledge and understanding of the world available to most Anglo-American Protestants at the time.
I’m less inclined to give him a “pass” as a slaveholder – after all, Quakers and others at the time were loud-spoken in their denunciations of human bondage, so no, slavery wasn’t just considered “normal back then” by everyone.
But even Cotton Mather, believer in witchcraft, was able to set aside at least some of his preconceptions, when faced with new evidence.
You see, a slave who Mather named Onesimus (from Hebrew scripture, of course), was an African with experience in the treatment of smallpox – a disease which was then ravaging European, African, and Native American populations.
The European introduction of smallpox and other European diseases to America is believed to have killed up to 90% of Eastern indigenous Americans, who had virtually zero natural immunity to these new pathogens.
During one particularly severe smallpox outbreak, Onesimus suggested that Mather try using an African method for protection from the disease. That method, improved over time, is what we would later call “inoculation”.
Cotton Mather was wise enough to set aside his sense of cultural and intellectual superiority, and listen to his “servant”.
Mather opened his mind to EVIDENCE.
If only modern anti-vaxxers possessed the humility and wisdom of a witch-hunting preacher from three centuries ago…
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #CottonMather #Onesimus #smallpox #puritans #SalemWitchTrials
The Mechanics of Colonialism
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinForts, Settlements, and Migration Routes into Frontier-Era Tennessee and Kentucky
During the 11th and 12th centuries, in an age before gunpowder, the Normans were able to conquer England by constructing forts (motte-and-bailey “castles”) on newly occupied land.
The exact same method – colonisation by fort-building – was employed in Southern Appalachia by land-hungry Americans in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.
Settlers were not entering a wilderness. They were entering lands with existing communities, trade networks, farms, and towns.
This is why the Americans who followed the first trappers and longhunters had to build “stations”, blockhouses, and forts along the trails and rivers by which they were entering and intruding upon land belonging to others.
With the advantage of an almost inexhaustible source population, gunpowder and firearms, this American-style “motte-and-bailey” system of occupation took far less time than the earlier, but similar, Norman subjugation of England.
This system can be seen in action to this very day, in places like the Levant, where illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land (the equivalent of Appalachian longhunters and squatters) are eventually fully supported by the coloniser’s military installations and a judicial system weighted in favour of the coloniser.
But enough of comparisons and analogies.
Here is a map I made as an aid in understanding the mechanism of early American colonialism.
With the exception of some scattered Spanish and French communties (which were often mostly Métis), every single place on this map was land still belonging to non-European Americans at the time.
#BeforeWeWereWhite #AmericanHistory #Appalachia #AmericanFrontier
Blonde Bombshells and “Damaged Goods”
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinDirect Maternal Lineage of Marilyn Monroe
Legendary film star Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926 to a mother who was first married aged only 14.
We can only speculate what role, if any, this child marriage played in the later mental health issues which would plague Gladys Pearl Monroe.
Gladys was actually born in Mexico to railway worker Otis Monroe and his wife Della Mae Hogan, with the family moving to California around the year 1900.
Her marriage at 14 to Jasper Baker was “stormy”, with many later accounts accusing Baker of extreme domestic violence. Gladys appears to have already been pregnant at the time of her first marriage, giving birth to their first child, a son named Robert Baker, at the tender age of 15.
Gladys Monroe managed to extricate herself from this marriage at the age of 20, already a mother of two children, but her children were taken away by Jasper Baker.
Gladys Monroe married again in Los Angeles at the age of 22, this time to a man called Martin Mortenson.
The exact hows and whys are unclear, but this marriage also broke down, and Gladys became pregnant by a work colleague (and married man) named Charles Gifford in 1926.
The child of this tryst, Norma Jeane, took the surname of her mother’s still legal husband, and was officially born as “Norma Jeane Mortenson” on paper.
Norma Jeane had what can only be called a desperate and difficult childhood, with “home” a constant rotation between intermittent spells with her birth mother, and time spent with foster parents, work colleagues of her erratic mother, and in orphanages.
Norma Jeane’s mother would spend her first spell in an asylum for the insane when Norma Jeane was only nine years old, after suffering what was then called “a nervous breakdown”. Gladys Monroe would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia…
Norma Jeane would take various quasi-paternal surnames before settling on her mother’s maiden name – the name by which she would become famous.
While guessing ethnicity from photos is a fool’s game of phenotype analysis, I am still posting this series of photos because I have some familiarity with the Hogan and Nance families behind Marilyn Monroe’s mother, and her mother before her. They are my own distant relations (Norma Jeane is an 8th cousin). Lest this seem like a wish for fame by association, I will point out that Charles Manson is a closer 7th cousin…
Both the Nance and Hogan families of Marilyn Monroe‘s maternal lineage are multi-ethnic, “Old Mix American” people, and it is hard to ignore the possibility that the tragic lives of Norma Jeane and her mother were the product of trans-generational trauma caused at least in some part by the low status of multi-ethnic women in American history.
This hypothesis pales to insignificance when we admire the sheer charisma and comic genius this oft-times lost little girl managed to give the world.
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #MarilynMonroe #genealogy
Paint Me A Picture
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinSlave Traders in 19th Century Brazil, possibly Genizaros [painting by Debret]
Cigano (Portuguese Romani) Slave Traders, 19th century Brazil [painting by Debret]
Painters, not unlike musicians or actors, need patrons or a paying audience.
This might seem obvious, but it has a direct bearing on how we view history.
English society has been notoriously class-conscious since the first Norman warlords began erecting their stone fortresses – aka castles – among the peoples of England after 1066.
These Normans/Northmen (of Normandy in France) were really just “Frenchified” Vikings with a serious superiority complex after spending a few generations away from their Northern homelands.
Their “Viking French” became the language of the ruling classes in Britain, and this legacy survives right down to the present day, even in American English.
When we want to sound educated, we tend to use words evolved from the French language.
When we want plain talk, we tend to use words evolved mostly from Saxon English.
Think of the difference between saying “an illuminated chamber”, or “a well-lit room”.
But I digress (or “wander off-path”, if we avoid French usages here).
Our deeply-ingrained sense of social class, for much of history, dictated what was deemed worthy of recording.
In the age before affordable photography, only very few people could afford to pay a trained artist for a portrait or painting.
The peasantry, the underclasses, and the poor were only rarely subjects for the artist’s brush. They simply couldn’t pay for such a service.
So art as a paid occupation – in the age before social realism – was generally concerned with portraiture of the ruling classes, landscapes, religious themes, and the documentation of “great events” – with only a few noteworthy exceptions.
*****
I invite any reader here to fire-up a search engine, and attempt to locate contemporary images of the American working classes and underclasses from any time before the mid-19th century.
Paintings, etchings, drawings, anything.
You will find precious little.
What is more, by the time American painters DID decide to paint scenes from the lives of frontierspeople and common people, America as a whole was already actively, aggressively engaged in curating its own myth.
Think of George Caleb Bingham‘s 1852 painting of Daniel Boone leading “white settlers” through the Cumberland Gap – a painting made over 80 years after the events it sought to portray.
This is where it gets a little ticklish and complex, because there ARE American drawings of things such as slave markets and slave auctions.
This is because America was happy to portray “The Three Americas” which underpinned the racial caste system. Black, White, Indian.
Anyone who was not “Black” (and thus unfree), anyone who was not “Red” (and thus savage), became by default and by design, “White” and thus free.
“Brown” was not an option.
*****
As we’ve already suggested, most artists in 16th and 17th century class-conscious colonial America painted “worthy” subjects, or at least subjects who could afford to pay them. The “white” merchant classes, religious leaders and elites, in other words.
So decades and centuries of art mostly portrayed only two groups of people – well-to-do “whites” or enslaved “blacks”.
In the post-Revolutionary years, as many American artists began to turn their faces away from “elite” subjects, and to the historical men and women who were deemed worthy of remembrance as nation builders, painters could no longer conceive that the American frontier was actually settled in large part by “brown people”
Yet it was.
And we can prove it by examining early camera lucida drawings and photographs, reading court and census documents, and cross-referencing folklore and DNA.
The paintings shown here were made by a French gentleman in early 1800s Brazil, a man named Debret. An unusual man with an early, almost anthropological fascination with the “non-white” peoples of Brazil.
One shows the house of Portuguese Cigano “Gypsy” slave traders in Rio de Janeiro. The other shows what are probably “Genizaro” slave traders marching Guarani captives to market.
What does this have to do with Anglo-American history?
THE EXACT SAME SCENES WERE OCCURRING FROM MAINE TO SOUTH CAROLINA TO LOUISIANA TO TEXAS TO CALIFORNIA.
American folk heroes like Jim Bowie were trading with pirates for slaves along the Gulf Coast before Texan “independence” from Mexico. Jewish slave merchants operated out of Maryland and Charleston. Many indigenous American tribes had become drawn deeply into this sordid trade.
And all of these people (who were often brown to begin with) were “co-mingling” and creating an even larger brown American underclass – an unsung and largely forgotten group which would spend decades, centuries, attempting to cross the color bar into “whiteness”.
Needless to say, the brown and impoverished rarely sat for painters.
For their own futures and safety, they were usually pressing ever westward, or keeping to the hills and hollers, swamps and backwoods…
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #SlaveTrade #brazil #cigano #romani #genizaro
The “Scots-Irish” and Appalachia, Part 2 (or I’m Going To Jackson…but not THAT Jackson)
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinHiram Keith with wife Elizabeth Ashby
As a kid growing up in 1960s and 1970s Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona, there was always a deep ambivalence in my family regarding “book learning”.
Book learning was great if it led to a good job or a roof over one’s head.
Where book learning became less welcome was the point at which it mentioned things like slavery. Or the theory of evolution.
Too much book learning was seen as a sign of thinking you might be better than less-educated people.
“Ten dollar words” were not only frowned upon – they were greeted with derision and outright hostility.
Now, on one level I understand these folks. No book is going to make a person a good mechanic, carpenter, sailor, or parent. A book might help here and there, but some things are only learned properly by DOING. Fair enough.
No one wants to be lectured by a “theoretical farmer” straight out of agricultural college when your family has been managing the same piece of ground for generations.
But some things ARE only found in books. Especially history books, because once we are dead, we are, literally, history.
And because living families carefully curate their stories, there is often a visceral fear of books. Because once someone is dead, especially long dead, all that remains are folk stories – and books, and documents.
History is the delicate dance between documents, and the living who must try to interpret those documents.
And when these interpretations don’t match the carefully curated family folklore, when these interpretations don’t match the carefully curated national folklore, certain bad things can happen.
Like culture wars. Like the banning of certain books.
My recent post on the overstated impact of the “Scots-Irish” on Appalachian culture got quite a few responses and shares. That’s great. It’s the reason writers write.
One gentleman suggested my views were off the mark, and that in his region, there were at least three “Scots-Irish” families for every family of English or German descent – let alone people of “non-white” ancestry.
He further suggested that West Virginia might have less “Scots-Irish” due to the historical influx of immigrant mine-workers.
This blog and podcast rarely concerns itself with late 19th century industrial immigration.
What we are interested in are the earliest origins of what is often called “heartland America”, those people with families stretching right back to pre-Revolutionary times, the people who were on the bleeding edge of the earliest frontiers.
I’m going to share what I know about one small part of Breathitt County, Kentucky. The town of Jackson, a small place, so not too hard to cast a glance over.
Here is a small cross-section of families present in Jackson, Breathitt County, KY during the 1800s. I have intentionally left out “Johnny-come-lately” immigrants, that is to say, families arriving in America during the mid-to-late 1800s. Because the bulk of “Scots-Irish” immigration occurred during the first three-quarters of the 1700s, they are of course included where present.
Here are some surnames “A” to “K”. If there is any interest, I can post the second half of the alphabet later this week. Remember! Having a surname which sounds of a particular ethnic background means very little in early American history. People of ALL backgrounds “borrowed” surnames from the British Isles – indigenous people, people of African ancestry, Jewish people, Romani people, Portuguese people, German people…
This list is neither highly-selective, nor does it claim to be comprehensive. It is merely based on my own research into multi-ethnic America. If anyone out there can share the surnames of documentable “Scots-Irish” families of Jackson, Breathitt County, KY, please do! The population today is still just over 2,200, so we should be able to find them.
*****
Adkins (earliest assumed ancestor – William Vortimer Adkin, born 1689 VA) “Scots-Irish”? NO.
Aikman (origins unclear – most genealogies claim Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster) No evidence of Scots-Irish ancestry at hand.
Allen (origins unclear – earliest known ancestors from 1600s Tidewater Virginia) “Scots-Irish”? NO.
Back (origins unclear – descended from apparently German “Bachs” of colonial Virginia, possibly Sinti)
Baker (origins unclear – related to early Bakers who intermarried with multi-ethnic Bolling families) No evidence of “Scots-Irish” ancestry at hand
Barnett (origins unclear – no records prior to 1820, with one “Joshua Barnett” head of household in Ohio County, KY including people of color)
Black (descended from a Scot or Ulster Scot, but family heavily intermarried with Germans, and indeed, French and some Portuguese)
Blanton (origins unclear due to apparent “non-paternal event” involving Bakers. Other Blantons in Harlan County, KY fought with Bunch‘s Regiment. Some Blanton men of dark complexion nicknamed “Gip” – origins of these Blantons also unclear)
Bryant (origins unclear, although most genealogies suggest Welsh ancestry. Earliest proven ancestor “William Bryant“, slaveholder and friend of non-Scots-Irishman Daniel Boone)
Burton (origins unclear, earliest documented ancestors found in 18th century Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Many Burtons of Wales and Somerset, England carry Romani DNA haplo)
Campbell (origins unclear – most genealogies claim Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster. Heavily intermarried with German Eversole and French Fugate families)
Clarkston (earliest documented ancestors George Clarkston b.1745 and George’s son Thomas Clarkston b.1787. Thomas apparently married to Nellie Feathers, woman with haplotype most common in Balkan region and southern France)
Collins (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestor William Collins b.1809 in Tennessee, who may have been son or nephew of Melungeon Valentine Collins.)
Conley (Connolly) (although an apparently Irish surname, earliest known ancestor Henry Connolly is referred-to in legal documents as a “Dutchman” with poor English??!!)
Combs (Coombs) (earliest documented ancestors from early 1700s Virginia. Notables included the Tory soldier, slaveholder, and killer Nicholas Combs)
Cornett (earliest likely ancestor John Cornett b. 1702 Henrico County, VA. Cornetts of Kentucky deeply multi-ethnic, with no sign of “Scots-Irish” ancestry)
Counts (slaveholders and descendants of Fort Germanna settlements – family lore refers to Counts people as “Black Dutch“, i.e. mixed or possibly German Romani ancestry)
Deaton (slaveholders, earliest documented ancestor Thomas Deaton of Henrico County, VA, whose son William Deaton also fought on the Tory side)
Evans (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in 1700s VA and NC. Surname is Welsh, and family intermarried with Welsh Bryants)
Francis (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in 1700s VA and KY. Intermarried with aforementioned Coombs and Fugate families.)
Fugate (well-known multi-ethnic Appalachian family of ultimately French origins. Famous for rare genetic condition which once rendered family members blue in color.)
Gaye (origins unclear, but likely connected in some way to Gaye and Bolling families of early Henrico County, VA.)
Gibson (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors appear in mid-1700s NC. See Melungeon Gibsons for possible connections)
Gose (origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors such as “Dutch John Gose” appear in mid-1700s NC. Many Gose people of Breathitt County enumerated as “mulattos“, and intermarried with multi-ethnic Nichols/Nickell/Knuckles families.)
Harris (origins extremely murky – some Harris people of Breathitt descendants of Benjamin Harris, b.1795. Little more is known.)
Hensley (earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors such as slaveholder Henry Hensley appear in mid-1700s VA. His childrens’ households included “free people of color”, and intermarried with “Angels” and “Howards“.)
Hogg (slaveholders; earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors include Thomas Hogg b. 1740 VA. Most genealogies suggest Scottish origins, but NOT via Ulster)
Hoskins (origins extremely murky – earliest documented ancestor probably the killer John Hoskinson of Maryland who changed/shortened his name and moved to Ohio Country, his sons moving down into KY. Name very common among the English Romani.)
Hounshell (earliest known ancestor Johann “John Hounshell” Hauenschild who died 1810 in VA., presumably of German extraction. All sons were slaveholders.)
Howard (earliest documented ancestor John Howard, born NC early 1700s. Sons and grandsons apparently intermarried with both indigenous and Melungeon Mullins women)
Joseph (earliest origins unclear – earliest documented ancestors from mid-1700s Delaware and Maryland, intermarried with multi-ethnic Salyers, Huffs, and Arnetts of Magoffin County, KY. No “Scots-Irish” here.)
Keith (origins extremely murky – earliest documented ancestor William Keith, whose dirt poor “preacher” son Hugh Daniel Keith abandoned family to run away with a young girl – but not before fathering other children by a slave consort. Hence the many “Keith” people once enumerated as “mulatto“.)
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #ScotsIrish #appalachia #genealogy
The “Scots-Irish” and Appalachia, Part 1
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinAltazara Smith and children
After all these years of being told that the “Scots-Irish” are the embodiment of Southern Appalachian culture, that the “Scots-Irish” are the progenitors of mountain music, that the “Scots-Irish” virtually built America, that the “Scots-Irish” were “born fighting” and thus the reason for feud culture and honor killing in the hills and hollers…
No. This researcher has cast an eye over quite literally tens of thousands of records from every county in Southern Appalachia, and is yet to find one single town, one single county, in which these “Scots-Irish” were the majority ethnic group.
Even the feuds so beloved of American lore only rarely featured families with ancestry able to be traced back to Northern Ireland.
French versus Eversole.
Tolliver versus Martin.
Hacker versus Barger.
Swafford versus Tollett.
Hensley versus DeZarn.
Even Hatfield versus McCoy.
Howard. Philpot. Mullins. Begley. Sizemore. Ingram.
Not a son of Ulster among ’em. Most reputable historians actually based in Ireland are deeply sceptical of this ethnic category called “Scots-Irish” – at least in the sense that the term is used in America.
Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland, from the time of English (and Welsh and Scottish) colonisation in the early 1600s until the American Revolution, was not ethnically-cleansed of its Gaelic inhabitants, and nor were the many English, Scottish and Welsh labourers piling into Ulster during “plantation” universally Protestant, never mind Presbyterian.
Many were simply migrant labourers escaping hard times in Wales, Northern England and lowland Scotland, chasing the “boom” occurring in the Wild West of Plantation (colonised) Ulster.
Unlike many American immigrants, the so-called “Scots-Irish” – actual Ulster Presbyterians with Scottish ancestry – often left a reasonable paper trail, in the form of congregational and ship’s charter documents, and it is not terribly difficult to trace their subsequent land transactions and migrations.
No, southern Appalachia was settled and colonised by a far more complex mish-mash of peoples.
And to understand it, we will need to discover why women in the mountains carried names such as “Altazara Smith” (see photo).
Next week we will begin publishing and sharing a compendium of Appalachian female names.
Let’s just say these names seem rather unusual for Ulster Protestants…
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #ScotsIrish #appalachia #names #genealogy
Speaking Chinese in the Wild West
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinChinese tradespeople in 19th century Arizona Territory
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was America’s first, and possibly only, federal law explicitly forbidding the immigration of a specific ethnic group.
Intended to remain in place for a period of ten years, many Americans might be unaware that this legislation, in one form or another, persisted until 1943!!
Even after this, the USA operated a “National Origins Formula“.
This is a term used to describe a whole range of laws and measures used from the 1920s up until the passage of The Civil Rights Act of the 1960s as a way of keeping America “white” and ostensibly “Christian”.
Here are some Chinese workers in Arizona Territory, as mentioned in our podcast episode “My Little Runaway“…
#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #ChineseAmericans #WildWest