Uncomfortable Home Truths

I know I made some members of my extended family unhappy when I unearthed the truth that my great-great-grandfather had not been shot off his horse while fording the Caney Fork River carrying a bag of gold. In fact, despite the fact that this family legend is completely preposterous, some still cling to it and don’t want to here anything I have to say on the matter.

How much worse it must be for Katrin Himmler, whose great-uncle Heinrich was the head of the Nazi SS and engineered the Holocaust, but whose grandfather and other great-uncle had always disclaimed any allegiance to the Reich or participation in its evil. When she did a little family research she found out the truth. The Sunday Times has a piece on her today, in preparation for her book being available in the UK next week.

The Living and the Dead

While researching my book last night, I was going through biographical information on soldiers who served with Terry’s Texas Rangers (the 8th Texas Cavalry) during the Recent Unpleasantness. I was looking at information about some of my relatives who served in the same Company E as some of the men (including the Lieutenant) killed at Sinking Cane.

I didn’t find anything new until I switched over to a rather famous uncle who served in another company rising from 2nd Sergeant to Captain in less than a year (he later given a battlefield promotion to Major for gallantry after being severely wounded). There was a link noting that he was the first cousin of some soldiers I’d never heard of. This meant there was a pretty good chance they were related to me as well. They served in Company E. Thus I found more family members to integrate into my story.

With their entries in the website was a link to a family researcher. It was someone with whom I was already acquainted because they go to a church where I used to be the worship leader. Turns out, entirely unbeknowst to either of us, this acquaintance is also a cousin.

That’s one of the things I love about this research – you just never know what you are going to discover. Everywhere I look I seem to turn up relatives, living or dead.

Sinking Cane

Last Sunday a contingent from the Sons of Confederate Veterans were at the Conley Cemetery in an area once known as Sinking Cane in Overton County, Tennessee. They conducted a memorial service for the six Southern soldiers who were massacre at the nearby farmhouse on 12 March 1864. It’s not the first time they’ve done this and hopefully won’t be the last.

Checking through my archives, it appears that in my changes of hosting location I don’t have the story of the massacre on this blog anywhere. Many readers may recall it. The farmhouse was owned by my great-great-great-great-aunt. She was also wounded in the shoulder when the Yankees killed the soldiers in cold blood.

A seventh young soldier was in the farmhouse – my first cousin four times removed. As the 200 troopers of the 5th Tennessee Cavalry (USA) surrounded the house, John Holford Officer was hidden in the loft upstairs by Uncle Abe, one of the family’s slaves. John and Abe were friends to the end of their days – well, to end of John’s days, as Abe outlived him by ten years. Abe gave an account of the events to the Tennessee Historical Commission in 1922.

Five of the six slain men were a part of the 8th Texas Cavalry, popularly known as Terry’s Texas Rangers. (They were not in any way related to the famous law enforcement body, but when there was confusion about this once they’d travelled outside the Lone Star State, they didn’t do anything to disabuse it.)

Of those five, two were in Company C, one from Company D, and two from Company E. The two from Company E served with cousins on my mother’s side from Gonzales County.

I spend a lot of time researching this, because I am eventually going to tell the story of all of this in historical fiction.

Voices from the Past

I mentioned last week that I had found a box of old cassette tapes while I was in Texas. After I made the discovery of the recording of my band, I decided to dig around in there some more. I made several other finds.

This is a very large box. There are lots of tapes in it and they were completely unorganised. (Now that I’ve been through them they are in greater disarray than before.) Digging through it I found a copy of To The Bride made for me year ago by my friend Larry, so I don’t have to buy it from Barry McGuire for $30.00. I own the vinyl, so I’m legally entitled to have a cassette copy – it just happens to be from someone else’s LPs. I found a another concert tape of mine – this one from the pre-band pre-electric days of 1985 at an Austin coffeehouse.

The most significant find had nothing to do with music. It only caught my eye because even though it had no case and no label, it had “David’s” penciled on one corner of the tape. The handwriting, as it turns out, belonged to my Uncle Dwight of blessed memory.

In February of 1948, my Uncle Dwight and Aunt Kay were moving from Chicago to Houston. Dwight had been a partner in a recording business in the Windy City and was going to set up his own studio. He was carrying a reel-to-reel recorder with him. He stopped off in Bartlesville, Oklahoma to visit family. During that visit he interviewed my father, two of my aunts (including my Aunt Norma, who thought she might marry John Dale Sanders), two of my cousins, my grandmother, my great-aunt, and my great-grandmother.

A day or so later my aunt and uncle were in Denison, Texas, where my grandfather was working. Well, at least he was based there at the time. He worked as a brakeman on the railroad. He was quite verbose and I now know more about the railroads in the 1940s than ever thought I would.

Of all these people, only my father and one of the cousins are still alive. My grandfather died the year before I was born. My great-grandmother died when I was an infant. My grandmother died when I was one. And I have a copy of that tape.

Even though I made a backup to leave in Texas, I carried that tape on my person all the way back home. I didn’t send it through any x-ray machine or put it in my checked baggage with the other tapes. I can sing my songs again (once I remember them) and I could even pay Barry McGuire if I had to, but I can’t get any more recordings of my ancestors.

From Tainted Past to Total Recall

Once it was shown that an ancestor of Al Sharpton was once owned by Strom Thurmond’s grandfather’s cousin, the floodgates have been opened. Politicians are now being scutinised by whether they have any ancestors who owned slaves.

The latest victim of genealogical criticism is none other than Barak Obama. It appears that the man who would be the first black President has ancestors that owned slaves. It wasn’t his black ancestors that have been traced, though virtually every slave that was ever owned in the US was either originally owned by a black person or was the descendant of someone who was. No, since Obama is proof that you are only as black as you feel, it was two of his white ancestors, a great-great-great-great-grandfather and a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother that are shown in the 1850 census as owning two slaves each.

So there – terrible truth has been dredged up. Obama has some Southern ancestors who weren’t poor. After all, as a general rule, lack of slaveholding was not a matter of principle but of poverty. People who could afford slaves had them. It was an inherent part of the economy.

And truth be told, Obama’s nothern white ancestors (one of who fought in the Union army) were probably, like St Abraham Lincoln, racists. For almost the entire ante-bellum era, abolitionism was by and large the view of a few Unitarians in New England. Even many of those didn’t mind if slaves were freed still didn’t consider them equals.

The same researcher who found out about Obama’s ancestors also discovered that John Edwards and John McCain are also both descended from slaveowners. I’ve been going to try to find out about Al Gore when I get the chance. In my family we don’t often publicise that one of my great-great-grandfathers fought in Gore’s Tennessee Cavalry, not wanting to be tainted any connection with the former Vice-President. However, if that Gore is a relative of Al, clearly this will have to be made known in case he decides to run for the Presidency.

The only presidential wannabe we can be sure had no slaveholder ancestors in the American South is Arnold Schwarzenegger and he isn’t eligible for the office. But then again, his father was a Nazi.

Like Pearls

While tag surfing, I came across a piece about the Al Sharpton and Strom Thurmond story I blogged about last night. It was in what has to be one of the most vitrolic anti-anything-but-radical-liberalism blogs I’ve ever seen.

I probably made a mistake by leaving a lengthy comment.  I didn’t get a particularly sensible response from the blog author, and it was unkind toward my family, though it was a bit more coherent than an earlier comment she made, “The Pigs in the GOP go oink oink oink, oink oink oink, oink oink oink…the Pigs in the GOP go oink oink oink…..all daaaaaaaaaay long!” which I believe was related to “Oh Larry, Lex has nothing to defend the GOP and their stinking Pig ways, so he comes here to make us out to be just like them. Ignore him. As a Pig, he’ll find something else to eat and spew.”

Just when I despair because of the silliness of Conservapedia, I realise that for every goofy idiot on our side, they have a raving lunatic on theirs.

Forefathers

Today is the Sunday of the Forefathers, the commemoration of the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh.

We might normally think of the ones mentioned in the geneologies in the Bible, but even with just one human parent, we have to remember that the ancestors of Jesus are a multitude. Even with two grandparents, four great-grandparents, eight great-greats, and doubling with each generation back, a lot of people played an important biological role in the story of redemption.

Most of these were people who lived and died unaware of their vital role in history. They had no idea that God had chosen their loins from which to bring forth the Son of Man.

It probably isn’t a tradition in the Orthodox Church, and maybe it is due in part to my interests in genealogy, but I think of the Sunday of the Forefathers as an opportunity to especially remember my own forefathers (and foremothers) whose names I don’t even know or for whose birthday into the next life I have no date. I know there are opportunities to remember the dead generally, but I especially set apart those who directly contributed to me being me.

May my departed ancestors find a place of light, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, whence pain, sorrow, and sighing have fled away. May their memory be eternal.