NFL Genealogy, part 2 (TB12 edition)

As promised, here is part 2 of the 2019 NFL divisional playoffs quarterback genealogy.

I kind of suspected that there may be other amateur genealogists out there who have already done Tom’s tree, and as I suspected, there was actually a nice article in the Boston Globe published last year that describes how the original Irish Famine refugees, Tom and Bridget Brady, arrived in Boston (!!!) in the 1850s and had two sons there before moving Gold Rush-style to San Francisco. Tom, of course, was born in San Mateo, CA in 1977. (He’s 41 years old, FYI. Just FYI if you didn’t know.)

So even though his tree is already there for all to see, I still wanted to do it myself. And I did. But actually it was a pretty difficult tree, and I admit that I cheated a bit and looked at the Boston Globe one in order to speed up my search for the paper trail. It still wasn’t as difficult as Mick Mulvaney’s tree, which was def the hardest one I’ve done so far, but it was the most difficult one in this miniseries. When I say a tree is difficult, I mean that instead of names nicely popping up immediately in the most-common Ancestry.com databases, nothing pops up, and instead I have to spend time doing things like browsing decades of newspapers on Newspapers.com, looking for the wedding announcements or obituaries of someone’s sibling’s spouse’s mother-in-law in an effort to find a grandmother’s maiden name that just doesn’t seem to be recorded in any official database.

One fun fact mentioned in the Globe article, that I also would have been able to find on my own through Ancestry: one of Tom’s paternal great-uncles, Colonel Michael J. Buckley, Jr., was both the first American prisoner of war taken in World War II and the oldest living graduate of West Point at the time of his death in 2006 at age 104.

Did Ben Roethlesburger’s great-uncle live to be 104? I doubt it.

Tom’s direct ancestors alive in 1900 are as follows:

• Philip Francis Brady, born in Boston to Irish emigrants, working as a fireman in San Francisco in 1900
• Ellen Donoghue, born in California to Irish emigrants
  • one of seven children; after her husband died in 1936 she went with one of her sons to live with four of her siblings (Maggie, Minnie, Annie, and Henry), none of whom ever married and all lived together their whole lives
• Michael J Buckley Sr., born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Irish emigrants
  • I can’t find him in the 1900 census; in 1910 he was working in Fresno, California as a hotel keeper
• Barbara Lally, born in Bilston, Staffordshire, England
  • Emigrated with her parents and siblings from England in September 1900 (arriving in Boston Harbor!!!), too late to be captured in the 1900 census. By June 1901 they were in Los Angeles, where she married Michael Buckley
  • This was actually the first family I’ve ever seen in genealogy research that emigrated from England to Massachusetts after the 17th century; 19th-20th century English emigration to the US doesn’t seem common
• Arthur William Johnson, born in Minnesota to Swedish emigrants. In school (age 12) in 1900
• Rena Lund, born in Norway
  • Emigrated to US in 1903 at age 15, and is married to Arthur Johnson in Minnesota at age 17 by 1905
• Charles John Obitz, born in Minnesota to German emigrants. Working by himself (not with any other family) as a hired laborer on a farm in Ayr, North Dakota (2010 population: 17) at age 25 in 1900
  • By 1910, is back home and married in Minnesota
• Anna Stish, born in Nebraska to to German emigrants. In 1900 she was 12 years old, living on her parents’ farm in Minnesota with her seven siblings, and had attended school for two months of the previous year.

SoOoOooOoo at least two immigrations into Boston Harbor(!!!) + 3 parts Ireland + 1 part England + 1 part Sweden + 1 part Norway + 4 parts Germany = 5 Super Bowl rings and counting, y’all

Here’s Drew Brees’s tree, which was fairly easy to put together:

Drew was born in Dallas, TX in 1979. His direct ancestors alive in 1900 were:

• Perry Samuel Brees, born in Michigan to parents from Michigan and Ohio. In 1900, living in Spencer, Ohio and working as a carriage maker.
• Maude Mae Doyle, born in Ohio to parents from Ohio.
  • I am unable to find her in the 1900 census. Her mother died when she was just one year old, and in 1900 her father is living with his next wife (who has the same rare last name as his first wife; they were not sisters but seem likely cousins) and a nephew; though she is only 15 years old she does not seem to live in the household. She then married Perry Brees at age 16.
  • Trivia: Drew’s 4th great-grandfather, Maude’s great-grandfather John Colvin, fought in the War of 1812 (which was ended by the Battle of New Orleans in 1815!!!!)
• Rolla Alexander Johnston Sr., born in West Virginia to parents from WV and Virginia. In 1900 he was 7 years old and in school in Lubeck, West Virginia, where his father was a blacksmith.
• Mildred Larose Henderson, born in West Virginia to parents from Virginia and Ohio. In 1900 she was 5 years old and living in Lubeck, West Virginia, where her father was a typesetter (<3!)
• Lester Thomas Akins was born in February 29, 1900 (leap year baby!)
  • His parents had been married four weeks earlier, on Feb. 2nd. When the census was taken in June, they were living with her parents on their farm in Gonzales, Texas, where his father was helping on the grandparents’ (Confederate veterans) farm. Both of Lester’s parents died when he was four. I can’t find him in the 1910 census; though he was just 10 years old, he was not living on his grandparents’ farm (though several other grandchildren were.) By 1920, he was working by himself as a “hired man” on a farm in Texas (street address: “North side Brady and Colf Creek road and South side Brady and Menard road“) and by 1930 he was married and had his own farm (street address: Nine Road).
• Herbert Benton Murphy was born in Texas. In 1900, he was 22 years old, living with his parents (both from Tennessee) and working as a ginner in a mill. He married the next year.
• Lillian Trussell was born in Texas. In 1900, she was fifteen years old, living on her parents’ farm in Burnet, Texas, and in school; she married the next year at age 16.
• Paul Charles Schultz Sr was born in Berlin, Germany, and emigrated to the US with his mother at age 8.
  • In 1900, he and his mother were living in Robertson, Texas, where he was working as a dealer of “gul mdse”. I’d love to figure out what that means, but don’t have ideas.

• Minnie Hiltpold was born in Switzerland, and emigrated with her family (the first Swiss emigrants I’ve seen) to the US soon after she was born.
  • In 1900, she was 21 years old and living on her parents’ farm in Robertson, Texas, with four of her eight siblings.
• William Thompson was born in Texas to a father from Denmark and a mother from England (or Germany, or perhaps the Bahamas?! One of her census records lists her birthplace as Nassau, one as England, and a few of her sons’ records list her birthplace as Germany. So she’s either born in Nassau in the English Bahamas, or Nassau, Germany?!) When the 1900 census was taken, he was single and living on his own in Corpus Christi, Texas, and working as a bottler. In September 1900, he married Mary Rosales.
  • William was murdered in 1936 at age 65, when he was stabbed by a man in a bar after he told the man to leave a woman Thompson was sitting with alone after the man grabbed her by the arm and tried to drag her out of the bar.

His death certificate (death due to knife wounds):

From the Corpus Christi Caller-Times article about the trial of his murderer (he was sentenced to 10 years):

• Maria (Mary) Rosales was possibly born in Texas, to a Spanish emigrant (Aguilino Rosales, from Spain!) and a Texan-born Mexican mother (Clara Villareal, whose parents were born in Mexico.) Her father ran a grocery store in Corpus Christi. However, in the 1900 census her parents household lists just three people: the two of them, and an “adopted daughter”, Mary Amaya, who was born in Mexico in the same year as Maria. So it’s possible that she is actually Maria Amaya, and her parents are not Aguilino and Clara, but relatives(?) in Mexico.
  • According to most of her census records, she was about 16 when she married William Thomas; however, if the later date on her tombstone in Corpus Christi is correct, she was actually on 13 when she was married.

 

2019 NFL divisional playoffs: genealogy edition

Okay readers, I know you are all just as delighted as I am about the Patriots victory today. I HAVE to admit, I am a little smidgey bit nervous about next weekend. Therefore:

Below are all of the direct ancestors of Kansas City Chief’s quarterback phenom quarterback Patrick Mahomes (age 23), and LA Rams’ Jared Goff (age 24) that were alive in 1900. As I’m sure you’ve all noticed from my the Trump Cabinet genealogy, I like to go back to 1900 because it’s my favorite census. It has all kinds of good data points like not ONLY the birthplaces of everyone’s parents, but whether or not they could read and write, speak English, whether they owned or rented their home, etc. etc. For Cabinet members, I only have to go back to eight great-grandparents to get to everyone alive in 1900.

Since these guys are so disturbingly (I know, only when compared to like, me) young, I now have to go back to sixteen great-great grandparents to get to the 1900 census. Yet far be it from me to shy away from a challenge during this high-intensity playoff season. I was able to fill out most of Patrick and Jared’s trees yesterday. Today I had to focus on watching the actual Patriots game, plus I kind of thought that I shouldn’t start on TB12’s before they won because that would be a jinx, but in my heart, I remembered how Tom still films those dialysis center commercials celebrating his new Super Bowl ring every year before they play in the actual Super Bowl, because Tom doesn’t care about superstition, and he doesn’t need you to care either.

However, the Eagles-Saints game is ongoing and it’s a much tougher call whether I’ll need to make trees for Nick Foles or for Drew Brees, so I’ll just go ahead and post these two today and the next half tomorrow.

     

Patrick and Jared both have interesting trees, I thought. They really represent the first and second centuries of American demographic/economic history well, respectively–the first half (1776 – 1880ish) being a story about the North & the South, white Western European & black Africans, farming, and westward expansion & colonization, and the second half (1880ish to the ’80s when these guys were born) being a story about adding in industrialization and open-border migration of new waves of Southern, Central and Eastern Europeans.

All of Patrick’s direct ancestors lived on farms in Texas in 1900. A bit less than half of them were black (the rest white), and almost all of them also had grandparents who moved to Texas from the South: Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, & South Carolina. Texas became a state in 1845, and conflict with Mexico over its borders ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. After this there were high levels of migration from cotton farming Southerners to farm in Texas–both white farmers and enslaved black farmers; 30% of the population of Texas was black at time of Civil War.

Half of Jared’s sixteen direct ancestors lived in the U.S. in 1900, four lived in Italy, and two each lived in the Azores (Atlantic islands colonized by the Portuguese since the early 15th century) and Poland. Only two of them lived or worked on farms; the rest worked as manual laborers in cities after arriving the US (in San Francisco, Baltimore and Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Here’s Patrick’s tree:

Ancestors I could locate in 1900:

• Wilburn Ben Mahomes, born in TX–I couldn’t find him in the 1900 census.
  • He was killed in 1950 when he drove his truck into a cotton train after bend in the road; he was identified in newspaper articles about the accident as an “old Negro farmer”. Both his parents also born in Texas. In 1910 he owned a farm, and could read and write. His father, Que (his name is given as “Que” or just “Q”) was born in Texas in roughly 1850, so it’s possible that Q Mahomes (Patrick’s 3rd-great grandfather) was enslaved when he was born.

• Ida A Hall, born in TX
  • Ida and Wilburn married in 1899, but I cannot find them in 1900 census. Both her parents were also born in Texas. She had 6 children.
• Mattie Veasey, born in TX, living in Van Zandt, TX and working as farm laborer in 1900 (age 14)
  • In 1900, Mattie was 14 years old and living and working on the farm of her grandparents, Richard and Rachel Veasey, with them, one of her uncles, and her uncle’s wife and young son. It’s unclear which one of Richard and Rachel’s 3 oldest children, William, John, or Ada, is her parent (they are the only 3 siblings old enough to be her parent). She doesn’t seem to be a legitimate child, as all three of those siblings married after she was born (also, none of them were living on their parent’s farm in 1900). Grandfather Richard was born in 1830 in Georgia, and grandmother Rachel was born in 1835 in South Carolina. It therefore seems an inescapable conclusion that Richard and Rachel were both enslaved when they were born, then gained freedom and moved to Texas after the Civil War. They had already established their family and farm in Van Zandt County, TX in the 1880 census, when they were living with their 7 children and Rachel’s 77-year old mother, Nicy, who was also born in North Carolina (in about 1803). Notably, Nicy’s race is listed as black, while Rachel (her daughter) is listed in 1880 as mulatto. It seems likely that Rachel’s father was a white man in North Carolina. By the 1900 census, Richard and Rachel owned their farm free of a mortgage. Neither could read or write.
  • Patrick’s great-grandmother’s name is given as Lucy Augusta Adams at age 20, but her mother Mattie is only ever listed as married to Willie Davis. It’s possible that Augusta had a first husband named Adams before marrying Patrick’s great-grandfather, but I could find any records to confirm this. So I’m not positive about the identity of one of his 8 great-great-grandfathers.
• Elijah S Norman, born in TX, living in Van Zandt TX and going to school (age 12) in 1900
  • Patrick’s grandmother’s parents’ names are listed in the Texas Birth Index, but I can’t find any record of a married couple of that name. While the family of her mother (who was only 15 when his grandmother was born) is easy to find in other records, her father’s name is more ambiguous. There is a birth record of a 22-year-old white man of the same name in Van Zandt, Texas, which is where the Patrick’s grandfather’s family above is from, so I hypothesize that this is the right man, but this is not confirmed. Elijah and Lela are this man’s parents. In 1900, Elijah was living with his widowed mother (whose parents were born in Alabama), his four siblings, and a 47-year old widowed male boarder who worked as a “Tombstone Agent”.
• Lela Mae Craft, born in TX, living in Van Zandt TX and going to school (age 6) in 1900
  • Parents are farmers, from TX and Alabama.
• Jasper (Gus) Thompson, born in TX, living in Brazos, TX in 1900.
  • He is black; parents are from TX and Virginia.
• Charlotte Lewis, born in TX, living in Brazos, TX in 1900.
  • She is black; parents are also from Texas. She has total of 13 children.
• Henry Rodgers, born in TX, living in Brazos, TX in 1900.
  • He is black; parents are farmers, born in TX (as are all 4 of their parents.)
• Susie Hunter, actually born in 1901, in Brazos, TX.
  • Parents are farmers, also born in TX. All family is listed as mulatto in 1910.
• Mert Whitman Martin, born in TX, living in Cherokee, TX and going to school in 1900.
  • He is white; 8th of 10 children. Parents are farmers, from Mississippi & Alabama.
• Lettie Zerilla Martin, born in TX, living in Cherokee, TX and going to school in 1900.
  • She is white; parents are farmers; they also employ a housekeeper and 2 farmhands. Although they have same last name and are neighbors with Mert’s family, his Martins are originally from Tennessee and hers are originally from Alabama (so they’re probs not related).
• Charlie Moris Sharp, born in TX, living in Cherokee, TX and going to school in 1900.
  • He is white, youngest of 7 children, parents are farmers, from TX and Tennessee.
• Ada Inez Waggoner, born in TX, living in Rusk, TX and going to school in 1900.
  • Parents are farmers and from Tennessee.
• Omer Mackey Fee Bates, born in TX, living in Parker, TX, living on farm in 1900.
  • Though he’s born in TX, his 13 year old brother’s birthplace is “Indian Territory”. (I think this means Oklahoma?)
• Nancy Florence “Nannie” Moore, born in TX, living in Parker, TX, living on farm in 1900.
  • Living with 15 year sister as boarders on another family’s farm. Both their parents died in 1890s.
• William Thomas Jackson, born in TX
  • Not found in 1900 census. Maybe he was really son of mother’s first husband, George Edens, who she married the same year he was born, and later changed his name to stepfather’s (Jackson)? George Edens was later imprisoned in TX, so perhaps she left him. William was later murdered, at age 40, during a dance in an oil field in 1924.

• Lily M Choate, born in TX, living in Hill, TX and going to school in 1900
  • Father is widowed, illiterate farmer with 4 children. He is born in TX but parents are from Alabama and Tennessee.

Here’s Jared’s tree:

Ancestors in 1900:

• John Oliver Goff, born in Illinois, living in Wabash Illinois and working as farm laborer in 1900
  • At 16 years old, his father had died. He is boarding and working on a neighbor’s farm, while his mother is renting another farm and living with just one of his brothers, though there are 6 siblings in total. She later remarries.
• Lily Jennie Black, born in Illinois, living in Milford Illinois and in school in 1900
  • Parents are farmers from Illinois & Ohio.
• I was not able to determine the maiden name of Jared’s great-grandmother Eleanor. All that is known about her is that she was born in 1909 in Philadelphia, so her parents presumably lived there in 1900.
• Jose Manuel Soares, born in Terceira, Azores
  • Jose emigrates from the Azores to the US in 1903. By 1910, he is working as a laborer in a brickyard in Marin, California.
• Rosa Ventura, born in Ribeira Seca, Azores
  • Rosa emigrated with her family in 1907; she and Jose married at some point between 1910 and 1920.
• George J McMullin, born in California, living in Belvedere, CA and going to school in 1900
  • Father is train dispatcher, born in CA to Irish emigrants; mother is Irish emigrant herself.
• Alice Musante, born in California; going to school in San Francisco in 1900
  • Father is Italian emigrant working as “carpenter at rooming house”; mother from Massachusetts. Her mother testified in the 1896 murder trial in San Francisco of her foster brother’s wife, who killed her husband because he beat and starved her. Alice’s mother testified that it was true that her foster brother had abused and neglected his wife.
• Frank (Francesco?) Panacci, born in Pontecorvo, Italy
  • Emigrates from Italy to the US with his two sons in 1914 at age 47; settles in Connecticut.
• Maria Giovanna FIori, presumably also born in Pontecorvo, Italy
  • She was still alive in Italy when her husband and sons emigrated to the US in 1914, and she doesn’t appear to have ever left Italy herself. Her first name is listed as their point of contact in Italy on the ship manifest, and her maiden name is listed on her son’s Social Security record.
• Maria Manna, born in Ancona, Italy
  • She emigrated from Italy to the US with her daughter Assunta (Jared’s great-grandmother) in 1920; her maiden name is known because shes listed her brother as her point of contact in Italy on the ship manifest.
• Mr. Ricardi (first name unknown), presumably born in Ancona Italy
  • He died before 1920, when his wife emigrated to the US and was identified as a widow.
• Harry Conklin, born in Maryland, working as a tinner in Baltimore in 1900.
  • Living with his parents, who were both born in Maryland; birthplace of father’s parents is “Don’t Know”, birthplace of mother’s parents is Germany.
• Minnie Nieberline, born in Maryland, working as seamstress in Baltimore in 1900
  • Living with her parents, both of whom were born in Maryland to German emigrant parents. Her father works as a day laborer.
• Michael Pijanowski, born in Warsaw, Poland
  • Emigrates from Poland to the US in 1901. By 1920, working as moulder in an iron foundry in Baltimore.
• Anna Marcinko, born in Poland
  • She emigrated from Poland to US in 1900.

Okay the NFC game just ended, so it looks like coming up next is:

 

Dan Coats, DNI, and the 2nd Englishman in Nahant

Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence (a rather new Cabinet-level position, created in 2004 at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission Report), was born in 1943 in Michigan. He attended Wheaton College in Illinois, then law school at Indiana University, though he didn’t ever work as a lawyer for very long. When later tasked by President G. W. Bush to “shepherd” the Supreme Court nomination of Bush’s friend, White House Counsel, and former Texas Lottery Commission Chair Harriet Miers through the Senate, he helpfully stated in a Sunday morning interview that, “If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole. But to prejudge her intelligence, I think, as not being intellectual or capable, is wrong. She is just distinguished herself in everything that she’s done. She’s risen to the top. Her colleagues have appointed her and nominated her for presidency of every organization that she’s been part of. So she must have something going for her.” Hey, remind me to ask him to write my law school recommendation, k? (Despite Coats’s persuasive abilities, GWD did eventually have to withdraw Miers’s nomination and nominate John Roberts instead.)

(Factoid learned from Harriet Miers’s Wikipedia page: she was succeeded in her first role in GWB’s White House, as the White House Staff Secretary, by Brett Kavanaugh in 2003).

Like many fellow secretaries and senators, Coats has spent virtually his entire career employed by the federal government. After law school, we worked for then-Indiana Congressional representative Dan Quayle. When Quayle was elected as US Vice President in 1988, Coats was appointed to his Senate seat; he then ran for the seat himself in 1990 and served in the Senate until 2016, with a break to serve as Ambassador to Germany from 2001 – 2005. He was nominated as the Director of National Intelligence by Trump in January 2017, and was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 85-12.

Dan’s mother Vera (née Svanlund) was born in Sweden and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1910 at age four. She was the fourth of 8 children. The ship record of the family’s November 1910 arrival in Ellis Island–during which time, of course, as in most of American history, the U.S. had completely open borders to everyone except Chinese people–shows her mother, Martina, traveling alone with five children under age 9, including Vera: also Hilda, Signe, Elmer (listed as Per?), and Dagmar. These ship records (as in the case of my own great-grandmother) are often the very best hopes for identifying the actual hometown of immigrant ancestors that are otherwise just known to have come from “Sweden” or “Ireland”. This one lists “Singias” as Martina’s birthplace in Sweden, and Evanston, IL as their destination in US. (The family then appears in the Evanston city directory in 1912.) The ship record also states that Martina can read and write, and gives her brother and uncle Peterson as contacts her closest contacts in Sweden, located in Sugsogd, Sorne (?):

Vera’s oldest sister Hilda’s baptism also appears on Ancestry in a Swedish database; showing their father’s name was Valdemar (he later appears in U.S. censuses as Walter); she was baptized as Hildur Kristina. The baptism location was “wexico kronenburg sweden”, which is likely Växjö, the capital of the county Kronoburg. Kronenburg is one of the southernmost counties of Sweden, with a current population ~200,000. Dan’s grandmother Martina was naturalized in 1936 at age 30. Her brother Per (Elmer?) was baptized in 1905 in Tingsås, Kronoberg, with his mother’s name listed as “Petersdotter”.

In researching Dan’s family, I realized how recently practiced (is it still in practice? I don’t know!) is the Scandinavian naming practice of boys last names being “FatherFirstName’sSon” and girls’ last names being “FatherFirstName’sDaughter”, rather than the same surname being passed from father to children in each generation. Walter and Martina’s marriage record lists a location of Thorsås, Kronoberg, Sverige (Sweden). After searching for this on several random maps, I found it on a map next to Tingsyrd, which is their hometown listed on ship register. It currently has ~3000 residents.

In 1910 census, still awaiting the arrival of his family en route via New York, Walter (still listed as Waldemar) was living in Evanston with his “brother-in-law”, Isaac Anderson. I therefore assume that Issac’s wife Jennie, was Walter’s sister. She arrived in US in 1888, at age 18 and unmarried, and married her (also Swedish born) husband Isaac, a tailor, in the US three years later. They likely provided the intel and support (we call it chain migration now) for Walter and Martina to leave Sweden nearly 20 years later. (In 1900, they were living in Evanston with Isaac’s brother, “Alfredo”; since Jennie could read and write, I suspect her brother Walter could as well.) Jennie’s death record in Illinois provides the names of Jennie and Walter’s parents names, including mother’s maiden name, and lists her birthplace as Smaland, Sweden.

The Svanlund family moved from Illinois to Michigan around 1914, and  Walter worked as carpenter “building houses” in 1920 and 1930 censuses. In 1940, Martina was widowed at age 64, living in her home with two boarders. In the 1930 census, Vera was working as a school teacher in Kent, Michigan, though later in the year she married Dan’s father Edward, in Indiana. Though married in Indiana, they seem to have lived most of their lives in Michigan, where Edward was born.

Walter Svanlund’s sister, Jennie’s, 1938 Illinois death certificate lists the names of her parents in Sweden: Johnson Svanlund and Brita Nilson. They appear in a Swedish census in 1887 living with their oldest daughter, Anna Mathilda, where Brita’s last name is listed as ‘Karlsdotter’. We can therefore derive that her father was Karl Nilson (and that his father was Neil).

Walter’s wife, Martina Peterson, is mostly listed with the maiden name Peterson, but also appears as Martina Pettersdotter in their oldest’ child’s birth record in Sweden, and in her marriage record. However, on daughter Hilda’s brith record, so appears as ‘Johansdotter’. So it’s possible her father was Johan Peterson, but he also could have been Peter Johanson. I wasn’t able to find any evidence of her mother’s name, and therefore could only identify seven of Dan’s eight great-grandparents:

Dan’s father’s side is half German immigrant, and half old-school colonial New England. I was able to trace out the family trees of both his great-grandfather David Coats and great-grandmother Martha Raymond to early 17th century English emigrants to Connecticut and Massachusetts. However, it was a bit difficult to pinpoint David Coats in 1900 specifically — after Martha’s death in 1890, the family seems to have had a rough time and dispersed for a few decades. In the 1900 census, their oldest son, Raymond (Dan’s grandfather), was in prison in Michigan. He married Dan’s grandmother a few years later. Next daughter, Edith, was working as a servant in 1900. She also soon thereafter married and had 2 children, but quickly got divorced, and then appeared in the 1910 census working as a cook and living with 2 small children as “companion” of an older married man in Kansas. Youngest daughter Ella also married, and David Coats, their widowed father, was living with her and husband in 1910 census, but I cannot locate him in 1900. In 1910, he worked as an upholsterer, so I assume he did not have white collar work in 1900, either.

Here’s how far out I was able to trace the Coats name in the US (9 generations before Dan):

The first Mr. Coats in the US, Robert Coats, was born in Wiltshire in England 1627, and died in Lynn (Lynn, city of sin — working class city north of Boston) before 1708. He married Jane Sumner in Ipswich (of the well-known clam shack) in 1657, who was born in Rowley, location of the shop that I take my car to when home in MA. (YES I know you were wondering, and YES it’s true that they are also ancestors of William Sumner Appleton, Jr. (1874–1947) the founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, which has been “the chief force behind much of the preservation of historic homes in the New England area”, and is the ancestor organization of Historic New England, which is the only organization whose bumper sticker I display on my afore-mentioned car.) Jane’s mother, Mary Baker, was born in 1642 in Rowley to Edward Baker and Jane (maiden name unknown). Her father, Edward Baker, was a passenger on Winthrop fleet of 1630, aka the founding colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So you can’t get much more old school New England colonial than that.

Robert and Jane are both buried in Lynn, at the Western Burial Ground. Her father died of smallpox around 1650 when Jane was ten; Robert and Jane petitioned for control of her brother’s estate in 1691 after her sister-in-law remarried. Robert was the 2nd inhabitant of Nahant (the weird little tombolo island to the north of Boston Harbor), where he was fisherman and shephard, and was appointed to 4-man committee in 1657 to defend Lynn’s right to Nahant. He took an oath of loyalty to the king in Lynn in 1678. How do I know this? It is clearly stated in “Records of ye towne meetings of Lyn“, which is my new favorite Ancestry.com repository.

As y’all may know due to some previous posts (like here and here), like many, I am rather fascinated by the Puritans of the MA Bay Colony (which was just the most successful, in retrospect, of several attempted English, French, and Dutch colonies in New England). They are surely an interesting bunch of characters with an interesting culture, which is surely made much more interesting by the influence that it ended up having on the later United States of America … a potential influence many of them were actually, pretty aware of at the time, which is also unusual. The Puritans’ extensive documentation of their activities, (and how history blessed them in preserving of their documentation), out of awareness that their activities may possibly be historic helps support a fascination with them, since there’s so much written by and about them still available to study and analyze.

One of my favorite things about studying the early Puritans is the dissynchrony between the reverence that their descendants–both literal and social–hold for the 17th  century Massachusetts Puritans, and the way that they were viewed by their own societies (i.e., 17th century English society). Today, the idea of being descended from, say, Mayflower passengers is an American equivalent to idea of being related to English aristocracy. Phrases like “blue blood” are used to describe descendants of the group of 104 English settlers who boarded a little, rented ship in 1620, who were considered to be such, such weird-ass weirdos by almost everyone, from the hired captain of the ship, Christopher Jones (who wouldn’t let anyone off of the ship while it was being repaired in Dartmouth, England, prior to sailing, “lest they would run away”) to William Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night laughingstock character of Malvolio was a caricature of the Puritans, who frequently complained about how immoral and Catholic were his plays (and the theater in general).

And in Will and the Mayflower captain’s defense, the Pilgrims were, definitely, weird-ass weirdos. Also pretty incompetent settlers. I use “weirdos” in the conventional, socially judgmental way, meaning a group of people whom very few in their own society respect or emulate. “Puritans” (which was a derogatory term in its day) were a larger group than Pilgrims, who were called Seperatists in their own time — Puritans were still a politico-religious minority, but were respected by a significant segment of society for their ideological and reformist zeal (I think an analogy to, like, Bernie supporters is appropriate), while Pilgrims/Seperatists were a whole other realm of odd and socially marginal (think the Costa Rican ex-pat chapter of the Green Party). The Pilgrims actually moved to Plymouth from the Netherlands, not England, as they had already left England in 1608 to form a hippie commune in the Netherlands. But by 1620 they were concerned that their children would run away with non-God-fearing Dutch people and/or that the Spanish army would attack their commune. Their passage on the Mayflower was paid for by English venture capitalists (who I am sure also thought that they were huge weirdos) who needed bodies to go the New World to catch cod, harvest timber, buy furs from Native merchants, and search for gold. Upon arriving, the Pilgrims realized that they had forgotten to pack fishhooks, and had to write back apologetic/defensive letters to their funders, asking them to send more food (plus fishhooks). They sent one of their leaders, Robert Cushman, back to England after being in Plymouth for only two weeks in order to re-negotiate with their funders, a joint-stock company called the Merchant Adventurers. (Spoiler alert: the Pilgrims never paid them back.)

As we’ve heard many times, half of the Pilgrims died the first winter, and they would have been just like all of the other already-failed English settlements in Virginia and Maine if not for the hero of their story, Tisquantum (better remembered by his nickname, Squanto), who by 1620 had already spent about five years living in England (hence his ability to speak English) and decided to live with the Pilgrims and keep them from dying so that he could live out the rest of his life in his hometown village (Patuxet, renamed Plymouth) after all of his family and community died from smallpox and the Pilgrims moved in to their abandoned town.

Point being, the “glorious ancestors” aspect of the Mayflower Society is a product of several centuries of revisionist history work. But, everyone greatly respects and honors those weirdos now, and all kindergartners learn about them in school, and there’s a whole national holiday honoring a big dinner party they had, so they must have something going for them!

 

What the 2nd Amendment had to do with silencing “a woman not fit for our society”

Watching the amazing courage of recently traumatized teenagers speaking to hundreds of thousands yesterday at the March for Our Lives reminded me, obviously, of a couple 17th century New England topics that I’ve meant to write about on THB. So here’s an extra post before the next Cabinet Genealogy Project post (which, spoiler alert, also goes back to the 17th century).

The first thing is just a reflection on how powerful our shared literature is in defining the American identify — loved how the Parkland teenagers used Thomas Jefferson’s nation-defining 1776 words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in their speeches. It reminded me of when the most impassioned part of James Comey‘s Congressional testimony last summer was the use of John Winthrop’s 1630 words, “shining city on a hill.” (Well, Winthrop actually didn’t use the ‘shining’ — from what I can tell, Ronald Reagan added that adjective, though I could be wrong; and Winthrop was directly citing Jesus Christ, himself. But the meaning if not the letter of Comey’s reference was to Winthrop’s use of the phrase.)

The second was how I’ve been meaning to write a post about the fantastic Partnership of Historic Bostons Anne Hutchinson-themed walking tour that I went on last October, and how it concluded with the observation that among the impacts of this over-ignored, fundamental figure in the American origin story are the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 7th amendments. Most of the details in the following post are based on my notes from that tour; thanks to PHB.

So, most people have already heard of John Winthrop. In the summer of 1630, a fleet of 11 ships containing about 1,000 Puritans dropped anchor in Boston Harbor. It was their second stop, after first sailing to Salem Harbor, where an advance contingent of 300 had arrived the prior year to get things set up, but someone decided the water sources in Salem weren’t good enough and that they should keep going. Winthrop, a wealthy lawyer who had been elected the governor of the colony back in England, was on the flagship, the Arbella. Unsurprisingly, he’d spent much of the voyage focused on writing his big kick-off speech. It was titled A Model of Christian Charity, and it was a sermon on Matthew 5:14, the section of the Sermon on the Mount wherein Jesus said to the hundreds of people who had followed him to a mountain to hear him address them all–in what was probably quite a similar vibe to that of yesterday morning’s march on the Capitol–“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”

The ~1,000 Puritans on the Winthrop Fleet were followed by roughly 20,000 Puritans fleeting England over the next ten years — a period called the Great Puritan Migration (which is associated with New England, but a similar number of Puritans headed to Barbados and other Caribbean islands). It quickly dropped off in 1640 at the launch of the English Civil War, during which the counter-cultural, political radicals who were the Puritans successfully overthrew the government of their own country, and therefore could just stay there instead of leaving to start new governments elsewhere. But by that point Winthrop was already well settled at his farm in Medford, and would continue to serve on-and-off as governor of Massachusetts Bay for a total of 18 terms before he died in 1649.

As I wrote in my post on early New England maps; neither Winthrop nor their even weirder and more counter-cultural friends, the Pilgrims, were the first Englishmen, or first Europeans to visit what we now call New England. But he led the largest group to arrive, had the first royal charter to found an English colony in the Americas. (The Pilgrims had only permission from the king to operate a corporation at Plymouth, specifically including his refusal to recognize their religion–they were supposed to make profits for their investors by sending back fish and timber, though they forgot to pack fishing hooks on the Mayflower and their investors began complaining quickly about what bad businesspeople they were. Jamestown also was just a corporation, not a royal colony, because Queen Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to be obligated to pay for it.) Winthrop fans now push to remember him as the “first founding father”.

Anne Hutchinson almost ruined the entire project, and one could dare to suspect that even Winthrop’s Christian charity may never have allowed him to forgive her for it. Hutchinson was a midwife, a mother of 15, a devoted Christian, an inspiring religious speaker, a leader of men, a troublemaker, and Winthrop’s nemesis for about two years until he successfully banished her and her followers from his shining city.

In 1633, the Puritan migration was booming. The year before, the King had dissolved the Parliament, tired of being constantly harangued to reform, and also appointed anti-Puritan fanatic William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud endeavored to increase public hangings of heretical Puritan ministers, and many of these leading Puritan ministers therefore decided it was time to leave town, and ship out to (new) Boston. New Boston was called Boston in honor of the best known of these ministers–John Cotton, leader of St. Botolph’s Parish in Old Boston in Lincolnshire–itself a derivation of the phrase “Botolph’s town” used during Saint Botolph himself’s Anglo-Saxon times.

The superstar preacher, Cotton, arrived in Massachusetts to much fanfare in 1633. The following year, John Winthrop lost an election as Mass Bay governor, and one of Cotton’s most devoted followers, Anne Hutchinson, arrived in Boston as well, with her husband William and 13 children. She had fervently wanted to leave on the same ship as Cotton, but was late in her 14th pregnancy, so their oldest son sailed with Cotton and the rest of the family joined the following year.

One of my favorite parts of Anne’s story is how you never hear anything about her husband–he left history no record of his thoughts or experiences, similarly to virtually all women of the time–and how he did everything in his power throughout his life to support her passions and projects. This included traveling twenty miles each way by horseback from their home in Alford to Boston on Sundays to hear her favorite preacher, Cotton, preach as often as possible; moving a family of 14 children across an ocean because she wanted to follow her preacher; publicly and privately supporting her through the biggest scandal in the Puritan world thus far as she was put on trial, during which time he secretly made arrangements for a new farm for them outside of the colony in the case that she was banished; then uprooting and moving the family there post-banishment. (During all of this, at any point he could have publicly denounced his wife, told her to stay home, stop holding meetings and stop making trouble, and she would have had no choice to obey and the whole sitch would have been over with.)

William had been a fabric merchant in London when they had met, and he was wealthy enough that the Hutcinson home in Boston was large enough to house not just their huge family and six servants, but the 60-90 people that Anne immediately starting inviting over on Sundays after church and Wednesdays after parish lectures in order to discuss the sermons. Their house was was about at the location of this Chipotle in downtown Boston (better known as the former location of the Old Corner Bookstore):

Inspired by Cotton, Anne’s view of salvation was that people who were saved had a piece of the Holy Spirit in their soul at conception; this was different than the standard Puritan view of men having no inherent holiness. In the Cotton/Hutchinson view, men therefore had inherent knowledge of good and wrong; their critics feared that the implication of this was that there was no real need for laws, then. The Hutchinson controversy is remembered as “the Antinomian Controversy”: antinomian means anti-law. The standard Calvinist, Puritan view of predestination was that men could achieve knowledge of whether or not they were among the saved through their works; Hutchinson said instead that works could be meaningless, since people knew right from wrong, they could be hypocritical and do both good and bad works and only they would know.

Winthrop kept a detailed diary and wrote many essays that were compiled into a memoir called the History of Massachusetts. On Oct 1st, 1636, he first mentioned Hutchinson and her Bible study meetings, called conventicals, in his diary: “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church at Boston, a woman of a ready wit and a bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors: 1. That the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person. 2. That no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” This was two days after he had opposed her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright’s appointment as the second minister of the First Church of Boston. Wheelwright was instead given land in Mount Wollaston (now Braintree) to start a new church. Yet Wheelwright continued to come to Boston to attend Anne’s conventicals. When he was present, he was always the official teacher/lecturer; when the group was just women, Anne was the official teacher.

Who cared about what some lady said to her friends about her views of salvation in her own living room after church, anyway?

Well, as well as the afterlife stuff, antinomianism involved the issue of who was eligible to vote in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Only recognized church members were eligible to vote in the General Court. To be accepted as a member of a Puritan church, you had to go up to the front of the church and describe to everyone the moment you knew you were saved. (This is still a common thing in many American Protestant churches; it’s usually called giving your testimony.) So by challenging what it meant to be saved and how one could tell whether one was saved, Hutchinson was messing not just with people’s minds, but with the definition of who could vote for John Winthrop to be re-elected governor every year.

It was further becoming a state issue because Anne’s charismatic conventicals had attracted an unfortunate follower: the new governor. In 1635, one year after the Hutchinsons had arrived in Boston, a 24-year-old named Sir Henry Vane, the son of the chair of the royal charter commission (Winthrop described him in his diary as  “a young gentleman of excellent parts”) had arrived from England with a request to revoke the charter. Winthrop was, as we’ll learn, as (if not more) politically saavy as he was devout–so in the face of this threat to the colony, Vane was immediately elected governor of the colony himself in the 1635 election. This was a clever co-optation of a potential threat to the colony. Yet Vane had also nearly immediately become a Hutchinson conventical attendee, follower, and advocate of the idea of expanding the rules about voting.

This was becoming a serious issue, and in the fall of 1636, Winthrop (who was voted in as governor again in 1636, after Vane’s first term–elections were held annually) & his allies decided to make moves and take the issue in hand. In September, they held a vote in the general assembly for the colony to found a college for ministers, similar to Emmanuel College in Cambridge where all the leading Puritan ministers had studied, in order to make sure the colony’s ministers were being taught correct Puritan beliefs and not Hutchinson’s growingly popular interpretations. In 1636, they called it “New College”, but they changed the name a few years later as a thank-you to John Harvard, the young colonist who bequeathed his library to the school.

Then in October, Winthrop and other non-Cotton and Vane aligned leaders called a joint meeting with Cotton and Hutchinson to discuss her obnoxious behavior, and produce a list of rules for Hutchinson to follow in order to rejoin their good graces. She declined, and they grew angrier. Around this time they also began accusing her of sexual immorality, because of course they did–we all know that sexually immoral women aren’t credible witnesses in court. The sexual accusations were pretty darn similar to what we still see in court–she was accused of secretly being a believer in “familialism”, a 16th-century English free-love sect, on the basis of her holding mixed-company conventicals.

By late 1636, the controversy had become hot. The General Court voted to hold day of fasting and prayer in January to help resolve the conflict. The First Church’s minister (and Winthrop ally) John Wilson and John Cotton both gave sermons preaching reconciliation. Cotton then unexpectedly asked John Wheelwright, Anne’s brother-in-law who’d been shipped out to Braintree, to speak after him. Wheelwright then preached for two hours, rallying up the crowed in the church (its location is now somewhere near the State Street T stop) with with exhortations to fight for their beliefs against the  “legalists” like Wilson. Winthrop et al. were obviously angered (Winthrop’s diary: “[Wheelwright] inveighed against all that walked in a covenant of works … and called them antichrists, and stirred up the people against them with much bitterness and vehemency”), but Hutchinsonites, including Vane, were jazzed up and inspired. The day of fasting and reconciliation had officially backfired. Now Winthrop, the lawyer, was forced to go the legal route to squash the divisiveness threatening his city on a hill.

At the next meeting of the General Court, Wheelwright was put to trial for contempt and sedition for his fast-day speech. He was judged guilty, but not without a fight–over 70 freemen signed an official “remonstrance” document, protesting his conviction and urging that it be overturned.

  John Wheelwright

This remonstrance then became the central issue at the May 1637 gubernatorial election, in which Vane was running against Winthrop. The church in Boston generally supported Vane and Hutchinson; the church in New Town across the river (not yet re-named Cambridge) generally supported Winthrop. Vane wanted the remonstrance to be read publicly prior to the election; Winthrop obviously did not and insisted it would be fine to hold the election first and then do readings and speeches afterwards. So they then fought over where the election should take place–if it were in Boston, the crowd would listen to the remonstrance if Vane read it; if it were in New Town/Cambridge, they would be willing to hold the vote first without the public reading. Winthrop was able to get the General Court to agree to hold the vote in New Town. As the gathered freemen debated whether to let Vane speak, John Wilson the minister climbed a tree (this is likely somewhere around Harvard Square) and extorted the crowd below to just go ahead and hold the vote. They did, and as predicted, Winthrop beat Vane in the election. Vane’s halboards, his flag carrying helper people, refused to carry the official colony flags for Winthrop. Burn! Vane, the twenty-five year old son of a royal courtier, decided he’d had had enough of this unpleasantness, and sailed home to England/daddy in August, never to return to New England.

 Sir Henry Vane

Now duly re-elected, Winthrop could turn his attention the root source of the conflict roiling his colony: Anne Hutchinson. The conflict truly was roiling his colony, as he detailed later in his written justification of his heavy-handed approach to the controversy. The headmaster of the Boston grammar school had left the colony with Wheelwright; of the forty-five wealthiest people in the city who had agreed to pay subscriptions for the headmaster’s salary, 24 had signed the Wheelwright remonstrance and had left the city by the next year. The anger behind the remonstrance had resulted in men refusing to pay their taxes, and in May of that year, 35 men had refused to go help with the Mystic massacre of Pequot people because Anne Hutchinson felt the Pequot War was unjustified. (In Mystic, a village of 400-700 sleeping women and children in circular wooden palisade were shot at, and then burned alive, by a Puritan raiding party led by John Underhill as retaliation for Pequot men’s murder of John Oldenham, who was an Englishman who’d been banished from Plymouth for sedition after writing letters back to England making fun of how weird the Pilgrims were, then pulling his knife on Miles Standish and calling him a “beggarly rascal”).

That fall, the general court called Hutchinson to stand trial for heresy and sedition. What’s remarkable about Anne standing trial is that as part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ civil court records, her words were recorded, and are still on file (last time I went to the Registry of Deeds in Salem to add a new trustee to our condo account,  asked if they could print the form for me, and they told me it was fine to just hand-write a letter because “we have documents from the sixteen hundreds here” and typed documentation is not required.) Unlike virtually all women from this time who’s lives must be inferred by archaeology or the words of their husbands, sons, or neighbors, Anne’s voice lives on.

The Wheelwright remonstrance, which had been signed by more than half of the freemen of Boston, was used as evidence she has created divisions in the colony. Anne served as her own counsel during the trial. She refuted all charges against her, debating the Cambridge-trained lawyer John Winthrop point by point. Since she had never made public statements, leading conventicals only in her own home, he struggled to get her to admit to anything that could be considered a convictable offense (in her words, “It is one thing for me to come before a public magistracy and there to speak what they would have me speak and another when a man comes to me in a way of friendship privately”). She stonewalled Winthrop’s questioning so effectively that Thomas Dudley (father of the only other woman from this generation in New England who left her words to history, the poet Anne Bradstreet, who was also the first published author of any gender in the North American colonies) had to step in and try to help Winthrop in the cross-examination.

On the second day of this civil trial, Anne’s approach was more aggressive. It’s possible that after discussions with her husband and supporters the night before, she’d decided that she was going to be banished anyway and had accepted this fate. She testified in court that she received direct, personal revelations from God (this was heresy, as the Bible as the only accepted source of revelation) and concluded this claim with, “if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” While Winthrop may had been shocked at this heresy, he may also have been glad that his opponent had made her conviction easier for him.

The court ruled Anne guilty of heresy and sedition, and ruled that she be held under house arrest over the winter until she could be tried in ecclesiastical court the next March in order to be officially ex-communicated. Winthrop’s final pronouncement at the trial was, “Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.” She spent the harsh winter of 1637 held in the Roxbury farmhouse of an antagonist, Joseph Weld, facing continual visitors pressuring her to recant. John Cotton, her mentor, felt so bad about the whole situation that he decided to move to New Haven, but Winthrop and others convinced him that that would make Boston look bad and that he should stay.

In the spring of 1638, her ecclesiastical trial was held. As in the first trial, she was demure on the first day, seemingly trying to attract the sympathy of the crowd; then on the second day did an about-face and stated that she had been only parroting her accuser’s words back at them the day before, and that she did not recant anything. Ultimately, minister John Wilson formally excommunicated her and condemned her to hell, and her former mentor, John Cotton, the man she had been devoted enough to cross an ocean to a new world for, concluded her trial with the following stab in the back in order to maintain his standing in Boston:

 John Cotton

“I would speak it to God’s glory you have been an instrument of doing some good amongst us… he hath given you a sharp apprehension, a ready utterance and ability to express yourself in the cause of God … [but] you cannot evade the argument … that filthy sin of the community of women; and all promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and women without distinction or relation of marriage, will necessarily follow…. Though I have not heard, neither do I think you have been unfaithful to your husband in his marriage covenant, yet that will follow upon it. …Therefore, I do admonish you, and also charge you in the name of Christ Jesus, in whose place I stand… that you would sadly consider the just hand of God against you, the great hurt you have done to the churches, the great dishonor you have brought to Jesus Christ, and the evil that you have done to many a poor soul.”

When it was all over, Hutchinson’s friend and fellow midwife Mary Dyer, who herself would be sentenced to death and hung by the Massachusetts Bay Colony about fifteen years later for the crime of practicing Quaker religion, walked out of the church with her arm around Anne. In response to a man by the door who said, “The Lord sanctify this unto you,” Hutchinson replied, “Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ.”

During the trial, her husband and several supporters had been working with Roger Williams, founder of Providence Plantation, to purchase land on an island called Aquidnick (in the area now near Newport, Rhode Island), and had already begun building houses there. Immediately following her trial, Anne, most of her children, and supporters walked for six days through the April snow from Boston to Providence Plantation. They then took boats across Narragansett Bay to their new homes. When they arrived, it was the first time she had seen her husband in almost six months.

So that’s very touching; and what does it have to do with the second amendment?

Within a week of Hutchinson’s sentencing at the civil trial in November 1637, constables had gone door to door throughout Massachusetts adding insult to injury: they were sent to collectively disarm all men who had signed the Wheelwright remonstrance. All signers were ordered to deliver “all such guns, pistols, swords, powder, shot, & match as they shall be owners of, or have in their custody, upon pain of ten pound[s] for every default” within ten days. This of course would mean that these men could not hunt, nor defend themselves from attacks, like maybe from Pequot men who were angry that their families had been burned alive in Connecticut. Most recanted their support of the remonstrance; those that refused were generally forced to leave Massachusetts.

This was the colonial version of a debate happening in England about the right to bear arms, as the country fought series of wars and revolutions over the rightful role of Parliament and the ability to impose religion on society (be it Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Puritanism). Catholic King James had attempted both to disarm Protestants, and the govern without the consent of Parliament, and his Glorious Revolution replacements, William and Mary, agreed to be governed by the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which included: “That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.”

Who knows, maybe James got the disarmament idea from the government of his colony, who used disarmament a few decades before as a means to force out political opponents from society without having to bother with trials.

Epilogue on Anne:

A year after the trial, a team from Massachusetts came to see if she’d be interested in helping them trade with Rhode Islanders; she called them harlots and declined to participate in their economic cooperation idea. In 1639, the family moved again, to the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, where they knew that Winthrop and his friends couldn’t bother them again. The location of their farm is not known with certainty, but is probably somewhere in what is now the Bronx. Anne’s husband William died in 1641. In the summer of 1643, Anne and most of her children were killed by Siwanoy men who were fighting Dutch colonizers for control of the land that is now known as New York City. One daughter, Susannah, was out picking berries at the time of the attack; she was captured but not killed and lived with the Siwanoy people for between two to six years until she was ransomed back to older siblings who were living again in Boston. From Winthrop’s diary upon learning this news:

“A daughter of Mrs. Hutchinson was carried away by the Indians near the Dutch, when her mother and others were killed by them; and upon the peace concluded between the Dutch and the same Indians, she was returned to the Dutch governor, who restored her to her friends here. She was about eight years old, when she was taken, and continued with them about four years, and she had forgot her own language, and all her friends, and was loath to have come from the Indians.”

Anne Hutchinson’s historical legacy includes, therefore: nearly single-handedly creating the first great political conflict in Anglo-American history, which shaped the politics of nascent New England, including the impetus for the founding of Harvard College, and established collective political memories that arguably inspired the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 7th amendments. As the early history of Massachusetts was literally written by her arch-nemesis, it took a few centuries for her to be credited as a key historical figure, though she still certainly doesn’t receive her due, IMHO. Besides the Hutchinson Parkway in New Jersey, the only public monument to Anne is a statue of her and daughter Susannah, which now stands kind of hidden behind some bushes in front of the Massachusetts State House (but still, take that, John Winthrop):

Also, in 1987, Governor Michael Dukakis pardoned Anne Hutchinson, revoking his predecessor Winthrop’s order of banishment from exactly 350 years earlier, which was nice, but I still think someone should make a movie about her and she should be better represented in American history textbooks.

Nikki Haley asks and answers: “Is it worth all this?”

Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, is my first fellow American child of immigrants in this project. She was born in 1972 in Bamberg, South Carolina (population 3,342), where her father was a professor of biology at tiny, historically black college, Voorhees College. Four years after Nikki (a nickname meaning “little one”; her full name is Nimrata) was born, her mother (who had earned a law degree in India) started an international clothing shop called Exotica International. Nikki began keeping the business’s books at age 13, then got a degree in accounting at Clemson University. She worked for a waste and recycling company before becoming the CFO of Exotica International, which grew to a multi-million dollar business (it also employed her husband, Michael Haley, as the menswear manager until Nikki’s parents closed the store in 2008).

She first ran for South Carolina state legislature in 2004, winning the election after a primary that included such intense religious (you know, mailers claiming that she was a secret Muslim–you know the drill!) and racial attacks against Nikki that, considering dropping out, she asked the SC chairman of the Republic Party, “You tell me — is it worth all this?” He asked for the governor’s wife, Jenny Sanford, to give her a pep talk, and she persevered. (And won.)

Five years after her first election, Governor Mark Sanford told everyone he was leaving to hike the Appalachian Trail over Father’s Day weekend (sorry, four children), and didn’t answer phone calls from anyone for 15 days. It later came out that he was visiting “his soulmate” in Buenos Aires. Jenny filed for divorce, and the governor, while avoiding impeachment, decided not to run for reelection in 2010. (He’s since ended his engagement to his soulmate, gotten back into politics, and is now representing South Carolina in Congress.) He and Jenny both encouraged Nikki to run for governor; and she was elected with 51% of the vote. She was reelected in 2014 with 56% of the vote.

Of the inevitable attention that her political story has always gathered — first female governor of South Carolina, first non-white governor of South Carolina, first Indian-American ever elected to anything in South Carolina, second Indian-American governor in the US, third-ever non-white governor of a Southern state, she said in 2010: “I love that people think it’s a good story, but I don’t understand how it’s different … I feel like I’m just an accountant and businessperson who wants to be a part of state government.”

(Two years later she decided to write a memoir about how it was different, so I guess she figured it out. She explained in a later interview that, “When I ran and when I won, I was absolutely shocked at the number of people that came up to me and told me that after seeing what I went through, they would never run for office, and that devastated me because that was the total opposite of what I wanted people to take away. It was at that point that I told Michael that we had to tell my story of this little Indian girl who went through challenges all her life and became governor of the greatest state in the country.”)

In the 2016, she supported Marco Rubio, and then Ted Cruz, in the Republic primary. Once Trump became the nominee, she said that while she would vote for him, she was “not a fan.” Just a few weeks after the election, Trump announced that he would nominate her as Ambassador to the U.N.; she was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 96-4.

Nikki’s parents are Sikh, the religion founded in their home region of Punjab in 1606 (I never knew that Sikhism was such a “young” religion!). I also learned from Wikipedia that her parent’s middle names are shared by all Sikhs: “Male Sikhs have “Singh” (Lion), and female Sikhs have “Kaur” (princess) as their middle or last name.” Though her father wears the traditional Sikh turban, her brothers cut their hair after teasing in grade school became too much too bear; Nikki has said of this, “It’s survival mode … you learn to try and show people how you’re more alike than you are different.”

Her dad became a naturalized US citizen in South Carolina in 1977, when she was five years old. (My dad became a naturalized US citizen at a ceremony in Fanueil Hall in Boston when I was five years old. One of my earliest memories is sitting in the balcony with my mom and baby Sara in a baby seat, maniacally waving at him every time he looked in our direction, and getting upset that he stopped waving back at me after like the third or fourth time.)

I found both of Nikki’s parents birth dates on ancestry.com records, which could theoretically help identify them in databases of Indian records. The only databases of Indian records available on ancestry.com are (the number is number of records in the database):

India, Select Births and Baptisms, 1786-1947	Birth, Marriage & Death	1,984,368
India, Select Marriages, 1792-1948	Birth, Marriage & Death	632,516

Familysearch.org also has a deaths database:

India Deaths and Burials, 1719-1948 (566,529 records)

But since Nikki’s parents are still alive in the US, that is not useful. Neither of their names match anything in the marriages or births database, either.

I found a list of mailing addresses in India for genealogical research here: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-trace-back-to-the-roots-of-my-ancestors-in-India.

The National Archives of India website states that a searchable database of its records was launched in 2015, but link goes only to 404 Directory Not Found. 😦

It pains me as a historical detective to admit, but I suspect this is as far as I’ll get in tracking down Nikki’s great-grandparents in 1900:

In looking for Nikki’s statements on immigration, I found her response to President Obama’s last State of the Union in 2016, during which she said: “We must fix our broken immigration system. That means stopping illegal immigration. And it means welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of their race or religion. Just like we have for centuries.”

As governor, she spoke often about celebrating immigration, and also spoke against illegal immigration and complained about the federal government/DOJ intervening to challenge state laws passed in South Carolina requiring photo ID for voting and requiring employers to verify and certify the legal status of their employees, as federal overreach suppressing the will of the South Carolinean people.

I also read the first page of her 2012 memoir, Can’t Is Not an Option, on Amazon:

“I am the proud daughter of Indian parents who reminded us every day of how blessed we were to live in this country.” That’s how I began every speech in my campaign for governor of South Carolina. I said it because I was proud–I am proud–to be my parents’ daughter. But I’ll confess: I also said it as a warning, a shot across the bow to those who thought they could make me being different–my being different or anyone’s being different–a disqualifying factor for leadership. I had been down this road before, and I was done with it. My parents were more American than anyone I knew. The fact that I was their daughter had made me stronger, not weaker. My opponents, I thought, might as well know that up front.”

“My parents are more American than anyone I know” — that resonates with me (I’ve actually written that exact sentence before about my dad, many years before the 2016 election), and with the purpose and spirit of this research project. Since the U.S. is a country of immigrants–literally, not idealistically–not celebrating immigration means not celebrating the U.S. Being anti-immigration is being anti-American; full stop. As I’ve written here before, it’s a self-hating impulse.

Her memoir also shares the most I suspect I’ll be able to find about her great-grandparents. She describes her parents’ families in India in the opening pages of the book as follows:

“Although she lost her father very young, my mother came from a wealthy family. She lived in a six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikh religion, to which she belongs … Mom had hired help to attend to her every need. Her clothes were custom made for her. She never had to carry her own books to school. At that time and in that place, girls typically weren’t educated beyond high school, but Mom went all the way through law school. She was offered the first female judgeship in India but couldn’t accept it because her family didn’t think it was appropriate … Mom met Dad at a mountain vacation area near Dharamsala in norther India, where Indian families of means would go every summer … My father’s father was a commanding officer in a horse-mounted regiment in the British colonial army. He was stationed all over the country, so my father lived most of the year with his uncle. I remember listening with incomprehension as a child when my dad told me that he only saw his parents for two months a year, during summer vacation.”

Just in the first pages of the memoir available for free view on Amazon, there are quite a few interesting and even horrific anecdotes about being the only Indians and only brown people in Bamberg, South Carolina in the 1970s and 80s: Nikki being told at recess that she couldn’t play kickball unless she chose whether to be on the white team or the black team; Nikki’s mother asking neighbors to babysit toddler Nikki, then finding her back covered with bruises during her bath and learning that other neighbors heard Nikki screaming all day as the babysitting neighbors beat her in their trailer (?!???!??!!)

Finally: as I was reading articles and interviews with Nikki, trying to find any mention of grandparents in India that might help make a connection, I came across this response in a 2012 interview with the New York Times that I’d never seen cited before. It made my jaw drop a bit:

“Q. Why are there so few women of your generation in high level politics?

A. It’s not because the challenge is too hard. It’s simply because women don’t run. The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton. Everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t run: I was too young, I had small children, I should start at the school board level. I went to Birmingham University, and Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker on a leadership institute, and she said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking “That’s it. I’m running for office.”

What a testament. I’ll just leave this here. If Nikki Haley does what many are whispering about and becomes the first female US president, in say, 2024 (2020?), let’s all remember to thank Hillary Clinton, hm?

Mick Mulvaney and Far and Away

I swear I was ready to not just automatically assume that “Mick Mulvaney” was descended from Irish immigrants, guys. Spoiler alert: he is. (But not as many as I was expecting.)

Mick was born in Alexandria, VA but grew up in North Carolina, where his father had a homebuilding company. The family later moved to South Carolina. He was a top honors scholar at Georgetown, then went to law school at UNC-Chapel Hill on a full scholarship. He practiced law for five years, then worked in the family business for about ten years in the Carolinas. In 2006, he was first elected to the South Carolina state house of representatives; then in 2010, he defeated a Democratic incumbent to become the first Republican to represent South Carolina’s 5th Congressional district since 1883. (FYI, SC-5 is mostly rural, has a median household income of $44,685, and is 67% white, 29% black, and less than 2% each Hispanic and Asian.) He was re-elected three times, and was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, self-considered to be the “farthest-right” group of House representatives. He was nominated as Director of the Office of Budget and Management (OMB) by Trump in December 2016, and was barely confirmed by the Senate, by a vote of 51–49. All Democrats, troubled by Mick’s leadership role in the government shutdown during the Obama presidency, and John McCain, who was troubled by Mick’s support for limiting spending for the Defense Department, voted against his nomination.

He has attracted further critique this year due to Trump’s choice to have him serve as the nominal leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency which Mick called “a “sick, sad joke” and for which he (as its leader) requested $0 in funding in the 2018 budget.

Guys, check out the shamrock pin:

Mick initially endorsed fellow libertarian Rand Paul during the 2016 Republican primary. Accounts of his personality are that he’s a true ideologue/believer, who believes in slashing spending and that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, but is also affable and perhaps goofy: “His first words to Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, were: “Hi, I’m a right-wing nutjob!” (Cohn’s deadpan reply: “Hi, I’m Gary.”)

In 2015, he gave the following quote during a Bloomberg interview:

Well, FINALLY. Some intellectual honesty from the Trump Cabinet on immigration. Snaps for Mick!

Wait, what’s that you say, John Dickerson from CBS? You interviewed Mick a few months ago on Face the Nation, and found that now his views have become more nuanced?

Dickerson read the above quote back to Mick, and asked how he feels about the administration of which he is now a top leader pushing for “merit-based” immigration reform. Mick’s reply (emphasis mind): “I think what we’re moving towards is a recognition that the immigration system of the 21st century in the United States needs to be different than it was in the 19th century when my family came here. Every other developed nation now has a system where you have to show merit. You have to show that you’re going to contribute to the economy. In fact, even if you go back to the 19th century when my folks came in and I think yours did as well, they had to have a certificate that said they would not be wards of the state. And I think that’s what we’re trying to get back to. The point where we want folks who will contribute to the economy. That’s why we want to move away from chain migration and over towards a merit-based system.”

Nuance … pathetic hypocrisy cause you have a cool job now and don’t care about xenophobia enough to risk losing your cool job over it: you decide.

Also, what?? Which illiterate immigrants brought certifications that they would would not be wards of the state? I haven’t come across any of these in the Ellis Island records I’ve been reading. Did Mike Pompeo‘s great-grandparent’s families remember to revoke their certifications before they dropped off their kids in those orphanages in Pennsylvania and New York?

Okay, so on to his tree. Guys, this one took a long time. Like, it’s been a couple of weeks since the last post, partly because I moved to a new apartment, but believe it or not, also because I spent days Googling for Mick Mulvaney plus the name of every single member of his immediate family and all of his in-laws’ immediate families in search of SOME sort of wedding announcement or obituary that would provide names of his parents’ parents for weeks, and have had NO luck.

For the first week or so, the only mention of his parents in an easy-to-find article was in this Politico article where he shares that his mother was a teacher, saved ketchup packets, and was Polish-American. The only extended mention of his father, Mike, that I could find online was article in Charlotte Business Journal about sale of Mulvaney Homes to an investment group in 2000. He talks a lot about his capitalization plan but nothing personal. I found his mother’s maiden name from his sibling’s birth records on ancestry.com, but since both of his parents were born in 1942, two years after the most recent publicly available US federal census, I can’t place them with their parents’ names in any records on ancestry. Since his parents were married in Minnesota and one of his siblings was born there, I searched for Mulvaney and Miller families of the appropriate age in the 1940 census in Minnesota, but could find nothing definite or even helpful.

Guys, I Googled so many different combos of words looking for info about Mick Mulvaney’s grandparents. I thought about giving up and moving on to Nikki Haley but I did not want to LET YOU DOWN, THB READERS!! I knew that you had been waiting patiently these long, long weeks for demographic information about the great-grandparents of Mick Mulvaney, and I was not prepared to abandon you so easily.

Finally, after two weeks of fruitless Googling, I looked again more carefully/desperately at the 2017 annual report of the Ireland-US Business Council, to which Mick spoke at a pre-St. Patrick’s Day summit about a year ago (basically the only useful result from the “Mick Mulvaney” + Ireland search), and noticed that there was a Youtube link promising videos of the summit. I figured that if an Irish-American politician gives a speech to an Irish-American business event, he’d definitely open with a little story about how “my grandparents Mary Margaret and Joseph Patrick came from County Mayo to Boston” or something like that, right? So I listened to the entirety of the Youtube video of the the introduction for this event. He wasn’t in it at all. I kept browsing through the Ireland-U.S. Council’s Youtube channel and finally found the right Youtube video from March 2017 and listened to all of Mick’s 40 minutes of remarks about President Trump’s brilliant economic insights about competition being important for business. He also made a few interesting comments about immigration policy and how “Ireland would be a tremendous beneficiary” of “adding a merit component” to US immigration policy.

No mention of his ancestors, except for a comment about how he had once done a follow-up interview with an Irish journalist, “I think her name was Katrina Perry” where he had talked about his “Irish roots”.

Commence Googling “Katrina Perry” + “Mick Mulvaney”, which comes up with nothing, really (disappointing but not super surprising) except for transcript of a PBS broadcast from last November in which they once mentioned Mick Mulvaney (since the government shutdown had just ended), and 40 minutes later in the broadcast did a pitch for a new book called “In America”, published by RTE correspondent Caitriona Perry. The spelling “Katrina” had come up in my first Google search because it was a transcript of the PBS broadcast, and that’s what her name sounds like phonetically.

Commence Googling “Caitriona Perry” + “Mick Mulvaney” — and there it was, an RTE video of Caitriona’s interview 2017 with Mick. Genealogical history detective for the win!!

In the interview, he states that while his father’s family thinks that his great-grandfather Matthew Mulvaney is from County Mayo, they aren’t sure because he didn’t write a middle name on his immigration form. He also states that his great-grandfather came in to the US “through Canada”, and settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota, which is where his family is from. He also reiterated that his mother is “as Polish as his father is Irish” which is interesting, since I have a paper trail confirming that her maiden name is Miller.

So, ta da! Now I know that not his grandparents, (as I had been assuming) but his great-grandparents were the Irish immigrants; that Matthew no-middle-name Mulvaney came to the US through Canada; and possibly that Miller is an Ellis Island anglicization of a Polish name. Also, that Mick Mulvaney and my mom are both half-Irish-half-eastern-European Midwesterners by birth, but my mom is less of a flip-flopper about immigration policy.

Now back to ancestry.com to search for Matthew no-middle-name Mulvaney born in Canada. Should be easy going from here.

Ok, forward to like a week after this where I have spent a minimum of 40 hours researching Matthew N.M.N. Mulvaney from Canada and trying to connect him to Mick from Minnesota. It was easy enough to find Matthew N.M.N.; but he was born in like 1820 and his youngest child was born in 1866, so I’m pretty sure that youngest child isn’t the father of Mick’s father, born in Minnesota in 1942. So Mick was probably distracted and missing a few generations when he describes his great-grandfather, which is understandable when you’re busy trying to wrest away control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so that you can destroy it from the inside in hopes of reducing the national deficit.

SooOOooOOoo since I had come so far in searching for the identify of Mick’s great-grandparents, I just did not want to give up. I felt compelled to find the right answer. If only I could figure out how apply this drive professionally. Anyhoo, a week after finding Matthew N.M.N. Mulvaney from Canada, I had compiled a list of all of his male descendants that as of this writing numbers over forty Mulvaney men, living throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota between 1870 and 1940. For each one, I also tried to locate records of their wives and children, to see if I could identify them as Mick’s father’s parents.

After about three days of this, I realized that I already had Mick’s father’s birth record on ancestry.com, which identified the names of his parents, and I just hadn’t paid attention to it because I think I had mixed it up with Mick’s own birth record because all the names of all these guys are just slight variations on combinations of Michael, Matthew, John, and Joseph. Oops. So, since Mick’s grandfather was already on my list of likely suspects, I had actually already compiled the records of him and his wife/Mick’s grandmother and their other kids. So then, I could just merge this new finding into my existing tree.

It turns out that the Irish immigrant, Matthew no-middle-name Mulvaney, is not Mick’s great-grandfather, but his great-great-great grandfather. Mick’s actual great-grandfather (also named Matthew Mulvaney) was the son of Matthew N.M.N.’s third son, Simon Peter. Simon Peter had 12 children (by two wives), was a naturalized US citizen (born in Canada), and was working as a laborer in a saw mill in Park Falls, Wisconsin when he died in 1922 at age 65.

But since I had started with Matthew no-middle-name from Canada, I found out a good bit of info about him, too. Also, I was curious about the Canada thing. Matthew was born in about 1820 in Ireland, but was in Pakenham, Ontario (just outside Ottawa, north of New York state) by 1847, when his first child was born. The Historica Canada online encyclopedia informs me that:

“The Great Famine of the late 1840s drove 1.5 to 2 million destitute Irish out of Ireland, and hundreds of thousands came to British North America. These immigrants arrived in large numbers and in poor physical condition, overwhelming the quarantine facilities put into place to prevent the spread of disease. Grosse Île, a station established across from Québec City, was a site of great loss in this period, and was commemorated in 1909 with the installation of a large Celtic cross, honouring the over 5,000 victims buried on the island, and the over 5,000 buried at sea. This wave was so dramatic that most Canadians erroneously think of 1847 as the time “when the Irish came.” The famine migration (1847‒52) marks the last large movement of the Irish to Canada (see Irish Famine Orph​ans in Canada). The famine immigrants tended to remain in the towns and cities; and by 1871, the Irish were the largest ethnic group in every large town and city of Canada, with the exceptions of Montréal and Québec City.”

So Matthew Mulvaney was likely a famine refugee. Did he bring a certificate saying he would not be a ward of the Canadian state, and would promise to not contribute to the overwhelming of the quarantine facilities of Quebec? I did not find one.

You know what I did find, though?

I was wondering, why would Matthew decide to move his family of seven children (wife Catherine was also born in Ireland, FYI) across the border between 1866 (when his youngest child was born in Canada) and 1870 (when two of his sons both died in the same year in Wisconsin at ages 8 and 13; maybe in some sort of accident)? At that point they had been in Canada for at least 19 years, and he was already 46 years old.

Well, one of the documents that popped on ancestry.com, of a type that I’d never seen before, was this very pretty certificate from the U.S. General Land Office, bearing the personal endorsement of President Ulysses S. Grant:

What’s that say? “Whereas, there has been deposited in the General Land Office of the United States, a Certificate of the Register of the Land Office at Falls St. Croix, Wisconsin, whereby it appears that pursuant to the Act of Congress approved 20th May, 1862, To secure Homesteads to actual settlers on the public domain, and the acts supplemental thereto, the claim of Mathew Mulvaney has been established and duly consummated in conformity to law for the north half of the northwest quarter of Section Thirty Two, Township twenty nine north, of Range fourteen west in the district of lands subject to sale at Falls, St Croix Wisconsin containing eight acres.

There’s even a map:

Reader, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What?! Does this mean what I THINK it means, Tina???!!??”

And I must tell you: yes, yes it does. This DOES mean that Mick Mulvaney’s great-great-great grandfather, Matthew No Middle Name Mulvaney from Ireland and Canada, BASICALLY lived out the entire freakin plotline of the best Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman collobaration / best movie produced in 1992 / best movie of all time that I know all of the words to:

I couldn’t believe it either, readers, but ancestry.com and the US General Land Office do not lie.

So, why would Matthew Mulvaney move his seven kids from Ontario to Wisconsin?

That’s right, it’s because the Homestead Acts of the 1860s distributed more than 270 million acres of lands west of the Mississippi River, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., within a few decades to 1.6 million homesteaders. For free.

The idea behind the post-Civil War “free soil” policy was that distributing land to homesteader/yeoman farmer types would prevent white Southerners from buying up the West to build new sharecropper plantations on land that was forcibly taken from Native peoples, as they had already done in the actual South a few decades earlier, under Andrew Jackson (see previous post).

So, Matthew was likely less interested in producing a certificate stating he would be a ward of the state, than he was in crossing the wide-open US border in order to receive the certificate above, awarding him 80 acres of free land from the US government. The scope of this whole federal program kinda puts Meals on Wheels in perspective, huh (that’s a reference to Mick’s much-lambasted claim that ending federal taxpayer support for Meals on Wheels was “about as compassionate as you can get”).

It’s funny how rarely (white) people reminisce about how they are in the (economic) position they’re in today thanks to free stuff their ancestors got from the government (land, education, crop subsidies, etc.)

So, going back to great-grandparents in 1900:

In 1900, Matthew Mulvaney was 23 years old and still living with his father (who was working as a section-man?) in Wisconsin, along with his two brothers (ages 18 and 20) from his father’s first marriage (their mother, Mary, had been born in New York to Irish-born parents), his father’s second wife, and their four children under age six. He was working as a hotel clerk, which I’ll classify as white collar work, and could read and write. In the 1940 census, he was working as a foreman in a “farm equipment manufacturer”, where his son Henry also worked as a press operator.

Matthew’s future wife, Mick’s paternal great-grandmother, was named Bridget Riley. WHAT?! Yes, you’re right; that is also the name of MY Irish great-grandmother. Mick and I are not related, though (at least not within the last 200 years.) The 1920 census states that her parents were born in Ireland, but both the 1900 and 1910 census, during which her brother Michael was living with her and Matthew in Wisconsin, states that their father was born in English Canada and their mother in Illinois. She and Matthew were married by 1905, when they appear together in the Wisconsin state census (he was then working as a section foreman–apparently this sectioning business relates somehow to the railroad), but in 1900, Bridget was a boarder with a family in Minneapolis, with no occupation listed.

Since she was not living with her parents in 1900, and her birthdate moves around a bit in the census between 1878-1880, and some census say her father was born in Canada and some say Ireland, and some say her mother was born in Ireland and some say Illinois (and some say Mississippi, and some say Louisiana) it’s hard to confirm her parents’ names. However, John Riley (born in Ireland and emigrated to Canada with his parents at age 5) and Margaret Flannery (born in Louisiana, to an Irish emigrant), who were married in Illinois, seem like the most likely parents who hit all of these locations (and had a daughter Bridget born in 1878 in Wisconsin). Especially since John Riley emigrated to Pakenham, the same small Canadian district that Matthew Mulvaney ended up (his father, Hugh, another one of Mick’s great-great-great grandfathers, also moved the family from Canada to Wisconsin and signed up for free land at the Land Office, in 1874). So it makes sense that his grandson Matthew would marry a girl whose family was also from Pakenham; that’s likely how they met.

I was curious to try to figure out where in Ireland Mick’s immigrant ancestors came from, since he mentioned not being able to figure it out, but since ancestry doesn’t have much in the way of Canadian immigration records, I wasn’t  able to find any ship registers (the most likely source of hometown listings) for Mulvaneys or Rileys. However, I was able to find the ship record for John Flannery, the father of that great-great grandmother born in Louisiana, traveling to New Orleans with his wife Ellen in 1849. His occupation is listed as farmer, and Ellen’s as dairymaid. No hometown is listed, but their cargo is: “Three boxes”.

Another ancestry.com user also posted the following story about John and Ellen Flannery, along with the photo below of the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans in 1847: “John and his wife lived and worked in this hotel on staff 1848-1851. See in census 1850 Listed as servants. This hotel burned in 1851 huge fire destroying 15 other buildings as well in this area of New Orleans. After the fire, John and Ellen Flannery and daughter Margaret moved to White Hall, Greene County, Illinois.” <– This is the kind of amazing stuff you can’t find in census records.

As I was looking at this Flannery family’s records, I looked at the names listed on another ancestry.com user’s family tree. These are tricky sources: I never use them as the sole source to confirm a name, date, or relationship, because a lot of people just randomly click accept on those little leaf hints and get excited that their tree goes all the way back to 1776 and don’t verify that the records they’re clicking “accept” on are actually for the right people. However, these trees are also the only sources for actual family knowledge entered by real people about what the names and birthdates of their grandparents and great-grandparents were — which is info even stronger than federal census records.

So I was looking at another tree that contained John Riley and Margaret Flannery, and I noticed the name of the tree. Huh, I thought — that would be so random if it were true. So I checked who the home person was on this other tree — and my suspicions were confirmed; “Pence Family Tree” was created by another Trump Cabinet genealogical researcher like me!! Yes, looks like John Riley of Canada and Margaret Flannery of New Orleans are the great-grandparents of Vice President Mike Pence, too. John and Margeret’s daughter Mary married Henry Pence in 1893, and their daughter Bridget married Matthew Mulvaney in 1902. This means that Mick and Mike Pence are third cousins. You’re welcome for the free research, guys.

Here’s as far as I was able to get with Mick’s tree, btw:

Turning to Mick’s other set of paternal great-grandparents: Adolphus William Brasser of Minnesota married Loretta Murray in 1900. Both were born in Minnesota. Adolphus was one of ten children of George and Clotilda; George was a “river pilot” in Bytown, Minnesota the 1880 census, which might be the coolest occupation I’ve come across so far listed in a census. He and both of his parents were born in Canada. Mick says that his father is as Irish as his mother was Polish, but “Adolphus and Clotilda Brasser” doesn’t sound super Irish to me, so I was curious to figure out where they came from before being in Canada and Illinois.

Adolphus’s 1920 census states that his Canadian father’s native language was French, and the 1930 census states his birthplace as “Canada-French” (n.b., all the Irish immigrants from Pakenham had their birthplaces listed as “Canada-English”). The 1900 census further states that Clothide’s father was born in France, and her mother in Louisiana (she was born in Illinois). Lookin a bit like Mick’s Irish-American grandmother was actually half French-Canadian.

Adolphus’s future wife, Loretta Murray, was born in Minnesota. One census says that her father was born in Ireland and her mother in Minnesota; another says her mother was born in Ireland, and another says that both her parents were born in Nebraska. I think it’s safe to assume that her parents were either Irish immigrants themselves, or first generation Irish-Americans. I can’t find Adolphus and Loretta in the 1900 census–maybe they were off honeymooning since they’d just gotten married–but in 1910 and 1920 Adolphus was working as a clerk at the Post Office, so I’ll assume he worked a white-collar job in 1900 as well. (By the way, so far the only Cabinet member who’s on the record talking about his working-class ancestors actually has the highest percentage of great-grandparents with white-collar jobs in 1900–25%.)

So after a 2-3 week odyssey figuring out Mick’s Irish ancestors, I was kind of expecting the history detective gods to give me a break with the Polish ones. No such luck.

It was easy enough to find his grandfather’s name, and I found his WWII draft card that gave his mother’s first name as “Rose” in 1944. Then, nothing. I knew his birthdate, and that he was born in South Dakota in 1911. Also, on his marriage record, there was a space asking for the bride and groom’s “nationality”, and both had written “Polish-American” (huh, apparently identity politics was already a thing in 1939. Wait, maybe all of American history is about identity politics? …Table that.) So he and his probably-Polish mother Rose had to be in the US censuses in 1920 and 1930, somewhere. And Rose should be in the 1910 census, too; even if she was a Polish immigrant, if she gave birth in South Dakota in May 1911, odds are she was in the US by 1910. But I spent the better part of another weekend searching for them–Joseph and Rose, living in South Dakota or Minnesota (or anywhere else)–I tried using the last name Muller, Mueller, M* anything. And found nothing.

Finally, at 11:30pm on St. Patrick’s Day while half-watching Law & Order, I searched the South Dakota births database for just “Joseph Anthony”, with no last name, born in 1911. And lo and behold; there was a record for a Joseph Anthony Orzlowsi, born to Andrew Orzlowsi and Rosie Wirkus, in the exact town (Day, South Dakota, right across the Minnesota border) on the exact birthday (May 15, 1911) that Joseph Anthony Miller was born. This birthday is confirmed by his WWII registration and his Social Security death record.

So, I was willing to accept the circumstantial evidence that Joseph Orlowski changed his name to Miller at some point prior to his marriage in 1941 at age 30. My initial guess about the change of name was Anglicization. It’s annoying when people never want to pronounce or spell your name. Then as I finally found the US census records from 1900 through 1930 for Joseph and Rose, I realized where the name Miller came from. In Rose’s entry in the 1940 census (where she was still living Day, South Dakota), I saw an entry I’ve never seen before in any census record: a “D” for “divorced” in the marital status column. At first I thought she may have divorced Joseph’s father; but he died in 1915. In the 1930 census (which also states that both of Rose’s parents were born in Poland), she is living with her second husband, Henry Miller, along with three children (Anne, Joe, and Rose Ozlowski) listed as Henry’s step-children, and four Miller children of hers and Henry’s. The 19-year-old, Joe, is actually Mick’s grandfather; he was still going by Joe Ozlowski in 1930 at age 19. But at some point in his 20s, it looks like he decided to take his stepfather’s name … even though his mother seems to have divorced his stepfather at some point in that decade as well.

So anyway: in 1900, Rose was 16, living with her parents (both Polish immigrants), working as farmers) and her six siblings in Day, South Dakota. She had attended school for three months in the prior year. Six years later, at age 22, she would marry Andrew Ozlowski in Day. Andrew died in 1915, when Joseph was 4 years old, and is buried in Day. I can’t find him in the 1900 census, but he appears in the 1905 census in Day at age 26, just a year before his marriage to Rose. He arrived in the United States between 1885 and 1890, at age 6 to 10, so he likely emigrated from Poland with his parents, but I didn’t have luck finding them in the US either. Since he was working as a farmer in 1910, I assume he was farming in 1900 as well, and since he couldn’t read or write in 1910 at age 30, I assume that he couldn’t in 1900 either.

Finally, Mick’s other Polish great-grandparents: Albert Jacobiec was born in Poland and arrived in the US in 1903, at age 35. In the 1920 census, he is working as a laborer in a boiler manufacturing company, and can read and write and speak English. Though his daughter was born in Minneapolis in 1911, I can’t find their family in the 1910 census (this is an elusive bunch of ancestors at every turn!) He appears in several Minneapolis city directories throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, beginning in 1922, working as a sweeper at William Brothers Boiler Company, and lastly in 1957, working as a machinist at age 89, and living with his second wife, who he married at age 72.

His first wife, Mick’s great-grandmother Tekla, died in 1915, just nine months after giving birth to Mick’s grandmother. From her three daughter’s census records, we know that she was born in Poland, but I could find no other records about her. So I don’t know her maiden name, whether she could read and write, or whether she was already living in the US in 1900.

Speaking of Anglicization, Mick’s grandmother listed her last name as “Jacobs” rather than Jacobiec on her marriage certificate.

I found no certifications of merit for any of these great-grandparents.

Next up: Nikki Haley!

 

The (Director of the) CIA and Chain Migration

[Day before posting edit: so, this week there was a news story that touches directly on the topic of this Cabinet Genealogy Project series. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced a change in its mission statement from:

USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.

To:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.

So, USCIS isn’t supposed to think its customers are customers anymore, isn’t supposed to talk publicly about granting citizenship benefits, or to promote awareness and understanding of citizenship. Trump’s USCIS director, Frances Cissna, explained to staff that USCIS should not call visa applicants “customers” because that would promote “an institutional culture that emphasizes the ultimate satisfaction of applicants and petitioners, rather than the correct adjudication of such applications and petitions according to the law.” Also, “he added that the term implied that the agency serves anyone other than “the American people.”

Cissna was “key adviser on immigration to Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign” and “advocates ending [the visa lottery program] as well as immigration based on one’s relatives already living in the United States.”

Oh, and his mother is a Peruvian immigrant, his wife’s mother is an immigrant too (and they speak only Spanish at home with their children).

I’m sure Cissna has super great personal justifications for why he doesn’t think his agency should state that the US is “a nation of immigrants” and their children and grandchildren (also sure he would be just delightful company at a dinner party, definitely), but obviously, he knows that it is. That’s not a mission or an ideal but a statement of fact. Being anti-immigration in general, anti chain migration, and believing and emphasizing that immigrants are “not Americans” are all self-hating impulses for Americans, no matter their ancestry. They’re America-hating impulses. The country has always been and still is a nation of immigrants, whether you delete the phrase from your website or not; hating on immigration means you wish the country would not exist.

Obviously Cissna would have a quite different life if the US were not a nation of immigrants, and his mother had stayed in Peru. So would literally everyone currently here, though; that’s the point of this project. None of us would have the lives we have if the US weren’t a nation of immigrants; not Native people, not me, not you, not Trump, not anyone in his Cabinet.

Particularly not the next up in this lil series, CIA Director Mike Pompeo.]

From Wikipedia: Michael Richard Pompeo was born in Orange County, CA, and graduated first in his class from West Point in 1986. After serving in the Army & patrolling the Iron Curtain for five years in Europe, he went to Harvard Law School, then worked as lawyer in Washington D.C., then moved to Kansas, where his mother is from, to found an aerospace and private security company (wait, like, do those go together? Are there security guards on the International Space Station?) with fellow West Point grads and an investment from Koch Industries. He was first elected to Congress in Kansas in 2010 as a Tea Party Republican (with the Koch bros serving as his largest donors). He then continued to win re-election, representing Kansas in the House, until 2016, when Trump nominated him to serve as the Director of the CIA. He was confirmed by a Senate vote of 66–32.

The very sixth sentence of his Wikipedia bio states that: “He is of Italian ancestry. His paternal grandmother was born in Caramanico Terme.” Woo huu, I thought, my first immigrant research! Actually, the citation for that Wikipedia sentence leads to a lovely local-son article –in Italian– in “the primary daily online news source for Abruzzo”, proudly explaining how the future U.S. CIA director’s great-grandparents were both from the town of Caramanico. It even included a photo of their marriage certificate, and all of their own parents’ names, including maiden names!! I didn’t even have time to enter any names in ancestry.com and see if any little leaves popped up, and I’m already at great-great-grandparents! Thank you, primadanoi.it.

(Also, it’s crazy how I could easily read that article, though I’ve never studied Italian, because my reading comprehension in Spanish and French combine to equal surprise proficiency in Italian too. Have you ever thought about how the Romance languages are all random derivations of Latin, and how each one of them, like, evolved in individual geographic enclaves that had formally been culturally integrated over vast distances, but then re-evolved towards culture isolation after the bureaucratic collapse of the Roman empire? And how that happened in what seems historically like a relatively short period of time, between the bureaucratic collapse of the Roman empire, and the medieval eras in which we know that people were writing/speaking early modern versions of Spanish/Catalan/French/Portuguese/Italian/Romanian etc.? Like have you? Thought about that? Languages!)

So, excited as I was to embark on Mike Pompeo’s ancestors’ immigration stories, I kinda didn’t even want to google “Mike Pompeo immigration” because I was worried he might not celebrate immigration as fundamental and essential plank of the ongoing American project, and hypocrisy makes me testy and I’d rather stay chill. But I did it anyway. Pompeo’s old Kansas campaign website’s immigration section just talks about border security and stopping illegal immigration. The only other public statement I found was a September 2016 article by Mike and Senator Tom Cotton (often suggested as a replacement as CIA Director) in the WSJ titled, “What We Learned in Scandinavia about Migrants“. I didn’t read it because I didn’t want to pay for a WSJ subscription. But I could read the opening paragraph before it fades to gray (added emphasis mine): “We recently visited Norway and Sweden to understand more about the European migrant crisis. What we saw provides important lessons for the American immigration debate. More than 1.5 million people have relocated to Europe over the last two years. Many are refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other war-torn lands. Many are simply economic migrants leaving poorer nations. The mass migration has strained European societies and and upended …” A critical article about the piece also cites a later sentence, “Norwegians understand that an open-border policy would strain their resources.”

Well guys after digging up this tree, I gotta tell you that that’s a pretty rich angle for Mike to take, given how much the Pompeos and their many fellow impoverished and illiterate relations benefited from the U.S.’s open-border policy of yore, and maybe even strained a resource here and there.

All four of his paternal great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. Actually, the great-grandparents written about in the Italian article came in 1907, the peak year for admission of immigrants at Ellis Island, which reached 1.3 million people. Hey Mike and Tom: I guess the US handled that many in just ONE year pretty okay, in hindsight, so maybe Europe will be able to survive too (fingers crossed). Prior to the 1965 immigration reform (which is still the basic family-reunification based system we have now), Ellis Island, founded in 1890 as the federal immigrant processing center was ACTUALLY an open border. For all nations other than China (any and all Chinese immigration was made illegal until 1943 by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880), there were no restrictions on U.S. immigration into Ellis Island until the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, which first set any numerical limits at all on U.S. immigration, and introduced the national quota system still used today (designed in 1921 to favor immigrants from northern Europe and to limit those from Italy, eastern Europe, and other Catholic countries). To get a sense of the scene at Ellis Island in 1907, here’s a screen shot from the Ellis Island new arrivals book, of the page prior to a list that included in one of Mike’s ancestors, that I happened to glance at and kinda love:

(I know you can’t really read it: it provides a lists of options for List of Races Or Peoples, including: African (black), Armenian, Bohemian, Bosnians, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Cuban, Dalmatian, Dutch, East Indian, English, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Herzegovinian, Irish, Italian (North), Italian (South), Korean, Lithuanian, Magyar, Mexican, Montenegran, Moravian, Pacific Islander, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Ruthenian (Russniak), Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danes, and Swedes), Scotch, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish-American, Syrian, Turkish, Welsh, West Indian.)

By the time the WASPs got their anti-Catholic quotas passed in 1921, Mike (and my) ancestors had all arrived already. They didn’t sign up for visas, wait in a line, or pay someone to smuggle them across a river and then a desert in the middle of the night, risking murder and/or rape in order to get into a society that they know is willing to pay for their labor as long as they’re willing to live in a cash- and fear-based shadow economy and listen to Mike and Tom and their friends bitch all day about how they’re here illegally picking their tomatoes and cleaning their houses and won’t leave. Nope, Mike’s and my great-grandparents just showed up. Oh, and invited all their friends and family to come, too. Mike and Tom and their friends prefer to call this chain migration nowadays, and want us to understand that it is not good for America.

Let’s look at a few case studies in chain migration through an open border:

Paul Pompeo: In 1900, Paul was living with wife of 3 years, Gemma, in Coke Ovens, Colorado. They had no children yet, and both worked for wages as day laborers. Neither could read or write well (some census records say they can, some say they can’t), and he could not speak English in 1900, but she could. From his 1910 application for a US passport, we know that he born in Pacentro, Italy (an Abruzzan town of ~1,280 current inhabitants, for which there is a dedicated professional American genealogist: https://www.pacentrogenealogy.com), that he emigrated in 1896, lived in Colorado and New Mexico, and was naturalized in Colorado in 1904. A ship record from 1898 says he has never been to US, is already married, paid his own passage and is carrying $11, is going to Pittsburgh, is traveling with four other people from Pacentro (2 going to Pittsburgh, 3 to New York), and cannot read or write (like about half of the others from Pacentro). One of these travelers is a tailor, all others, like Paulo, have the bucolic profession, “country man”. He didn’t seem to last long in Pittsburgh; as ship records show his wife and brother Rafaelle arriving in Ellis Island with the intention of meeting him in Colorado one year later.

How did an illiterate county man who didn’t speak English learn there were coal mining jobs in Colorado? Well, there was a 29-year-old Rafael Pacella (Gemma’s maiden name) living in Coke Ovens Colorado in 1900 as well; he had immigrated in 1890. Rafael’s ship record says he was heading to Colorado, Giuseppe Pacella was also on board, but heading to NYC. Rafael seemed to be a frequent courier of Pacentro county men to the US; he also arrived in 1902 to Boston with 15 others from Pacentro, including father-son Carmine and Gustavo Pacella, heading to Colorado; he states then that he has been previously been in the US from 1891 to 1901 and was naturalized in 1903. In 1909, he arrived again on a ship from Pacentro, this manifest listed his closest relation as his wife, Rita?, who always remained in Italy; this time he was heading to Paterson, NY.

So Paul and Gemma probably heard about coal mining in Colorado from her family. They moved from Colorado to New Mexico at some point between 1905 and 1908; in the 1910 census, they were in New Mexico, and he was working as a foreman in the coke ovens. By 1920, he and two sons are working on their own farm, and in 1930 he owned his own hay and grain farm. (Also in 1930, just among their neighbors on the same page of the census form, language spoken as well as Italian are Austrian, Flemish, and Russian.) Gemma died later in 1930, at age 52, and is buried in New Mexico; I can’t find him in 1940 census, but he died in 1950s. I noted in census records that another family, Charles and Adelena Pompeo of Italy (neither ever attended any school, but Charles ran a grocery store) and their children also lived in Colfax, New Mexico; they’re likely related.

So how extensive was the Pompeo chain of migration from Pacentro to the US?

Well, I searched ancesry.com’s census records by surname and sorted by census year. There were no Pompeos in the US in 1880. (The 1890 federal census is lost.) In 1900, as Paul and Gemma were starting off in the coal mines in Colorado, there were six Pompeo families in US (a total of 19 people): brother and sister Gidenio & Jaeoma in central Pennsylvania (they sailed from Italy to NYC in April 1900, along with six others from Pacentro in the same ship)–they were both railroad laborers, and had immigrated in 1892 and 1898 (both were also married, with spouses still in Italy); Brunetto & Nunziatta & 4 children in Missouri (all immigrated 1896; laborers, illiterate); Sepaseo & Rosa & son (tailor, immigrated 1897) in Manhattan; John and Pasquale, 20 and 16 yo boarders in an Italian barber’s house, both working as barbers in the Bronx; Giovanni & Catherine & 2 sons (he was a “molder of plaster”, immigrated in 1897) in Boston; and Paul and Gemma themselves, our illiterate day laborers in Coke Ovens, Colorado.

By 1930, thirty years later, there were over 320 Pompeos in the US.

In Colfax New Mexico alone, Pompeos in 1930 included (there were no Pompeos in New Mexico in 1900): Atilio (born in Colorado in 1903), coal miner, & Antonia (immigrated 1906) & 4 children, Carlo (stock & grain farmer, illiterate) & Adelini (immigrated in 1900 and 1902 respectively) & 4 children; Quinn (born Colorado, telephone exchange operator) & Sunta & 2 children; Joe & Nancy (born Colorado, grain & hay farmer) & 3 children; Emma & Paul (grain & hay farmer, immigrated 1898, illiterate) & 2 children (22 yo Harry, Mike’s grandfather, is farm laborer); and James & Nelli (born Colorado, hay & grain farmer) & 2 children.

In Pittsburgh, the Pompeos in 1930 included (recall there were only brother-sister laborers, Gidenio & Jaeoma, in Stowe PA in 1900): Peter & Enrichetta (grocery store keeper and clerk, immigrated 1903, 1909); Dominic & Anna (steel laborer, immigrated 1913 and 1916); August and son (widowed, not working, owns home, immigrated 1890; son is railroad clerk and born in PA). In south Middleton, in central Pennsylvania, there were Joseph, Anna & seven children (he immigrated in 1914, merchant, she born in PA to an Italian father, married at age 16 and had 7 children at age 27); in Williamsport, also in central PA, there were John (the census-taker charmingly wrote that he was born in “Abruzzo, Italy”, not just Italy) and Nellie and 8 children (he immigrated 1908, owns grocery store, wife born PA to Italian parents, married age 18); and in Philadelphia, there was Iacoralla Pompeo (carpenter, immigrated in 1914), married to PA-born daughter of Italians & living with in-laws; 78 year old Castrille Pompeo (immigrated in 1880) living with widowed daughter and her 7 children (3 sons work as laborers in suitcase factory); and finally, 14 year old orphaned Mary Pompeo, living in St Edmund’s Home for Crippled Children, both of whose parents were born in PA; and 12 year old and 8 year old orphans, Elizabeth and Richard Pompeo, living in the Soldiers Orphan School.

PRETTY CHAINY, huh? I hope Tom Cotton doesn’t find this blog post to read next time he’s Googling “chain migration” or he might get upset thinking about how America had to pull together and fight for its survival under this onslaught of non-English speaking, unskilled and non-meritorious Pompeos draining the country’s resources.

Seriously, next time you’re chatting with the WSJ editorial board about immigrants draining resources, Mike? Ask how many Pompeo orphans should Pittsburgh’s charitable resources have been expected to support? Is someone going to reimburse the coal barons for this?

Genara Pacella: The New Mexico death certificate of Paul’s wife, Genera, did not pop on ancestry.com, but it did on familysearch.org, the Mormon Church-compiled genealogy site! Thank you for your painstaking archival research, Mormons! The information on the certificate was supplied by her husband (Paul); it states that she died of “carcinoma uterus” (uterine cancer), with a secondary cause of diabetes. For our tree purposes, it also gives her parents’ names, and confirms that her birthplace was also Pacentro. Her 1899 ship arrival record gives her occupation as “country”, and states she is going to meet her husband Paulo in Eleanor, Colorado; she is traveling with 36 year old Raffaele Pompeo, who is also going to meet Paulo, and also has the occupation of “country”. Raffaele (not the same as her brother Rafael, mentioned above) also stated that he has been in the US before, from 1895 to 1898. Each were in possession of $50. (I can’t find Raffaele in any US censuses, but I did find an orphaned 13 year old Raffaelo Pompeo born in US to Italian-born parents in Clarkstown, New York’s St Agatha Home for Children in 1930. Note that the Pompeo orphans listed above were just the ones in Pennsylvania.)

Chain report: In 1880, there were 3 Pacellas (all born in Italy) living in US: Vito, 54 yo illiterate laborer living with cousin in Chicago; Frank, 30 year old laborer in a boardinghouse in Luzerne PA, and John, agricultural laborer in IL. In 1930, there were more than 475 Pacellas in the US.

Giuseppe Bandolino: Mike’s other Italian great-grandfather first arrived at Ellis Island in 1902 at age 24; he is listed on the ship register as a farmer from Caramenico going to “Stockhill” to meet brother “Germ”(?), who paid for his passage. He cannot read or write, and it says he is already married, though he apparently returned to Caramenico to marry Carmela in 1906 (as per marriage certificate in the Italian news article). He and Carmela are listed on another ship record traveling together in 1907; no one is listed in the space for names of friends they are meeting. I cannot locate them for sure in 1910 census, since the closest couple are ‘Joe and Rosa’, not Joe and Carmela (but immigration years of 1901 and 1906 are right on); but they are living in a boarding house in New Mexico with two small children and Joe’s brother Cammello Brandolino; Joe and Cammello are both working in a cement factory. In 1920 and 1930 he is coal miner, in 1940 he is a washery man in a coal mine in New Mexico (and his 25 year old son is also a coal miner; while 3 children under 18 all in school.) The 1930 census states that he never attended any years of school. Being totally illiterate, he signed a mark next to his name on his WWI draft card, which the Army recorder noted (“his mark”):

Chain report: In 1880, there was one Brandolino in the US: a “Gim Brandolin” working as agricultural laborer in Virginia. In 1930, there were about 100 Brandolinos in the US: mostly in Colorado and Joliet, Illinois, and also in central Pennsylvania, Cleveland, West Virginia, some in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, and some in Manhattan and even in San Mateo, California.

Carmela Sanelli: As noted above, Joe/Giuseppe and Carmela were still living in Caramenico in 1900. By the way, guys, this is what Caramenico looks like:

And this is what Pacentro looks like:

Like, can you imagine how shitty it must have been to be an illiterate farmer in such a beautiful place, that moving across the world to be a coal miner in a desert was appealing enough to attract half the village to Ellis Island?

Carmela was not a naturalized US citizen in 1930, but was by 1940. By 1940, she had had eight children. She herself had been the oldest of six children of her parents, Camello and Felicia. (None of the children were literate in later census records in which they appear.) As we know, Carmela left for the US right after her marriage at age 20 in 1907. Her next oldest brother, Nunzio, died in Italy at age 27. The next sister, Rosa Maria, also married in Caramanico (to Dominic Zigrossi) and they made their way to Joliet, Illinois, where her husband worked for a railroad company; she received a pension after he died in 1927. I don’t see any US immigration records for their next sister, Angeladomenica. The fourth sibling was brother Antonio, who came over to the US in 1920, was naturalized immediately at age 21 (occupation: laborer) in Jaffery, Pennsylvania. In the 1940 census, he is a laborer in a steel mill (it also says that he completed the 6th grade, but doesn’t note literacy.) He died in 1959 in Pittsburgh, at Mercy Hospital, the same hospital where my great-grandfather Michael Bugos, who also immigrated to the US and worked in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, had died in 1929, thirty years earlier. Antonio’s occupation at his time of death was an oiler at J&L Steel. Antonio’s home address was 3.7 miles away from my great-grandparents’ house in Pittsburgh–they were closer to the river, he was more south, almost in the airfields of the current Allegheny airport, actually.

Directions from my great-grandparents’ (steel-working immigrant from Slovakia) house to Mike Pompeo’s great-granduncle’s (steel-working immigrant from Italy) house in Pittsburgh in 1959

I don’t find US records for Carmela and Antonia’s youngest sister, Elena, either. So of six Sanelli children, three emigrated to the US, to New Mexico, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

Chain report: Sanellis in US in 1880 included ten non-citizen “Sanell”s working as agricultural laborers in SC, CA, IA, NY, KS, IL, TX, ME; as well as one 3.5 year old Daniel Sanelli, born in Massachusetts, who died of whooping cough in 1870.

In 1930, there were about 170 Sanellis, mostly in NY, NJ, PA, IL (mostly in Joliet, like Carmela’s sister Maria Rosa and her husband), as well as in TX, OK, IL, CA, MA, CT, UT, MI, FL, and CO.

Why Joliet, why Colfax, New Mexico? How did these illiterate, Italian-speaking new arrivals know where to go? A certain Carmilla Brandolino (born 1890 in Caramenico) came to Joliet in 1906, on his ship along with eight other people from Caramanico, all going to Joliet. They all state they are going to meet family (father, brother, husband, cousin) etc., except for one guy who wrote “no one” – I feel like we all know that guy, right? How did the Brandolinos of Joliet, IL decide to move to Colorado, then? We could ask Salvino Brandolino of Caramanico; on his U.S. passport application in July 1920, he wrote that he arrived in the U.S. in 1899, was naturalized in Joliet in 1904, that he lived from 1915-1920 in Colorado and Illinois, and was then living again in Joliet, working as a laborer. In 1910, he was Colfax New Mexico with wife Mary and 1 year old son, a brother in law, and four other Italian male boarders, all working as coal miners. In the 1930 census, at age 49, he is living as a boarder with an Italian family along with with two others, again all working as coal miners. From what I’ve found, he was the first of the Bandolinos of Caramanico to move to the US; we can blame him for chain migrating all these other Caramanicans, be they Bandolinos, Sanellis, Zigrossis. Oh, on the passport app, it actually asks him the reason for which he desires a passport:

“To bring family to America.” I worked on this so long, and he just tweets this out to the passport investigator? Not a care about merit, just ch-ch-ch-chain migration. How did the American culture and economy that the founders engendered survive this onslaught? How is there even still a Cabinet for these grifters’ great-grandson to belong to?

Let’s move to Mike’s mom’s family. There’s a nice article on Mike visiting his mother’s childhood home in Wellington, Kansas in 2010 along with “aunt Joan Conrad of Winfield”. Turns out his mom and aunt Joan were just two of 13 siblings (!) Their grandparents were:

James Ulysses Grant Mercer: (aw, a Union sympathizer! Didn’t find any of those in Linda McMahon or Scott Pruitt’s trees!) Born in Ohio, in 1900 he was 30, living in Beloit, Kansas, with his wife Mary Josephine, their two small children (they only ever had 2) and three boarders: Ross Hardwick of Missouri, Zela H Grandmoujin of Kansas and French parents, and Josie L Destillie of Missouri and German parents. They likely found these boarders through his Mary’s Belgian connections (more on that next). He owned his home and worked as a laundryman. In 1910, he worked in laundry in a steam mill, but in 1920 he operated a pool room (!) Then he died in 1942. Tracing his own ancestors out in the US federal censuses for a while (because I COULD), I was able to get out to UG’s great-grandmother, Mildred Wood (Mike’s g-g-g-g-grandmother), born in 1799 in Virginia.

Mary Josephine LaPaille: Mary Josephine was born in 1872 in Belgium, and immigrated with her parents and older sister the next year as a one-year-old baby. In 1880, she is living in Kansas with her widowed (farmer) father, sister, and younger brother Philip, born the year after the family arrived in the US. Her mother had died before she was 8. I was not able to find an immigration record or birth record in Belgium for her father, Simon, so can’t determine whether he was the first in the chain of Belgian Lapailles to arrive in the US, or if he was following family. I tried to figure out any particular geopolitical reason why Belgians might emigrate in 1872; but couldn’t find much. Belgium had become independent from the Netherlands during a 10-year long war beginning in 1830 when Simon (born 1833) was a child himself, and ongoing conflict between French (Walloon), Dutch, and Flemish speakers in the country continued into the 20th century. Later censuses note that Mary’s native language was French. Chain report: in 1880, there were 16 Lapailles in the US, in three families: one in Indiana, headed by Edward born in Kentucky to a father who emigrated from England, one in Kentucky, headed by widowed Rosa, born in Indiana to parents who emigrated from Germany, and one mother-in-law born in France, living with her daughter’s family in New Jersey. In 1930s, there were 42 Lapailles in the US, all in Kansas and Kentucky (including Mary Josephine’s brother Philip and his family).

After Ulysses died in 1924, Mary Josephine lived with Earl and Ruth (Mike’s grandparents) and their 13 children until at least 1930, though she appears to have remarried a Frank Ponton (another Frenchy sounding name!) the year before she died, in 1932.

William J Douglass: In 1900, he was 32, living on a farm in Kansas with his wife and two children, one male boarder, and his widowed father, James. (James Douglass was a New Yorker; born in New York to a Scottish immigrant and a New Yorker mother. He served in the Union army (my first non-Confederate Civil War great-grandfather of Trump’s Cabinet!) as a wagoner for four years before being discharged with a disability. He died 2 years late in 1902.) In 1910, William is still on his farm but is also listed as ‘livestock dealer’, and he and wife Lura were living with a new boarder and HER father, Colby Row. In 1920, they were on the farm with their son and daughter-in-law, and in 1930 the son and daughter in law are still there, plus two young sons. But in 1940, William and Lura were now living with their daughter, Grace (Mike’s grandmother) on her and her husband’s farm, along with their first ten children. He died in May 1940.

Lura Rowe: Lura was born in Maine–my first real Yankee to investigate! But her parents moved to Illinois in 1872, the year after her birth. Attracted to the land of Lincoln, maybe?! Her father Colby, who was living with her and Douglas in 1930, was drafted by the Union Army in 1863, but did not appear to serve. He married in Maine the next year (to Philena Bartlett–a very old New England family!) He was assessed taxes on one carriage to the IRS every year between 1862 and 1866, too. I was able to find the names of all four of his grandparents (four more of Mike’s g-g-g-g-grandparents), who were all born roughly at the time of American independence, one of whom was a captain in the War of 1812, and have great Hawthorne-esque colonial New England names like ‘Dearborn Blake’ and ‘Hannah Hussey’. Colby’s wife died before the 1880 census–perhaps during childbirth, as her second daughter was also named Philena, and I learned on Downton Abbey that sometimes they’d name babies after the died-in-childbirth mothers–which means that Lura grew up from age 8 with a single father.

Mike’s tree, chains and all:

Next up: Mick Mulvaney!

P.S. Seriously Mike, I hope you feel bad about how hard-working American taxpayers had to support all those anchor baby orphans. The orphanage in Philadelphia is still operating, if you want to pay reparations.

Part 2: Scott Pruitt’s family in 1900

After the SBA Administrator, the next public servant up in our Cabinet is E. Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Wikipedia tells us that “Pruitt was born in 1968 in Danville, Kentucky, but moved to Lexington as a boy … [after his freshman year on a baseball scholarship at another school, just editing to include this bc it explains his interest in baseball mentioned later] he attended Georgetown College in Kentucky and graduated in 1990 … he then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where he attended the University of Tulsa and earned a Juris Doctor in 1993.” Some quick further Googling uncovers some local-son Oklahoma and Kentucky news features written after his EPA nomination last year. This let us know that, “Pruitt — who goes by Scott — was born in Danville, Ky., but grew up in Lexington as the oldest of three siblings. His father, Edward, owned several steak restaurants and a convenience store, and his mother was a homemaker, he told The Oklahoman.” Mmkay so now we have his father’s name, and know that he has two other siblings. [Actually, I already remembered that he had a brother, because of news stories about the brother (Derek)’s various run-ins with the law (DUIs, obstructing a police officer, etc.)] Another article quotes his mother on the nomination announcement: ““It’s pretty exciting,” said his mother, Linda Pruitt Warner, who still lives in Lexington.”

Nice, now with first names for both parents, hopefully ancestry.com can do some magic! Note that this article also lets us know that it looks like his mother has remarried a Mr. Warner, and that she still lives in Lexington, KY, both of which are also helpful tidbits to help narrow down demographic records that pop up from ancestry’s amazing (or scary, obvs, depending on your POV! I recognize that this kind of research creeps out many people more than it does me) databases.

So actually in this case, ancestry.com didn’t pop up much on the first try (with just Scott and his parents’ names). But when I googled Pruitt’s mother’s name, her father, Eugene “Gene” Bell’s obituary came up, which provided the names of both of her parents, as well as his parent’s names (obituaries usually include mother’s maiden names, as well, which is obviously super helpful for genealogical research because maiden names are usually one of the hardest data items to confirm a match on. Like even if you know someone’s mother’s name was Linda and her age, there’s still no way to be very sure which of the several Lindas born in a certain state in that year was her). Using that info, ancestry.com was off to the races with Linda’s family, and I was able to find not just Scott Pruitt’s four great-grandparents on his mother’s side, but also all eight of Linda’s great-grandparents, within one evening.

All four of Scott’s great-greatparents were born in Kentucky, and all eight of Linda’s were as well, except for one, who was born in Virginia — more on him later.

I then turned my attention to Scott’s father, Edward. So far I knew just his name and that he had owned several steakhouses and a convenience store in Lexington, Kentucky, while Scott was growing up. After like an hour or so, I still couldn’t find much more info besides that 😦 Ancestry didn’t pop any records for him — no birth or death records, no marriage record between him and Linda (which doesn’t mean there isn’t one, it just means that either the database holding their record hasn’t yet been digitized by ancestry.com, or that it’s not publicly available because of the date or other reason, or both) or between him and anyone else, since they seem to be divorced.

Google searches for “Scott Pruitt father” and such did not turn up anything; I tried to search for Edward Pruitt and restaurants and business stuff, to not much avail, except learning that Scott had appointed the family friend and Oklahoma banker who loaned him money to buy his house in Tulsa and to invest in a baseball team in the 90s (you may know that prior to his EPA service, Pruitt was elected Oklahoma Attorney General, during which tenure he sued the EPA fourteen times. Prior to being OK AG, he was in the Oklahoma state senate for eight years, during which time he also was co-owner and the managing general partner of the minor league baseball team) to manage the Superfund program at the EPA when the friend/banker found himself in need of a job because the FDIC had banned him from the banking industry for life in July 2017 due to criminal fraud and/or mismanagement. Cuuuute, not swampy at all, and I bet he’ll do great things for the Superfund program.

But anywayzzz back to the increasingly elusive Edward Pruitt senior … something I read in a genealogical advice article once that has stuck with me and that I have found in practice to be truly, super good advice, is that when you find that you can’t go up any further, go sideways. Sometimes, even when you’ve totally hit a brick wall with the information that you have about a certain ancestor in terms of finding their parents, if you then turn to fleshing out their siblings’ trees–even stuff like the trees of the sibling’s in-laws, children, etc.–you find records for the parents you were originally looking for, which are linked only to the other siblings and not the one you started with.

Using this approach, I was able to find just one more tidbit about Edward Pruitt — his son Derek’s 2006 wedding announcement states that, “Parents are … Mr. and Mrs. Donald Warner of Lexington, Ky., and Mr. and Mrs. Edward Pruitt of Tulsa”. So this lets us know that, as well as still being alive, Edward was living in Tulsa as of 2006, and also was remarried, though to a Mrs. of unknown individual name. Unfortunately narrowing the search for Edward Pruitt to Tulsa didn’t help much. I also tried connecting him to Derek’s middle name, “Kinnaird”, since that definitely sounds like a family name to me, and having just spent a few hours reading all the names in Linda’s family for the last hundred years, I knew that it wasn’t from her side. But that didn’t really turn up anything either. Then, I tried looking at records of Scott and Derek’s sister, Tracy, and while looking for her, a site called “criminalpages.com” popped up, listing known associates of Derek’s (recall his record of DUIs, etc., mentioned above). Among the names listed, besides ones I already knew like his wife and mother and brother Scott, were:

BUD BRYON PRUITT
EDWARD K PRUITT
KATHY L PRUITT

SoOoOoOoOoo I’m going to presume that Edward K is their dad, Edward. I would bet that Kathy L is probably Edward’s wife / Scott’s stepmother. As for Bud … uncle Bud, maybe?

I then found Bud’s obituary; which I almost put aside because it doesn’t mention Edward or any of Scott or his siblings, but then noticed one of the pallbearer’s is Scott’s sister’s husband. So then I thought, ah ha! There has to be family connection. The obituary mentions a son “Butch (Kathy) Pruitt of Tulsa, OK”; so okay, maybe Edward goes by Butch? And his wife is Kathy, so she would be Scott’s stepmother, as I suspected in the list of known associates. Bud’s funeral was held at W.L. Pruitt Funeral Home in Hustonville, KY, which he had run along with his brother. This is also where Scott’s mother Linda’s father’s funeral was held. And kinda goes along with the small-business-ownership trend in the family, since we know that Scott’s father ran restaurants and stores.

After putting Bud and Butch’s info into the tree, in order to test the theory that Butch is the same person as Edward K Pruitt, and adjusting my estimated birth date for Edward, who I had assumed was around 25 when his son Scott was born [but his father’s birthdate made me see that was infeasible, and he was actually just 16 when Scott was born (Linda was 17)] I happily found a birth record for “Edward K Pruitt” being born to Emogene Burge, who was listed as Bud’s wife in his obituary. Yay! Genealogy detective points unlocked!! For a few hours of Olympic bobsledding, there, Butch, you had me thinking about giving up and only posting about half of E. Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator’s great grandparents. But I tracked you down. (Thanks due to Google and criminalpages.com as well).

As expected, once we get past 1940, a cascade of federal census records fill in the rest. Voila, Scott Pruitt’s family tree out to sixteen great-grandparents:

FYI, four of the 16 were born in Mississippi, one in Virginia, and the rest in Kentucky. But as promised, let’s focus on the just the eight great-grandparents:

Scott Pruitt’s paternal great-grandfather, William Lee Pruitt, had the best-off (economically) family that I’ve seen so far in this project. William was born in Kentucky, as were both of his parents. In 1900 he was one year old, living in a free-owned house with his parents (both of whom could read and write) and 3 older siblings, and two servants, both black men (one born in Kentucky, one in Tennessee; one could read and write and one could not). His father worked as merchant. Yet in 1910, the family’s fortunes seem to have turned for the worse, as they no longer had servants, and interestingly, his mother was also working outside the home, as milliner in millinery store, while his father as “livery man merchant” in furniture store. They had also moved to a new address that happened to be next door (I just noticed this while looking at the census form) to a 79-year-old Jas and Ellen Pruitt, whose occupation was “own income”. So it looks like the youngish family of eight (dad was 45 years old) had moved back in with parents/relatives after hitting harder times.

We know from later census that William later completed high school, and also had a bit of a paripatetic career: he worked as auto mechanic in 1920; as an undertaker in 1930; as a salesman in grocery store in 1940; and we know from his son’s obituary that he later founded his eponymous W.L. Pruitt Funeral Home. (And we know that his son Bud continued to run the funeral home, that his grandson Butch ran restaurants and a convenience store, and that his great-grandson Scott ran a baseball team, and later, the EPA. A family history of small business administration! If Mike Pompeo turns out to have a family history of environmentalism, THAT will be weird, guys.)

William’s future wife, Velma Vaughn, was four months old when the 1900 federal census enumerator visited her family in Lucas Mill, Kentucky on June 22, 1900. Her parents (both also born in KY) lived in a free-owned house, and her father’s occupation was listed as a miller, though he is a farmer on later census records. Later census records show that she completed high school (she and her husband are the first great-grandparents I’ve seen who did!), and that in 1920, at age 19, she worked as bookkeeper in a mill. First white collar female employment! She was married within the next five years, as her first child was born in 1925.

Eddie Will Burge, from the set of great-grandparents from Mississippi, was 5 years old in 1900, living in rented house with his parents (his father was laborer in saw mill), and two older brothers, as well as five boarders. We know that he later completed 8th grade; then worked motor driver in saw mill in 1920, as a “state range rider” in 1930 (what is that? Idk), a farm laborer in 1940, and that he was a WWI veteran, and died in Texas. As I was looking up his parent’s records, I noted that in the 1940 census, his 69 year old father was remarried to a 36 year old woman (her name was Artemis!! Love that), which is like, okay whatevs I get that women weren’t allowed to work so sometimes you had to marry an old farmer 33 years old than you to put food on the table, but what was further notable about it was that they were living with their two small children AND Artemis’s own mother, who was ALSO 69 years old, i.e. the exact same age as the husband, in the house. Like, ugh/awk.

Lela Elizabeth Smith, the oldest great-grandparent in the bunch, was 11 years old in 1900, living on free-owned farm with his parents, seven siblings and one boarder. Though she could not yet read or write, she was going to school, along with some other siblings; others worked as day laborers, though one 22 year old brother was a schoolteacher. Her mother (named Minerva Courtney!) had had 10 children, of which 8 were still living. Her mother was to die five years later, when Lela was 16, and — guys, seriously — four years later in the 1910 census, when she was 20, her father Jeptha had remarried a new wife 33 years younger than him, and was living with one of her previous children, three new children and none of his 8 children from his first marriage. I can’t find her anywhere in the 1910 census, so don’t know what she was doing between ages 11 and 28. We know that she completed 10th grade, and didn’t marry till 28 (to a husband eight years younger than her!) and had only one daughter, Joy Emagene, at age 34. Lela, such a modern woman (demographically, at least)!

Soooo, like, did she and Eddie Will bond over how both of their fathers liked women with Greek goddess names and liked thirty year olds when there were in their sixties?! No like seriously, that’s a weird coincidence, right?

This is a picture of Lela’s father, Jeptha T. Smith, who married a woman who was exactly the same age as Lela and then apparently kicked his original eight children out of the house:

Turning to Scott’s maternal great-grandparents:

Of Scott’s previously mentioned four great-grandparents on his mother’s side, their situation in 1900 were very similar to those of Linda McMahon‘s, though all in large, semi-illiterate farming families, but on farms in Kentucky rather than in North Carolina.

Jesse Elmer Bell he was 12 years old in 1900, living on father’s free-owned farm with parents and ten other siblings, aged 1 to 24. He and the other three oldest boys also worked for wages as farm laborers. He had gone to school for 5 months in the last year, along with five other siblings who had gone from between one to five months each, but he was marked as not being able to read or write, though the older children could. From later censuses, we know that the highest grade he eventually completed was 5th grade. I also found the following newspaper announcement from twelve years later:

“THE STANFORD INTERIOR JOURNAL, LINCOLN COUNTY, KENTUCKY, Tuesday, February 6, 1912, Waynesburg: Dan Cupid has visited our little hamlet again, Mr. Elmer Bell and Miss Winnie Smith were made one at Stanford Monday. The bride is in her sixteenth year and is a very attractive young lady and the groom is one of our most enterprising young men. They will leave soon for Arizona where they will make their future home. The sale of Mr. Frank Bell was well attended January 26th. Everything sold well. Mr. Bell’s future dwelling place is Arizona.” I don’t know what the sale of Mr. Frank Bell means either. (Or Dan Cupid? Did we know that Cupid’s first name was Dan? Is this one of those “Southern things”?) Also, at first I thought it was some data entry error that all of their children were born in Kentucky except for the oldest one being born in Arizona, but this confirms that for some reason Jesse and Winnie went to Arizona after they got married. They only stayed for a couple years (though I found his Arizona voter registration forms for 1912 and 1914, which note that he weighed 165 lbs), and then returned to Kentucky.

From a wikipedia search wondering why newly married Kentuckians would move to Arizona in 1912: “In 1912, Arizona almost entered the Union as part of New Mexico in a Republican plan to keep control of the U.S. Senate. The plan, while accepted by most in New Mexico, was rejected by most Arizonans. Progressives in Arizona favored inclusion in the state constitution of initiative, referendum, recall, direct election of senators, woman suffrage, and other reforms. Most of these proposals were included in the constitution that was submitted to Congress in 1912. Taft signed the statehood bill on February 14, 1912, and state residents promptly put the provision back in. Hispanics had little voice or power. Only one of the 53 delegates at the constitutional convention was Hispanic, and he refused to sign. In 1912 women gained suffrage (the vote) in the state, eight years before the country as a whole.” So maybs, Scott Pruitt’s great-grandparents Jesse and Winnie moved to Arizona immediately after their marriage to help the cause of keeping Republican control of the Senate? Then moved back home quickly because President Taft dashed their hopes by signing a statehood bill like literally two weeks after their wedding?

The future sixteen-year-old bride, Winnie, was also born in Kentucky, though her father was the one of Pruitt’s eight maternal great-great-grandparents born outside of Kentucky, in Virginia. In 1900 she was 6 years old, living on father’s free-owned farm with her eight other siblings aged 10 months to 20 years, her mother having died in the previous year after giving birth to her 9th child. The five children between ages 6 and 16 had attended school for six months of the prior year, but only the children above age 10 could read and write. From a later census, we know that the highest grade she later completed 8th grade. The assumption that I used to link this Winne Smith with Jesse Bell’s future wife (given the struggle with not knowing maiden names mentioned before), as well as knowing from a later census that her father was born in Virginia, is that her father Charles’s middle name was Ashby, which was also the middle name given to her son Paul.

In searching for Charles Ashby Smith to confirm that his middle initial ‘A’ stood for Ashby (since I saw this on another ancestry.com user’s tree, which is not a reliable documentary source), I found the following rather remarkably detailed summary of his life in a collection of Confederate veteran’s memorials: “Charles Ashby Smith arrived in Waynesburg in the early 1870’s with the Southern Railroad’s surveying team. Educated as a bookkeeper and employed as such before the Civil War, he served as a records clerk for the company which surveyed the right-of-way for the track. He first saw his future wife, young and pretty Sarah Elizabeth Singleton, who was about 12 or 13 years old, as she watched the surveyors map the route through her parents’ farm, located to the northeast of what is called “Buffalo Hollow.” Family members recall that he remarked to his co-workers that he was going to come back and marry that girl.” After completing his duties with the surveying contractors, Charles came back to Waynesburg and on 11 Dec 1879, he married Sarah Elizabeth. Charles and Sarah made their home with her parents for a time. Then Charles bought the Pond farm and moved his little family into a newly built log house, complete with stairway and railings. Their children were Vernon Jackson b. 28 Sep. 1880, William b. 25 Oct. 1881, Mary Victoria b. 18 Oct. 1883, Addie b. 22 June 1884, Grace b. 17 Dec.1886, Gertrude, b. 25 Mar. 1890, George C. (b.23 July 1892-d.14 Mar. 1943), Winnie, Carrie Lee (10 Jan. 1897-29-July 1969), and Johnny, b. 11 July 1899. Charles’ pretty little wife died soon after Johnny was born, leaving him with the children to rear. Charles Ashby Smith came to Kentucky, having been through a most terrible war, wounded at the second Battle of Bull Run, and found a home he loved. More of the Charles Ashby Smith family history can be found in the book Bicentennial History, Waynesburg, Kentucky and Southern Lincoln County, 1792-1992, written by Wanda Alford and Eldred Melton.”

Speaking of marrying young girls, I did find it notable that Scott’s mother Linda herself was just 17 years old when he was born in 1968, and that we heard from the Stanford Interior Journal that her paternal grandmother, Winnie, was married at 16. Linda’s own mother, and her other grandmother (the 12 year old girl who caught the eye of an out-of-town railroad surveyor) both married at age 21. Scott’s father Edward was only 16 when he was born. (Scott himself married his wife Marlyn when he was 22.)

In 1900, Logan Campbell was 3 years old, living on a rented farm with his parents (also both born in Kentucky) & three siblings. His mother was 26, had been married for nine years already, and had 4 children so far. Both parents could read and write, and the 6 and 8 year old siblings had gone to school for 4 months in prior year. We know from later census that 6th is highest grade he later completed. Since I was curious, I looked for Confederate military records for each of these Southern families, and (though drafted / registered) his father and grandfather do not appear to have fought in Civil War.

Finally, in 1900 Ora Foster was one year old; her parents’ first child. They were 26 and 24, had both been born in Kentucky, had been married 3 years earlier, and were living in a rented house. He was an engineer in a saw mill. He could read and write, but her mother Cordelia could only read. We know that 6th is highest grade that Ora later completed. Her son Sam’s 1998 obituary noted that she was known as “Doll”.

So, interesting to see how Scott Pruitt’s family participated personally in westward expansion and the early 20th century battle over women’s suffrage with that whole Arizona thing, huh? Maybe for my capstone project I will, like, write a 20th century history of American using only the stories of the present Cabinet’s great-grandparents.

Coming up next … CIA Director Mike Pompeo!

Part 1 of a lil Trump Admin history research project

This is the first post of a series I decided to work on this week while watching the Olympics. As y’all probably know, I loooovelovelove doing genealogy research … no matter how much someone might already be a history nerd, it’s still different and more interesting and fresh to learn about historical happenings through the stories of what was going on in your own parents’ parents’ parents’ lives. No matter how much you might already knew about them, you always find some info that’s somehow surprising, too; it’s like history detective work combined with soul searching combined with kitchen table storytelling.

So since I’m paying for my ancestry.com subscription anyway, and am still facing the same roadblocks in my own family tree (Bridget Burns, WHICH COUNTY in Ireland were you from?! Enna Chinel, WHO was your MOTHER?!), and also, spending much time thinking about how bizarre it is to claim Dreamers are not American (e.g. ‘Americans are Dreamers too’) when 99% of people in this country are descended from people who became Americans not because they signed up for a program but because their parents moved here from somewhere else without asking them first–I decided to occupy myself online during Olympics commercial breaks by working on an idea inspired by this writer I saw on Twitter. She does stuff with the hashtag #resistancegenealogy like look up immigration trolls’ great-grandparents census records to show them how their ancestors chain-migrated, lived in ethnic enclaves and didn’t ever learn English once in the U.S. (next time you feel compelled to share with the twitterverse that YOUR precious ancestors did things the right way, worked hard, and learned English, maybe like, check first.)

Just to quickly note, though, this particular project isn’t actually as much about a political agenda as it may seem–though I for sure have a political agenda, in pointing out how, like, self-hating it is as Americans to be hating on immigrants, particularly unskilled ones–but is also just about doing something that I truly enjoy and helps me understand U.S. history more richly. Even if you don’t like someone, their family history is still interesting to learn because it’s American history & American history is usually fascinating stuff.

So what’s the project? I’m going to build out the family trees of the current Trump Cabinet, which consists of 15 secretaries and 8 Cabinet-level administrators (there are usually 9 but Trump decided to remove the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors from the Cabinet), out to their eight great-grandparents, wherever in the world they were in 1900. The Cabinet roles are, in designated-survivor presidential-succession order (I think?) as follows:

Secretary of State

Secretary of the Treasury

Secretary of Defense

Attorney General

Secretary of the Interior

Secretary of Agriculture

Secretary of Commerce

Secretary of Labor

Secretary of Health and Human Services

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Secretary of Transportation

Secretary of Energy

Secretary of Education

Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Secretary of Homeland Security

White House Chief of Staff

United States Trade Representative

Director of National Intelligence

Ambassador to the United Nations

Director of the Office of Management and Budget

Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

Administrator of the Small Business Administration

1900 is a natural stopping point for U.S. federal census research, as one of the great tragic fires in the history of recordkeeping burned all of the 1890 U.S. census records. Also, as well as the birthplaces of all individuals and each of their parents, the 1900 federal census form asks the enumerator to note whether each person can read, write, or speak English (it is the one census form that does that, so it’s prob my favorite one). I am operating under the assumption that most Cabinet secretaries’ parents names and birthplaces will be available on the Internet, and that they are of such an age that it will be easy enough to locate their parents in the 1940 census (the most recent one that’s publicly available–did you know that U.S. federal census records are released 72 years after the census year, and the next one will be available in 2022? (1950 data coming up! Get excited.)

I’m going to start at the bottom of the designated-survivor list and work upwards. I was able to get to ten of Linda McMahon’s great-great-grandparents in one evening of ski slalom watching (featuring an interview with Lindsey Vonn & her grandfather, who was stationed with the Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean war just a few miles from the Olympic ski slope; this is what I’m TALKING about, people), so hopefully the rest of the project stays similarly feasible.

So, without further ado:

Linda (Edwards) McMahon’s ancestors in 1900

Google-available info on Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Linda McMahon’s family background is that she was born Linda Marie Edwards in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1948, and was the only child of Evelyn and Henry Edwards, who both worked at at Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point. She met Vincent McMahon when she was 13, and married him when she was 17 and he was 20, after which she attended and graduated from East Carolina University. They’ve stated in interviews that Vince, who had several abusive stepfathers, was struck by the happiness / stability of her family and fell in love with Henry and Evelyn as well as Linda.

They launched their own wrestling company in 1980, in Cape Cod of all places (did not know!), four years after filing for bankruptcy and briefly receiving food stamps. Linda served as President and CEO of the WWWF, and Forbes now estimates her net worth at $1.2 billion. She ran for Senate (unsuccessfully) in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012, and was confirmed as SBA Administrator by the Senate on February 14, 2017, with a vote of 81–19, including the yea votes of both senators she had run against in Connecticut (Blumenthal and Murphy).

Hi Linda!

There is only one marriage record of a Henry Edwards and an Evelyn in North Carolina in the appropriate date range (their marriage was in April 1943, in Camden NC), so I’m going to assume those are her parents.

This assumption is further supported by an interview Linda gave to C-Span, stating that her paternal grandmother lived with her family when she was growing up. Henry Walton Edward’s mother, Annie (nee Jackson), died in New Bern (Linda’s birthplace) in 1968, and her husband, Joseph Henry Edwards, died in 1944, four years before Linda was born.

The first remarkable thing I saw in going back two generations from Henry and Evelyn was how rooted in North Carolina both of their families were. Of Linda’s eight grand-grandparents–Edwin Fletcher Edwards, Matilda Bass, Samson Everette Jackson, Lucinda Bass, Andrew Jefferson Strickland, Ida Josephine Bunce, Joseph Carlson Ammons, and Effie Bennet–all were born in North Carolina, except for Edwin Fletcher Edwards, who was born in Tennessee and then moved to NC later.

Since the 1900 census has those read/write/speak English columns, I made a spreadsheet tracking this info for each great-grandparent in this project, as well as whether they were an immigrant, if so whether they immigrated to join family already here (I guess we call this chain migration now), and whether they were employed in what I would describe as a white-collar work (work requiring education and mental work more than it requires physical work).

Following is the summary of Linda McMahon’s great-grandparents:

Note that Matilda Bass and Lucinda Bass were not sisters, and are unrelated from what I can determine.

All of these people except one lived and worked on farms in North Carolina in 1900. Edwin Fletcher Edwards, the only one born outside of NC and the only one who could not read or write, worked on a farm that he rented, along with his wife Matilda and ten children.

Matilda had 10 children aged 10 months to 17 years. Though she could read and write, none of her children could, and none of them had attended school in the prior year. The oldest four children also worked for wages off-farm, as “laborers”. Since I researched her own parents in order to see if she was related to Lucinda Bass, I also found that her father died when she was 5 years old, fighting for the Confederacy, and that his family as a child did not hold slaves.

Samson Everette Jackson lived on his own free-owned farm, with his wife Lucinda, eight children, and his 76 year old widowed mother, who could not read or write.

Lucinda’s 8 children were aged two to 22. Only two had attended school in the prior year, for 3.5 and 4.5 months respectively, though all of the children above age 8 could read and write. Her father also fought for the Confederacy, though not apparently related to Matilda Bass’s father (and he survived the war).

Andrew Jefferson Strickland, the only one not living on a farm, was single and lived with his widowed 63 year old mother in a house that she owned. She had had nine children, but he was the only one living with her in 1900. Both she and he worked for wages as day laborers.

His future wife, Ida Josephine Bunce, lived on her widowed father’s free-owned farm, along with her four other siblings, aged 16 to 28, and one of her brother’s wife and their one year old baby. Her two oldest brothers (including the married one) could not read or write, and both of them also worked for wages as farm laborers.

Joseph Carlson Ammons also lived on his father’s free-owned farm with four other siblings, aged 16 to 27. His mother could read but not write, and his oldest sister and one brother could not do either. Two of his brothers worked for wages as farm laborers, and Joseph C. displayed some initiative and worked for wages as a painter. (I did not label this white color labor, since I don’t know what he painted … if he painted portraits or other works that required artistic education and creative/mental labor, than that probably should qualify as white collar work. If that was the case, Joseph, I’m sorry. And I hope some of your work has survived and is maybe available on invaluable.com or something.) Joseph’s father, Andrew Jackson Ammons, was also a Confederate veteran whose childhood family did not appear to hold slaves. Also, one of his brothers was named Benjamin Franklin Ammons. Cute.

Finally, Joseph’s future wife, Effie Bennet, lived on her father’s rented farm, with her parents and nine other siblings, aged six months to 20 years. She was the oldest. Interestingly, of all the children, she had attended school for two months in the prior year, along with only two of her other siblings, aged 9 and 10, who attended for four months each. Despite this, the 9-year-old could not yet read or write, but all older siblings and the parents could. Two of her teenage brothers worked for wages as farm laborers.

I think the common-ness of illiteracy was what struck me most about this tree. Though I know, intellectually, that until the 20^th century invention of birth control, possibly the most significant technological development in human evolution since agriculture, women regularly carried ten children per marriage (and hence died a lot earlier), it still strikes me every time I look at the census record columns “number of children born”, “number of children surviving” on the 1900 census, and how often they’re both in the double digits. But I already knew about birth control and reproductive health in early 20th century U.S. — but in this particular tree, I was honestly surprised by the high levels of illiteracy in rural North Carolina in 1900. This research really sent me back to the summer of 2011, when I was working in Malawi and also reading up on Irish history (specifically, Malachy McCourt’s lovely book), then came back that autumn even more psyched about Irish genealogy than I normally am and finally made a break-through to find the 1900 census listing for my great-grandfather’s parents, and saw that his mother, my great-great-grandmother, had emigrated herself from Ireland, married in Baltimore, given birth to ten children of which four had survived, and had never learned to read or write. It really struck me at that time how much more similar her life was to those of women in rural villages in Malawi that we had been striking out into the field/off the grid in order to interview for a World Bank research study, than it was to my life, her Harvard-educated great-great-grandaughter’s. It’s so striking not just how the world can change within 100 years – honestly, much of the 1900 world doesn’t look unbelievably different than the 2011 world, from certain social viewpoints; like, the plot of Downton Abbey isn’t impossible to understand – but how rapidly the character of a family’s fortunes can change within 100 years.

To me, the whole point and history of American greatness seems fundamentally based on unskilled, illiterate, poor people, like the Edwards, Basses, Jacksons, Stricklands, Bunces, Bennetts, and Ammonses, sending their children to school and their children doing better in life than they did. Which is why the idea of wanting to restrict immigration of unskilled or otherwise poor people is just so un-American.

Okay, next up: Scott Pruit!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trails of Tears

This weekend, I visited the brand-new exhibit, Americans, at my favorite place in D.C., the NMAI, which was happily still open despite a pending government shutdown. It was a fantastic, multi-part exhibit and I highly recommend it.

One of the three independent sub-exhibits of the exhibit was about the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Though I’ve heard the term “Trail of Tears”, and knew that it had something to do with Andrew Jackson forcing cold, crying Cherokee people to walk through the south during the winter and causing a lot of death and destruction, I don’t really remember ever actually studying the Indian Removal Act, actually.

I learned that: by 1830, the U.S. government conducted international relations with several sovereign nations located throughout the Southeast, between the Atlantic and the Mississippi river. These included the Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Muscogee (Creek) nations, which were sometimes called “the Five Civilized Tribes”.

Citizens of these countries owned farms, businesses, and enslaved people, just as their European-descended neighbors did. This situation essentially conformed with the wildest dreams of the Founding Fathers for the fate of Native peoples; Washington and Jefferson both hoped they would all eventually just learn English and become Christian yeoman slave plantation owners, too, instead of getting mad and attacking European settlers for digging up actual corn farms and hunting grounds in order to plant tobacco and cotton.

The home pictured below, called Malmaison (after one of Napoleon’s estates), full of imported French furniture, was the home of Greenwood Leflore, Principal Chief of the Council of Chiefs of the Choctaw Nation at the time of the Removal Act. It sat on 150,000 acres, worked by 400 enslaved farmers owned by Mr. Leflore (pictured in portrait below) in what is now Mississippi. These photos were taken by the Historic American Building Survey in 1936; the house burned in a fire in 1942. Pretty civilized looking to me; I’m sure Washington & Jefferson would have approved.

The idea of “Indian Removal” was that all these independent nations just sitting around in the Southwest were all IN THE WAY, annoying, uncivilized, and should just, like, go away. They were sitting on prime agricultural land that could be put to much better use as slave plantations. Everyone knew that Indians were lazy and weren’t really very good Christians or farmers. And there was all that land west of the Mississippi — couldn’t they all just, you know, go there? It would be better for them in the long run, all things considered. These three points: that sovereign Indian nations were in the way (of economic development, of course), that there was lots of land west of the Mississippi that they could just, like, go to, and that that would probably be better for them anyway — was the framework of the policy. Most voters agreed that the Indians should go away; the controversial bit was all of those legally binding treaties that the U.S. Government had signed with all the nations. It would be a bad precedent for international relations in general for a young nation to just be cancelling its treaties after it thought about them a little bit more.

As Jeremiah Everts, a missionary who wrote extensively and lobbied Congress about the immorality of the Indian Removal movement, wrote in the exhibited excerpt below:

The movement for Indian removal was debated in the public (both in the South and in the North) and in the Senate for decades before the Indian Removal Act was finally passed. I’ve mentioned the general arguments for it: Indians weren’t civilized or hardworking enough, were in the way, their land could be put to much better use as slave plantations, railroads, and gold mines, and there was tons of land in the west where they could go instead anyway. The governor of Georgia, William Lumpkin, believed strongly that the presence of Indian nations within the state of Georgia was holding back its development, and led the passage of anti-Indian laws in Georgia the 1810s and 1820s that launched the movement for Indian removal nationally. As excerpted below, he wrote, “I consider it…degrading to the Government to pretend any longer to treat these unfortunate remnants of a once mighty race as independent nations of people. … Georgia could never be extensively developed until this [northwestern] portion of the state was settled by an industrious, enlightened, free-hold population.”

Andrew Jackson campaigned on the controversial Indian removal movement, and his election in 1828 was the turning point that led many of the governments of Indian nations to believe that their best course was to go along with removal and negotiate for the best lands possible west of the Mississippi, rather than face potential military action from the U.S. Army under a commander in chief who had been the general who invaded Seminole land after the War of 1812 in order to get Spain to cede its claims to Florida to the U.S in 1819.

The general arguments *against* Indian removal were that the under its own self-proclaimed, equitable and democratic ideals, the U.S. government had no right to forcibly suggest that Indian people and nations relocate themselves; and further that doing so in violation of their international treaties weakened the young U.S. government’s credibility, to itself and to other governments. New Jersey senator Theodore Frelinghuysen spoke for six hours over three days during the debate in the Senate prior to passage of the act. His speech opens with:

“God, in his providence, planted these tribes on this Western continent, so far as we know, before Great Britain herself had a political existence. I believe, sir, it is not now seriously denied that the Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves; that they have a place in human sympathy, and are justly entitled to a share in the common bounties of a benignant Providence. And, with this conceded, I ask in what code of the law of nations, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been extinguished?”

A few hours later he asked:

Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the  white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No, sir. In that severe and impartial scrutiny which futurity will cast over this subject, the righteous award will be, that those very causes which are now pleaded for the relaxed enforcement of the rules of equity, urged upon us not only a rigid execution of the highest justice, to the very letter, but claimed at our hands a generous and magnanimous policy.

Well, he was right that in the future, the decision would still be scrutinized, and that the decision would be seen as less than righteous and magnanimous. As the speech ended:

Sir, the question has ceased to be — What are our duties? An inquiry much more embarrassing is forced upon us: How shall we most plausibly, and with the least possible violence, break our faith? Sir, we repel the inquiry — we reject such an issue.

As it turned out, the Senate did not reject the inquiry, and it did figure out how to most plausibly break its faith. The wording of the Act of 1830 was optional: Indian nations were given the option to up and leave for the land west of the Mississippi, purchased from France to fund Napoleon’s wars in 1803. The U.S. Government would pay for their removal, and would provide U.S. citizenship to those who preferred to stay in the South (though that part deal was later reneged on as well).

This policy proposal was unlike anything ever undertaken by the young national government. The Act initially allocated $500,000 ($12.7 million in 2017 dollars) to pay for the relocation of several sovereign nations, and required that the President personally sign every deed of Western land granted. Two years after passage, Jackson had signed 10,000 deeds and was 11,000 behind and had to ask Congress to amend the Act so that other people could sign them. By 1838, the costs of removal comprised 20% of the entire federal budget.

By the 1850s, the costs had reached $100 million, or $2.7 billion in 2017 dollars. Today’s senators, economists, and historians typically attribute the U.S.’s 19th century economic history to Western expansion and the glorious possibilities inherent in a free-market system. The same history, told from the white-(supremacist)-tinted glasses, would see Indian Removal as the lynchpin process that resulted in the southern cotton boom (slave-grown cotton on land appropriated from Indian nations quadrupled nationally from 750,000 bales produced in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850), which generated the real economic activity that brought in foreign currency (cotton was over 50% of US exports through 1850) to spend on a massive fiscal stimulus (paying for the transportation, food and clothing rations, and bureaucrats) necessary to conduct Indian removal. As the exhibit stated, “The boom enriched contractors, who provided cattle, pork, coffee, sugar, corn, flour, salt, wagons, teamsters, pack horses, boats, ferrymen, road builders, rifles, and ammunition.” Fundamental social engines of the economic growth enabled by the “free-market” political system were the enslavement of Africans to work on land dispossessed from Indians.

The actual stories of removal are the parts of history that are recalled the most often today. Though the act required that all of those bureaucrats do a nice, benevolent job (from Jackson’s first inaugural speech: “It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people”), as the result of their efforts up to 25% of Cherokees, Chicsaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles died of sickness/starvation/injury before they reached their Western reservations. The phrase “trail of tears” was not popularized until the 20th century. From the exhibit:

“For nearly a hundred years, almost nobody talked about removal. Entire books about Andrew Jackson barely mentioned it, and no one learned about it in school. But in the early 1900s, a handful of Cherokee activists began to popularize the phrase trail of tears. First, the term described only the Cherokee removal of 1838. Later it included the removals of all southeastern Native nations. It then became shorthand for policies toward all American Indians. The core meaning of the phrase, though, still refers to a moment of national shame and a betrayal of American values. Trail of tears resonates in American conversation because the country is still coming to terms with what happened and what it means.”

During a weekend of twittering about governing shutdown, I had truly not intended to go to the NMAI in order to ponder the nature of American democracy or the role of the U.S. Senate as a deliberative body. But then I walked into the Trail of Tears exhibit room and read from the first panel:

In 1830, only white men could vote, and millions of people were in bondage…but 50 years after the American Revolution, the United States was the only representative democracy on earth [Tina’s note: Ummmm, hey NMAI curators, love you but, ever heard of Haiti?? Fail, NMAI curators. Have been meaning to write a blog post about the Haitian Revolution for a few weeks, now, actually, but am still feeling raw about it]. Europe’s revolutions had failed. Kings and commoners closely watched the radical experiment across the Atlantic. The Indian Removal Act was written and debated on this worldwide stage. The United States knew that removing American Indians from their sovereign territories could damage its reputation as a new democracy. The contradiction between democratic values and Indian removal is why the act was so ferociously debated, why it cost so much and took so long, why it was forgotten for half a century, and why it is burned into national memory.

What particular bits about this just feel so undesirably fresh? The US policy being debated on a world stage? Potential for reputation damage? Contradiction between democratic values and proposed policies that we are told will strengthen national security and prosperity?

Maybe it’s the betrayal inherent in the debate on DACA, a program created by the US government that it promoted to residents and encouraged them to register for: “We have never yet declared treaties with them to be mere waste paper.”

It’s become trendy over the last few years among self-identifying conservatives to push for revisionist history of Jackson–the general idea being: maybe he did some objectionable stuff that should be properly understood in the historical context, but he’s gotten a bad rap and he was for the people and anti the elites and anti the national debt and we dig that and we dig him too, sorry it’s not PC. We’ve heard of how the Steves Bannon and Miller love Jackson, and seen how Trump likes to pretend to have read a book about him.

I think the fundamental connection that I felt between the history mentioned in the exhibit and today’s news was with the recent comment by a (Canadian) guest on Tucker Carlson’s show, ““In Arizona, a majority of the grade school children now are Hispanic. That means Arizona’s future is as a Hispanic society. That means in effect, the border has moved north,” and the official White House response to reports of Trump not wanting immigrants from Haiti and Africa due to these countries being shitholes: “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people.”

Who are the American people? Presumably not Hispanic grade school children in Arizona, nor immigrants from Haiti, otherwise these statements do not hold up.

If American politicians are supposed to fight for “the American people”, then, who are they? Are they: the people who live in America? Whether descended from those who arrived via land bridge 40 thousand years ago, via boat without a visa 100 years ago, or via foot across a border 16 years ago? And if, actually, “the American people” is more specific than “the people who live in America”, what moral code decides who’s American enough to not be forcibly removed?

The end of the exhibit discussed how the phrase “the trail of tears” became popularized in the 20th century in the first place. In 1914, Cherokee PhD student Rachel Caroline Eaton (pictured below), the first Indian woman in Oklahoma to receive a PhD, whose mother had walked the Trail of Tears march from Georgia into Oklahoma, titled her dissertation, “Trail of Tears”. Cherokee educator, writer, and Bureau of Indian Affairs staffer Ruth Margaret Muskrat then used the phrase as the title of a poem, which she performed nationally as part of her activism for Indian rights, which included leading the National Congress of American Indians. I swear I didn’t deliberately visit this exhibit the day after the 2018 Women’s March in D.C.

******

Postscript: Below is excerpted from the Wikipedia page on Greenwood Leflore, proprietor of Malmaison plantation & leader of the Choctaw Nation in 1830 at the time of the passage of the Removal Act … a lot to unpack in this life story. I wish there were more 500-page biographies about this guy available at Barnes & Noble.

“In 1830 LeFlore led other chiefs in signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which ceded the remaining Choctaw lands in Mississippi to the US government and agreed to removal to Indian Territory. It also provided that Choctaw who chose to stay in Mississippi would have reserved lands, but the United States government failed to follow through on this provision. While many of the leaders realized removal was inevitable, others opposed the treaty and made death threats against LeFlore. He stayed in Mississippi, where he settled in Carroll County and accepted United States citizenship. He was elected to the state government as a legislator and senator in the 1840s. During the American Civil War, he sided with the Union.”

30 Year Mortgages & FDR

For some reason this morning while walking to the Metro, I was thinking about how I would respond if someone asked me what the best and worst days of my life so far have been. I think that the worst was the day they announced the travel ban. The best was the day of the amazing surprise 29^th birthday party that my amazing friends threw for me about four years ago (insert existential-screaming-about-human-aging emoji face), which had a “1929” theme (everyone dressed in 20s formal wear; there were silver punch bowls full of champagne and passed boxes of candy cigars) and the joke was what the 1930-themed birthday party would be like the next year.

Then at work today, the company’s newest director, a former head of risk of the Federal Housing Administration, gave a lunchtime “Intro to Mortgage Financing” presentation. I have already studied quite a bit about the history of mortgage financing, but obviously I went, because I love mortgage financing and lunchtime presentations equally. During his talk he mentioned that the 30-year mortgage was a uniquely American invention that came about in the 1930s, and is still not available in some economies, where mortgages are mostly five-year balloon and/or floating-rate loans. I asked why it came about in the 1930s, and he said that the FHA basically created it (when the FHA itself was created, in 1934). I never realized this, as mortgage regulations weren’t on the lengthy list of new government programs created in the 1930s that I learned about in The History of US Agriculture class at nutrition school. Policies and programs enacted under Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s transformed so many aspects of American life and economy, from farming to finance. (My two favorite economic subjects to study, since none of the rest of any economy works without them!)

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was and is a massive shift of risk (the risk that interest rates will change and you won’t be able to afford your mortgage anymore) away from individual households onto the financial system, and has become a key building block of that modern financial system and of American society. Homeownership has been and is a primary American method for both building wealth and transferring it across generations. Actually, I suspect that with the decline of real wages, homeownership is perhaps even more important for inter-generational wealth transfer now than for previous 20^th century generations—the ability to live with your parents has become a more important subsidy for many millennials than it was for our parents, who could spend the money that millennials now spend on student loans on their first mortgages. Homeownership is also a key link between the 20^th century policy infrastructures of racism and current racial disparities. Did you know that in 2009, the typical black American household had a net wealth (assets minus debts) of $5,677, a typical Hispanic household $6,325, and a typical white household $113,149? Bank redlining—not offering mortgages in minority neighborhoods—isn’t a sexy topic, but it wasn’t made illegal until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the government is still collecting hundred-million dollar settlements from banks practicing it. Segregation of bank lending by neighborhood prevents residents of these areas from accessing mortgages (and therefore accumulating personal wealth equal to the leveraged value of their home over the 30-year term of their mortgage), lowers the value of the real estate that is there even if they are able to purchase it (because the resale value of a home in a redlined area is going to be lowered by buyers not being able to get financing), and therefore also results in public schools being less funded by property taxes, weakening access to a second primary method for building and transferring wealth across generations: college education.

But I digress — so, white America, at least, thanks you for the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, FHA/FDR. The FHA was one among so many transformative agencies created by Roosevelt’s New Deal: besides Social Security and farm subsidies, perhaps the best remembered creations from this burst of agency-making, there was the FDIC, the SEC, the minimum wage (via the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), the repeal of Prohibition, all those Art Deco Post Offices. The 1930s really were hellish for the United States—concurrent economic and ecological disasters delivered by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, as if Katrina/Harvey happened every few months during the financial crisis, and if the crisis had had more than twice the impact on unemployment that it had. It was a horrible and transformative decade in Europe as well. In Germany, the democratically elected leader responded to the economic despair by creating modern fascism and enacting genocide. In the United States, the democratically elected leader responded by creating the modern welfare state and declaring in his first presidential inauguration speech that “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself”.

Speaking of Germany, FDR also decided to re-arm the US military beginning in 1938 and began secret war planning correspondence with Winston Churchill in 1939 (it had to be secret because much of the US public and leading Senate Republicans were opposed to US interventionism in Europe). “America First” was the name of the most prominent anti-war group, headlined by pop culture icon Charles Lindbergh, trying to pressure FDR to commit to not go to war with Hitler and to convince the American people that FDR was lying to them and was unduly influenced by the British and American Jews. In a keynote speech on Sept. 11, 1941 in Des Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh proclaimed, “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. …It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. …Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

America First disbanded three days after Pearl Harbor, and Roosevelt and the military were ready to go to war. If there had been a different US President elected in 1933, as they saying goes, we might all be speaking German. My point is just that leadership matters; and seems frighteningly random. Prior to 2016, but even more so since then, I think that both political science scholars and laypeople deeply underestimate the role of individual leadership and somewhat random chance in political history. We underestimate its importance because we can’t model it and we can’t predict it. At a certain fundamental level, it mostly comes down to luck whether your country’s national resistance leader turns into Nelson Mandela or into Robert Mugabe. It kind of comes down to luck who your country’s president is when planes crash into the World Trade Center on September 11^th or when the New York stock market crashes in September 1929, because no one asked them what they’d do if that happened on the campaign trail. The decisions of powerful people move history much more than we want them to be able to–it’s easier to understand history and ascribe historical developments to things like rates of inflation, technological innovation, or the weather. Yet so much comes down to something fundamentally unpredictable, un-modelable, and not data-driven: the character of people in charge when bad things happen. The world would be very different 50 years later if a different guy had been elected US president in 1933, in 2000, in 2016. It’s scary that the personal characters of individual leaders can bend the arc of history so significantly, and quickly.

Also, after the presentation I said to the presenter, “That was great, I love financial history!!” and may have weirded him out because maybe that’s not something people say a lot (Sorry! But I do.)

And this was the scene at the best birthday everrr

James Madison and I agree: to save the republic, less blabbering about finding consensus, more bitter partisanship.

Yesterday, on a whim, I went to a book talk in Baker Library at the Harvard Business School by HBS Professor David Moss for his new book, Democracy: a Case Study. The idea of the book is to use the HBS case study method to tell the story of American history: in nineteen case studies, he provides the background to a particular decision to be made, and then has students/the reader decide what they would do. (Then the appendix tells you what happened.) They are apparently doing a pilot program using the book in high school American history classes, which is cool because I have thought of that exact idea myself before.

My favorite tidbit that he mentioned in the talk, which is not a case but just from the introduction of the book, was about the motto of the United States, ‘e pluribus unum’ (out of many, one). I dig the motto and before writing this, had thought that I referenced it in my St Patrick’s Day post about tap dancing, but it looks like I didn’t. Anyway, as Moss agreed, it’s a lovely summation of the “unique promise of the US” (his words) to harness diversity to unity through a nation-building project, done together.

Where did the motto come from? On July 5, 1776 (that’s the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the 13 American colonies, for those among ye unpracticed in historical inference) the Continental Congress in Philadelphia faced the first important task of any new organization aspiring to greatness, a task well known to all on the HBS campus. They needed really good marketing materials.

The first order of business on July 5 was to form a commission to create a seal for the new nation. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson worked for two weeks on the design. Ben wanted a picture of Moses parting the Red Sea, TJ wanted a picture of Hengest and Horsa, the mythical first Anglo-Saxon brothers to invade England, and Adams wanted a picture of Hercules rolling stuff up a hill. They settled on Moses on one side, and a weird heraldic crest with six sections representing England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany and Holland that was held up by a female Liberty figure and a American soldier holding a rifle and a tomahawk, with a Masonic eye in a pyramid looking down from above, and a little banner saying “e plurabis unum” at the bottom, for the other side.

The armchair critics in the Continental Congress thought it looked stupid and refused to bring it to a vote. Six years later, they finally agreed on a seal featuring an eagle flying around carrying thirteen arrows and an olive branch, which you may recognize:

In the eagle’s beak is a banner, though, including the only part of the original Seal Commission’s proposal that the Congress liked: the phrase ‘e plurubis unum’. It is a powerful and lovely phrase, and the Latin implies a connection to classical civilization and democracy, which was still an important Renaissance/humanist-type goal, even mid-Enlightenment period, as were our Continental Congressional friends. From which noble progenitor did the committee, likely the three best-read men in the Colonies, source this motto? Cicero, most likely? Horace, perhaps?

Actually, Ben Franklin had seen it on the cover of his favorite “gentleman’s magazine”, and just straight-up plagiarized it from there. There is no known usage of the phrase before the publication of this magazine, about 80 years before:

It was supposed to mean that the magazine was, as Moss said, like an “18th century Reader’s Digest” that would take “many” types of writing, like poetry, essays, etc., and form “one” magazine for their gentlemen subscribers. Always remember, followers: no art is new, and the best inventions are just better versions of someone else’s work!

So, once the United States had a seal, we could embark upon our great experiment in republican democracy. As you likely know, post Declaration, there was a period during which the 13 states operated under the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781 (the Revolutionary War was offish ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1783). Under these Articles, there would be a common Continental Army, a congress of representatives from each of the 13 states who would meet in the de facto capital of New York City, and only this national government could declare war. It could impose no taxes, to be funded only by contributions by the states. Thus the federal government could spend, but was not allowed to tax (as Prof. Moss noted, as many people would still prefer today! Ha ha ha!) FYI, the Articles also stipulated that if “Canada” (another British colony, present day Quebec region) wanted to join, they were to be welcomed.

But by 1786, within just a few years, things were not working out. In Virginia, Baptists were rebelling against a proposed religious tax on anyone who was not a member of the Church of England (the official church of the state of Virginia). Jefferson had proposed a Bill for Religious Freedom, but then left for Paris to buy more books and wine and left it to friend James Madison to continue the fight. There were separate currencies in each state. In Rhode Island, people suffering from burdens of debt taken on during the Revolutionary period had organized in the state legislature and had starting printing so much Rhode Island money that they created a hyper-inflation that caused a political backlash from creditors.

Most pressingly, armed Revolutionary War veterans in western Massachusetts were rallying and rebelling against the Massachusetts legislature after their farms were foreclosed upon by Boston bankers for non-payment of debt. The reason for so many delinquent Berkshire farmers? They were all war veterans who had left and borrowed against their farms to fight the British under promise of an army salary, which they were still waiting to be paid five years later. It turned out that the states, even with their own money printing presses and hyperinflation, didn’t feel like contributing to the federal government’s budget, even when that meant unpaid veterans such as Shay’s rebels. George Washington, the soldiers’ former leader, wrote that he was “mortified” by the situation. Thomas Jefferson-whose money came from his slave plantation at Monticello (though he died $100k in debt due to his commitment to his book and wine collection) and who never fought in battle during the war, though he did run away and hide at his back-up slave plantation, Poplar Forest, while the rest of the Virginia militia fought British forces sent by Benedict Arnold to capture him–felt more sanguine about the rebelling veterans, writing to Madison from Paris not to worry too much about the situation because “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

From his viewpoint on the ground in Virginia, Madison was more concerned. He and Alexander Hamilton convinced everyone to meet up in September 1787 in Philadelphia, nominally to revise the Articles, though their goal before it even started was to create a new system for the federal government.

At this point Prof. Moss introduced a description of the writing of the Constitution that I had either never encountered before, or had forgotten. We learn in high school history that the 18th century is called “the age of Enlightenment”; a time of salons when men and women throughout Europe wrote each other letters about politics and philosophy, gathered to discuss them, and then went out and guillotined their kings and queens to create new, perfect governments. They were all very self-aware of what they were doing. We actually just read about the Enlightenment in my early modern Europe class last week. In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote a helpful summary of the effort in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”: ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.’

The French, the likes of Voltaire, Montesquieu, & Rousseau, were known as the Enlightenment leaders. (Hence TJ’s many book-buying trips to Paris.) In 1770, a group of Poles asked Rousseau for advice on how to re-create their own government. His advice was to encourage Polish nationalism by promoting songs, parades, and outfits (“How then to move hearts, and make the fatherland and laws loved? Shall I dare to say? With children’s games; with institutions that are idle in the eyes of superficial men, but which form cherished habits and invincible attachments”) that would make Poles identify as Polish only and hate Russians. (“If you make it so that a Pole can never become a Russian, I answer to you for it that Russia will never subjugate Poland.” Thanks for the ethnic nationalism, Rousseau!)

So prior to their big constitutional convention, Madison asked TJ if he could borrow his library, and he hunkered down and read everything Monticello had to offer on the topics of republican democracy, in order to figure out an idea for a better government that he could pitch in Philadelphia. (Thankfully Rousseau had died and stopped giving out advice eight years before.) He also had to spend a lot of time convincing George Washington, who didn’t want to, to go to the convention. (GW probably knew he’d be elected president of the Convention as soon as he got there, which he was, and he didn’t think everyone was going to agree on anything, so didn’t want to have to lead it.)

Last sidebar about TJ’s library: I have visited Monticello once, after Leigh’s wedding. It is weirdly shaped and looks smaller than you think it’s going to, but feels much bigger yet still weirdly shaped on the inside. I didn’t get a picture of it, but this was afterwards at UVA; we joked that we were standing on the Jefferson grass in front of the Jefferson pillars of the Jefferson library because everything in this part of Virginia has the same intro adjective:

I mean, as someone who also spends too much borrowed money on books, it is great that Jefferson had amassed the largest library in the colonies and gave Madison so much material to figure out government from. (His library later became the initial collection of the Library of Congress, now the largest library in the world. The New York Public Library is the 4th largest in the world, the Boston Public Library the 15th largest, and Harvard libraries the 17th largest). The angle presented by Moss that was new to me was Madison’s conclusion of his research project. Basically, he decided that the Greeks, and the French Enlightenment thinkers, had all gotten it wrong about democracy.

The classical democratic ideal was always a “small” republic, ideally just about the size of, you know, city-states like Athens and Sparta. Citizens needed to be similar and have a common identity–hence Rousseau’s urging for Polish nationalism through special songs and outfits. Yet what was troubling Madison as he looked at yet more religious conflict in Virginia, capitalist conflict in Rhode Island, and the Shay’s rebellion in Massachusetts was what Hall identifies as the remaining, perennial problem of democracy: how to empower the majority, while protecting minorities? Whether Baptists in Virginia, creditors in Rhode Island, or unpaid veterans in Massachusetts, he saw that in a “small” area, such as one of the states, it was too easy for the tyranny of the majority to oppose fair treatment of these minorities. A small, homogeneous and harmonious republic, where every citizen was proud of their similarities (Polish or otherwise) was what everyone in Europe philosophized and rhapsodized about, but Madison decided that they were all wrong. As his co-conspirator Hamilton wrote in their series of essays advancing this idea, the Federalist Papers: “When Montesquieu recommends a small extent for republics, the standards he had in view were of dimensions far short of the limits of almost every one of these States. Neither Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, nor Georgia can by any means be compared with the models from which he reasoned and to which the terms of his description apply.” (Federalist Paper #9)

What would work better, he proposed, was a big, diverse democracy where every group–factions, as he labels them throughout the Federalist Papers–would be small enough in the grand scheme of things that they would have to fight things out with many, many other factions, and form coalitions to advance their interests. Madison saw a large, strong, central government that all factions would be forced to deal with, and that could veto unfair laws by the states, as essential in preserving the unity and harmony of the republic. His bitterest battle on behalf of the ‘Federalists’, those that agreed on this view (which included Hamilton and Washington), against the anti-Federalists (Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe–who worried that a strong central government would just devolve back into a monarchy) at the Constitutional Convention was about whether the national federal government should be able to veto laws passed by states; a policy he called “the federal negative”. Eventually, he lost that battle, but won the war on getting a Constitution passed creating a much stronger federal government with the ability to tax and regulate the states. This battle at the convention in Philadelphia over the federal negative rule is the first case study in Moss’s book.

Moss’s personal conclusion about the connection between his studies of American history and the present day resonated with me. He stated that, “bitter partisanship is more fundamentally American than cooperative consensus.” As Madison anticipated, throughout US history, bitter fights between factions on so many issues have not been exceptions to otherwise peaceful national harmony, but have been the standard path towards progress. In a sense, the system was *designed* by the founders to be so. Moss provided a list of historical policy accomplishments in the US that he said were born of intense, bitter and partisan struggles, including the public education system, and the creation of LLCs, limited liability corporations. He identifies the point of breakdown in “constructive” factional disagreements into “destructive” disagreements, the largest example of which is the Civil War, as when participants cease to believe in the underlying democratic system. Southern secessionists did not view Lincoln as a legitimate president within the constitutional democratic system, and were willing to just leave rather than continue trying to fight it out within the system. In other cases, factions have been willing to accept the ‘winning side’ when they still see the democratic, Constitutional system as legitimate.

So the conclusion for those concerned with American politics today: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, maybe don’t try so hard to agree on finding common ground in the middle: rather, fight as hard as you can for your own political beliefs when you see them threatened. (Moss also says to work to rebuild the culture of democracy, which he feels has atrophied somewhat in recent years.) This jives with my own political instincts lately. Like, if you are feeling compelled these days to “better understand Trump voters” and to read Hillbilly Elegy to learn more about working-class white people in Appalachia–great! Lifelong reading is important in building the muscles of empathy, expanding global understanding and is the basis of humanist education. (While we’re making book recommendations about poor white people in Appalachia, allow me to suggest Christy, my absolute favorite book from ages 12-13.)

Seeking consensus and understanding with those you disagree with may be helping yourself understand the world better, but, sorry, it’s not how you’re going save the Republic. None of the 19 case studies in democracy resulted in a more perfect union because everyone just finally tried harder to find consensus. The system is designed for action by factions. Protesting, joining political interest groups and associations, sitting in the cold outside of grocery stores doing voter registration drives, and harassing your Congressional representatives is what guides the wheel on the car of the Republic. From the days of Shay’s rebellion, which forced George Washington to leave retirement and pitted friends like Madison and Jefferson against each other in very public forums, unpleasant, bitter and awkward partisanship has been the driving force of change here, whether we enjoy it or not.

Daniel Shays (left) and Job Shattuck, rebellious leaders.

Post-script: props on the graphic designer of Moss’s book cover, because this eagle is much cooler looking than the one on the US seal on your passport, but minus 0.5 points because there are only 12 rather than 13 tail feathers.