Into the Unknown: Our Intrepid German Ancestors

We are nearly all the descendants of immigrants, those hearty people who risked everything to start again in a new land. Their bravery and fortitude made our country what it is today, made each of us what we are today.

Immigrants leaving homeTo emigrate in the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century was to leap by faith alone into the unknown, leaving behind home and family, familiar neighborhoods, routines well established, even loved ones they never wished to leave behind. All to begin again from scratch with little more than a few precious dollars and enormous stores of energy and faith.

Most of us fortunate enough to have been born in America will never know the immigrant experience. We’ll never know those forces of poverty, oppression, or persecution so strong that Leaving home on ship sepiathey drive emigrants to leave their homes and venture into the unknown. We’ll never know their particular kind of hope and fear mixed with regret and relief, the concoction of emotions that has driven immigrants to our land for nearly four hundred years, and continues to drive them today.

Hope, fear, regret, and relief. What recipe is this? It is when we leave anything once loved behind in order to better our lives. A lover, a spouse, a job, a home, a town, a country. We hope for better lives, but fear the unknown. We regret that our lives didn’t work out as planned, but feel relief at being free of untenable circumstances. We feel nothing as simple as a single emotion, but a mixture so foreign that we can’t put our fingers on it. And so the emotions churn about and we describe it physically, as feeling numb, or having a reeling head or a pounding heart.

For our Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century ancestors who left their fertile Rhine River Valley homeland in Germany to seek better life in America, Religious warthe need to leave was acute. Their country had been the finest in Europe, a land of noble heroes and spectacular scenery, of majestic castles and cathedrals and prosperous farms and orchards. But forces conspired to make life difficult for our ancestors there.

Traditional inheritance practices in Germany meant that land was divided equally between all children, which meant that farms were made increasingly smaller, and land hunger drove the people to search farther afield for suitable property. More important, Germany was torn by nearly ceaseless war, its once mighty empire in now in fragments, its people desperate and hungry.

The Holy Roman Empire of Germany during the Middle Ages was the wealthiest and most powerful in all Europe. Art and science flourished there. Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type, which made possible the Enlightenment and the spread of knowledge throughout the civilized world. Germany’s prosperous farmers and skilled craftsmen were hailed as the finest in all Europe.De_stadt_Maastricht,_door_den_prins_van_Parma_(Alexander_Farnese)_met_storm_verovert,_den_29_july_des_jaars_1579_(Jan_Luyken,_1679)

Then in the early 1500s Martin Luther translated the Bible into German and gave his people not only direct access to the word of God, but the language of literature and poetry. Luther didn’t stop there, though. He went on to publicly question the very tenants of the Catholic Church, leading others to do the same and sparking one of the greatest revolutions of all time, the Protestant Reformation, and leading the way to the Age of Enlightenment.

But the road to Enlightenment was full of terror and violence. And thus was ushered in one of the most destructive and longest wars in European history. The Holy Roman Empire was fragmenting. War after war raged through the land. The Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Spanish Succession.

One after another they crashed like tidal waves against the people, wreaking more destruction each time until carnage covered the land and Martin Luther church doorthe countryside and its people were in ruin. Religious hatred and political divisions pitted Catholic against Protestant, Hapsburg against Ottoman, north against south, prince against prince, and in their armies, peasant and farmer against peasant and farmer. The devastation was enormous, the taxes oppressive as local leaders sought more and more money to wage war.

The country’s population was ravaged, falling from thirty million to twelve million as the Holy Roman Empire fought for its very existence against the rise of Protestantism. As in any war, the common people suffered disproportionately. Some fled. Many died.

Unpaid armies and bands of mercenaries roamed the countryside pillaging and plundering, villages left burning and their people dead or without sustenance. And then the winter of 1708 came, the coldest in 100 years. Birds, it was said, froze in mid-air, men mid-step. Farms and their farmers perished in the cold, and the people cried, “Enough!” Those who could, left.

William Penn handbillMany fled to Switzerland or the Alsace region of France. After the end of hostilities some went home, some stayed, but many came to America, mostly to Pennsylvania. A generation before, William Penn visited Germany to spread the word that Pennsylvania would welcome them.

Some were old enough to remember the handbills passed out by his agents throughout the country proclaiming a land of milk and honey; a place where the climate was temperate, the fertile soil nearly free, kings and princes unknown, and religious and political tolerance the cornerstones of society. A place where Germans could prosper and thrive, free at last. If only they could get there.

And so our ancestors pleaded their case to England’s Queen Anne, saying,

“We, the poor, distressed Palatines, whose utter ruin was occasioned by the merciless cruelty of a bloody enemy whose prevailing power, some years past, like a torrent, rushed into our country and overwhelmed us at once; and being not content with money and food necessary for their occasions, not only dispossessed us of all support, but inhumanly burnt our houses to the ground, whereby being deprived of all shelter, we were turned into open fields, there with our families to seek what shelter we could find, were obliged to make the earth our repository for rest and the clouds the canopy for covering.”

The sympathetic queen thus invited the beleaguered Protestant Germans to sail to America on English ships, Ship Sally carrying Palatinesoffering them passage and land in exchange for bonded labor.

By the thousands, they packed their meager belongings and headed for the promised land. From May to November of 1709 nearly thirteen thousand passengers left their desolate homeland and sailed the Rhine to Rotterdam, and on to England. By June there were one thousand immigrants passing through Rotterdam every week.

Of those, there were 2,257 Catholics who were sent back. The enmity between the two was far from over. One historical account written in 1897 quotes a contemporary diarist who wrote, “Thursday, 29 September [1709]. The Popish Palatines who came hither, were ordered to go home, having passports for the same.” Catholic vs ProtestantQueen Anne knew exactly who she wanted to populate her colonies. She was designing her ideal New World.

After arriving in England, from there our ancestors traveled on to Canada, Australia, Ireland, or America. Once in America the Protestant Germans who answered Queen Anne’s offer were required to pay off their price of passage by working in camps set up for that purpose along the Hudson River.

After that tour of duty, which typically lasted five to seven years, they were finally free. Free to practice their religion. Free to find and homestead land. Free to join in building a new country that was free to all.

Many of the immigrants made their way to William Penn’s land, which had been given to that quirky Quaker by England’s Charles II in repayment of a debt to Pennsylvania NY NJ map 1751Penn’s father, one of the largest land grants awarded an individual in all history. Penn wished to name the land Sylvania for its vast forests of trees, but the king wanted to name it in honor of Penn’s father. They compromised, and the land became known as Pennsylvania.

Lutherans, Reformed, Swiss Mennonites, Baptist Dunkers, Moravians, Quakers, and Amish all flooded into Pennsylvania’s wilder regions. A second wave of immigrants began in 1727, and from then to 1775, around 65,000 Germans landed in Philadelphia and settled in Pennsylvania.

These are our ancestors, the ones who survived war and religious persecution to find their way to America and once here, to build strong frontier families that made their way without the aid of anyone excepting their nearest neighbors, who were also a hearty stock of immigrants. They cut their homes from the forest and built their farms with blood and sweat. They survived and thrived and raised their families well, which led, in the end, to you and me.

So when you think on your German ancestors, think of the historical times in which they lived, the history-making events they endured and helped to shape, and the hope, fear, regret, and relief they felt to the depths of their being in coming to America. We can be proud of such character and strength that brought them here. And remember, those genes reside in us, too.Pennsylvania settlers color

 

The Puzzling “White Indians” Who Loved Their Abductors.

Yesterday I wrote about the five Boyd children who were brutally captured by Iroquois warriors in 1756.The White

If that sounds terrifying, it probably was. At least it started out that way.

The Boyd children were taken by force, their mother and youngest brother killed because they couldn’t keep up.

The children were with their captors for seven years. Then the frontier wars were settled. Treaties were signed stipulating that all captives be returned. Colonial troops went into the wilderness to rescue them, returning with hundreds at a time.

But several of the Boyd children fought against returning home.

When they were forced under guard to reunite with their European-American families, these children managed to escape, and returned to the communities of their captors.

My blog post yesterday was a story of events, not explanations. Captured by Indians

Now I’m wondering about the explanations.

Why did not just these children, but so many others, and adult women and occasionally men as well, choose to stay with their Native captors?

Was it Stockholm Syndrome, wherein a captive irrationally identifies with her captor and blames her own people for not rescuing her?

Or was it something else, something the European Colonials did not want to even think about, that the Natives actually had the more desirable way of living?

If you’re expecting a definitive answer to that question, I can’t give it. I have only supposition, and some input from far more knowledgeable people than I.

Catheraine Carey LoganCaptive-taking by Native Americans was surprisingly common in Colonial times.

It was also common for captives to choose their Native communities over their Colonial families.

This puzzled the European Americans to no end.

They came to America believing that conversion would be easy once Natives saw the superiority of the Europeans’ religion, clothing, agriculture, dwellings, and every comfort known so far to man.

Yet there were very few Indians who converted to English culture, while large numbers of English chose to become Indian. Even Benjamin Franklin pondered why:

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

One author put a bottom line on it in 1782, writing that,

“thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”

Those are not the popular writers of their time, the serial novelists aCaptive Womennd journalists who sensationalized stories of captor brutality that today’s academics call “capture narratives.”

These narratives were the thrillers of their time, and the public ate them up.

I have no doubt of much of their truth, aside from the sensationalism. A few were written as eye-witness captive accounts, after all.

Yet James Axtell, historian at Sarah Lawrence College, writes in the William and Mary Quarterly that the Natives treated their captives as equals nearly from the beginning of their captivity.

He notes that though food on the trail was scarce, it was shared equally with the captives. The children were given soft moccasins for running, lessons in survival, snow shoes for easier travel.

White captivesOnce in the villages, the captives were given Indian clothes, taught Indian songs and dances, and welcomed as family members into specifically appointed adoptive families.

It wasn’t necessarily easy. There were often rituals and trials that had to be passed, such as a gauntlet to beat the whiteness out of them, and afterwards, a second ritual to wash it out.

But once these trials were passed, captives were awarded full integration into the tribe.

Compared to the stern and rigorous life of a New England Puritan, or the hardscrabble life of a pioneer farmer, this life might have seemed more compassionate and civilized. The English were new here, still trying to tame the wilderness, bring it to its knees before the saw and the plow, to furrow its land and regiment its growth, much as it did its children.

I can see where life would definitely be more difficult for a European-American child of that time.

Most of the thousands of “white Indians” left no explanation as to why they chose their adopted Native families and culture over the Colonials. They just traded in their hard shoes and disappeared into the wilderness.

The only narratives we have are from those who chose to return to Colonial society. In those writings, it is clear that the “white Indians” valued what Axtell calls the Natives’

“strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity – values that the English colonists also honored, if less successfully.”

Mary JemisonAxtell also notes other values, such as:

“social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, ‘the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”

As I said, I’m no expert. I’ve read only a few academic papers, not even enough to make me dangerous.

But if what these academic researchers say is true – and I have no reason to doubt them – isn’t it a shame that the imposition of culture was so one-way? Isn’t it a tragedy that the annihilation so complete?

We lost a whole culture. But what did we also lose in not heeding the lessons of our own children who chose to have different families?

My Tragic Boyd Blood

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On my father’s side I come from a long line of Boyds. So far so good. But things happen to Boyds that make me want to look over my shoulder now and then just for having Boyd blood.

Of course, things happen to every family, but when they happen to Boyds they tend to be so big or tragic or astonishing that they are recorded in history books.

This story tells only one of them.

Starting with Robert dictus de Boyd in 1262, the Scottish Boyds ascended to nobility…were given a castle…were accused of treason…lost their castle…were literally stabbed in the back…regained Royal favor and a few more castles…were imprisoned in the Tower of London…executed… mortified… regained favor again…and were generally kicked about like royal hacky sacks for some 500-odd years.

Then, in 1746 Sir William Boyd was executed for attempting to take the British Crown. cabin-in-the-wilderness-lake-georgeMeanwhile, half a world away in the wilds of Pennsylvania, John and Nancy Boyd were about to have their lives ripped apart.

In the mid-1700s my Scots-Irish ancestors came to America in search of a place where the land would sustain them.

Where they could build a home, raise a family, and live in peace, far from the volatile mess in their homeland.

the-comforts-of-homeJohn Boyd and Nancy Urie thought they found it in the unbroken wilderness of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley.

They cut their plot of land from the forest, built a log cabin, and commenced living the hard but independent life of a frontier family.

John was a farmer, and a few miles away lived his neighbor, John Stewart, a weaver.

the-french-lessonOn February 10, 1756, John and his oldest son, William, started out for Stewart’s to buy a web of cloth.

With five active children and a new one on the way, Nancy Urie Boyd needed plenty of cloth to sew, one stitch at a time, into clothes.

David Boyd was a responsible boy of 13, and after his father left for Stewart’s, his mother sent David out to chop wood.

He took his hatchet, and his little brother John, who was six, went along to pick up chips.

cherokee-scouting-fort-duquesneTheir two sisters, Sallie and Rhoda, ten and seven, stayed inside with their mother and little brother.

David got busy with the wood, and his hatchet rang out through the forest.

He put all his concentration on placing the hatchet perfectly straight into the log, splitting it right through the middle.

Taking of captive babyHe was concentrating so hard, in fact, that he didn’t hear the Iroquois Indian who had walked right up to him.

But little John did, and he screamed. David turned, but it was too late.

The Iroquois grabbed David by his belt, threw him over his shoulder, and ran off into the forest.

John was snatched the same way, and in seconds the two boys disappeared into the trees.

Within moments Sally and Rhoda and their little brother, not yet three, were taken, and all five of them were brought together a short ways off.

chase-womanThe Natives instructed the children to run.

As he ran, David looked back to see his agonized mother standing before their home in flames, her hands raised to the heavens, praying, “O God, be merciful to my children going among these savages.”

The party of Natives that took the Boyd children also took their mother after setting the cabin to flames.

They drove the party on until the pregnant mother and smallest child could go no more, and so they were killed along the trail.

Boone_abductionThe children were traumatized. But they did as their captors told them, running on the trail, always running, and staying silent.

And so they survived and were taken hundreds of miles into the Ohio Territory, and there they were separated and given to different tribes.

But they were not made to be prisoners in the way we usually understand the term.

rice-gatherersYou would think that a captor brutal enough to slaughter a babe before his mother and a mother before her children could not show humanity.

But the Boyd children were adopted by the community and given new parents who taught the children this different way of life.

They ate and slept alongside these Iroquois and Delaware people.

They helped to hunt or prepare food, to care for babies and elders, sew shirts, haul firewood, prepare herbal medicine.

Tthe-tannerhey learned lessons of the forest and the stars and the animals. They became what people of the day called white Indians.

After living in the tribe for four years, David Boyd’s adoptive Delaware father decided it was time to return him to his white family.

David hesitated. This had become his new family, and he liked his new life.

He went reluctantly and was reunited with his father, John Boyd.

Twice thereafter he attempted to flee back to his Delaware family, but was brought back each time, and eventually he married a white woman, settled down, and had ten children.

Rhoda Boyd was rescued by the famous captive hunter, Colonel Bouquet.

Sarah Columbia Boyd Berryman.border.rBut on the trip to Fort Pitt, where she was to be reunited with family, she escaped to her Native family, and never returned to white society.

Sallie was returned to her father on February 10, 1764. John was returned on November 15 that same year, along with his brother, Thomas.

That was exactly 250 years ago. I don’t know of any Boyd tragedies of the kind that make history that have happened since then. My family left the Boyd line behind with my great-grandmother, Sarah Columbia Boyd.

Perhaps the Boyd family can rest now.

There are numerous differing accounts of the Boyd capture. I chose to follow what seems the most credible source, the book Setting All the Captives Free, by the scholar, Ian K. Steele.

Happy Not Anniversary

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Today is not my wedding anniversary. But my husband and I celebrate the date every year. This morning he gave me a big hug and said, “Do you know what today is?” I thought for a second and said, “Oh, it’s our Not Anniversary.” Later tonight we’ll have a nice dinner and laugh about the events of 31 years ago. We had been engaged for about a year but hadn’t gotten around to getting married. He was more of a traditionalist than I, so asked me sweetly if I would care to finally settle on a date, please. I gave it some serious thought and came up with March 4th. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that there was no more appropriate date in that or any year than March 4th. The date itself would add a layer of significance to our marriage. It would be as symbolic as the vows, the ring, the wedding cake, and the two-foot tall candle I bought to burn on each anniversary for the next 50 years.

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He and I have both made our livings as writers during various times of our lives. We can’t go into a restaurant without proofreading the menu. We rewrite actors’ lines in the TV shows we watch. We read book passages out loud to each other if they’re particularly well written. We love words, and we love when they are used in ways that imbue them with layers of meaning. Like the name of this blog: We’re All Relative. At its most basic the blog is about my family’s genealogy. I am telling our stories to the family’s future generations so they don’t have to wonder who they are or where they came from. Peel off that layer and you’ll see a second theme, rather the opposite of the first, that the end game of genealogy is ultimately an exercise in meaningless. Because the farther back you go the more ancestors you have, until you ultimately have a connection to everyone. And therefore no one.

My fifth great-grandfather was Sir John Boyd, who left the comfort of his peerage position in Scotland in 1736 to ply the seas and take up life on the wild frontier of Pennsylvania. Good enough. But I wonder what my other 253 great-great-great-great-great grandparents were doing in 1736. Am I really up to finding out? And what about their parents, and their grandparents? Because they’re all my ancestors too, all 1,024 of them. And this is where the numbers really start adding up. Go back three more generations and you have 15,382 direct ancestors of the grand-parental variety to sort out. Add four more generations, putting you roughly back to 1450, and you have more than a quarter million grandparents of various great- and great-greatness. Add in just one sibling per grandparent and you’re over one million grandparents and first cousins. They all have stories. But I’m not digging them up.

Okay, we’ve peeled off that layer of meaning to We’re All Relative. The next, and last I’ve thought of so far, is about our own meaning in this world. Who we are is relative to place, time, and circumstance. That we are alive today, our ancestors – all billions of them – had to pick the spouses they did, cross the seas when they did, survive the plagues of disease that they did and outrun the wild animals that they did. Robert Boyd was one of three children of my before-mentioned fifth great-grandfather John Boyd, who were killed in an attack on their home by hostile Native Americans. My ancestor was not home at the time, and thus I was born. The fact that I exist is predicated on billions and billions of individual circumstances, decisions, and fates that came before and still occur every day. Which makes me think I could have named my blog, We’re All Irrelevant, or We’re All Impermanent, So Watch Yourself. I think I’ll stick with the top layer. I just like it that I can dive into deeper waters if I have a hankering.

March 4th carries a much less existential symbolism. It is a date with semantic meaning. To be married is to march forth into a shared life. It is to face the trials and share the joys of life side by side, always side by side. It is a commitment to the future, to shared goals and dreams and spontaneous diversions. I’m not one to ever want to march anywhere, but to march forth is in keeping with the formality of a traditional wedding. After our march together down the aisle and then back up the aisle, we fairly ran everywhere else. Sometimes with direction, sometimes not. Sometimes together, sometimes not, but always verging back to our shared place.

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But we didn’t do it on March 4th. No. After being excited about the date and planning the time and place for the wedding and making all kinds of preliminary plans, he came home from work one day and informed me that he had to shoot a commercial on March 4th. It Had Been Decided. The client, the agency, the talent, the production team, even the damn helicopter had been put in motion toward a March 4th date. It was written in pen, while my wedding had only been penciled in. That was the rationale.

We ended up not getting married for another year. There was no urgency pushing us toward a specific date, so we let life carry us along until one or the other – I forget which – decided it was time to pen in a date. We had a lovely wedding on some date, either May 2nd or 4th or 5th, and proceeded to forget which actual day it was every year thereafter. We used to rely on my mother-in-law to settle the date question every year. She’s gone now, but my sister has a pretty reliable memory and a rock-solid reliable planner. I couldn’t tell you even now what day we got married. I only know it was early May and it wasn’t March 4th. I’ll probably call my sister on the first or second of May to get it straight. Sometimes we forget entirely, or remember sometime around mid-May. But we never, ever forget our Not Anniversary on March 4th.

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Happy Not Anniversary, dearest husband.