Your Ancestors’ Memories Live On In You. Now There’s Proof.

Posted on April 11, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

My precious niece, a pretty little 18-year old social butterfly, is afraid of crowds.

Put her in a room that’s well-stocked with people, even strangers, and she’ll be the center of attention. But put her in a crowd where everyone’s passing her in different directions and she may just have a panic attack.

My mother-in-law was afraid of pools of water. She wouldn’t go in a lake. She wouldn’t go on a boat. She wouldn’t go near my swimming pool, and even had to take a deep breath before getting in the spa. I could practically hear her heart pounding.

Now it turns out that their parents, or grandparents, or even great-grandparents may be why.

If your great-grandmother was nearly trampled to death in a crowd, there’s a chance you will fear crowds, even if you never heard great grandma’s harrowing story.

Because scientists think that your ancestor’s memories can actually change your DNA.

That if your great-grandmother was bit by a dog and became mortally afraid of them, you stand a chance of inheriting a fear of dogs from her.

The traumatic event changes their DNA, and then passes that changed DNA to the next generation, then the next. The effect continues until your grandmother’s DNA becomes diluted by the increasing number of descendants, and so disappears.

The idea of ancestral memory – of remembering things that happened to your ancestors — isn’t new, but this is the first time it’s getting the boost of scientific proof.

Of course, like all heritable traits, it doesn’t mean that every offspring will have that genetic memory, just as not every child of brown-eyed parents will have brown eyes. Heritability doesn’t work that way.

I suspect we will find that plenty of other traits are transmitted genetically, besides disease propensity, hair texture, nose shape, fear of water, and the like.

I can’t think of any real phobias of my own. I almost wish I did so I could test the theory. I could ask my mother if she, her parents, or her grandparents were ever, say, bit by a dog or nearly drown in the Blue Hole, which was said to be bottomless.

Then I would learn something about both that ancestor, and myself.

Genetic memory, who knew?

Typhoid Falls on the Eggleston Home

Posted on April 9, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

In the summer of 1865 a typhoid epidemic swept small towns throughout America.

Every member of my great-great grandfather Clinton Eggleston’s family in Aurora, Ohio, came down with the fever. Typhoid sign

It’s impossible to tell where it came from, though the highly contagious disease could have been brought by soldiers returning home from the Civil War. A war in which more than twice as many soldiers died of disease than of battle. Diarrhea was their most common killer, followed by typhoid and typhus.

Hospital, Washington DC

The Eggleston home became the family’s personal hospital, with all of them bed-ridden and neighbors sitting vigil and doing what was necessary to keep the family alive. Clinton decided professional medical help was necessary, and hired a male practical nurse to provide what meager care there was available then.

The nurse no doubt applied cold towels to keep fever down, changed sweat-soaked sheets, fed them broth, and did what he could to keep them calm through delirium and pain.

Pale girl

They lived at that time in a new home on a farm in Aurora, Ohio, only a few miles southeast of Cleveland, which was then no more than a large village that had been founded only 40-odd years previous. To the other direction, the house was about a quarter mile from Clinton’s father’s house, where he settled in 1809, building first a log cabin and then a two-story frame house.

The first of my great-great grandfather’s family to perish was Abigail Hickox Eggleston, beloved wife and mother. Seven year old DeWitt and ten year old Frances, my great-grandfather, recovered, but their older sister, Mary, did not, yet lingered a month or more longer than her mother had.

Woman deathbed Recovery for the others was complete, and my great-grandfather suffered no long-lasting ill effects from the disease, other than the tragic loss of mother and sister, who I am sure he mourned for all his life.

What Do We “Really” Discover in Our Ancestors?

Posted on April 7, 2014 by admin

Why do we do it?

Why do we spend our time digging into the past, an exercise that is sure not to change the world in any meaningful way?

Why do we spend hours on end combing through dusty stacks or tussling with software that won’t bend to our will?

I know my answer. It’s simple. Because someone has to do it.

It’s because I have all of my birth family’s photos and memorabilia, and my siblings have hounded me for years to make copies for them, so I’m finally getting around to it.

But that’s not the real answer, is it? We both know it.

There’s a reason I’m the one who ended up with all the photos, after all. Because I have always been the one who has her nose stuck in old journals of my great-great grandfather or who sits picking through dog-earred photos of my un-labeled ancestral strangers that someone shoved in a box and forgot about long ago.

I go after my ancestors with bloodhound-like dedication.

It’s a way of grounding myself, of adding to my understanding of who I am. I want connection, I seek connection to the past “me’s.”

Because as much as I am an individual, I am also an amalgamation of all those who came before me.

That’s heredity. The simple idea that some of my traits – and maybe some of my most important traits – come from my birth family.

And so where did they come from?

A family line may pass down so much more than DNA-dependent traits.

A family passes down its way of looking at and living in the world. And if you’ve ever wondered why you do something a certain way, maybe it’s because of your great-great-grandfather.

At family get togethers my grandfather, always political and with a wry sense of humor, used to get the kids around him, and lead us in singing, “Vote the Democratic party in November, if you want to go to heaven when you die.” It still makes me laugh!

Through genealogical research I know now that he was raised by a staunch Democrat, who was in turn raised by another staunch Democrat.

There is a book I found called History of Allen County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, published in 1906.

In it I found a sketch about my great-grandfather saying, “Like his father, he is a Democrat, and has served as school director, justice of the peace, trustee, assessor and supervisor.”

Now I know that I come from at least four generations of staunch Democrats, and if I look hard enough maybe I can trace the propensity back further.

Family “traits” can take strange turns, too.

I heard a story one time about a family whose tradition it was to cut the Christmas ham in half before cooking it. That’s the way it was done and no one questioned why.

But a young member of the of the family asked. Her mother didn’t know, nor did her aunts, who all cut the ham thus so before baking as well.

So she asked her grandmother, and learned that as a young bride she had a small oven, and needed to cut the ham in two for it to fit.

These are the delightful stories we can uncover when we take interest in our forebears.

But does the information have any use to us? Probably not in proportion to the amount of work it takes to find it. Family Bible Letter to Clara Minerva Brown Eggleston

But that’s just talking in practicalities. It’s not “practical” to want to know more about yourself.

It’s not “practical” to spend your time digging through your past when you “should” be straightening a messy house or putting in a few extra hours at work.

That’s okay. I’m a self-diagnosed progonoplexic.

Progonoplexia is a condition marked by obsession with one’s ancestors.

It was coined to describe the modern Greek people’s preoccupation with their ancient past.

But heck, if those monuments and statues and writers and philosophers were mine, I’d be obsessed too. If one must be obsessed with anything, ancient Greece is one of the healthier choices I can think of.

I’m not sure I can say I’m “obsessed” with my past. But there is a great sense of satisfaction in discovering my forebears. Especially the ones of just two or three generations ago, near enough to have made a big difference in who I am.

Yes, I am a staunch Democrat, like my father and grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great grandfather.

I also have a “tender heart” like my grandmother, or so says my mother.

I have courage, like my great uncle, who after shooting a grizzly bear in Alaska but being injured in the process and unable to make it back to camp, opened and slept inside the bear. (But I’ll go on record as saying I’m not that brave!)

And I am easily frustrated and distracted, like the great-grandfather who up and left his family and never returned. Again, the trait in me is diluted. I’m not that easily frustrated, but I’ve been told I don’t suffer fools.

My husband would say my genealogical pursuit is “internalizing,” which he equates with wheel-spinning. He thinks everyone should be externalizing, thinking and doing in the real world. But there’s room for both, and I do both.

What do we really discover in our ancestors? Ourselves. I know more about myself today than I did before starting my genealogical quest. And that has to be a good thing, right?

Right!

The Puzzling “White Indians” Who Loved Their Abductors.

Posted on April 5, 2014 by admin

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.

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 Logan Captive-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 a Captive Women nd 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 captives Once 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.”

Axtell 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

Aside

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. Meanwhile, 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.

John 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.

On 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.

Their 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.

He 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.

The 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.

The 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.

You 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.

They 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.

But 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.

“Mules are Always Boasting that their Ancestors are Horses.”

Posted on April 1, 2014 by mulberrygrrl

“Mules are always boasting that their ancestors are horses.”

I read that somewhere and busted out laughing. It’s true, isn’t it? And mules aren’t the only ones who do it. I do it. You do it. We all do it.

Napoleon’s horse.

And it’s nothing to be sheepish about either. It’s easy to understand why we light up when we find an impressive, well-known ancestor.

At its most basic, it’s because we all like a good story. Life is just a series of interconnected stories. And telling those stories is the basis of communication.

The joke, “Mules are always boasting that their ancestors are horses” is about communication. So I’ll keep my comments to the way we communicate our interest in genealogy to others.

Man o’War, one of the greatest racehorses of all time. In his career he only lost one race.

When we tell people that our ancestor is a “horse” – someone who impresses people, like George Washington or Marie Antoinette or Man O’War (see photo at right), we’ve suddenly got a conversation. We’ve made a connection.

They know just enough about that historical person to be “pre-interested.”

Conversation is about finding topics of common interest, after all, and if you don’t have anything to say except that you’re related to a person who lived a long time ago, the only response you’ll get is the back of your dinner partner’s head as he turns to talk with the person on his other side.

But talking about your “horses” isn’t all about impressing other people. In fact, it’s not even primarily about impressing other people.

Copenhagen, horse of the Duke of Wellington.

My eyes glazeth over after a spell spent double-checking demographics on the umpteenth ancestor in my family tree.

If you’re at all human, you probably feel the same.

We’re like the dinner partner. We don’t want to bore ourselves. Saying you’re related to Sir Isaac Newton (as I’ve been saying since I was a child) is just a shorthand way of telling someone how interesting, how rewarding it is to research your family’s history.

But unlike our fictional dinner partner, we’re just as interested in the no-names as we are the famous ones.

I’m every bit as interested in my ancestor the Reverend John Fitch, who is not well known, as I am in Isaac Newton.

But I can’t expect anyone else to be interested in him…unless I know enough about him to weave an interesting story. I know what gets a reaction – and follow-on questions – and what doesn’t.

Theodore Roosevelt and his horse, Little Texas, who led the charge up San Juan Hill.

In fact, I’m more interested in the good Reverend Fitch, because his story is not well known. I had to work hard to find out that he moved a congregation into the wilderness of Connecticut in the mid-1600s. That he was a friend of Uncas, the chief made famous in “Last of the Mohicans,” and that he helped get Mohicans on the Colonists’ side in King Philip’s War.” That’s a story or few.

We genealogists have to be obsessed, otherwise we won’t find anything more interesting than dates and names.

We are more than kin connectors or clan catalogers, family finders, or pedigree-ophiles.

The Lone Ranger saved a wild horse from an enraged buffalo, and in gratitude the horse gives up his freedom to become the Lone Ranger’s faithful steed, Silver.

We are storytellers, and we have to be blood hounds for the details, because therein lies the story.

I’m going to keep looking for the horses in my past. I’ll no doubt find some jackasses* as well, but I bet a few of them will make interesting stories too.

Note: A mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey, or jackass.

“Mules are Always Boasting that their Ancestors are Horses.”

Posted on April 1, 2014 by admin