Obscure Family History…

I thought Sam Parker was from North Carolina.

 

My grandmother was born in 1894, the fifth child of six to Pomeranian immigrants who had settled in the outskirts of Chicago (now the Wicker Park neighborhood) around 1885 . At 17 she married a German from Thuringia and they moved to North Dakota to establish a farm. Five years and three children later, he died of an infection. It was the first of three husbands whom grandma buried.
Older widowers in Dakota didn't mind a ready-made family, so she remarried to a man 20 years her senior. Family legend has it that her husband smuggled whiskey in from Canada while struggling to make ends meet. After a decade and fathering seven more children, he died in 1927. A year later, the family lost the farm.
With too many mouths to feed at home, Mom left school at 16 to work in Chicago as a domestic. Her brother enlisted in the Army, beginning a 40-year military career. Grandma remarried and had three more kids before her husband was killed in a highway crash.

 

I guess it's how someone wants to classify it. Parker had more U.S. medals, but Calvin Ward was awarded medals from about half the countries in Europe. Ward is sort of a footnote to history because unlike York and others, he tried to forget what he'd seen in the bottom of a bottle and finally did it by ending his own life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_I._Parker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_John_Ward

 

That explains a lot about Hedda Hopper. Signed, a guy who used to live in Altoona. She also was portrayed as a backstabber in “Trumbo.”

Apparently my maternal side has some distant connection to Custer. It’s rarely discussed.

 

Mxyzptlk?

 

My grandpa's sister married the guy who coined "rock 'n' roll"

 

Trumbo was brilliant.

 

I've already dumped a lot of genealogy stuff on previous threads, but I've been seriously doing it now about 15 years, and among my findings:

1) Raynald/Reunaud de Chatillon, essentially the villain of the movie "Kingdom of Heaven," is my 27th great grandfather. Adds some gusto to the scene where legendary Muslim warrior sultan Saladin most emphatically and most deservedly whacks off his head, on July 4, 1187.

2) Henry VII, father of Henry VIII, is my -15th GGF. The fat guy is my 14th great grand uncle. Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, is my first cousin 14 times removed.

3) The current Queen Elizabeth II is my 13th cousin, once removed.

4) Giles Corey, immortalized in "The Crucible" for demanding "more weight" as he was being executed by crushing after the Salem Witch Trials, is my 10th GGF.

5) Matoaka Pocahontas Rebecca Rolfe Powhatan is my 14th great grandaunt in law.

6) I am descended from 3 participants in direct combat in the Revolutionary War, fully qualifying me for Sons of the American Revolution and a bunch of other lahh dee dahh societies.

7) I am descended from John Iyannough, the Wampanoag Indian chief who helped arrange the first Thanksgiving, as well as white settlers who came over within weeks of the mayflower, so I had ancestors on both sides of that table.

B) In colonial New England, a couple of my direct ancestors were, first, the first legal slaveholder in Vermont I believe; and then another was involved in a murder trial in his young adulthood (mid 20s) which he was accused and then acquitted of slaughtering several Indians to clear the land for settlement, thrn settled down for a nice happy life operating his farm, ( including siring a daughter who got married in order to spawn my line of descent) only to be paid a return visit some 35-40 years later in which the descendants of those Indians, living maybe 20 miles away, hopped on their horses and cantered into town in order to settle the family accounts due. And as Sheriff Bart so aptly put it, "they was open for business, baby!"

9) I signed up for AncestryDNA two or three years ago. The results were mildly interesting but not surprising. Given my known ancestors (great grandparents) were 7/8 Irish and 1/8 British, I expected the results to say 87.5 percent Irish and 12.5 percent English.
Well, well. The original results said:

84 pct Irish
10 pct English
3 pct Baltic/Nordic/Scandinavian (bright red hair does run in our family)
2 pct Central European

~ 1 pct Native American or indeterminate Asian

... all of which actually fits pretty well with the paper trail mythology.

But then ... As the technology improves, AncestryDNA issues periodic new updates on the newest results. Late last year they sent me a breakdown that read:

86 pct Irish
14 pct British ...
that's it. No further breakdown.

Which of course matches perfectly with my original expectations, but kind of glosses over the paper traces of Native American or random European ancestry.



I got plenty more. Those are only the highlights. (I'm related by galactically distant cousin/nephew links to every US president but two: Martin Van Buren and Fatfuck.)

 

Thanks to @qtlaw for starting this thread -- it got me to do a Google dive on my grandfather and find a few things I had missed before.

My maternal grandfather has a Gaelic Football stadium named for him in Derry. My parents and my mom's family all went to Northern Ireland for the dedication; I was in college then so I missed out.

Once or twice before I tried a half-hearted Google search trying to find John Mullan Stadium but came up empty handed. This time it occurred to me that it's probably in Gaelic. Sure enough, I found Sean Ó Maolain Park in Glenullin. It's the home of John Mitchel's GAC Glenullin, which includes a Gaelic Football team.

My grandfather founded that club in 1925. He was the local schoolmaster. He was only 23.

Just a few years later he emigrated to the United States.

Here's where it gets interesting: we have no idea why. He didn't want to. He missed Ireland terribly and I think was fairly unhappy in the U.S.

My family is Northern Ireland is Catholic and quite... uh... politically active in that regard. It seems pretty clear that he was involved in something that made staying in Ireland impossible for him (and the late 20s were a dangerous time for young men with Republican leanings in the North).

He came to the U.S., married a lovely Polish girl and had six children; one son and five daughters, including my mother. He was a penitentiary guard here, at Alcatraz, Lewisburg and Terminal Island. He died in the early 70s. I have little to no memory of him.

In 1977 my parents took me to Northern Ireland for a week to see the family. My grandfather's brothers and their families were all there. It was an eye-opening time to be in Derry -- the Troubles were very much in full swing, and there were barricades and heavily-armed British troops everywhere we went.

Again, I have no idea what my grandfather got into before he left... but in 1977 at ten years old I had tea in the home of the leader of the Sinn Fein. He learned that we were visiting and insisted on welcoming us 50 years after my grandfather left. (It's killing me that my mom can't remember his name. I've done a bit of reading on The Troubles lately. I'd love to know who I met.)

At the dedication of the stadium in 1986 people were asking my uncle for his autograph. He did not have a great relationship with his father, so I cannot imagine how odd that was for him.

Whatever led him to flee Ireland has been taken to the grave. His children never dared ask him; his brothers hinted that there was a good reason why he had to go but never gave any details. They're all gone.

I called my mom this morning to wish her a happy Mother's Day. I told her that I had found a little background on the club and that their Wikipedia page includes a discussion of my grandfather leadership in creating it. She thought that was pretty cool.

After we hung up she texted me a photo of her father when he played with the club he founded. He's front left, with the great hair. Genetics hosed me on that front.

 

My mother was very into genealogy for about fifty years, from the time I was 7 or 8 until her death. I can't tell you how many trips we made to dig out information, from the un-air conditioned attics of Georgia county courthouses digging in boxes of old records to walking old church graveyards to stomping around in briar covered old family cemetaries. On the other hand, it also prompted a two week family trip to Washington D.C. when I was 12. They found an apartment that rented by the week, so we could cook breakfast and dinner and only eat lunch out, saving some money for more valuable things. My father, brother and I spent a week in the Smithsonian and touristed all over the area while Mom was locked down in the National Archives and the Library of Congress. The cool part of that trip was that we were in D.C. through the Israeli Six Day War, so when I watched the Evening News they were reporting from the Pentagon that we were driving past pretty much daily. That gave the headlines a bit more immediacy to my young eyes.

The other big benefit of her digging into old records was that she spent a fair bit of time at the Atlanta Downtown library poring over microfilm, including some loaned from the Archives. This meant that during summer vacations from school I could go down there with her and prowl the aisles of books looking for stuff that looked interesting while she made notes for a couple of hours. Picture a kid holding both arms in front of him, carrying a stack of books up to his chin out to the car.

I'm eligible for the Sons of the Revolution, as we have several Revolutionary soldiers in the line, including the only one that I would consider notable, Col. William Prescott, the commander at Breed's (not Bunker) Hill who is supposed to be the one who said "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes". We also had family on both sides of the Civil War, so I'm eligible there as well. SAR/DAR etc. was never my thing.

The earliest that she could pin down my father's direct line was a multi-G Grandfather who shows up in the 1820 Census as having come to Georgia from Carolina. Her family came to New England early, and could be run back to England and France. I'm sure there are a few notables if you go back that far but I don't recall or value any as that far back things spread so wide that you might be related to anyone.

 

The 1920s weren't a good time anywhere on the Irish island. Between the revolution, the civil war, partition, sectarianism running rampant and people forced to flee their homes if they lived in the wrong neighborhood... I wouldn't have been happy in that environment.

@PCLoadLetter, was it Ruairí Ó Brádaigh who you met? Some background: Uncompromising republican Ruairí Ó Brádaigh dies aged 80

A fair bit of my dad's family is still there. He left right before the Troubles intensified. Last visited in 2015. There was a short stretch in the aughts where we went every year or two. In a lot of ways I feel more at home there than I do here.