Monday, May 12, 2014
Graduation
Well, the reason I have not posted and kept up with this blog is a combination of school, family, and other circumstances. Basically: Life happens. This past Saturday I graduated with my second master's degree (MLIS). I recently moved halfway across the country from Georgia back to Louisiana. My husband medically retired from the Marines and started a new job with the VA. I also had a baby last August and was ill for a couple of months afterwards. Now that I am finally done with school and I am starting to get settled, I intend to post on here again! So stay tuned. I hope to post tonight or tomorrow. I just need to pick an ancestor and do it. :)
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
On a side note...
I have never really blogged before because I felt like if I did, every post should have some meaning. It should be written like a college research paper, because, damnit, I have a masters degree and I am working on a second master degree. Well, since I am in grad school right now and already have to write a bunch of well thought out, well researched, well worded papers, if I took this approach, I would never get to blog. I will admit it, writing well does not come easy to me. I am not talking about the little things like "you're" vs "your" or other things like that. I am talking about all of the more complicated grammar mistakes, coherency (if you can't already tell), organization, vocabulary, etc. For that reason, this blog is pretty informal. Yes, I am going to try to keep it from sounding like an illiterate 3rd grader wrote it, but I am not going to go all out formal graduate school level paper on it. I am going to write what comes to mind, and there is a good chance I am not going to proof read much. If that offends you or makes you angry, don't come here. And like I said, please don't judge me. I wrote a 100+ page thesis and then went back to grad school for more. I am so very tired and doing this for fun. Please take mercy on my poor little graduate student soul (and this blog).
Finally: Pocahontas
I have to say, when I was growing up, I had this irrational fantasy about being descended from Pocahontas. I know, everyone wants to be a princess or a queen. I wanted to be a bare footed girl running around the Forrest in a loin clothe (oh wait, that's me now). I was dark skinned, dark haired, and I kind of thought I looked a little like Pocahontas (from the Disney movie, so not really Pocahontas at all). I should also note that I wanted to be descended from Pocahontas and John Smith, because while I loved history, I had absolutely no idea that they never got married and I was quite ticked at Disney when they had John Smith go back to England in the end. It wasn't until much later (and by much later I mean when Pocahontas 2 by Disney came out, another movie with which I was quite miffed), that I realized she married John Rolfe and had a kid (and I am still unclear if she has any actual descendants) and then promptly died at the ripe old age of 22-years-old. Let's just say I was heartbroken.
Fast forward, what, ten years? I don't know and right now I am too sick to look up the release date of Pocahontas 2 and do the math to see how many years it has been (first world problems at their best). Recently, I was discussing an ancestor with one of my cousins. Now, at the risk of rambling and making this post even more incoherent (I was an English major for most of college, if you can believe that, and now you know why I changed majors), let me explain who this ancestor was. His name was William Bronson Lear. He was born in 1840 and he died in 1923. He was born in Nicholsville, Kentucky, and he died in the Hico community of Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, according to his obituary. I don't know for sure who his parents were. I know perhaps more about him than any other ancestor. I have his photo (in which he looks like a certifiable white man). I know he served for John Hunt Morgan in the Civil War and stayed in prison camp at Camp Douglas. And I know some other details. But not who his parents were for sure. His death certificate says his parents were William B Lear, Sr. and Bessie Pound. But he appears on the census with Henry Lear and Massey Pond, although he does not appear to be in their immediate family. I knew his parents were from Virginia. And at some point in time, before I was organized (if you can consider me organized now) and I was still jotting my genealogy notes down on napkins (a habit I inherited from my mother), I scribbled that his mother was a Pound and was a Native American. No idea where I got that from, and we know how those rumors go.
Well, recently I was speaking to a cousins about William. She had plenty of stories to impart about William, as well as photos I had thought did not even exist. The most interesting story perhaps was that William was indeed half Native American, and around 1910 he got a letter from the government notifying him that he could move to Oklahoma to Indian land there. However, if he didn't move, he would lose his claim to the land and benefits and his name would be stricken from the Indian rolls. Well, William being the old man in poor health that he was decided he wasn't moving there because he had no family there and he was too old to be moving off on his own. In addition to this story, there was a story about William's kids going to school and one day there was a lesson on Pocahontas. The kids told the teacher that they were from the same tribe as Pocahontas, but they emphasized that they were NOT related to Pocahontas.
I am definitely not an expert on anything Native American. I do know that we have some Native American blood. My great-great-grandparents on the other side of my family always said they were Choctaw, and it is quite obvious from their photos that they are Native American. However, I do know that a lot of Native American tribes, by virtue of being tribes, had a lot of intermarriage, sometimes to more extent than everyone else in America at that time (yes, I mean everyone; sometime in your family tree some cousins married, you cannot escape it). We even learned in my genetics class that there was a high instance of albinism in a lot of tribes due to the intermarriage of families (okay, I am trying to find a euphemism for inbreeding, but like I said, EVERYONE was inbreeding a little at the time). What do I draw from this? It is pretty likely that if our family was from the same tribe as Pocahontas they were some way related to her, probably too distantly to even remember it or know it, but sometime back there years before, they were related to her, meaning I am probably related to her.
Is this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt? Heck no! By genealogy standards and historical standards we haven't even come close to proving it. It is a rumor, although a pretty good one based on family stories, and then on top of that my assumptions or deductions, or whatever you want to call my possibly flawed reasoning, is added in.
However, it is much closer than I have ever been and I will take whatever I can get.
Fast forward, what, ten years? I don't know and right now I am too sick to look up the release date of Pocahontas 2 and do the math to see how many years it has been (first world problems at their best). Recently, I was discussing an ancestor with one of my cousins. Now, at the risk of rambling and making this post even more incoherent (I was an English major for most of college, if you can believe that, and now you know why I changed majors), let me explain who this ancestor was. His name was William Bronson Lear. He was born in 1840 and he died in 1923. He was born in Nicholsville, Kentucky, and he died in the Hico community of Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, according to his obituary. I don't know for sure who his parents were. I know perhaps more about him than any other ancestor. I have his photo (in which he looks like a certifiable white man). I know he served for John Hunt Morgan in the Civil War and stayed in prison camp at Camp Douglas. And I know some other details. But not who his parents were for sure. His death certificate says his parents were William B Lear, Sr. and Bessie Pound. But he appears on the census with Henry Lear and Massey Pond, although he does not appear to be in their immediate family. I knew his parents were from Virginia. And at some point in time, before I was organized (if you can consider me organized now) and I was still jotting my genealogy notes down on napkins (a habit I inherited from my mother), I scribbled that his mother was a Pound and was a Native American. No idea where I got that from, and we know how those rumors go.
Well, recently I was speaking to a cousins about William. She had plenty of stories to impart about William, as well as photos I had thought did not even exist. The most interesting story perhaps was that William was indeed half Native American, and around 1910 he got a letter from the government notifying him that he could move to Oklahoma to Indian land there. However, if he didn't move, he would lose his claim to the land and benefits and his name would be stricken from the Indian rolls. Well, William being the old man in poor health that he was decided he wasn't moving there because he had no family there and he was too old to be moving off on his own. In addition to this story, there was a story about William's kids going to school and one day there was a lesson on Pocahontas. The kids told the teacher that they were from the same tribe as Pocahontas, but they emphasized that they were NOT related to Pocahontas.
I am definitely not an expert on anything Native American. I do know that we have some Native American blood. My great-great-grandparents on the other side of my family always said they were Choctaw, and it is quite obvious from their photos that they are Native American. However, I do know that a lot of Native American tribes, by virtue of being tribes, had a lot of intermarriage, sometimes to more extent than everyone else in America at that time (yes, I mean everyone; sometime in your family tree some cousins married, you cannot escape it). We even learned in my genetics class that there was a high instance of albinism in a lot of tribes due to the intermarriage of families (okay, I am trying to find a euphemism for inbreeding, but like I said, EVERYONE was inbreeding a little at the time). What do I draw from this? It is pretty likely that if our family was from the same tribe as Pocahontas they were some way related to her, probably too distantly to even remember it or know it, but sometime back there years before, they were related to her, meaning I am probably related to her.
Is this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt? Heck no! By genealogy standards and historical standards we haven't even come close to proving it. It is a rumor, although a pretty good one based on family stories, and then on top of that my assumptions or deductions, or whatever you want to call my possibly flawed reasoning, is added in.
However, it is much closer than I have ever been and I will take whatever I can get.
The Beginning of (Great?) Things
Quite a while ago, I tried to start a little genealogy blog. Not to make money and not even really to spread information on my family tree. I just loved to blab about genealogy and I am pretty sure everyone on my Facebook as well as my husband were tired of hearing about it. For the same reason, I am starting this blog now. Why not just continue the old blog? Well I didn't like the name, and I am pretty stupid when it comes to working this blogger thing, so I could not figure out how to change it. I can't even figure out how to change stuff on this blog I made just now. If you are looking for some deep thoughts that are going to answer your questions about what is the meaning of life or what true happiness means, you are probably in the wrong place. I just want to talk about my genealogy search. Soooo, yeah, I don't know what else to say, besides that is pretty much it and here is my blog.
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