Reading Albion’s Seed told me a lot about my own family. My mother’s father was a proud man, the description given of the Scotch English border people who immigrated starting about 1725. Author David Hackett Fischer says that most of them arrived in America desperately poor, with no possession but a stubborn pride.
We know nothing about my grandfather’s grandparents except their names, Paul Brown and Sarah Leonard. My grandfather liked to imagine he was descended from Peter Brown of the Mayflower. Impossible. There is no genealogical record covering the missing century and a half. And… Peter Brown only had daughters.
The strongest clue about Paul Brown’s origin is geographical. His son Ebenezer was born in Ten Mile, Washington County Pennsylvania. That’s the Appalachian Mountains, to which the book says this last wave of immigrants was unceremoniously shuffled by the good people of the Delaware Valley who didn’t want to put up with either their poverty or their presumption. Ten Mile is where Ebenezer married Mayflower descendant Mary Cook, uniting the Puritan and the Scotch border sides of the family.
Religion is another clue. My grandfather was a staunch Presbyterian, the predominant religion of this wave of immigrants. First in the family to go to college, he became an orthopedic surgeon. Though he survived until I was in my mid-20s, I never had much of a conversation with him. He wasn’t much interested in his grandchildren. He did, however, insist on the rather elegant sobriquet he had invented for himself “Granddoc,” grandfather the doctor.
Though neither was even an ounce French, Granddoc had us call our grandmother Grandmère. She was a third generation German immigrant from a prosperous New York city family. He had married up. As the book would have the border immigrants, he appears to have been a controlling husband.
Grandmère had inherited lovely crystal stemware appropriate to German wines which a Presbyterian could never serve. She didn’t drive. My mother had to (or was glad to!) get her license at 14 to drive her mother around Long Beach, Ca. Mother recounted that her parents jealously guarded their individual investment portfolios.
My mother had little use for the old man. She like to point out his hypocrisy, such as going to church on Sundays but chasing the nurses during the week, which would fit with the Scots-Irish characterization in the book. Mother married my dad despite her father’s wishes. I don’t know what he wanted for my two aunts, but they never married.
Granddoc was apparently a generous Christian. After Grandmère’s sister Eleanor was widowed when her missionary husband died of some Chinese disease, he let her live rent free in one of their properties until their five children grew up. After his death in 1968 Mother counted more than a million dollars in uncollected doctor’s bills. He was lenient with those hammered down by the Depression.
As I recall the story, mother drove Grandmère’s own modest car. Granddoc drove a huge prewar Packard like this. A bit precariously. He was in his 70s and had only one eye. I suspect the other had been lost in a farm accident growing up – it was never discussed.
That’s the story of my English-Scotch ancestry. I’m glad to have the insights of Albion’s Seed give it some more balance.
Another of the book’s interesting observations is that the German Pietists who immigrated to the Delaware Valley were welcomed by the Quakers who found them spiritually compatible. My father’s ancestors settled in Tulpehocken, a center of German Pietism, in the 1730s.
For what it’s worth, it was not hard to trace the origins of my father’s family back to about 1500 in Germany. Fischer says that the Pietist immigrants were mostly literate. The family tree for my Pilgrim ancestors begins about 1400 in East Anglia, the most literate part of the island, from which the Puritans sailed. On the other hand the Scots-Irish didn’t have much written family history on either side of the water. Most couldn’t write. Paul Brown just showed up one day in Appalachia.
Reflecting on the five generations the whole tribe was in America, my rough computation is that I am 1/16 Scotch, 1/16 French, 3/16 English and the rest German. My children therefore inherit each of those ancestries by half, the other half being Ukrainian.
What is Ukrainian? Oksana’s surname, Badovsky, is prevalent in Slovakia and by some accounts originated from a town in Poland. Oksana’s family’s recollection only goes back to her maternal great-grandfather, a kulak liquidated by Stalin in the 1920s. In the ‘40s the Badovsky family was forcibly resettled from Kirovograd Oblast to Okha on Sakhalin Island, where her father was born and raised before they came back.
Upon return they were again displaced. The riverside village of Novogeorgievsk was flooded by a hydroelectric project in the 1960s and the whole population moved a few miles to the newly built lakefront town of Svetlovodsk. For all the moves they still identify strongly as Ukrainian. By arithmetic the kids can claim to be half Ukrainian – it wouldn’t make much difference if we knew more. In spirit they are purely Ukrainian. Our hope is that they can enjoy more stability than their ancestors.
We also hope that they can have more of a sense of “their own people” than Oksana or me. Oksana’s life in Kyiv contrasts strongly with that of her upbringing. Her mother has never been comfortable with our friends here, making herself scarce whenever we have company. I’m a gregarious sort. I liked to entertain in Washington, D.C., but found myself more and more cancelled even before the turn of the century. Most of those whom I called friends twenty and thirty years ago don’t return my calls. Some are openly hostile on account of my skeptical views on most modern mantras. So far as I can see the kids are well accepted here. Hallelujah!
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Eddie finished his exams yesterday, doing pretty well. He likes the school and they like him. When I noted that he was lucky to be with smart kids who wanted to be there, he rejoined, no, quite a few are there because their parents forced them. They are not happy about the workload. What a blessing that he is!
Here’s a brain teaser. You have a thirteen inch stick. How many tick marks do you need to put along one side of it, and where do you put them, in order to be able to measure every integral distance between 1 and 13 inches? For example, if you put tick marks at 1 and 3, besides 1 and 3 you could measure 12 and 10 starting from the other end, and between 1 and 3 you could measure 2.
Eddie and I talked about where Zoriana should go to school. Her loving, caring Sunflower School is less than academically rigorous. Should we enrich her education and leave her there, or move her? If so, when and where? Though we have at least a year and a half before we do anything, we should have a plan.
The question is social as well as academic. You make lifelong friendships in school, and you might meet your marriage partner as well. I planted the questions in Eddie’s mind, making it a team effort. He should get to know how people prepare to enter Russanovsky Lycée. We might do the same for our girls.
Quite a tome. Haven't read the book but troubled by the Virginia Cavalier stereotype. One side of my family arrived in VA in the 1630's, received a property grant alongside others, some as released indentured servants. They were not particularly wealthy as were most people nearby. Hard work eventually paid off but they were not favorites of the King nor principals of the VA Company as was Sir William Berkeley who owned a huge estate.
Suggesting three waves starting with New England in 1630's dismisses the established VA colony that had a legislative body in 1619. Quite true that each area was founded for different goals but each was setup by investors hoping for a return. VA even had a revolutionary precursor - 1676 Bacon's Rebellion (https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm) where Sir Berkeley got smacked.
My other side were from displaced Scotsmen - most dirt poor surviving on wits and a strong dislike of government. They were pushed out nearly everywhere they attempted to settle from NE south and as late arrivals much better land had been claimed. Emigrating from Scotland to Ireland many kept moving but had no liking for the Irish.
The divisions among these settlers are also reflected in England itself, even today. Scots, mids and the south of England retain much of the 1600's! Remarkable that the three groups could cooperate to create the USA.
Slavery was a very odd thing in 1619 where blacks arrived from a captured ship. Colonists were confused about what to do with people who didn't speak English and had no understanding about farm work. Initially they got land grants like indentured servants but by 1660 or so, the grants became more limited with more settlers arriving so the first laws that relate to property began to be created, culminating in actual slave law in 1705.
I do hope to read the book but it's on a long list.
Going forward, Ukraine will need your children.
When an individual enters a university, he or she gathers around friends with similar aspirations, but I think it is important to have friends with good personalities during middle school and high school. I think parents also need to be careful.
Mr. Graham looks like your grandfather.
Atavism.