I’m am a nephew preceded by multiple greats of Robert E. Lee on my mother’s side and Jean Laffitte on my father’s.
Contrarianism and rebellion come naturally to me, I guess.
I have an ancestor who was probably at Valley Forge with Washington. (We have pay stubs with dates before and after the winter stay there.)
I also have ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, including one guy who dressed up as a pie-selling woman to spy on Union troop camps.
Well my last name is Booth…so possibly…
In addition to the ancestors I mentioned earlier, I had one who was, prior to the Civil War, a vocally anti-secession Whig living in north Georgia. He was in his 50s, too old to be drafted, so he stayed behind when the boys went off to war, and continued in his trade of making wagons.
Well, the war soon provided a market for his wagons. After the battle of Chickamauga, this ancestor was called upon to haul the wounded away from the battlefield, to the Confederate hospital in Ringgold.
For the duration of the war, he was harassed for his firmly pro-Union sentiments, and was repeatedly victimized by Confederate marauders.
My grandfather spent a good portion of his career as treasurer of Reykjavik, Iceland, including the WWII era, IIRC.
An interesting thing that gives some historical perspective to how recent slavery was that I found is this:
I was born in 1966, years after JFK was killed, grew up with color television and AC and had a Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s like every other teenager and even played with Ataris, so in other words I’m not that old (“I’m only 41, I still have my virility…”). But my parents’ wedding was attended by a former slave owner.
My g-g-g-g grandfather, who owned 48 slaves, died at the beginning of the Civil War (really interesting story about his estate, but I digress). He was 72 when he died, leaving behind 10 grown children by his first wife as well as a pregnant 30 year old widow with whom he already had two little girls, the oldest of whom was named Becky (born when he was about 68). In his will, which I have a copy of, he left Becky two slaves, a young newlywed couple; divorcing the ethics of slavery it was a good bequest- the husband was about 21 and the wife was about 18 and he probably figured that by the time Becky married they’d have several children that would increase her dowry. (He died before updating his will to list her younger sister and his twin sons were born two months after he died, but he did make a “to be shared with any subsequent issue” comment.)
Anyway, Becky, born in 1856, was therefore a slaveowner, though only 5 when her father died. Due to an odd series of marital crossovers that I won’t go into Becky was my mother’s great-aunt and step-grandmother (among other relationships) and so came to her wedding. To quote my mother “She was in her 90s and she didn’t know who the hell was getting married, but she was there.”
I just think that’s odd- slavery and slave auctions and the Civil War seem as remote as Cleopatra and dinosaurs and the Flood- just a “not here/not now” void of the past- but it was so recent that there was a slaveholder at my parents’ wedding and I’m too young to remember Beatlemania or the first moon landing.
Becky’s father, the old man, was born in South Carolina to Swiss parents, Huguenots who spoke German and English well into the 19th century, and had the given names George Washington because he was born about the time Washington was inaugurated. He lived in an extended family (the 1750s built house is still there) that included the grandparents who had emigrated in 1735. This makes me just three “kiss on the cheeks” away from a man who knew “the immigrants” and from a man who was born the year Washington was inaugurated (one cheek kiss being me and my mother, the second being my mother and Becky, and the third Becky and her father). To quote Obama quoting Faulkner “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.”
Something I already knew is that my grandfather’s sister was abducted into a white slavery ring in the 1920s. It was the standard m.o.: “traveling salesman” sweet talks a naive country girl, convinced her to elope, drugs and rapes and sells her. She wound up in a brothel in Chicago where she smuggled a letter to her family. I would love to know more about this but the participants are dead. (Her children might know something of it, or might not, but it’s a sensitive subject to broach- “Your dead Mama ever tell you about back when she was a whore in Al Capone’s time?”) All I know are fragments, including my grandfather’s comment “You ever wanna rape a girl and sell her, make it one who doesn’t have 10 brothers and a daddy and thirty cousins, every one of them with a gun and a train pass and too dumb to give a damn about who’s who in a big city.”