Who were they?

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

Source unknown.

The Rocket Scientist has developed a passion for genealogy.  He has traced his family back as far as he can, and mine as well.  Contained in all those wealth of facts and figures, birth and death dates, residence location, and marriage records, lie some fascinating stories.

It turns out that I can, if I choose, apply for both membership in the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution.  I can think of few supposedly reputable organizations that I would be less likely to join than those, so this amuses me mightily.

Some of his ancestors where in Virginia pretty shortly after it became a colony. In addition to English blood, he has Scotch and Irish (which may explain the red hair).  His ancestors include governors or two states.

But most amusing to all of us is the story of his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.  This ancestor was the son of two first cousins -- first cousins on both sides, maternal and paternal (two sets of siblings intermarried).  Which would make him his own second cousin, two times over.  They lived in Arkansas.  [Supply your own  joke here.]

Mysteries have been solved: why my paternal grandfather cut off ties with his birth family, making it difficult to track his ancestors at first.  My great-grandfather divorced my great-grandmother, who about a year later married another man in the same town.  Given that one of my grandfather's siblings was born about a year before the divorce, and given the paucity of divorces in Georgia in the 1910s, it does make one wonder.

But most interesting to me is my mother's side of the family.

When I was an attorney, long long ago in a galaxy... okay, pretty close to here, I was telling a fellow associate that my mother was a native Floridian, which were in fact scarcer than hen's teeth.  He scoffed, stating that his ancestors had been in California for four generations.  I felt vaguely ashamed.

It turns out I can trump him.  My mother's family was in Florida for seven generations, back to the early 19th century, having immigrated there shortly after it was bought from the Spanish.

Some context: this was before the setting of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's The Yearling, long before air conditioning and the land boom of the 1920s. Before the Second and Third Seminole Wars. Before Florida was a state. Florida was an inhospitable place, and my ancestors lived there for seven generations.

Of course, there was a very high probability they were slave-holders: agriculture in the territory consisted of plantations, and 44% of the population of 140,424 in 1860 were slaves.  This makes me quite uncomfortable, as it should, but refusing to face the past is the province of the coward.  I am not a slave-holder, but am the descendant of them, and it behooves me to do all that I can to work towards the eradication of the legacy of slavery and institutional racism which still exists in this country.

It turns out I am a Southerner -- a Floridian and a Georgian -- through generations and generations.  Allowing for the fact that my dad was a Navy brat, I am part of the first generation to live (and probably die) outside the South.  Me and my sister in Alaska are, in our family at least, pioneers.  My sons are definitely not Southerners, being about as Californian as one can get.

Interesting.  I never thought of myself as a pioneer. 

As far as the second part of that quote, that is still to be seen.