Genealogy & Family History Community
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Leave the blood feuds at home
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Good morning, everyone. I did not start out to be a genealogist or a family historian. I knew a bit about my family history from some of the things that my parents had told me when I was a child. My dad's family came from Appalachia, and I knew that he had ancestors who fought in both the American Revolution and Civil War. I knew that my mom's father's family came to the US from England in the 1880s, and that her mom's family, the Grays and the McLeods, came from Scotland via Canada.
I had never even tried to research our family history until my two older kids were in middle school. As part of an 8th-grade US history project, they had to construct a genealogy. I pulled out the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of the family Bible, my baby book. My dad's maternal grandmother was listed as Zilla Harlin who was married to William H. Seay. William Seay had served in the Union Army during the Civil War. He was not exactly a war hero. He developed dysentery and was discharged as medically unfit after nine months. He became a dentist after the war.
Zilla turned out to be even more interesting. Harlin is one of the variant spellings of Harlan (originally Harland). My great-grandmother was a member of the Harlan Family. She is actually number 568 in the Harlan genealogy. The Harlands/Harlans started out in England, and emigrated from there to Ireland, and from Ireland to America in the late 17th century. They were Quakers who were evangelized by George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. Once I knew that my great-grandmother was a Harlan, it was easy to trace my relationships with the rest of the Harlan family in America, since Adolphus Harlan wrote a history of the Harlan family in America back in 1914.
It turns out that I am the 4th cousin (three times removed) of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan shown here:
Justice Harlan is known as the "great dissenter", and he is best known as the one justice who voted against Plessy v. Ferguson. Here is part of what he wrote in his dissent:
What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation. ~source
Son 2 managed to get some mileage out of his relationship with the Justice. When he was an undergraduate at Penn, he spent his summers working in the manuscript library at Princeton. Princeton has a room that contains a collection of Justice Harlan's papers. Son 2 walked in to work one day, pointed to the room, and said "he's my cousin." He got a lot of respect from his co-workers after that.
I had had much less success tracing my mom's side of the family. Her maiden name was Hunter, which is about as common an English name as you can get. After my mom passed in October, I spent some time going through her things. I found a photo album with a lot of pictures I had never seen before. The album included pictures of both my maternal great-grandmothers. All I knew about them is that they both lived well into their 80s and that they had both lived with my mom's family when she was young.
This is a picture of my mom's paternal grandmother, Anna Feekings Hunter. She was born in England, and she had tea every afternoon. I have her tea set. My mom called her "Grandma".
As you can see, she was a tatter or lace-maker. The strands she used to make the lace were held in bobbins made of bone.
This is my mom's maternal grandmother, Alice Gray McLeod with her parasol. My mom called her "Gram."
Here is a picture of Gram with my Aunt Alice and my Uncle William. "Willie" died in childhood, and I did not know that there were any pictures of him still extant. My mom told me that her mom (Grammy to me) was never the same after Willie died.
Through some quirk of genetics, there is one blonde in every generation in both my mom's and my dad's family. Willie was the blonde one in my mom's family. I was the blonde one in my family, and Son 3 is the one of my kids who is blonde.
My mom also had a younger brother, Bob. Uncle Bob was my favorite uncle. Unlike my great-grandfather, Uncle Bob was a real war hero. He was a medic who traveled with the tanks through Germany at the end of the war. He earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. My mom has the telegram that her family received when Uncle Bob was wounded. Here is the newspaper clipping showing him receiving his Bronze Star:
I think that my mom may have acquired these photos and clippings when my Uncle Bob passed away in the 1990s. My son Rob is named after him. Mom was the very last of her generation. I am so glad that she left us these wonderful photos.
The floor is open.