When the Amateur Genealogist sees "Brick Walls" Tumble or Disintegrate: the Glenns of Redfrew

After decades of doing archival research on Herman Melville and other writers (including weeks on the manuscripts of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Clemens, and Faulkner) I decided to try to find something about my white ancestors, starting with two of the tiniest anecdotes about G Grandfather Parker and G Grandfather Bell. Were our physical deformities all inherited or did it have to do with pellagra? Was sharecropping hereditary? Had anyone before Grandpa Costner known how to read and write? Was there any book anywhere that had one of their names in it? Did some of them really have six toes to a foot, prehensile ears, and double rows of teeth?

What I found will go into ORNERY PEOPLE: WHO WHERE THE DEPRESSION OKIES?, about the Southwestern and Western movement from the 1600s, the illustration of American History through one representative family. I mean the Okies who were in Indian Territory before the opening of the Cimarron Strip, the ones who came from the South. I don't know how to do it yet, but I have not eight or ten but hundreds of amazing stories, often (astonishingly) in the words of direct ancestors and uncles and aunts and cousins. As recently as a week ago I found words of a GGG Grandmother preserved in a Dawes Commission affidavit. You can tell the story of the movement west in the ancestry of any representative Depression Okie, I know now. Meanwhile, university presses in Oklahoma are so terrified of the word Okie that they reject a book proposal by return email. (Not an exaggeration, folks.) In Oklahoma, "Okie" is the N-Word.

Now with many newspapers (not all--many don't survive and most have not been digitized) in databases, I have astounded myself over and over again. Who would have thought that because of some political chicanery in 1844 some ancient citizen would put on record praise of the politics of the twice-GGGGG Robert Ewart, the Committee of Safety and King's Mountain man, dead since 1781? ("Two times GGGGG? The Scots believed in keeping the blood lines pure. Or as a Waco cousin who is in water management says, we have those limbs that don't branch. Now, that man descends from the cousin who published a book in 1846 about his captivity in Mexico (a genuine captivity narrative!) and his surviving the black bean lottery, when ten of the prisoners were unlucky.)

Now, I will never be a scientist with DNA, but I can profit from the work that Family Tree DNA has been doing. Sometimes, I can go to FTDNA and find something about a wholly mysterious family. Take the Glenns of South Carolina, John Glenn known only in Dawes Commission affidavits. There he is in FTDNA along with John B. E. Glenn, the 6' 5" tall black haired black eyed (was that the Cherokee blood?) GG Grandfather whose horse died under him in Mexico. There they are, with others, all traced to Renfrew, down the Clyde from Glasgow.

Steele, Saye, Renfrow, Barnes, Jenkins, Ferguson, France. That's been pounding in my head. Now with Google I can see that I missed a couple of the Territorial Governors and misspelled others. Who else has names of Governors of Oklahoma Territory stuck, however imperfectly, between his prehensile ears?  Was Renfrow originally Renfrew? Is Barnes a cousin, like the Barnes who told the WPA about a visit from the James Brothers and the Younger Brothers?

Family Tree DNA does not solve the Parker mystery (THAT was the hardest wall) but it gives cousins in VA early and common ancestry there or back in England. How tall did they grow in Renfrew? There was this Glenn cousin in Texas who used to shoot down any tradesman's sign he hit his head on. But that's another story . . . .

Maunderings so as not to think about the damage Bernie is doing to the country  . . . . And how I have lost my respect for Elizabeth Warren because she has not told Bernie it's time to stop. Yet my essays about her are still up on the internet, long after I got her elected. . . .

"Poor Herman"--title of a new play: Being Austenized is Being Osterized.

I'm just looking at the title, here, "Poor Herman," not commenting on Doss's work. You could apply that title to the ongoing Austenizing of Herman Melville.  Write a sequel to MOBY-DICK, write the lost THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, write a biography of Ungar, write a book about Ahab's wife, write about a Byronic love affair with Augusta, write about Hawthorne and Melville in Love Grove (rats, though, that's been done!). &c. &c. "Poor Herman."

From Greg Lennes's site:
"Poor Herman" is a new play in development by Elizabeth Doss. Austin Texas playwright Elizabeth Doss is a three-times great-granddaughter of Herman Melville. Doss uses an all-female cast to unearth a little-known chapter in Melville’s life when he was struggling to salvage his declining reputation after the initial critical and financial failure of his now epic “Moby-Dick.” The five-woman cast play every character in Melville’s life including Melville himself and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Opens Thursday; 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through May 28. Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. $10-$25. 512-686-6621

Cousin Milton Walker Sims 1831-1912

One of the strangest things I have found in working on ORNERY PEOPLE is that Milton and Cousin Jesse Wadlington Sparks (also my cousin, not related to Milton) were together on a fateful day in 1863. Granted that I am kin to millions of Americans and in 1863 was already kin to many tens of thousands, what is the likelihood that two men who went down in General Grant's correspondence were cousins of mine but not of each other? Did they ever have contact again before Sparks's death in 1896? Sims would very likely have read in the papers about Sparks's death.

You saw Carly fall? You do know who tripped her, don't you?

He repented that marriage as fast as he did the one to Kasich.

No Exit Polls for Me--Janis Joplin 5-7--& Meanwhile my Ornery Cousin Major Sparks

I will not waste a moment today on the final deterioration of Cruz and Sanders.

According t the Nashville Tennessean on 17 November 1889, two or three nights earlier Major Jesse W. Sparks boarded the train bound for Chattanooga.

Here is THE RAILWAY HOG. / A True Story of How His Impoliteness Was Rebuked."

"The car was crowded, but Mr. Sparks' keen eye soon discovered as he progressed along the aisle what he doubtless considered a favorable opening. An individual, who would by some extremists have been considered a hod of the human species, lay spread across two seats, with his luggage on a third.

'Is this seat engaged?' queried the Major, pointing to the seat upon whose plush covering the stranger's pedal extremities were extended.

The stranger answered not a word, but gave a surprised and insolent stare at the questioner.

The Senator, without more delay jerked the seat over, probably severely abrading the stranger's shin-plasters."

WHAT FOLLOWS EARNS COUSIN JESSE A PLACE in my

  ORNERY PEOPLE.

Jesse was in his 50s. 

Notice "New York Values" as in 1889.

Cousin Jesse W. Sparks--When Terry's Rangers were formed in Houston in 1861

Blackburn's Recollections

 Lieutenant Sparks, who had belonged to the United States army if I mistake not, came authorized to administer the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States and enroll us as her soldiers. A little incident happened at the time which showed the feelings and determination of the men. They were lined up on three sides of a hollow square (as I now remember). The enrolling officer in the center asked this question, "Do you men wish to be sworn into service for twelve months or for three years or for during the war ?" With a unanimity never surpassed, a shout unheard of before, that whole body of men shouted, "For the war," "For the war !" not one expecting or caring to return until the war was over, long or short, and the invaders had been driven from our borders. And now the regiment is ready for service, as fine a body as ever mustered for warfare. The majority of them were college boys, and cowboys, professional men, men with finished education, men just out of college, others still under-graduates, men raised in the saddles, as it were, experts with lariat and with six shooters, and not a few from the farm, from the counting houses and from shops.

 

Cousin Jesse Sparks had not in fact been in the Army earlier.

Cousin Jesse W. Sparks's Loyalty to a Fellow Texas Ranger

The headline is cut off: AFTER TWENTY-ONE YEARS.
New Orleans PICAYUNE 28 January 1893.