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It's clear now that Skip Gates is a suck-up of the
highest order. Knowing better, he assured Affleck that Affleck's mother was a
Freedom Rider in 1964: "Your mother was there"--with powerful
pictures displayed behind the men. That to my mind is unforgivable, even worse
than removing something embarrassing because the subject is a
"megastar" who just might be persuaded to get you into the Academy of
Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. For years I have been working intermittently
on a book to be called something like ORNERY PEOPLE: WHAT WERE THE DEPRESSION
OKIES?--(question mark at the end). I started off thinking there would be no
written record of my Colonial and Early Republic ancestors and found, in fact,
masses of documentation, including some of their own words going back to the
1600s. In the years before I learned to demand clear proof I accepted some
connections others had made. I loved being a North Carolina Gregory for a
while--after all, 7 sons fought against the British. I loved being descended
from Cyrus Parks--after all, that made me a Beattie, some of whom in
Pennsylvania had been heroic. Alas, the connections were not there. I learned
that in genealogy there were recurrent types: the "I want to be kin to
kings at any cost" sort of fantasist or "I want to get a glimpse of
their character more than their names" sort of ancestor hunter. To lie, to
say one more ancestor was at King's Mountain, would dishonor the 9 or a dozen
who did fight there. Dammit, GGGG Grandpa Knox is in the history books as a fighter there but at 90 in his pension application he said
he was not there because Col. Johnston (whom he did not identify as his
brother-in-law) had sent him away on some business. You go back to camp half an
hour away and bring something back and you miss the whole magnificent one-hour
show. You don't lie. You don't lie when an uncle carries out an order to draw
and quarter a murderer. You don't lie when someone kills a slave with a blow
from his cane and gets away with it, in Maryland just before the Revolution. You
don't lie when one of the men skins a wolf alive. (I was startled last week to
see this practice depicted in HORSESHOE ROBINSON.) You find unimaginable
heroism, too, if you were an Okie whose folks got to Indian Territory early,
for often you can track their passage from Philadelphia or Baltimore or
Charleston. But you verify and verify and rejoice in all you find. You never
lie to yourself or others. Skip Gates must not be allowed to perform on PBS
again. He shames all honest genealogists.
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