My friends know that I periodically go down genealogical rabbit holes. It’s somewhat like working in a mine--you go deep into dark recesses, for there rich deposits may be uncovered. Eventually, however, you have to leave the darkened past and return to the light of day and engage the world as it is. But it is great fun, and it can be useful as well—as long as you can properly understand what to do with it, what it really means, and more importantly, what it does not mean. I will explain.
After a long period of exploring varying paternal lines, I have recently returned to researching my mother’s side of things. I took one particular couple, 3rd great-grandparents John and Lucy, as my launching-off place. They were a farming couple, like everyone else in the South at that time. They owned a small farm in Alabama that they worked themselves without slaves. These yeoman farmers were the very vision of Thomas Jefferson’s America; that is, of course, for everybody else besides himself and his set.
There is enough variety in this couple’s ancestry to keep things interesting. John’s descent was something of an outlier in the antebellum South, as he was the grandson of a German Hessian soldier. Lucy’s ancestry was distinctly split. Her father’s people were relatively recent Anglo-Irish immigrants, coming over in the mid-eighteenth century. I say Anglo-Irish on purpose. They were not Scots-Irish, not a Presbyterian in the lot. Neither were they recent English residents in Ireland, the so-called “Ascendancy.” If you were “ascendant” in Ireland, what possible interest would you have in the backwoods of South Carolina? They seemed to be from the “Old English” in Ireland–as Irish as the Irish, just not Gaelic, with names like Brewster and Dickson.
But Lucy’s mother’s people were a different matter altogether. They were all old Virginians, of the very sort we Southerners like to think we descend from, rather than the indentured servants who were usually our actual forebears. These Taliaferros and Smiths and Townleys and Worthams and Berrymans and Newtons and Grymes formed a thick web of connections; a cousinage that included people whose names made the history books, such as Washington, Fitzhugh, Lee and Warner, etc. This is the world that tobacco and avarice created: one of plantations and slaves and inheritances and settlements and lawsuits. These people are no more fascinating than the indentured servants they brought over; it is just that they are the ones who left a written record.
It is this particular lineage that proved to be my ticket into the Jamestowne Society. I am a member of six of these heritage groups, and frankly, the puffed-up, ceremonial self-importance of some of them can invite ridicule. Not so with the Jamestowne Society. They are a serious organization which promotes and supports real historical research and preservation. I wish others were so inclined. Of course, the Jamestowne Society does have its social side, as would be expected. And while there are chapters all over the nation, such as the one in Dallas, the organization is, at its heart, still very much of a Virginia thing. And so last year, I found myself sitting at a banquet table in Williamsburg with all these old Virginia elites—or, as I suspect, their wannabes. It was the paternal side in me that took a bemused, ironical outlook on all this, as the son of a woman born to sharecroppers in a dog-trot cabin. 1
My stake in all this rests with one Robert Taliaferro, a true Cavalier, if you will. He arrived in Virginia in 1647, at the very time that the regicidal Puritans were consolidating their regime in England. He was a colonial success story; marrying a woman with connections and quickly prospering in land speculation and tobacco. His sons built on that legacy. His name is not at all English, he being the grandson of a merchant from Venice, Bartolomeo Taliaferro, who emigrated to London in 1562.2 The Talaiferros are well-documented in England, with their coat-of-arms registered and all that goes with that. So, this is a very satisfying lineage to latch-onto.
And the phrase “latch-onto” is intentional. When I had my DNA tested on Ancestry.com, it showed absolutely no Italian ancestry. That is not hard to explain. Robert Taliaferro was my 9th great-grandfather. There were 2,047 others. Bartolomeo, my 11th great-grandfather, was one of 8,192. And this gets to my point. This Virginian ancestry plays no greater part in who I am than my other 2,047 lines of descent at that generation. Ancestry.com would have to take their DNA percentages out to four or five decimal points before it would begin to register! This is what makes the pretensions of descent from Charlemagne, for example, so ludicrous. (In fact, everyone whose ancestor ever set foot in Europe in descended from Charlemagne; most just cannot prove it.) All things being equal, a patrician lineage is of no greater significance or weight than descent from a shopkeeper, a dirt farmer, or a ditch digger.
Sure, our genetics determine our physical characteristics which are so fascinating to see transmitted from one generation to the next, as well as our susceptibility to certain diseases and propensities, etc. But when you hear the old country expression, “blood will tell,” it is nonsensical to believe that it is the actual blood that determines our destiny. What is obviously meant by this little axiom is rather the teaching, the training, the learning that occurs consciously and subconsciously as one matures within a certain environment. The actual blood is actually the least important component of that. “Tribes” and families are based on something deeper than blood. We see that from the Old Testament with the wife of Moses, the Egyptians who accompanied the Children of Israel out of Egypt, Caleb, Rahab, Ruth and others—outsiders all, but incorporated into the family. The New Testament speaks of the “grafting-in” of Gentiles.
And it goes beyond that. So whether we are born to a particular tribe or “grafted-in,” we all, to a certain degree, make choices. We consciously choose to hold to certain family traditions and beliefs, while letting others fall away. And that is the way it should be. That was certainly the case with me. I may initially, and instinctively, respond to a certain situation based on what I have absorbed from the way I was raised. The fact that I may also supress that reaction, and respond in a different manner, based on other examples from my heritage, is exactly what I am talking about. We pick and chose from our families all the time.
I tend to reject any type of determinism out of hand, whether it be Calvinism or Marxism. Prof. Robert P. Sapolsky’s recent book, Determined, is getting a lot of buzz. He rejects even the possibility of free will. Such soulless works are really a bit offensive, as well as being a waste of good trees.
Which I remember seeing. One chimney remains standing still.
The English anglicized the pronounciation, however, to Tolliver or Tollifer.
Yeoman! Blast from my feudal past, lol. You are so fun to read. Ever thought of writing a book for ancestry buffs? A how to?