The Begats

The Begats is dormant nowadays, but you might like my newsletter. I'm Maud Newton and my book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, will be published by Random House in March 2022.

[thebegats]

Hello! The Begats is still abandoned. But my book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, will be published by Random House in March 2022. 

[thebegats]

Ancestor Hunger

I’ve been working on a book about ancestors and I’m finishing up the second draft. Right now it looks like it will probably be out from Random House sometime in 2021, but it’s not on the schedule yet, so we’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ve been so buried, I can barely remember the last time I looked at Tumblr -- but hi! 

Now that I’m going to have a little more time to write things other than the book and day-job stuff, I’ve started a new newsletter, Ancestor Hunger, over at Substack. It’s free. I’ve sent out a couple dispatches so far and I’m aiming for two a month. We’ll see about that, too.

Here’s a little about where I’m coming from: Ancestor Hunger and Religious Conversions. 

[thebegats]

In Which I Meet an Activist Cousin

David Newton, a cousin I met online recently because we’re a DNA match, turns out to be a charter member of Common Cause and a longtime Sierra Club activist. He’s in his 80s, my grandfather’s first cousin, and so my first cousin twice removed. 

It cheered me up to be in touch with him, because my father and some of the other closest members of my Newton family are very conservative, and I’m... not. 

Googling around to learn more about David, I found an op-ed he wrote about Trump’s inconsistency on climate change. David cites a New York Times advertisement Trump signed in 2009 (image above), in which he and others urged Obama to work to curtail greenhouse gases, to “determine the fate of our planet.” David also notes a Politico article citing an application from one of Trump’s companies warning of climate change’s “dire effects” in an “application to build a sea wall.” I think I’ve encountered both of these facts before, but I’d forgotten about them.

David is the brother of a cousin I cited in my Harper’s article, the one I corresponded with when trying to find out more about the history of our Newtons. He’s the closest cousin I’ve met through DNA.

[thebegats]

I enjoyed Juvenal’s eighth satire/screed when I discovered it recently. The title translates to something like, “Of what value are your pedigrees?” The answer: not much. The rest of it is here.

[thebegats]

In the autobiographically-inspired parts of his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne considered the possibility that some of his Puritan forebears wound up in hell and/or that he himself was their comeuppance. 

I’ve always loved his writing, and the older I get the more I'm struck by all the patterns of rumination we share.

[thebegats]

Trump’s Mother Hailed from Scottish Island Where Landlords are Reviled

Donald Trump’s father was German, but his mother was a MacLeod from the Isle of Lewis. She was born there to a large family in 1912. They lived in a one-room cottage. Trump’s “ancestors suffered in ‘The Clearances' -- a tragic, decades-long period of upheaval in Scotland, during which greedy landlords forced families from their homes”-- and many locals view him as “the antithesis of Lewis’ collective history.” According to researchers:

The distrust of property barons and the fear of losing one's home runs deep on the island, permeating the residents' collective conscience. "I think people to this day in the Highlands and islands have a deeply skeptical attitude to landlordism," says Maclean. "It has a very negative history in this part of the world."Yet today, Trump lives by the very trade that saw his family and hundreds of thousands of other Scots uprooted, thrown from their humble homes often with just the clothes on their backs, forced to start over. Trump could not have turned his back on those roots more if he had tried.

[thebegats]

When the Trump Family Hid its German Roots (and Other Trump Ancestry Links)

Donald Trump’s family hid its German roots, especially when selling to Jews. Even in the 1987 book The Art of the Deal, Trump falsely claimed his ancestor came from Sweden.

What Trump’s ancestral village thinks of him.

Based on Trump’s white supremacist appointments and his self-congratulatory remarks about his own genes, is now when those of us who’ve been autosomal-DNA-tested should start worrying about eugenical uses of that information?

Image of Freidrich Trump and family (Trump’s grandfather second from left, grandmother second from right, and father, Fred, at left) taken from Wikimedia Commons.

[fickettstgenealogy]

Hahaha!!! Well…. Yes, it’s true 😊😊

[gaslightgallows]

A very nice thing that happened yesterday.

I am a passionate amateur genealogist. I like to describe myself as being descended from “awful white men of history” (because it’s true!). One of my favorite things to do is badger my friends into letting me research their family trees. Thankfully, they’re usually quite surprised and interested in what I find, so it all works out.

Yesterday, a friend of @whiskeyandjack asked me to do her family tree (the friend’s, that is). That was a bit of a first, as I’ve never had anyone ASK me to do a tree before. But I’m slowly figuring out how one researches family histories in Australia (it requires a very different approach than I’d use in the U.S. or Britain), so I’m always glad of the opportunity to improve myself. 

In the first 5 minutes of digging, I found some photographs on another tree on Ancestry.com. That’s pretty unusual, too; often I’m working with people who don’t have an aunt or an uncle with the genealogy bug, so their family’s never been studied before. But I found a lovely picture of my new client’s late great-grandmother and forwarded it on to her.

Whiskey texts me: “Omg she’s so happy she’s almost in tears.” And then I found out last night that even the client’s father was moved, when he saw the photo. Apparently he was very close to his grandmother, and neither of them had ever seen this photo. 

So that’s actually 3 nice things that’ve never happened before. 1) Getting asked for a tree. 2) Photo on the first day. 3) Client’s parent’s tears of joy.

That’s a pretty fulfilling first day of research right there. :)

[nprfreshair]

So often we’re told, ‘Forget about slavery. That happened so long ago. Get over it.’ But when you do a genealogy search — people don’t realize that the struggle is real — to find these people, to understand how they lived and how they died and how oppressed they were, the reality hits you.

Regina Mason

When Ancestry Search Led To Escaped Slave: ‘All I Could Do Was Weep’

(via nprfreshair)

[bibliobriarpatch]

Huh, so, I just realized that I have no DNA matches for one branch of my family tree. Um… ???

[thebegats]

Family legend has it that my great-grandmother, Rindia, gave her church a large insurance settlement that her son S.E. received after being terribly injured in a car accident when he was only 17.

Afterward, my mom says, Rindia and S.E. were too poor to buy food or firewood. My mom remembers going with her mom, my granny, to their little house in Grand Prairie, on the outskirts of Dallas, to give them provisions long after Granny had divorced my mom’s father (another of Rindia’s sons), Robert.

Rindia and S.E. went to Bethel Temple in Oak Cliff. The church was or would soon become “the largest Assembly of God Church in America.” Although my grandfather evidently reviled the minister, Albert Ott, for taking the money, my mom says Rindia herself never complained.

Several years back, I found documentation of the accident in the Dallas Morning News archives. “Skull is crushed as truck is hit,” one story read.

Then, last year, I visited the Dallas Public Library and unearthed court documents showing that the full settlement, awarded on May 5, 1936, was $4400 (about $75,000 in today’s dollars). The court held on to the funds until May 12, when the lawyers received $1466, and the doctors received $934. Later that year, Rindia petitioned for distribution of the remaining $2000 (about $34,000 in today’s dollars), which must be what she gave to the church.

[thebegats]

Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations, and at least part of my father’s reluctance to accept Moni’s diagnosis lies in a grim suspicion that something of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself.

“Runs in the Family: New findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes and identity,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

[thebegats]

Few records related to women's suffrage have been made fully available to the public. Many of these records have not been microfilmed, digitized, or indexed. [T]he only way to view many of them is by visiting special collections or research rooms to see and handle the original documents. Often collections of these types are exceedingly fragile, and can only be handled by appointment with the assistance of repository staff.

Young & Saavy Genealogists’ tips for researching the voting status of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers after adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920. (via @oftreesandink and @bibliothekla)

[thebegats]

I finally found an ancestor who fought for the Union in the Civil War! I was so happy. Except then I requested his pension application from the National Archives and it turns out that John G. Johnston's battalion -- from a Kentucky county that according to the New York Times was "overwhelmingly Unionist in sympathies" -- was "never mustered in” to the U.S. service. As a result, neither John nor his widow received a pension for a disease (of the right testicle--ouch) that his application says he contracted from "cold and exposure" during his service. 

He submitted his first application in 1883, and her pleas after his death ran through 1920, with the last attempt being filed on her behalf by a relative stranger.

He enlisted on March 1, 1965, when he was about 38 years old. I don’t know the details of his service, which only ran from May 2, 1865, to October 23, 1865, and I’m just starting to learn about this part of Kentucky, but judging from a portion of the Congressional Edition transcribed by historian Marlitta Perkins, the lack of mustering-in and the consequent denial of invalid pension applications was a predicament for many men who served in state-organized militias in Kentucky. 

John's grandson, Zone, my great-grandfather, later became a letter-to-the-newspaper-signing Texan socialist. Coincidence?

[thebegats]

Thoughts related to my book

7. What’s your current obsession?

I’m writing a book about the science and superstition of ancestry. It’s a blend of memoir, reportage, anecdote, history, science, philosophy, cultural criticism, and ghost stories, I hope an open-hearted blend. I’ve been drawn lately to histories of spiritual beliefs about ancestors that predate Christianity. I didn’t realize that ancestor veneration was prevalent even in Western Europe before the saints became seen as spiritual ancestors, supplanting the ancestors of the body.

As someone with a complicated family structure—my stepdaughter is one of the most important people in my life, and my amazing niece and nephews are not biologically related to me, and I also have a stepfather and a stepsister, and twin half-siblings I’ve never met—and a complicated relationship with some of my family members, I’m not fetishizing the biological family. I’m wary of our cultural fixation on looking to our genes to understand ourselves. At the same time, the influence of our genes, our ancestors, on the people we are is undeniable. All we have to do is look in the mirror to see that. Most days right now I’m thinking about these kinds of things.

Thanks to Narrative Magazine for asking me to answer the Narrative 10. 

Image: “the so-called Togatus Barberini in the Capitoline Museums may represent a senator holding two ancestral funerary portraits.”

[thebegats]

Drabble writes about her fear of inheriting a legacy of misery: 'My mother was seriously depressed for much of her later life, and her depression oppressed and infected me, or so I have come to believe.' Although Drabble uses a 'SAD' lamp in the winter to mimic natural sunlight, which cheers her up, and was briefly in therapy, she nonetheless is convinced that depression can have a positive as well as negative effect. 'My mother used it as a weapon to manipulate others,' she said, as the afternoon wore on and the sky grew darker outside the living-room windows in Porlock Weir. 'It took the form of anger.' Her own bouts seem to feed her art — 'happy and buoyant don’t force you into action on the page; you go shopping when you’re up' — and also force her to reassess things. 'It’s useful,' she pointed out, 'for stripping off ways of getting through life that prevent you from having to think.'

“The Dame of the British Interior,” Daphne Merkin’s profile of Margaret Drabble