Month: February 2019

Lazy Man’s Guide

Lazy Man’s Guide

by Justin Durand

I wonder how many people remember Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment? I think I bought my first copy when it was brand new, at the head shop on North Avenue in Grand Junction. I would have been 16. Over the years I’ve bought and given away so many copies I’ve lost track.

This passage has been particularly influential over the years in keeping me from turning myself into a spiritual teacher like so many of my friends.

“Every person who allows others to treat him as a spiritual leader has the responsibility to ask himself: Out of all the perceptions available to me in the universe, why am I emphasizing the ignorance of my brothers? What am I doing in a role where this is real? What kind of standards am I conceiving, in which so many people are seen to be in suffering, while I am the enlightened one?“

This approach is a necessary corollary of two main ideas. One, “We are equal beings.” And two, “There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.” Put the two ideas together, and it’s easy to see, “The state of mind that most needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened.“

  • The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, by Thaddeus Golas (1971).
20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History

20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History

by Justin Durand

With the full majesty of the New York Public Library, one of my favorite spots on Earth, here are 20 Reasons Why You Should Write Your Family History by Carmen Nigro, Managing Research Librarian, Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History & Genealogy, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (February 9, 2015).

When I lived in New York (1987-91), I worked just a few blocks away at 90 Park Avenue, so I was there several times a week and often also on my lunch hours.

An Ancient Plague

An Ancient Plague

by Justin Durand

Something happened to Europe’s Neolithic farmers. These people had largely displaced the old hunter gatherer population in many places. Then, 5 or 6 thousand years ago they began to decline themselves. Some people have suggested they were displaced by invaders from the steppe. That has been my preferred theory. Other people think they just moved away because of stress from climate change. That would be interesting. There’s no evidence either way, or at least there’s not enough evidence to convince a majority of experts. 

Now, here we go. A new theory. Maybe it was the plague.

“Between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, many Neolithic societies declined throughout western Eurasia due to a combination of factors that are still largely debated. Here, we report the discovery and genome reconstruction of Yersinia pestis, the etiological agent of plague, in Neolithic farmers in Sweden, pre-dating and basal to all modern and ancient known strains of this pathogen. We investigated the history of this strain by combining phylogenetic and molecular clock analyses of the bacterial genome, detailed archaeological information, and genomic analyses from infected individuals and hundreds of ancient human samples across Eurasia. These analyses revealed that multiple and independent lineages of Y. pestis branched and expanded across Eurasia during the Neolithic decline, spreading most likely through early trade networks rather than massive human migrations. Our results are consistent with the existence of a prehistoric plague pandemic that likely contributed to the decay of Neolithic populations in Europe.” (Davidski, quoting Rascovan et al., emphasis added by Davidski)

Y. pestis. Oh, very nice. This seems like good answer. It’s certainly an interesting answer.

Grandma’s Ethnicity

Grandma’s Ethnicity

by Justin Durand

When I was in, oh say 3rd grade we were supposed to go home and ask our parents where our families came from. That was probably the first time in my life I ever heard about this ethnicity thing I’m always writing about. It might also be the first time I had any sense of genealogy.

I don’t actually remember what my mother told me or what I told the teacher the next day. I’d bet my answer was that I’m English and Swedish. Something easy, anyway. I know that because I was surprised so many kids the next day didn’t know and some had what seemed to me to be unnecessarily complicated answers. One guy said he was “Heinz 57” and that was the first time I ever heard that expression. This was Brigham City, Utah circa 1964. You’d think parents would be prepared with answers to genealogy questions.

I’m pretty sure the point of this exercise was to begin introducing us to fractions, but I don’t remember actually doing any fractions here. At least not in school.

But I do remember my mother explaining it all. Her father’s parents both came from Sweden, so he was full Swedish, and that meant she is half Swedish, and I’m a quarter Swedish. There was even an Swedish sailor when I was little who called me his “little qvarter Swede.” (In Greeley, Grandma Long’s boarder.)

What I really remember from it is that Grandma Place was German. Easy. She spoke German. And Grandma Swanstrom was “half English, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter Irish.” Hard. I learned something about fractions.

When I was a bit older I figured out that Grandma Swanstrom’s ethnicity was simpler than I imagined at first. My bet was she arrived at her numbers by figuring her dad was English, and her mom was Scotch-Irish. I was able to confirm this insight many years later when I saw the marriage record for one of Grandma’s brothers. It said exactly that. Father English, Mother Scotch-Irish.

The cool thing for me is because the calculation is not strictly correct, it tells me something about how people simplify American ethnicity. See the chart above for a more detailed analysis of Grandma’s ancestry. Her father has an English mother but his paternal ancestry has bits of Scottish. And her mother has bits of English. But both of them are really mostly just colonial American.

In the course of Grandma’s life I got a few other clues to how she saw ethnicity. Without asking directly. Because I already knew you can’t ask leading questions if you’re really intent on finding out how someone sees something.

I learned that Grandma thought of her red hair and her parents’ red hair as a part of their ethnicity. Her dad had “bright red hair and red handlebar mustache”. Of course. I think today we would say he was a ginger. His mother was from Yorkshire. And her mother had “auburn hair”, which her father said was her mother’s “crowning glory”. Her ancestors were Scots and Irish, so it’s not a surprise they had red hair.

Then too, when Grandma was diagnosed with skin cancer and again when she had high cholesterol, she told me her ancestors would have included many Vikings raping an pillage in Ireland and Scotland. So she must have a lot of Scandinavian ancestry. And that reinforces her fair skin. Plus, she said, half in fun, Scandinavians live up there where’s there’s not enough beef (remember her father was a rancher), so they live on fish. And there’s no fat in fish. So their bodies store every bit of fat they get, to use when they need it. So her high cholesterol proved her Scandinavian ancestry. (Grandma liked to read science and psychology magazines, so I imagine she had a pretty accurate picture of the science behind all this.)

This is all fun stuff. I’m taking time to write about it because it might be interesting someday for Grandma’s descendants to have this little glimpse of how she thought about ethnicity.

More Information

  • Go out and play with Pedigree Pie. It’s the software I used to create the chart of my grandmother’s ancestry. It takes your ancestry from FamilySearch.org. Very handy.
Luce Brands

Luce Brands

by Justin Durand

My great grandfather Wilford Luce was a rancher near Big Piney, Wyoming. I came across this little clipping I pulled from the local paper back in the days when brands were recorded at the county level and published periodically as an aid to identification and protection.

Wilford Luce Brands

Grandpa Luce worked for A. W. Smith on the Mule Shoe Ranch he “had a rope and a good horse.” He homesteaded near Big Piney, Wyoming in 1886. His ranch, the LU Quarter Circle, was the first ranch on the Green River in that area, north of the cutoff on the Green River. He lived first in a dugout or “soddie” but afterward built a cabin with buffalo hides over sod for the floor. This cabin and those he subsequently built were all in the shape of an “L” for Luce.

The picture of his brands above shows the LU Quarter Circle first, then two other brands, the Circle Dot (used for horses), and the Flying Heart.

Branding was a community event. The following interview is from the Early Sublette County Brands Project:

Jonita Sommers- So how did they know which calf went with what person?

Bud Sommers- Well, at that time old Rex Wardell was foreman and he’d ride in the heard and mother a calf up with the cow and when he saw what calf belonged with each cow he’d rope it and drag it in and tell who it belonged to and they’d put the brand on.

Jonita- And what would he say?

Bud- Well, he was kind of comical far as that goes. He’d bring it in if it was old Bill Luce’s brand he’d say, “Red Willie” and if it was Olson’s brand, old Charlie Olson, he’d say, “3 Bar Charlie” and he had, oh, a lot of different. . . oh, Nels Jorgesen, who was Diamond Bar — and he’d drag one in and he’d say Diamond Bar — always the point down,” and it was interesting to listen to him.

I just discovered today there is a “new” book on brands in this area of Wyoming: Branded: History of Green River Valley and Hoback Basin Brands. I need to order a copy for myself. See New brand history book available at Pinedale Online (Nov. 27, 2016).