Month: October 2019

What Happened to the Old Europeans?

What Happened to the Old Europeans?

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s a video from Masaman about the Old Europeans. He explains, they are “the original people groups of Europe that inhabited the landmass before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, a group which would later evolve into the vast majority of European nations we see today, from the Russians, Italians, Irish, Norwegians and Greeks.“

Not much is known, but our knowledge is inching forward with new techniques and discoveries.

I’m posting about the Old Europeans here because the G2a Hauris — along with other members of haplogroup G2a — are probably among the survivors of this older European population that was overrun by invading Indo-Europeans in the Bronze Age.

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Updated Oct. 22, 2019 to add an additional link.

Faerie Lore Among the Scots-Irish

Faerie Lore Among the Scots-Irish

by Justin Durand

More from Barry McCain on faeries. I look forward his posts, and I like the way he introduces the idea of faeries and faerie lore:

After talking about the immigration of Ulster Scots to America in the 18th century, he says, “Some of the Faeries from Ireland followed these people to the Colonies. From the early 1700s into the early 1900s belief in Faeries endured. It was in the Southern Uplands and Backsettlements that these beliefs survived the longest and there are still a few people in these areas that see things and believe.“

My single memory about fairies comes from Aunt Betty, my mother’s sister. When I was growing up, I spent summers at her house, and other times of the year we visited fairly often. I say now that we went there for the weekend every 6 weeks, or so. Might not have been that often.

Anyway. Every night after dinner we’d clear the table and put the dishes in the sink, then take a break. Longer if there was company, shorter if it was just her family (and me). Then, Aunt Betty would say something along the lines of, “It doesn’t look like the fairies are going to do the dishes, so I’d better do them.” And she did.

Once in a while she would mention the fairies in another context, but the basic idea was always that the fairies were connected to chores. The “little people” might have done a particular chore, but they didn’t do it, or at least hadn’t yet done it.

Sometime in my teens Aunt Betty stopped making her jokes about fairies — after my mom made a joke about the word fairies not having the same meaning it had when they were growing up. Maybe Aunt Betty didn’t really stop saying it, but she stopped saying it around my mother.

I don’t remember either Mom or Grandma ever joking about fairies, or mentioning them in any context. I thought it might be that fairies were something Aunt Betty picked up when she was a nursing school. She went to a Catholic school in Idaho — St. Alphonse, I think — and came out with some sayings that no one else in the family has. Things like saying “Judas Priest” when she was exasperated.

I don’t know why Aunt Betty would adopt the idea of fairies from a Catholic college, but it doesn’t seem impossible. It took me a long time before I thought to ask Mom if they had this idea of fairies doing housework when she was growing up.

It seems they did, but I haven’t been able to get any good stories. The whole thing seems pretty vague. It must have been exactly the way Aunt Betty did it. Just something people say, but no sense behind it of anything more. Maybe connected to the tomte, a Swedish house elf, or maybe not. Maybe part of the same set of superstitions that include not sweeping the floor after dark. I can’t tell.

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Solutrean Hypothesis

Solutrean Hypothesis

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s an argument against the Solutrean Hypothesis. I’ve been meaning to look for something like this. The Solutrean Hypothesis is that one wave of prehistoric migration to the Americas came from Europe, the people perhaps traveling in boats along a northern “coast” of sea ice.

I like the idea. The experts do not. It’s one of those things that falls seemingly in the same category as Mary Magdalen as wife of Jesus. Crackpot enthusiasm. The experts still prefer the idea America was populated by people from Asia traveling across what is now the Bering Strait.

Jokers like me stoutly maintain that our ancestors came up from the underworld through a hole (“sipapu“) in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then spread to the so-called Old World from here.

The primary evidence for the theory seems to be the similarity between arrowheads made by the Solutrean people in Europe with arrowheads made by the Clovis people in America slightly. But it’s debatable whether there’s a genuine similarity. And that debate is the location of most of the action here.

But there’s another piece of evidence. I came up with the idea on my own, before I knew the Solutrean Hypothesis was already a thing.

My inspiration was the distribution of mtDNA haplogroup X2. It appears in both Northern Europe and in the Americas. A small-ish group. Look at a map, and you’ll see why some people (like me) have thought some group must have gone from Northern Europe to America. A nifty solution, but probably wrong. The experts think X2 probably spread to both Northern Europe and the Americas from a common center in Asia. In other words, they took the long away around.

Ruth Luce

Ruth Luce

by Justin Durand
Ruth Grant Luce
Ruth Luce’s memorial plaque in Ogden, Utah

Ruth (Grant) Luce was always one of my heroes. She was born in Maine the year before the American Revolution. She came west with the Mormons when she was 72 and lived another 12 years after that. She died at the age of 84, having been a pioneer of Nauvoo, Salt Lake City, and Ogden. That’s some pioneer hardiness.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Ruth’s husband Malatiah Luce was granted a lot in Great Salt Lake in 1848, making it likely he died there, not back in Nauvoo.

One of the things that bothered me at the time is the Ruth Luce was also listed at the Pioneer Overland Travel Database as receiving a lot in Great Salt Lake in 1848. If true, there would be some problems interpreting the entries. Would Ruth have been granted a lot if her husband was present and received a lot at the same time? It would be possible theoretically, but it didn’t work like that for any of the other pioneers on the 1848 list.

So, I wrote to the BYU Family History Center. I can never say enough good things about them. Their answer — Ruth did not receive a lot. That was a mistake and has been corrected. Very nice.

They also did some light cleanup in this area, which I deeply appreciate.

I had Ruth’s date of death in my database as 3 June 1860. Not even. I vaguely remember seeing other dates. I chose one of them, and made a note to do more research. BYU has done it for me.

BYU says, “The inscription on her gravestone shows her death date as 13 June 1860. However, the Utah State History Cemeteries and Burials Database shows 3 July 1860. The gravestone appears to have been created quite some time after her death, so we are using the date that appears on the Utah State History cemeteries and Burials Database as the more accurate date of her death.”

So now we can start the endless battle of correcting Ruth’s death date all across the Internet.

Romanticizing Cowboys

Romanticizing Cowboys

by Justin Durand

In the 1880s, “America was no more impressed by a cowboy than by a railroad employee or a shopkeeper,” according to Lynn Jacobs. That will come as a surprise to almost everyone I know, because cowboys are the embodiment of our regional heritage and culture. But that all comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s deep-seated insecurity about his own masculinity. 

“Before Roosevelt, no one wrote about cowboys with anything but disdain. They were migrant workers, seasonally employed, badly paid, ill-treated, ‘the very picture of malnutrition,’ living outdoors in miserable conditions, herding big, dumb, easily spooked, dangerous animals across inhospitable land. The cowboy came in all colors, white, black, Hispanic, Indian, but mostly he was ‘a sad spectacle,’ Lynn Jacobs wrote in Waste of the West, a history of public lands ranching. ‘He was scraggly, dirty man with tattered, ill-fitting clothes and an unmistakable smell. His poor sanitary habits, inadequate diet, alcoholic tendencies, and excessive time in the saddle made him weak and sickly. . . . When not doing mundane ranching chores, he spent his time drinking and smoking, playing cards, and generally doing little one could call exciting, heroic, romantic.'”

Updated May 21, 2020 to add link.