Month: April 2020

Bush Cemetery

Bush Cemetery

by Justin Durand

I’ve been lucky to meet Matt Barnes online. He’s the project guru for maintaining and restoring Bush Cemetery in Rock Port, Missouri.

Bush Cemetery Tour 1 of 2

My Horn ancestors are buried in this cemetery. When Grandma Miller was first telling me about her ancestors, this cemetery is where they were buried.

Matt sent me a note night before last to let me know how spring clean up day went, and give me some photos of a stone he’s re-setting: “Mowed the cemetery and reattached the top of Ruth horne’s stone. I also removed several stumps”

Ruth (Barrett) Horne (1830-1872)

This Ruth Horne was the widow of Lewis Skidmore Horne, who was brother of my ancestor William Steven Horn(e) (1831-1896). William was Grandma Miller’s grandfather.

Whenever I hear from Matt about his latest projects, I reflect about how it would be if every small cemetery in rural America had someone like him. I wouldn’t mind hearing from dozens of people all around the country about the work they’re doing to maintain and preserve the cemeteries where my ancestors are buried.

I subscribed to Matt’s YouTube channel. This is the kind of ongoing family history I want to hear about.

Updated May 10, 2020 to add link.

Bure Tree Redrawn

Bure Tree Redrawn

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I’m surprised we don’t hear more DNA stories like this, particularly in Scandinavia where the widespread use of patronymics would channel research along these lines.

The Bure family in Sweden, a prominent family since medieval times, has a project devoted to using yDNA to investigate the early origins of their patrilineage.

They recently found a match whose accumulated mutations show he must belong to a branch that separated from their line in historic lines but would not be descended from their earliest known ancestor.

Every genealogist’s dream, but it takes work. And a bit of luck.

We have a similar situation with the Svanström connection to the Briese family but we haven’t attracted the same level of attention a prominent family like the Bures does.

The yDNA suggests the common ancestor of the Svanströms and Brieses lived within historic times. Maybe in the 1600s or 1700s. And now we have a closer connection to the Kruse family. The Briese family has a formal project. We’re tagged along with them.

Our earliest proven ancestor was Peter Jönsson Cavat (1732-1759). His son Jonas adopted the name Svanström. Some descendants exchanged Svanström for Ögrim and Øgrim.

Because of the geographic distribution of our closest yDNA matches, it now seems clear Peter Cavat’s paternal ancestor, not so far back, came to Sweden from what is now Germany. Perhaps from in or near Lütjenburg in Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. That’s where our Kruse cousins originated. (My sisters might perk up here: this is the same town where Grandma Place and the Gottschs originated.)

Both Peter Cavat and Jonas Svanström were connected through their wives to the German merchant community. There are several Kruse families in Sweden. The ones I’ve been able to track have been from Germany. That makes sense; Kruse is a German name that means curly. Some were even in Östergötland and Kalmar, near the Svanström family.

My guess is that we’ll turn out to be a branch of one of those families, but we need more testing of Swedish Kruses to make it work. Testing will help both by including and excluding possible connections.

More Information

Black Dutch

Black Dutch

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I had a link I liked about the term Black Dutch. I went looking for it today and found it in Wayback. The page is so old it recommends a Yahoo group for further discussion.

In 19th and 20th centuries America it was relatively common for people to identify themselves or other people as Black Dutch. The idea was that even though a person’s skin was dark enough to be noticeably different, they really were still White.

The Black Dutch were said to be Germans (Deutsch) or Dutch with dark hair and coloring. The analogy is to the Black Irish; Irish with black hair as opposed to Irish with red hair. (Remember, we’re dealing in stereotypes here.)

In reality, Black Dutch was often a euphemism for bi-racial (White and Indian) or tri-racial (White, Black, and Indian). It was also relatively common to explain people with dark skin as Portuguese, which served the same purpose of obscuring a mixed-race background.

Grandma Miller told me her Horn ancestors were Black Dutch. “Grandma Miller” was Evelyn (Horn) Miller (1913-2010), of Lovelock, Nevada. Her grandmother Rachel (Roberson) Horn (1847-1932), of Tulsa, Oklahoma was probably Cherokee or part-Cherokee. (This is my conclusion. It’s been hotly debated my entire life.)

I wasn’t surprised. The Horns claim to have Indian ancestry. If that’s true, and it seems to be—the DNA shows the smallest trace of it—they would almost certainly have had some way of explaining it away. The odds were good their explanation would have been Black Dutch.

Mike Nassau finds 8 different meanings for Black Dutch, including the relatively modern “Melungeon“. As a working definition I still prefer to gloss it as bi-racial or tri-racial but I like Nassau’s niceties. I’m hoping to find a case someday where one of the less common definitions comes into play.

  • Mike Nassau, “Black Dutch,” Black Dutch <blackdutch1.webs.com>, Apr. 6, 2006.
Myth of the frontier

Myth of the frontier

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I keep watch for pieces about the mythology of the American West.

Westerns and cowboys are the American myth, hands down. My neo-pagan friends find meaning in Norse culture, in Celtic culture, in every romanticized period of history except America.

I’m not going to embed this one because it’s so long: How Historians Killed the Western.

"The Western died in the 1970s. It went from the primary genre of Hollywood production, making almost a third of yearly movies at its peak, to a relic of a bygone era requiring revival for new productions. The Western was felled from its high-horse. What murdered it? The direct murderer does not matter, for as one Western about a mistaken murder said, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The genre was fueled by the American frontier myth, which also propelled American exceptionalism. As the historical theory behind the frontier myth crumbled in the wake of great social upheaval, especially when related to the American Indian Movement, the driver of Westerns died, resulting in the Western’s demise."

Historians notwithstanding, the generation before mine loved cowboy romanticism. Both my parents devoured Zane Grey and other cowboy novels when they were growing up, then graduated to serious history as adults. In the early 1960s my dad watched Westerns—which meant we all watched them, like it or not. I think he liked them, but also Westerns were all that were on all three networks from probably 7 to 10 pm every night. That’s when we watched TV because Dad believed in getting up precisely at 6 am every day, weekends included.

It was the way things were back then.

The way I remember it, Westerns began to give way to police and detective shows after about 1965.

It’s a truism to say fish don’t see the water around them. My chums don’t see cowboy culture because it’s all around us. Europeans see it more clearly. I’m not surprised anymore when my European cousins want to hear about their relationship to people in the Old West.