Month: April 2020

Thomas Nock

Thomas Nock

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I noticed recently the Scottish Prisoners of War Society (SPOWS) still lists Thomas Nock as a possible prisoner. Oh my. I thought we settled that.

The Scottish prisoners of war who are the subject of this society’s research were taken prisoner after the Battles of Dunbar (1660) and Worcester (1661), then deported to New England. In America they tended to stay together, with some intermarriage in the first generations. They formed the Scots Charitable Society, now the oldest charitable organization in the Americas.

It was this tendency to stick together that led to the idea Thomas Nock might have been one of them. He was where they were, and his surname Nock could maybe be a form of Knox.

The modern expert on the Scottish prisoners is Andrew Millard, an archaeologist at the University of Durham. He supervised excavations on a mass grave used for the Scots who were interned at Durham Cathedral in 1660 after the Battle of Durham.

The SPOWS page for Thomas Nock quotes from an email Dr. Millard sent to Teresa Rust and me on Oct. 9, 2018:

The date of the 1652 grant was doubted by Stackpole in his Scotch Exiles typescript (see attached page) where he said “the last figure is very indistinct and doubtful. It may be 1656 or later.” Have you managed to see the original of this grant?
 
If that date is not certain, then all are agreed he had a land grant was in 1657, but there is another indication he was there slightly earlier. Both the Tibbetts and the Knox books says Thomas’s son Thomas jr. made a will on 15 Feb 1676, though Stackpole says 15 Sep 1676. An image of this will ought to be on Ancestry https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=8996, but I don’t have a subscription to US records. Ancestry have transcribed the month as February.  Sylvanus, another son, was taxed in 1677 according to the Tibbetts book and Stackpole. They must have been 21 to make a will and be taxed, placing their births in or before 1655 and 1656. Sylvanus was apprenticed in 1670 according to the Tibbetts book, which conventionally would have happened at the age of 14. Although age at apprenticeship did vary, this would fit with a c.1656 birth.
 
If the 1652 date is correct I agree he is unlikely to be a SPOW, but if he first appears in 1655-56, in a place where there were a number of SPOWs, then I’d still consider him to fall in the possible category. The key thing is the date on that first land grant, for which the original or a good image of it needs to be consulted.

Good enough. We have to start somewhere. I was skeptical, however. It’s unfortunate my response the same date is missing from the Society’s website.

One of the main reasons for thinking Thomas Nocke might have been a Scot is that his surname could have been Knox, and in fact this is typically the modern spelling among his descendants. However, the spelling Nock is preserved in the place name Nock Marsh, and there are Nock/e families documented in England. In fact there have been several attempts over the years to identify Thomas Nocke in Dover with different men of that name in English baptismal records. I continue to be cautious. This line of thinking can only be speculative until there is a firmer basis for going a particular direction.

I think it's also worth noting that while Stackpole did so much of the pioneering research on the families in this area, he is not always as careful as he might have been. You yourself have provided an example. He says the will of Thomas Jr. was 15 September 1676. The actual date is "the ffifteene day of ffeburary in ye Yeare of our Lord God one thousand six hundred Seaventy Six". 

Similarly, when he says the "the last figure is very indistinct and doubtful" in the 1652 grant, that's something I would want to verify. It might be worth noting that others have also read it as 1652 (for example, Genealogical Dictionary of Maine & New Hampshire). I've seen it myself on LDS microfilm but didn't pay any particular attention. Without unpacking my notes, I couldn't even say right off if what I've seen is the original or a typescript copy. As I recall it's in a somewhat unexpected place in the records so it might take me some to find it again.

However, I'll repeat what I said in my first message. Thomas' son Thomas Jr. was born 26 March 1654/55. This, I believe, is key to the rest of the dating. Thomas Sr. and Rebecca were likely married before June 1654. This makes 1652 a very plausible date for a first land grant to Thomas. We see this scenario over and over and over in early New England genealogy. A boy reaches his majority, ends his apprenticeship or indenture, then marries and gets a grant of land almost simultaneously. Of course it would be that way. The town would not have allowed him to marry if he could not provide for a family. Nor would the town have failed to provide him with land if he had recently come of age and expected to marry. Thomas' marriage before 1654 and the date of 1652 for the grant are mutually supportive.

Then approaching the question from the opposite direction - if Thomas had been taken prisoner at Dunbar in 1650, and arrived with other Scots prisoners on the Unity in Dec 1650, it seems he would have served an extraordinarily abbreviated indenture if he was free and married by June 1654. Three years, compared to the 6, 7, 8 years served by other prisoners. 

This additional information seems dispositive. It is highly improbable Thomas Nocke was one of the Scottish prisoners.

More Information

My SPOWS ancestors are John Clark, Peter Grant, John Sinclair, and John Taylor. Thomas Nock is my ancestor but not one of the prisoners.

Stackpole, Scotch Exiles
Waco

Waco

by Justin Durand

We watched Waco last Sunday night. It was, for me, unimaginably powerful.

Here’s a trailer from YouTube.

In 1993 the ATF got a search warrant for the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, and an arrest warrant for David Koresh, the religious leader of the group, on weapons charges. Instead of serving the warrants, the ATF launched a surprise raid, trying to force entry. There was a gun battle. The raid failed. No one has ever figured out who fired first but both sides blamed the other. The FBI took over, then for 51 days all America watched the Feds fumble the operation. Finally, on April 19 the FBI launched an assault that resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children and 2 pregnant women.

These events in Waco took place against the backdrop of Ruby Ridge, a similar incident in Idaho six months earlier. That one was an 11-day siege of the Randy Weaver family cabin after Weaver resisted arrest on weapons’ charged. The FBI killed Randy Weaver’s dog, 14 year old son Sammy, and his wife Vicki.

None of these people were particularly warm and fuzzy characters. Randy Weaver was a white supremacist, and David Koresh seems to have turned the Branch Davidian women into his personal harem. They weren’t “nice people” but the bad guys here are the government agents who went after them.

I don’t imagine it’s a parallel that will occur to most people, but I see my early Mormon ancestors in these stories. Joe Smith was a prophet with questionable morals and tactics. He seduced other men’s wives, engineered a ponzi scheme, created a private army, destroyed a printing press when it was used to print an opposition newspaper, and on and on.

Smith was, of course, immeasurably more successful in his own lifetime than either David Koresh or Randy Weaver. Next to Uncle Joe they look like two-bit wannabes. Even so, in the eyes of their contemporaries the early Mormons must have looked every bit as outlandish as the Branch Davidians. And those Mormons didn’t have just one equivalent of the Siege at Waco; they went from crisis to crisis. Everything from the Panic of 1837 to the Haun’s Mill Massacre to the assassination of the Prophet at Carthage Jail and the exodus to the western wilderness.

After watching Waco, I’m reflecting on what makes our Mormon history “sacred history” and Branch Davidian history just some crackpot and his followers resisting arrest?

I think it might have helped that Joseph Smith’s church survived the early setbacks and was fortunate to get some distance from American mobs while it matured a bit under the leadership of Brigham Young. I would be surprised if any of my Mormon relatives think of our pioneer ancestors as being in the same category as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.

Heritage of Hate

Heritage of Hate

by Justin Durand

I hadn’t planned to write about Southern identity any time in the immediate future. I decided to do it because of this excellent video by The Cynical Historian. He does interesting work and this one is particularly good.

The video is particularly timely right at the moment, when America is governed seemingly by un-reconstructed Confederates and neo-Nazis. This is not our ancestors’ patriotism.

The basic idea here is that there is a mythology of the South’s Lost Cause, with four important elements:

  1. Slavery was good for the enslaved.
  2. The issue in the Civil War was states’ rights, not slavery.
  3. The North was the aggressor.
  4. Reconstruction was designed to punish the South.

If you’re a Northerner, or like me a Westerner taught by the modern equivalent of Yankee schoolmarms, you’ve heard it all before and you’re rolling your eyes. If you’re a Southerner, you want to punch someone—or failing that, maybe just vote for Donald Trump again. (Why the South fell in love with a New York City conman is a mystery to us all. No sense of heritage there.)

One of the things I like about this video is that it is not just a partisan hack job. There’s an element of truth in each of the mythological claims. Cypher takes time to explore. For example, it would be hard to see Sherman’s March through Georgia as anything other than total war (“Northern Aggression”) but at the same time we should acknowledge that Gen. Stonewall Jackson on the Southern side advocated total war from the beginning.

I have some cousins who belong to Sons (and Daughters) of the Confederacy. I qualify for membership but I can’t even imagine joining. They say “Heritage Not Hate.” I say “Heritage of Hate.” And, as an old-fashioned Patriot it’s hard for me to imagine any world where someone could celebrate ancestors who committed treason.

My main take-away from this video is the idea that someone I think is eminently reasonable (Cypher) thinks there might be a good rationale for keeping the public statues to the heroes of the Confederacy. The argument seems to be that we don’t need to destroy history even when we disagree with it. I come at it a little differently. I see no reason to maintain public statues and monuments of any kind if they don’t represent a widespread majority of the population there now. I don’t see that we need to maintain statues that represent only a race and class ascendancy from an era when those people could position their views as “normative.”

At one time I believed the rest of the country is just waiting for the old guard to die off so we can all move forward. Now our national politics have shown there must have been a stronger undercurrent of racism than we imagined.

And that brings me to one of my long-held but definitely minority opinions. We didn’t do ourselves any good fighting the Civil War to keep the South. We should have let them go. By forcing them to stay in the Union, we’ve likely sewn the seeds of our own defeat.

Daughter of Time

Daughter of Time

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As a Riccardian, Josephine Tey’s novel Daughter of Time is an old favorite.

Re-reading last night. I didn’t expect it to provide an example of how researchers go wrong.

The story goes like this. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is convalescing after an injury. A friend triggers his interest in Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. One of the most famous mysteries in the English-speaking world. Richard supposedly had them killed. It now seems that story was pure Tudor propaganda.

At one point in the novel, a student researcher tells Grant the story of the Boston Massacre. Grant responds by telling the story of the Tonypandy Riots.

Grant says the point of his story is not just “Someone blowing up a simple affair for a political end.” It’s how history has been falsified. “The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story in nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.“

When I was an undergraduate I read a similar story about the dangers of oral history. Star-crossed lovers in wartime Yugoslavia who ended up committing suicide. Except both of them were still alive, and the people telling the story knew them, knew their identity, and knew they weren’t dead.

This is the kind of thing we need to bear in mind when doing historical research. Very often it’s the story that matters. Contemporary accounts aren’t necessarily true accounts.

A few pages later, Grant and his researcher decide they need to look at reactions to the death of Edward IV. Tey gives us a great parting line: “Only historians tell you what they thought. Research workers stick to what they did.”

I’d say that’s sound advice for genealogists.

Re-thinking education

Re-thinking education

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

A few days ago I wrote about Online Learning (Apr. 13, 2020). There’s no doubt you can learn on the Internet. Good quality stuff, if you search it out.

Here’s an article that suggests targeted learning might someday replace university degrees. “Could targeted, bite-sized chunks of education help you get a job?”

This particular article focuses on the rising cost of education, and whether online courses and certificate programs could replace a university degree. Or maybe not replace, just supplement.

This isn’t a new idea. I think it must have been around since the early days of the Internet. Hey look, here’s something that might happen. Easy futurism.

Now the landscape has been transformed, just in the two months since this article was written. Here in Colorado we’re all in COVID-19 lockdown. Schools are closed; replaced in various ways by online instruction.

It’s a new world, both for school and for work. It was totally impossible, so they said, to let people work at home. Until it had to be done to keep employers in business. Now it’s magically possible.

I tease my nephew that his education is over. He’ll never get further than 9th grade. It’ll be digging ditches for him. It’s funny only because we know the world has changed. Whether or not he’s ever able to go back to a traditional classroom environment, the certification process will adapt. He’ll graduate high school and go on to college, in whatever way those things end up being defined.

When I retired a few years ago, I thought I would like to good back, finish my Masters’ degree and get a PhD in History. I applied to universities. I got accepted. And I decided I don’t really want to go. Not this school. Not that school. Not right now. I love reading and watching videos; the learning itself.

Even when I was college I pushed against the structure. I wanted to go my own direction. Week 3, I’m thinking that chapter we had to read is fascinating. I want to explore that. I’m not ready to move on with the rest of the class to the next topic.

Today, when I look at online versus classroom education, I agree with the guy in this article. “[H]e came to the conclusion that a major part of formal education was ‘signalling’; that it was used to ‘filter society by which people are smart, conscientious and conformist enough to put up with it'”.