I’m using my COVID lockdown time to organize some of the genealogical projects I’ve had on the back burner. One of those is joining the Society of Boonesborough, a lineage society for descendants of early settlers at Daniel Boone’s Fort Boonesborough. My ancestor James Kenney was an early settler at Boonesborough. As James Kenny he…
Month: April 2020
Jacob Howry
I’m a member of Sons of the American Revolution through my ancestor Capt. Andrew Grant. I’ve been thinking lately I might want to do supplemental applications for other qualifying ancestors. There are a lot of them. My first thought was to do a supplemental application for James Kenney, because my mother and sister belong to…
Purbelow
The 1850 census of Deseret (really taken in 1851) shows two boys in the household of Stephen Luce. There’s a mystery here. The Mormons got to Utah in 1847. The Luces arrived in 1848. Everyone was still settling in when Brigham Young decided to conduct a census that would be the official 1850 census of…
Jukes and Kallikaks
Not many people remember it now, but biologists used to like the idea of eugenics, improving humans by controlling who is allowed to reproduce. In that whole muddle the Jukes and Kallikaks were iconic. In 9th grade biology our textbooks had a chapter on genetics. Mendel and all that. I was already a fledgling genealogist….
American Exceptionalism
White supremacists make a basic mistake about history. They imagine we live in the same world our ancestors did. They’re just wrong. Our ancestors in America had to learn how to live on the Frontier. The Indians knew how to live here, but the settlers didn’t. In the process of adapting the settlers created a…