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…
Defining Family
In modern culture wars one side thinks there is something sacred and eternal about our “traditional” family structure, while the other side wants to experiment. Medievalists just laugh. I think it’s safe to say most people don’t realize how family structures have evolved through history, even in our European diaspora. We don’t live in the…