Family Ties -- Not Always Positive

Cousin Johnny

Ever see those Ancestry commercials where someone is searching their heritage and runs across some relative who held an important place in history or who was a leader in or part of some important historic movement or struggle? (Wow, that's a tortured sentence. Forgive me. I may go back later and try to clean it up.)

Or maybe you've watched Finding Your Roots on PBS. I've never seen an episode, but the plugs they run on the show tend to follow the Ancestry pattern: Oh, hi, celebrity person. I've researched your family tree, and I found these spectacular people. Occasionally the host finds someone scurrilous up the tree, but I don't see those often.

Of course, once you start looking at family history, you hope you find those heroes. It's not just about bragging rights, though. It shows that you come from good stock. 

That's why I was excited to find that I'm related to members of the English peerage and possibly to a couple of English kings and an ancient Irish king. I can brag about it, sure, but after researching some of those people and their roles in history, I've discovered those relations don't necessarily mean I come from good stock. One of kings I may be related to executed his own brother, for heaven's sake.

Both Sharon and I can trace our ancestry back to the earliest American colonies, then to the American Revolution, and on to the Civil War, where our forefathers fought on opposite sides. Her people were part of the migration west to Oklahoma and Texas and have deep roots in those state. Mine were pretty much all Yankees until Dad was hired by American Airlines and went south. Part of his training took him to Chicago, where he met Mum and convinced her to marry him. Man was she shocked when she moved to his posting in Midland, Texas.

Once considered the oil headquarters of Texas, Midland in the late '40s was in no way cosmopolitan. Heck not all the streets were paved. And she didn't even get to live in town initially. Instead they lived in a former barracks at the converted airfield that would become Midland International Airport -- a name that sounds much grander than the reality. But I digress.

While researching a previous post, I found Sharon was related to the Cash family. The Cashes came here from the British Isles and initially settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The family eventually migrated to the South and became part of the migration of the middle southern states to Texas and Oklahoma. 

I remarked to her at the time that it would be cool if she were related to Johnny Cash. I made a half-hearted effort to find a link, but my skills and patience aren't really suited to spending a great deal of time running through all the lists of people to identify which one would be link I needed.

I was trying to find someone in the Cash family who had some sort of tie to an interesting historical incident. I was plugging names into Google and was about to give up when I found a link to a "book" that was supposed to be about the Cash family. I use the quotes because the writer, Ben Cash from New Mexico (another place Sharon has lots of family), had typed up a couple hundred pages of the family history of the Cash and Buffington families. 

He had a hundred copies made and signed them. Someone PDFed a copy, number 74, and posted it on the Internet. The information Ben provided about the branches leading to Sharon meshed almost perfectly with the information I had from Family Search. 

As I slogged my way through the utilitarian writing, I found a part where he answered the question of whether the family had ties to Johnny Cash. Care to guess? Yup, Sharon's a distant cousin through the brother of one of her direct ancestors. 

And then I found that this direct ancestor was married to a Lucy Ann Tyler. And it turns out that family legend has it that Lucy was the aunt of John Tyler, 10th president of the United States. Unfortunately both Ben Cash and another source I found on Family Search say the link is not provable. 

According to the second source, Lucy Gunthorpe, you can't even definitively prove that Lucy's last name was Tyler. The information about her name and relationship to a president come from a gravestone that Gunthorpe says was erected by family some years after Lucy Tyler's death. 

But as you might expect, not all is sweetness and light in the Cash family. One of the women, Harriet Cash married a William Davis, who Ben Cash mentioned as having driven a supply wagon on the Trail of Tears, one of the shameful incidents in American history that's mentioned but not dwelled on. 

These posts are meant to delve into the history our family's forebears participated in or witnessed, which I didn't do much of. But the next couple of posts will look at probably-not-a-cousin John Tyler and the Trail of Tears. 

Meantime remember the old saw, you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family.