Up a Tree

Philo T. Farnsworth with a fusor Last time I introduced you to Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who conceived of and invented most of the technology for television, for which he received contemporary credit, credit that faded over the years as a big corporation sought and gained the credit for.  Now sure, pretty much all complicated ideas are thought of, often by numerous people. You might be like me and have all sorts of ideas for useful inventions that you've seen come to light over the years. You might have even thought, "Hey, I thought of doing that a long time ago!" But someone has to come up with the ways to accomplish the idea, to put flesh on the bones, so to speak. And many ideas build on other ideas that just weren't carrying out the mission. Television was one of those ideas, and Philo brought it from idea to reality. He did that again many years later with a device called the fusor.  After World War II the idea developed that nuclear energy could be used for g...

Legrand G. Capers Jr. This post doesn't really have anything to do with our family history, but I ran across a weird story I just had to share. It takes place during the Civil War and involves a soldier, a virgin, and a gunfire-induced pregnancy that resulted in a literal son of a gun. Legrand G. Capers Jr., a physician, served during that terrible conflict as a Confederate doctor, after helping form the Confederate Medical Department in Alabama. By 1863 he had become chief surgeon for a battalion of the 4th Georgia Volunteer Infantry. During his tenure he says he witnessed a medical miracle, which many years later he reported in the American Medical Weekly , published in Lexington, KY. Here's an abbreviated excerpt from that report: " On the 12th day of May, 1863, the battle of R. [1] was fought. [...] Our men were fighting nobly, but pressed by superior numbers, had gradually fallen back to within one hundred and fifty yards of the house. [2] " My position being nea...

One name turned up repeatedly in my explorations of Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats: Ezra Pound. Now, I'd heard the name before, but I knew next to nothing about him -- that he was a poet about sums it up-- despite my one college-level class in poetry. But here he was, popping up in the biographies of Yeats and Frost and in connection with other literary luminaries such as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, to name just two. In fact, Hemingway once wrote of Pound: "Any poet born in this century or in the last ten years of the preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked. It as if a prose writer born in that time should not have learned from or been influenced by James Joyce or that a traveller should pass through a great blizzard and not have felt its cold or a sandstorm and not have felt the sand and the wind." So I turned to my genealogy site to look him up, ...

Poet W.B. Yeats had a complicated history with women.  Let's start with Maud Gonne. A New York Times*  article from 2008 describes Maud Gonne as a "beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary" and the muse for much of Yeats' romantic poetry over several decades. As mentioned in the previous post, Yeats' fixation with Gonne led him to propose to her four times -- and he was turned down four times. Still the relationship persevered in what they would call a mystical or spiritual marriage.  Both were fascinated by the occult and the mystical. In 1908, for instance, Gonne was in Paris and sent Yeats a letter describing a vision she experienced: "I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & and thought strongly of you & desired to go to you." Because she was an actress, Yeats wrote a play for her that he intended for her to star in, but she ref...

 I mentioned a couple of posts back that the kids were were distantly related -- as in 10th cousins a few times removed -- to the wife of W. B. Yeats. It turns out she was a bit of a character in her own right, so I'll leave a discussion of her and her marriage to Yeats for the new time. I'd heard Yeats' name from time to time in my life, but a couple of things made me actually pay attention to the man and his works. The first was our trip to Ireland in 2013, when our tour took us to County Sligo and the supposed grave of the poet. I'll discuss that supposed comment at the end.  Yeats is almost a second patron saint of Ireland, and probably would be if he'd been a Catholic or even a believer. People come from all over to visit the grave and take pictures of it. Sharon's pic graces the top of this page. Yeats was born in Dublin but his life was split between England and Ireland. Still, he always considered himself Irish, wrote many pieces about the country and se...

Suppose, just suppose, one of the most famous quotes in poetry didn't mean what many readers -- and countless posters, coffee cups and other slogan-adorned merchandise -- think it does. That may well be the case with Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." You know the lines -- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. We view those lines, most often out of context, as being an inspirational reflection on forging our own paths, eschewing the way of the masses to find something better, probably, overlooked by the crowds who prefer the comfortable, well known routines that dominate daily life. Take a chance, the lines seem to cry out, and you'll find serendipity that will completely change your life. Surely this is the case sometimes. We discover new music, new art, new food, new relationships that we gratefully recognize as being so much more interesting and challenging than the beaten paths we ha...

I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it.  As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up.  The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related ...

The headline jumped out at me as I perused one of the several news feeds I check each day: "Taylor Swift is related to famed poet Emily Dickinson and now it all makes sense," proclaimed a CNN headline. Ordinarily I wouldn't have cared a whit and moved on. I'm not a Swiftie or even a fan (then again I'm not exactly the target audience.) But these days she can hardly sneeze without some news outlet posting a breathless article about it. But with what I consider to be the inordinate amount  of publicity the woman receives and my delving into my family's past to learn more about history, I gave the article a read.  A lot of questions popped up in my head. Who cares, was the first. Well obviously Swift fans, who've apparently made comparisons between the women. And I suspect they'd be excited because they would imagine a genetic link between the two women's perceived greatness, so of course their idol would have been fated to become their favorite songs...

I've read several news analyses and opinion columns over the years discussing why Supreme Court rulings on the religion section of the First Amendment are so varied. Why, they ask, can't the court be consistent with its rulings? The answer is both simple and complex. The simple answer is that the rulings reflect the two main streams of thought that have existed since the ratifications of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: accommodationism and separationism. The more complex and nuanced answer is that even if you appeal to the Founding Fathers -- a group whose membership fluctuates according to the persons or groups who appeal to them -- you find both sentiments at play, even in the two men we've been looking at: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Just one example for each man: Jefferson started attending worship services held in the House of Representatives after a prominent Virginia preacher was invited to speak at a service, and apparently continued to attend for t...

A letter such as the one sent by the Danbury Baptist Association to a sitting president needed to be answered. When I first read it, I was a little confused because the letter doesn't seem to indicate that the writers knew anything about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which were ratified a decade before they contacted President Jefferson.  Now I wonder if they were testing the President. How committed was he to religious freedom? After all, his politics trended to a "states' rights" perspective. Now that he held the president, would he commit to defending religious rights for everyone as part of the duties of his office, or might he side with states that had enacted establishment legislation and defer to them in the hopes that they, like his home state, might see the light and disestablish their Christian denominations? I've not read widely enough to settle these questions. But keep them in mind when you consider the contents of the letter. Take a min...

I neglected to mention last time the outcome of the "Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion" -- it failed. Perhaps you already guessed that.  I should also point out Patrick Henry's reasoning on the bill. Simply put people who follow religion -- and yes, I know that whole argument about how "Christianity's not a religion, etc." -- and who regularly attend churches for religious instruction tend to be the kind of citizens we want to foster: prone to follow rules (laws), not given as much to being quarrelsome, more generous than the average unchurced person, regular nice people. And government should want to prop up an institution that creates these law-abiding, somewhat passive citizens. I see this reasoning quoted in an annual ad by a commercial business that used to appear in the papers I read. Ben Franklin -- hardly a Christian icon -- and George Washington -- pretty much your standard Anglican churchgoer -- believed the same ...

Arguments over the meaning of religious liberty have taken place since before the creation of the nation. We've all heard the tales about the Puritans and the Pilgrims coming to America to escape the religious persecutions in England -- and in truth many other European countries.  England, of course, has an established church, the Church of England, more commonly referred to as the Anglican Church, though we may have forgotten that the reigning monarch is also the titular head of this communion. He or she technically can push the church in any direction he/she chooses and can appoint any number of officials. In practice these days, the Crown takes advice on the nomination of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the prime minister, who in turns takes advice from a nominating committee which consists, somewhat paradoxically, of members mostly not from the Anglican communion. What we don't usually hear much about is that once the Puritans, and Pilgrims to a much lesser extent, arrive...

Thomas Jefferson made his views on religion abundantly clear in his writings. If you're curious and have the time, look up his correspondence with Joseph Priestly, an English scientist credited with "discovering" oxygen, and Unitarian minister.  James Madison, on the other hand, can be a little harder to pin down. He associated with Jefferson, who could properly be called Madison's mentor, sought Jefferson's advice, acted as a stand-in for Jefferson and succeeded Jefferson in the presidency, in no small part because of Jefferson's support. He was baptised as an infant in an Anglican church and was married by an Episcopal minister. He seems to have attended church regularly when at home, but was not so faithful while away attending legislative session. As a president, though, he attended worship at a local congregation and with a group that met in the House of Representatives. Some have ascribed political motives or social convention to this attendance.  He did...

Today I intend to approach my topic a bit backwards from my usual method. That method is to search through the genealogies of the Reagans and O'Connors until I encounter a relative whose info contains a reference to a historical event, then research that event and write about it. Occasionally I run into an interesting story about the person that illuminates the times he/she lived in and relate that story. But today, in light of discussions that have been ongoing for a couple of decades and have intensified in more recent years, I wanted to hark back to the reason the Barebones Parliament failed -- a striking difference in approaches to religion in public life. That same issue resulted in the colonization of the land we live in by English settlers -- note that this did not seem to be a problem for the other major nations who made their mark on the American landscape: the Spanish, French, and to some extent the Dutch. Sure religious dissidents existed in those nations, but they weren...

After starting with a couple of my ancestors who carried Puritan names, we turned to look at a a man named Praise-God Barebones and how he made his mark on history simple because of his name -- the so-called Barebones Parliament having been named for him. I thought I should check to see if any of our family was related to him, which I did, but I'm sad to say I could find no listing for him on Family Search.  This doesn't mean someone in our clan wasn't related to him. I may not have searched properly or may have run into Family Search's limit of 15 generations to find a match. But he is still the link that leads to today's history. The Nominated Assembly or Parliament, as it is more formally known, began after the death of Charles I. Oliver Cromwell led the rebellion that brought about Charles' downfall, and in the aftermath he established a Commonwealth. Cromwell was a religious man of the nonconformist bent -- nonconformist being anyone who belonged to any of ...

I wrote last time about Praise-God Barebones, a Puritan, sort of, who lent his name to an ancient session of Parliament. That might sound like an honor, but as we'll see, there's more to the story. Barebones, who is also referred to as Barbon, sort of appears in England. He was probably born a couple of years shy of 1600, and most of his early life is a matter of speculation because of the lack of written documentation.  He served an apprenticeship as a leather seller, and we have a document showing that he became a freeman and a member of the Leathersellers Company in 1623. He became a member of a non-Anglican congregation sometime close to 1632. This congregation is sometimes referred to as a Baptist congregation, and Barebones was once accused of being an Anabaptist, the older precursors of Baptists who favored adult baptism and required those baptized as infants to be rebaptized as adults. Barebones was certainly not an Anabaptist as he would later pen a work defending infa...

I posted a long time ago about a couple of my relatives whose names I thought were somewhat unusual -- Experience Sabin and Truthful Wait. They were born at a time -- Experience in the late 17th century and Truthful in the early 18h -- when English Puritans often named their children in one of three ways, if they were not named for a member of the extended family. This latter practice tends to cause confusion as fathers, sons, uncles and cousins -- and sometimes the equivalents among women, though not as common -- would all bear the same first name and occasionally the same full name. By far the most common was to name their children after people in the Bible. This isn't particularly unusual. The practice was used for a long time in Christian communities and continues to this day. They, and we, have no shortage of Matthews, Marks, Lukes and Johns, names that are also common outside of religious communities.  According to the New England Historial Society web site, half of all Purit...

Governments bring bureaucracy wherever they arise. In the Old Testament God warned the Israelites after they clamored for a king so they could be like the other nations (that kind of reasoning almost never being good). They'd have to have armies, which would require something like a draft, and would require taxes to fund the armies, which would require more taxes to fund the government, which would ... well, you get the point. Oh, and you have to have information, lots of information. Take William the conqueror, for example. William I, king of Normandy, set his sights on England, and in 1066, England's reigning king, Edward the Confessor, died, giving William a chance to fill the vacuum. Of course no shortage of Englishmen wanted the spot, so William had to bring his armed forces over to make sure he sat on the throne.  He was sort of closely related to the previous king, so he had sort of a claim to it. Never mind that Edward had already decided who his successor should be. W...