AND HE DIDN'T PASS THROUGH CUSTOMS TO GET INTO THE COUNTRY, AND DIDN'T PAY ANY TAXES OR SOCIAL SECURITY WHEN HE GOT THERE!
One of my Dutch ancestors owned a pasture downtown. I'm pretty bitter that property didn't stay in the family.
Buck's family claims that their revolutionary war ancestor got a land grant for his military service, which he immediately sold to buy a canoe so he could float down the Delaware looking for a good place to settle. The land grant is now downtown Scarsdale.
(No actual facts were harmed, or corroborated in any way, in the making of this anecdote.)
On one of those celebrity genealogy shows, Rob Lowe discovered his "revolutionary war hero" ancestor was really a Hessian.
Wow, think of the canoe that land would buy today.
My father's side has some Revolutionary War loyalists that we don't talk about.
The first Flippanter arrived in Virginia and promptly skipped out on his contract of indentured servitude to head north to Connecticut.
4: I'm sure there were Hessian heroes too.
Now, whose ancestors were Heshers?
The first Minivet in the colonies came with the Massachusetts Bay Company, and his son, who shared my first and last name, was a church refusenik, who didn't have his children baptized, and only became a freeman thanks to the Half-Way Covenant. Fertile soil for the atheist horde we are now.
That's not a mixed metaphor if you add in dragon's teeth as an intermediary.
2: Anneke Jans or Everardus Bogardus? If so we're like nth cousins or something.
They ought to get around to honoring Anthony Janszoon van Salee, New York's first Muslim, and the son of Murat Reis, President and Grand Admiral of the Salé Rovers/Republic of Salé. He was a prominent landlord - and what can be more New York than that - with extensive properties in Manhattan and was the first to own Coney Island. I won't hold my breath though.
13: I'd have to look up the name, I don't remember it offhand. Most of my Dutch ancestors ended up going upriver, to Albany, and then back down to Kingston. Chasing beaver, naturally.
One of the first white settlers in Alabama was Abram Mordecai, a Revolutionary War veteran. He established the first cotton gin in the state.
One of my Dutch ancestors had 400 acres in Brooklyn, and served as a schepen for some time.
If only the million or so of his descendants could divide those 400 acres: we'd get, what, 16 square feet each!
we'd get, what, 16 square feet each!
At $964 per square foot, that's over 15 grand.
One of my ancestors was one of the first settlers in Indiana Pa.--not quite the NYC panache. In preparing for a local genealogical field trip we are planning around the area, I discovered that he was apparently Jimmy Stewart's third great-grandfather.
Not the most culturally-sensitive chap if this is account is true, The little stone house was built by Fergus Moorhead out of memorial stones heaped by the Indians on the graves of their warrior dead. He had been captured by native Americans during the revolution and ended up in Quebec under the British and was eventually exchanged (his future son-in-law in the line that leads to me was likewise captured (in a different encounter, Lochry's Defeat) and ultimately ended up in Montreal but escaped--probably made for good BS material at family gatherings).
Buck's family claims that their revolutionary war ancestor got a land grant for his military service, which he immediately sold to buy a canoe so he could float down the Delaware looking for a good place to settle. The land grant is now downtown Scarsdale.
If the canoe was birchbark, which it very likely was, it's probably worth quite a bit of money, if it's still in good condition.
In preparing for a local genealogical field trip we are planning around the area, I discovered that he was apparently Jimmy Stewart's third great-grandfather.
My brother-in-law is Jimmy Stewart's second cousin. So I guess that makes us related by marriage.
21: If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
Jimmy Stewart played my friend's grandfather in a movie. So that makes, I dunno, no difference to anything.
You're saying he traded Scarsdale for a canoe and then didn't even keep the canoe?
By easily checkable but unchecked family history, Jimmy Stewart was my uncle's commanding officer.
Caleb Heathcote purchased the land that would become Scarsdale at the end of the 17th century and, on March 21, 1701, had them elevated to a royal manor. He named the lands after his ancestral home in Derbyshire, England. The first local census of 1712 counted twelve inhabitants, including seven African-American slaves. When Caleb died in 1721, his daughters inherited the property. The estate was broken up in 1774, and the town was officially founded on March 7, 1788.
Something's fishy--I suppose it's possible the land grant was somehow part of the broken-up estate, but that seems unlikely. This wasn't unsettled land at that point.
27: My uncle was a bomber pilot flying out of England. I just don't know about the time/unit details.
When my ancestor got a post-Revolutionary War land grant for his services, it was way out in bumfuck western New York state.
I suppose it's possible the land grant was somehow part of the broken-up estate, but that seems unlikely.
I literally know of no support for the Buck family story, so it could be bullshit, but why would that be unlikely? Confiscating a loyalist-owned estate, breaking it up and handing it out to veterans seems perfectly plausible to me (based on no actual knowledge about how land grants worked).
My uncle was a bomber pilot flying out of England. I just don't know about the time/unit details
You don't know, or you just don't want to admit that your uncle killed Glenn Miller?
Wikipedia says that was the RAF. He was U.S. Army.
Whatever helps you get to sleep at night, dude.
31: but how would they have known to do that before the war started?
35: Broken up for other reasons in 1774, and then transferred from the new owners as a result of the war?
As discussed here previously (!) the NY state revolutionary war land grants were all in Western NY, in the area with the classically named towns.
My ancestors all seem to have been undistinguished peasants or small craftsmen (and railway workers). I don't know where I got the idea that I'm so great. On the other hand, my ex's family were big time slave owners and OG Texas Indian killers, so I guess I'll have to explain that at some point.
|| Reading this Metafilter thread, it took me from the first mention of Fry's dog to about the Queen's Innuendo comment to get the waterworks going. Never let it be said I'm not competitive in strange, useless activities.
|>
My ancestors were all railway workers. They spent the whole of the pre-modern period doing nothing.
37: Was the Buck family history debunked here previously? I'd forgotten.
Or maybe I'm wrong -- NY set aside the "Central NY Military Tract" in the area around Syracuse ( this was part of a " why do all those towns have classical names" discussion) but I guess that doesn't rule out the possibility of some land grants in other areas. Presumably you could find out by checking out the recorder of deeds in Westchester county, since the rev war land grant would be in the chain of title (if true) for property in downtown Scarsdale.
41: there were also federal land grants.
Not sure about 43 -- I know the continental congress set out a land grant plan, but since there wasn't really a federal government at the time (and what there was in NY state wasn't around Scarsdale) wasn't it all administered by the states?
42: google indicates that all NY state revolutionary war land grants were indeed in western NY. However, there were also federal lands grants. I assume those were strictly in the territories, but I don't know--it's possible that some of those federal grants involved reclaimed land in various states. I can't find info on this (in the two minutes I've looked).
I don't particularly want to debunk it, though -- explaining to my inlaws that their family stories are bullshit seems counterproductive. (Especially on my fifteenth anniversary! Congratulate me!) I'm happy just repeating the story with the caveat that it's unsubstantiated.
44: I just google shit and repeat what it says.
Presumably somebody wound up with confiscated Tory land.
When my ancestor got a post-Revolutionary War land grant for his services, it was way out in bumfuck western New York state.
Yeah, in PA it was basically all the land north and west of Pittsburgh (west of the Allegheny river, actually). The one ancestor who was captured by Indians may have gotten a grant (he worked for a land company, so he was the initial "warrantee" for and sold a number of semi-vertical shit parcels in the area, not sure if the provenance of any were for his service). In the mid-1790s he took off for Cincinnati and subsequently to some land just north of there because he remembered how good the land seemed in that area from his march under Indian captivity (from the Ohio River near Ohio-Indiana border to Detroit).
Happy Anniversay, LB and Buck, however long ago your ancestors stole land from the indians.
LB, let me be the first to wish you and Buck a happy anniversary!
LB, let me be the first to wish you and Buck a happy anniversary!
Does it count if I spelled "anniversary" wrong?
Congratulations on falling five years and one day short of the Obamas!
57 was actually to the cast and crew of the original 90210.
But Happy Anniversary to Buck and LB, too!
New York history along the Hudson is pretty interesting, since you had Dutch landowners who tried to set up a basically feudal peasant/aristocrat society and were pretty successful at doing so through the mid 19th century. It's not a subject I know a lot about but would like to know more.
Fifteen is the crystal anniversary, which would work out great if somebody gets you Soap episodes.
63: We reconfirmed our traditional anniversary truce yesterday, which is good because crystal generally annoys me. If it's glassware meant for drinking out of, it's too heavy, and if it isn't, it's a pointlessly fragile sharp glittery thing.
61: Yes, the contrast in land ownership patterns between those counties and the ones just over the hills in Connecticut and Massachusetts persisted for a long time, and is still reflected today in the patterns of the older housing stock. Not so much with the standard New England prosperous farm houses in the Hudson area--you tend to get the estates and then more modest foreman/tenant dwellings.
Ok guys, I'm heading onto the 10 right now. How long will it take me to get there?
To your 15th anniversary with LB?
66: The traditional 16th anniversary gift is a plausible self-justification for white flight.
We're coming up on our third, which I think is the Play-doh anniversary.
which is good because crystal generally annoys me
If you lay off after 24 hours or so and then take some xanax and chill out you can avoid that part.
Re the OP's title: Please speak teh language of Freedom.
sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little, save the outline.
_House of the Seven Gables_.
Is this an unbelievably WASPy crowd, or is this more usual with East Coasters, or what?
Is this an unbelievably WASPy crowd, or is this more usual with East Coasters, or what?
I don't think this thread really scratches the surface of the WASPiness lurking in the commentariat, but the other thing you said is true, too.
I'm not all that WASPy myself, just married WASP (well, Catholic actually but with some old-school WASP ancestry). I'm awfully white, but I can't trace any family back past 1900 or so, and most lines immigrated in the 20th C.
Happy Anniversary to LB and Buck!
Happy anniversary!
I don't know anything about my ancestors. I could listen to the results of my grandmother's Internet genealogy attempts but then I'd be bored and know a bunch of things that are probably wrong.
I'm sick tonight. I blame Mitt Romney.
Is it WASPishness, old age, or just good old fashioned privilege that leads me to ditch you folks in favor of some local culture? No point in even speculating.
61, 69: Some of Fenimore Cooper's lesser-known novels are about land relations in New York. I haven't read any of them but I once downloaded a few on Google Books. Also (but JSTOR-walled).
Happy Anniversary!
I am WASP-free.
Me too. Even my one protestant great-grandparent was a Scot.
Happy anniversary!
I mentioned this in the earlier thread too, but Alan Taylor's The Divided Ground is largely about the way Central and Western NY got surveyed and settled (starting with the war and continuing with the purchase of the land from the Indians). It's quite interesting. One point he makes is that in those days there was a lot of confusion over who exactly had the right to make treaties and acquire land, the main disputants in this particular area being the federal government and the states of New York and Massachusetts. New York's claim was in many ways the weakest, but it was the most aggressive about going ahead with its plans anyway and letting the chips fall where they may, so it ended up winning out. The general issue was later settled in favor of the feds, but it was too late for these lands.
See, in this thread people are using "WASP" with the meaning that I used to think it had, before a previous thread where some of the same people told me that was totally wrong.
The probably learned their lesson from Vermont.
(It's intermission at the festival. If anyone gets a chance to see Rick Bass read with Stellarondo, take it.)
78: I had the same reaction, but it's really only 5 commenters and a spouse who are claiming land-owning 16th-century roots in [what became] the U.S.