Most
people when they meet me online think I’m from somewhere in Europe or maybe
Canada, except for those who happen to look at my hometown info on my Facebook
profile sometime. Even some of those
think I’m lying about that. I’ve asked
before and they tell me that I don’t seem like an American, that I don’t act or
talk like one. Especially like an
American from the South.
They mean
it in a positive way, of course, so I don’t take offence. How can I, when even my own son tells me that
I don’t really belong here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, or even in America? Keep in mind that he himself and his girlfriend
are planning to flee for other parts, even out of the country, once they graduate
college.
Hell, I’ve
even had people around here ask me where I’m from sitting at a bar or somewhere
else. My professors at the university
were all from up North and my accent adapted naturally, so I sound like I’m
from the Midwest. Normally, that is.
Recently learned my accent unconsciously alters to match whatever subject I’m talking about. If it’s home and family or high school, I take on a Southern drawl. If it’s Scotland, I shift to a brogue. If Ireland, I shift to a lilt. And yes, even a Cajun-Creole accent if I’m talking about the food or the area. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even realize I did it.
Recently learned my accent unconsciously alters to match whatever subject I’m talking about. If it’s home and family or high school, I take on a Southern drawl. If it’s Scotland, I shift to a brogue. If Ireland, I shift to a lilt. And yes, even a Cajun-Creole accent if I’m talking about the food or the area. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even realize I did it.
I can
assure my national and international friends, as well as my more local
detractors (like the high school classmates who defriended me on Facebook
because I said I respect Al Jazeera more than any other news source), that I am
indeed from here. I even qualify for
First Families of Tennessee and similar groups in several other states. Not necessarily of here, but definitely from
here.
I hadn’t
realized just how much I am from here,
though, until I started looking into the histories of the various families from
which I descend.
I first
got interested in geneaology when I watched the miniseries “Roots” during its
first showing on television. I was
thirteen, I think, at the time and my favorite character was Chicken George.
My parents
had always told me we were English (Hamiltons) and Dutch (Hicks and Buchanan),
but just the little bit of digging I managed at 13 told a different story.
It turned
out that the Hamiltons originated in Scotland, same with the Buchanans,
while the Hicks originated in northern England.
The Stewarts (my paternal grand mother’s family) we knew originated in
Scotland from some research one of my dad’s uncles had done. So, for most of my life from early
adolescence until just a few years ago, I identified as Scottish-American.
I became
and remain a staunch Scottish nationalist.
I joined the Scottish Nationalist Party on the 700th anniversary
of the Battle of Stirling Bridge and remained a member until they forbade
international membership following a change in UK law. If they had found out about my membership in the cross-party Scottish Republican Socialist Movement they would
have expelled me anyway. I’m still a
member of SRSM, though not as active the past few years since June 2009, and also associated and friends with many
members of the pro-independence Scottish Socialist Party.
I am also
associated informally with the Irish Republican Socialist Movement,
which other than the name is not formally connected with the SRSM. I respect its members and leadership, and
regarding Ireland’s politics I am a republican socialist. However, I believe that reunification of the
island, if it ever occurs, would have to take place along the lines of the
quasi-federal Eire Nua program of Republican Sinn Fein. I also appreciate the anti-sectarian stance
of the Ulster Nation people.
Besides
the new UK law, another reason for the SNP’s prohibition of international
members was the attempted infiltration of its ranks by white supremacists
cloaked in tartan and using the label “Anglo-Celtic”. If there’s one thing Scottish nationalists
can’t stand, it’s "Brigadooners", especially of the variety in the League of the
South and organizations associated with it, like the Southern Party and the
Conservative Citizens Councils.
The term
“Anglo-Celtic” is an affectation, not a historical reality. I am quite sure the League of the South knows
nothing of the Clan Singh either. The
Clan Singh is officially recognized by and registered with the Lord Lyon
King-of-Arms and the Council of Scottish Chiefs, with its own elected chief,
tartan, and coat-of-arms,
and its membership is all South Asian.
Clan
membership is a big part of Scottish identity, especially among nationalists,
but not an absolutely necessary part, is more about name and allegiance than it is genetics and biology.
Scottishness is just as much urban “Trainspotting” as it is the
plaid-clad “Braveheart”.
Under the
old Brehon/Brieve laws, servants and even slaves were counted as part of what
is now considered the clan. The Brehon
Laws, the old Celtic body of laws dating from the oral laws of the druids,
lasted in Ireland in central and western Ulster and in all of Connacht until
the Flight of the Earls in 1607. The
Brieve Laws, the Scottish version, lasted in the Isles and Western Highlands
until the end of the Rising of the ’45 in 1746.
In other
words, the descendants of Frederick Douglas, should they wish, are entitled to
join the Clan Douglas Society as full members by virtue of their name. That probably surprises nearly as many people
as the fact that a huge percentage of African-Americans are entitled to join
the Sons of Confederate Veterans as full voting members in their own right, by
descent from a freedman or slave ancestor who was a veteran.
Incidentally,
Barak Obama is entitled to join both the SCV and its Military Order of Stars
and Bars as a descendant of Jefferson Davis, just like his cousin, Dick Cheney.
And anyone may join the SCV, or its Sons of Union Veterans counterpart, as an
associate member, even recent immigrants with no prior connection to America,
by the way.
I am
Robert Charles Hamilton III, my father is Robert Charles Jr. and my grandfather
Robert Charles Sr. And that’s as far
back as the “legitimate” line goes.
Legally, Hamilton is indeed my name, but biologically I’m not a
Hamilton. However, under the modern rules in Scotland governing clan
membership, I am a member of Clan Hamilton. By descent I am American, and
before that Irish and Scottish, with some bit of English and smidgens of
German, French, and Cherokee.
I am also
an atheist social anarchist who grew up with Jewish godparents who ate kosher bacon and I have Muslim goddaughters who eat halal hot dogs,
as well as a Palestinian niece in Gaza City.
Then there’s all my Filipino former in-laws who still consider me part
of the family; friends of my son have nicknamed him “Asian”.
That
reminds me of this story. A Palestinian,
an American, a French Iranian, and an Israeli got onto a boat in Paris…wait. That isn’t a story; that really
happened. I was there, as the
American. I have pictures. Not “those” kind. It wasn’t last Friday night, it was a crowded
public Batobus tour boat cruising the Seine River in May.
I also
have 74 lineal and collateral ancestors who fought for the Confederacy,
according to the reckoning of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in units of the
Army of Tennessee, Army of Northern Virginia, Army of Trans-Mississippi,
Department of East Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia, Western District of
North Carolina, and Department of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
I also
qualify through a few others for the Sons of Union Veterans, not a unique
situation by any means, except for maybe the number of qualifying ancestors
I’ve identified. One (from Snowhill,
Georgia) served in the 22nd Indiana Infantry and the rest with the 1st
Tennessee and Alabama Vidette Cavalry, politely termed a “partisan ranger”
unit.
I mention
the Civil War right off because here in Chattanooga, you have to ignore it to
get away from it. It surrounds you
everywhere. The USA’s first and largest
military park is the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, after all. Same for the country’s first National
Military Cemetery. Civil War monuments
spread over downtown, along Missionary Ridge, and across Lookout Mountain and a
few other places. Less than a mile from
my high school is a Confederate cemetery; another is in the middle of downtown.
The
neighborhood where I lived until recently is the one through which ran the
route of the Army of Tennessee’s retreat from Chickamauga Station (across the
rails from where Lovell Field is now) the day after its disastrous route from Missionary Ridge the
previous day. Maybe
President Lincoln had a foreshadowing that would be happening on that first
Thanksgiving Day, which he had instituted in October 1863 as a PR distraction
from the Union debacle at the Battle of Chickamauga and the almost
Pyrrhic losses in the “victories” of Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
I was
raised in the East Brainerd area of Hamilton County for
most of my childhood before we moved east a few miles to Ryall Springs. The community that was called Concord until
Birds Mill-Parker Gap Road had been rechristened Brainerd/East Brainerd Road in 1926. The only remaining evidence
of the former name are Concord Road and Concord Baptist Church.
Concord
Road was once part of the stage route from the county seat of Harrison, where
the mail and stage road from Old Washington (Tennessee, not D.C.) crossed the
Tennessee River. The road came southward
along the west side of the valley until the former Shepherd mansion, then
crossed to the east side. The first
section is now called Hickory Valley Road, the second is Concord Road. Concord Road crossed Chickamauga River at
Carpenter’s Ford before continuing southwest to the Old Federal Road.
Concord
Baptist Church, was established in 1848 as the Baptist Church of Christ
at Concord. Its founders included some
former members of the Church of Christ at Chickamauga, the congregation
attached to the Brainerd Mission, which sat on land bought from former
British Indian Superintendent John MacDonald, whose trading post was across Chickamauga
River from Old Chickamauga Town of the Cherokee.
Old
Chickamauga Town had lain where the sub-divisions of Brainerd Hills and Brainerd
Heights now sit and the late 19th century whistle-stop of Worley
once lay. Whorley is another post name
which never really took, except for the now defunct Masonic lodge which my
paternal grandfather used to belong to.
Before it was named Worley, it had been called Ellis’ Crossing after
the crossing of the railroad tracks by Bird’s Mill Road.
The
railroad engineer who laid out the town of Whorley was W. T. Worley, whose large two-story house
sat where East Brainerd Church of Christ is now. Well within Concord community and three miles
from the post station. In the early, ante-bellum days
of Concord, the local “meeting house” was there. “Meeting house” was a 19th century
euphemism for a tavern and inn, often with prostitutes and gambling in addition
to booze and beer and food.
The
euphemism was not without basis. Often
taverns were the only public building than churches in which local men could
get together and discuss community issues, politics, and business. There are a lot of public buildings here
these days, but the closest that would qualify as a meeting house is the
Hardees. And only in the mornings, but
pretty much every morning.
An earlier
rail stop than Whorley had been planned closer to the midst of Concord just
before the Civil War, a mile or so down
from the station at Graysville, Georgia.
It was at or near the intersection with John D. Gray's planned Harrison
(Tennessee)-Lafayette (Georgia) Railroad, and was to have been named Johnson.
Part of the railbed that had been laid for the aborted project became
Gunbarrel Road, the modern shopping mecca of the region.
I can
remember when Gunbarrel was a tar-and-gravel, sometimes dirt, road not even two
lanes wide. We sometimes played
stickball and other games there because there was never any traffic.
I went to
school in the local area throughout my educational career. I went to East Brainerd Elementary for six
years, which was less than half a block from our house on North Joiner/ Walnut
Grove/Ryan Road. At time, the school was
first through sixth grades. I had gone
to St. Nicholas Kindergarten at Grace Episcopal Church.
East
Brainerd Elementary began its life a hundred years ago on land donated by
William T. Walker, the station-master at Chickamauga Station, who lived across
the road. The house still stood until a
decade ago. The school’s first name was
Walnut Grove, the name it had had when it met in its old building a mile
away on South Gunbarrel Road. One section of the current school
dates from the original Walnut Grove School.
After
leaving East Brainerd, I went to Tyner Junior High for three years, Ooltewah High
School for one year, and after my final two years graduated from Tyner High in
1981. I studied political science, with
minors in psychology, religion, and history, at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga, graduating in 1985.
So, you
can’t say I’m not from around here. In
fact, my roots in the area go deep.
My
mother’s parents both went to Tyner in the latter years of the Great
Depression. The school gets its name
from the village that used to be there before the coming of the now-defunct
Army TNT plant in 1940. The
continued existence of that plant during the Cold War made the area one of the
top ten sites for the Soviet ICBMs in the event of a global thermonuclear
war. The real thing, not a video game
played by a young Matthew Broderick.
My son and
I drove through the 2200-acre Enterprise Nature Park that’s now part of the complex there
one weekend. On one part of the drive,
we found two-feet thick walled concrete bunkers from that era. His reaction was, “Holy shit! The Cold War was real!!”.
Naw,
we Americans were just kidding and so were the Soviets. Right?
My
father’s mother went to school in Dade County, Georgia, and his father in
Muncie, Indiana aka “Middletown USA”.
Tyner High
and Junior High got their names from the village of Tyner, which in turn got
its name from the whistle-stop built in the mid-19th century when
the East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad first laid tracks through the
area. The village included a redoubt
built by soldiers of division of the Confederate Army of Tennessee commanded by
Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne. The
whistle-stop got its name from its station master, Capt. J. S. Tyner.
The U.S. Army took the village of Tyner but not the station, which operated mostly as a
passenger stop until the 1960’s. The
village formerly sat at the crossroads of Hickory Valley Road and
Chattanooga-Cleveland Pike (now Bonny Oaks Drive). All of its houses were destroyed, but the
redoubt remains.
Another
redoubt built by Cleburne’s troops had been destroyed to build the original
Tyner High School. Cleburne, by the way,
was originally from County Cork in Ireland
Cleburne’s
troops built three more redoubts built in that area of Hamilton County, two on
Milliken Ridge between Hickory Valley and Chickamauga Station and one at the
then county seat of Harrison. Of the
first two, one was destroyed by the drunk who inherited Altamede.
Altamede, the former Shepherd mansion built in the 1840’s by Col. Lewis Shepherd and modeled on James Vann’s Diamond Hill at Springplace, Georgia, reigned over 7000 acres of land at one time. The narrow valley bordered by Trading Post Hill-Stein Hill-Dupree Hill (all part of Milliken Ridge) on one side and Concord Ridge on the other through which the old post road ran is called Hickory Valley. That was also the first post office in the area, but the name didn’t stick.
One of the Dupree descendants of the Shepherd family got into the habit of selling off the dirt from the top of Dupree Hill behind Altamede to get money for booze. The first part to go was the redoubt. The other redoubt, on Stein Hill, was destroyed to make way for a water tower, though you can still see the base of the wall and the rifle pits. The third redoubt, at Harrison, is under the waters of Chickamauga Reservoir along with the old town.
After
their village was taken by federal eminent domain, many of the village’s
residents moved just south of their former homes, taking the name Tyner with
them, encroaching upon the hill where the original high school, the one my
grandparents attended, sat. Others moved
slightly east to the area called Silverdale.
My Hadden great-grandparents moved out east to Ryall Springs.
Tyner
wasn’t the only community obliterated to make way for the sovereignty of the
army; the African-American community of Hawkinsville, along Hickory Valley Road
north of Chattanooga-Cleveland Pike, bit the dust as well. However, its residents also managed to
recreate their community, a few miles southeast (centered on Pinewood Road). Part of the community of Shot Hollow in what
became the northern section of the Army reservation was expelled as well.
Smack dab
in between the village of Tyner and the community of Hawkinsville, in the
southwest corner of the crossroads, sat the store of my great-grandfather L. B.
Hadden, Sr., father of my grandmother Pauline Hadden Hicks, until 1940. L. B. was married to Sarah Oliver, descended
from the Cades Cove Olivers of Upper East Tennessee.
L.B. Sr.’s
father, Civil War vet William A. of the 8th Georgia Home Guards, was
married to Sarah’s older sister, Minnie, his second wife. For years, my grandmother went to visit
“Grandpa and Aunt Minnie”. Minnie and
Sarah were the daughters of George Washington Oliver, who served in the Civil
War with both the Confederate 4th Tennessee Cavalry and the Union 22nd
Indiana Infantry.
The Cades
Cove Olivers, Minnie and Sarah’s family, had been among the first
Euro-Americans to settle in Carter Valley, now County, west of Sullivan County,
prior to relocating to the cove in Blount County for which they are famous.
My
grandfather Nathan A. Hicks Jr. lived several miles to the west in East
Chattanooga, what the city now calls “Glass Farm District” (just as they have
redubbed North Chattanooga as “North Shore”), but walked from there to Tyner
and back every day because at the time Tyner had the best football team and
Nathan A. Jr. wanted to play football, and did.
One of
great-grandma Sarah’s maternal uncles, Adolphus Horn, gave his name to the
village of Hornville in southern Hamilton County which is now the Chattanooga
community of East Dale. My mom’s
paternal grandmother (Eunice Bethemia-Jane Buchanan Hicks), along with her
father (Nathan A., Jr.), her mom (Pauline), uncles (Paul, Freed, David) and
aunt (Irene) all lived with their spouses (Pauline, Dean, Marjorie, Ruth—later
Jean—and R.L. Buckner).
Great-great-grand
Uncle Adolphus later owned a thousand-acre strawberry plantation which
ultimately became the town of Lakesite, north of the Tennessee River; he
himself founded another town called Gold Point which eventually disappated.
Eunice
Bethemia-Jane was one of the results of the union of two lines of Buchanans,
both descended from two brothers, John and James, who first lived in Virginia
in the mid-to-late 18th century. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather James migrated to North Carolina where his descendants lived until well
after the Civil War, in which his grandson Benjamin S. Buchanan was a sergeant
in the 25th North Carolina Infantry.
In 1768, John, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, sold
Evan Shelby, father of later Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby, the land that
became Sapling Grove, the first of the North-of-Holston settlements (later
Pendleton District) which ultimately became Sullivan County, Tennessee.
Aside from
the exploration-era Spanish Presidio de San Pablo established by the would-be
conquistador Juan Pardo, governor of La Florida, at the Late Mississippian town
of Cauchi, or Conesauga, and the mid-18th century French trading
post called Fort Charleville at the Great Salt Lick on the Cumberland River,
Sapling Grove was the first settlement by Europeans inside what became the
State of Tennessee, and the first that lasted.
Evan
Shelby may have been the first white man to have a homestead in what is now
Tennessee, but John Buchanan already owned, or thought he owned, the land upon
which it was later built, so how you define resident would determine which of
the two gets the title of First Citizen.
One of the
signatories of the Cumberland Compact, John Buchanan was one of the pioneers
around 1780 in the Cumberland Basin settlements centered around Fort
Nashborough, which was on the site of the former Fort Charleville at what
period maps name the Great French Salt Lick.
I’ll get to that part of the story a bit later.
In the
generation before James and John, our Buchanans split from the line which begat James Buchanan, future
President.
Nathan
Andrew Hicks, Jr., my mom’s dad, was the latest in a long line of Nathan Hicks
extending back into the 18th and maybe even 17th
centuries, or even farther. In every
generation of that line of Hicks, there was a Nathan, sometimes the oldest son
but not always. My granddad was the
oldest among his siblings, likewise with father, but Nathan Andrew, Sr.’s
father, Nathan Edward, was the youngest of his.
Due to the
constancy of the name Nathan in our line of Hicks along with the proximity of
areas they were born in, I have little doubt that I am related at least by
marriage to the Cherokee Hicks which produced Charles Renatus Hicks, longtime
Assistant Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation who served as Principal Chief
for two weeks before his death. Why?
Nathan Edward’s father’s name was Nathan Renatus. No proof, but it’s a decent hunch.
The Hicks
lived in Sullivan County from the 1780’s, and there are still many there. Nathan Edward’s sister Jennet married Nathan
Gregg, who became commanding officer of the Confederate Department of East
Tennessee and Southwest Virginia’s 60th Tennessee Mounted
Infantry. Jennet’s and Nathan Edward’s
father, Nathan Renatus, had died shortly before the outbreak of the war, and
their mother took them and their siblings to live near her birth family in
Blount County, bordering the State of North Carolina.
Close by
the Hicks in Blount County during the war lived the family of another
Confederate soldier, Nimrod Jarret Smith, a sergeant in the Thomas Legion of
Cherokee Indians and Highlanders of the Western District of North
Carolina. Years after the war, when
Nathan Edward, then working on the railroad of which one line ran right through Swain County near Qualla Boundary reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, where it
included a station named “Cherokee”, married Mary, Jarret Smith’s eldest
daughter.
Not long
after the wedding, Mary became sick and her nearest age sister, Cordelia,
travelled to Sullivan County, to which the Hicks family had returned after the
war just as the Smiths had returned to Qualla, to care for her. Unfortunately, Mary died, and Cordelia, who
had become close to her brother-in-law while caring for her sister, married him
and became my great-great-grandmother.
Her father, Jarret, or Tsaladihi, became Principal Chief of the Eastern
Band in 1880.
Delia and
Nathan Edward had eight children together before she died, after which he
re-married to Mary Roberts of Columbus, Georgia, whom he met while working
another rail line, and moved his whole family to Flint Springs in Bradley
County. Nathan Edward and Mary had eight
more children, giving him a total of sixteen, and they are buried next to each
other at Flint Springs Church, him as Edward Nathan, no doubt since he used his
middle name due to the multiplicity of Nathans in his various families.
Nathan
Edward’s oldest son Nathan Andrew, Sr. was the Hicks who married Eunice
Bethemia-Jane Buchanan.
Nathan
Andrew and Eunice Bethemia-Jane’s marriage was not the first encounter between
their two families. That occurred on the
evening of 30 September 1792.
That night
a young Cherokee warrior, Aganstata (Ground Hog), Jarrett Smith's grandfather, and his older brother, Nunnehidihi (Pathkiller), were part of a 300-plus strong force of Cherokee,
Muscogee, and Shawnee led by Cherokee war leader John Watts trying to massacre
a small group of 14 barricaded inside a fortified blockhouse in the Cumberland
Basin called Buchanan’s Station, named for its owner, John Buchanan. So, one
night about two hundred and twenty years ago, two of my
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers were doing their damnedest to
kill each other, and since there’s a historical marker there I know exactly
where that spot is.
After the
end of the Chickamauga Wars, which began in mid-1776 during the American
Revolution and lasted until November 1794, Aganstata, my
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, changed his name to Uwati
(Ancient One), which he later Anglicized to David Watie. His brother Nunnehidihi, changed his own name
to Ganundalegi (The Ridge), and was later known as Major Ridge. Those barricaded inside Buchanan’s Station
were the family and close friends of the afore-mentioned John Buchanan, as well
as himself.
Aganstata/David
Watie survived to die a natural death in 1842 in the Cherokee Nation in Indian
Territory; Jarret Smith was his great-grandson.
David’s son Isaac, or Stand (from Degataga), Watie, later became
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory during the Civil War
and a brigadier general commanding the First Indian Brigade of the Confederate
Army of Trans-Mississippi. Another son,
Buck Watie aka Elias Boudinot, died in a political assassination by partisans
of the John Ross faction the same day in 1839 as David’s brother Major and
nephew John.
Boudinot
and the Ridges died for the sin of opposing Ross’ unilateral imposition of
himself and his faction upon an already existing government, that of the
Cherokee Nation West, and refusing to accept his dictatorial edicts. Had the true cause been over the Treaty of
New Echota, many more would have died, several of Ross’ relatives among them,
including one his brothers Andrew, who had been one of the first advocates of
voluntary Removal years before the Watie and Ridge families.
Removal,
of course, had long been a feature of policy among the Cherokee themselves for
themselves. Before the early 18th
century, the group of towns known as the Overhills along the Little Tennessee
River didn’t exist. They only came into
being after the British colonies began to encroach on their neighbors’
territory. In his History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, James Mooney
alludes to stories from living Cherokee sources that their last town in the
north, on the headwaters of the Ohio River, was abandoned in 1708.
When the
old men of the Overhill Towns signaled their lack of willingness to continue
war against the Americans in 1776, Dragging Canoe removed his people westward
to the Chickamauga (now Chattanooga, Tennessee) area. Five years later they removed into the Five
Lower Towns area. After the wars, the
earliest emigrants from Cherokee territory in the east to remove across the
Mississippi River came from among the former militants. The same former militants provided the
strongest support for emigration within the new Cherokee Nation East.
As for the
defenders of Buchanan’s Station, they all survived. Their attackers, however, were not so
fortunate, losing a great number of warriors, including Muscogee leader
Talotiskee, Shawnee leader Shawnee Warrior (his actual name), and Cherokee
leaders Kitegisky and Little Owl, brother of the renowned Cherokee war leader
Tsiyugunsini (Dragging Canoe) who had died of natural causes six months prior
to the battle.
My dad’s
ancestors were a bit less colorful, at least as far as written history is
concerned, anyway. At least as far as
his mother is concerned. Although, it is
interesting to know that I am related by intermarriage or by blood to everyone
in Dade County, except for the newcomers.
His mother Nelle’s family, the Stewarts, and her other families, the
Tittles, Cases, Murphys, Adams, and Martins, came to the area on the heels of
the Cherokee, mostly from Warren County, Tennessee, after the Removal in 1838,
settling the Georgia county known since the Civil War as the State of
Dade.
The
Stewarts were one of the first families in Rising Fawn and the Tittles and
Cases two of the first in Salem, or Trenton as it soon came to be known. The Murphys gave their name to the hollow
coming into the northwest of the county from the Tennessee Valley, while the
Martins owned a large plantation straddling the Georgia-Tennessee state
line. Later ancestors helped establish
the communities of Stewart-town, Hooker, and New England.
“My” Adams are the
same bunch that produced Presidents John and John Quincy Adams, making me a
distant cousin of Provisional Irish Republican Army and later Sinn Fein leader
Gerry Adams. The Adams originated as the
MacAdams of Galloway in Scotland, a sept of the Clan Gregor. The
Martin who built the house near the stateline was married to an Adams, and they
in turn were cousins of the Hale for whom Hale’s Bar was named.
I find it
amusing that the leader of the largest republican movement in Northeast Ulster
(aka Northern Ireland) is what might otherwise be called an Ulster Scot. The same is true for the most famous northern
republican of all, Bobby Sands, whose family originated in northern England
before migrating into Lowland Scotland and later to Ulster.
The
Martins, who had a large farm or plantation straddling the state line and whose house I
managed to see before it was destroyed, owned a few slaves, two small families,
and it is through them that I have African-American relatives that I know of,
possibly by blood. Two of my Case
great-great-grand uncles had common-law wives who were nominally slaves, so
there may be more. The Martins came from
Ulster, specifically Tir Eoghain, where they once followed the Cenel Eoghain
that became the O’Neills of Tyrone.
The
original antebellum house of the Stewarts (and that of the Curetons, whom some
Stewarts married) is still standing in Rising Fawn. I know because I’ve seen it. It even survived
the tornado of 27 April 2011 that devastated so much of Dade Co.
After the
war, the Stewarts moved some distance away to the area in the county now called
by their name, Stewart Town. No one with the name
Stewart lives in the county anymore, having all moved away, mostly into
Tennessee. But the Murphys, who
intermarried with the Stewarts so many times they consider any Stewart a
cousin, own the house in Stewart Town.
One of my
dad’s uncles, Dick, traced the Stewart line back to Scotland, to the royal line
of Scots through the Stewarts of Appin.
This, of course, makes us descendants of the Kings of Scots and of the
Lords of the Isles too. Of course, the
Stewarts were so prolific, at least in regard to their “illegitimate”
offspring, that being their descendant is not all that notable and the number
now includes possibly the entire population of Scotland.
During the
Civil War, my ancestors from every family in Dade County fought in all four
companies the county provided to the Confederacy in the 6th, 21st,
34th, and 39th Georgia Infantry regiments. One was an
officer, Lt. James Alexander Case, in Co. F, 34th Georgia
Infantry. Two, possibly three, were
named George Washington Tittle, one buried in Cash Canyon (the Tennessee River Gorge). I also have two Confederate ancestors named
George Washington Oliver.
I have
ancestors buried the length of Wills and Lookout Valleys, from the mouth of Wills Valley in Alabama near Fort
Payne to the foot of Lookout Valley at the Tennessee River in the river gorge named Cash Canyon.
My dad’s
family on his father’s side is a bit more colorful, though for reasons not many
of our older relatives wanted to talk about until it was too late to get much
more information.
My
great-grandfather Hamilton, David M., was one of the nicest, most caring people
I’ve ever met. He’s one of the two
reasons I gave my son the first name David (the other being an otherwise
unknown boy I met on the side of the road in Mexico;
David’s middle name, Nicholas, comes from his mother grandfather in the
Philippines). He’s also not really my great-grandfather, at
least biologically. We didn’t find that
out until I was at university and my grandfather in a nursing home with
Alzheimer’s and paraplegia. He told me
himself in one of his more lucid moments, one in which he was not thinking I
was “Bobby”, my father.
After
arriving home following that visit, I told my mother and she called Aunt
Margaret, my dad’s sister, who confirmed it.
She had known for quite some time but hadn’t ever gotten around to
sharing the information. Margaret had
learned it from Lorraine, Uncle Lee Stewart’s wife (we never called her Aunt
Lorraine because she always said she was too young to be an aunt), who had
heard it from Grandma Hamilton (my great-grandmother).
It turns
out my “real” great-grandfather was surnamed King, and Papa Hamilton (R.C. Sr.)
knew this because he’d worked for him at the A&P grocery in Muncie,
Indiana, which is, or was, considered by sociologists to be the archetypical
city of Middle America. I’ve found some
indications that King’s family came from County Galway in the province of
Connacht, the name having originally been MacConroy, or MacConraoi.
Along with
the O’Malleys of Umaill, the O’Flahertys of Connemara, and the O’Dowds of UÃ
Fiachrach Muaidhe, the MacConroys of Gno Mor (and their cadets the O’Heeneys of
Gno Beg) were one of the clans of sea-kings in Connacht. The earliest designation for the family and
their followers in Irish was Delbhna Thira Da Locha, Delbhna of the Land of Two Lakes,
the Debhna being a large population group in Ireland during the Late Ancient
and Early Middle Ages that later broke into eight dispersed groups in Connacht,
Leinster, and Meath.
The title
of The MacConroy as chief of the name was Mac Mheic Con Raoi, and as ruler of
his territory was King, later Lord, of Delbhna Thira Da Locha. After the year 800 CE, they were nominally
subject to The O’Flaherty as King of Iar Connacht and Lord of Moycullen. Iar Connacht took in not only the
O’Flaherty’s base of Connemara but Moycullen as well, a medieval barony
contiguous with Thira Da Locha. In
practice, the MacConroys were independent, probably called kings by their
followers and even by the O’Flahertys.
I suspect
that nearly all of Papa (Robert Charles Sr.) Hamilton’s ancestors, including
both his “adoptive” father and his “biological” father, descended from Famine
Irish. Grandma Hamilton, Anna Roach,
certainly was, on both sides, her mother being from the Rice family (either
Rhys from Munster or O’Mulcreevy from Ulster) and her dad from the Roach family
(de la Roche), descended from Godbert, the first Cambro-Norman knight to cross
the Irish Sea in 1167, two years before Strongbow, Richard de Clare, came at
the invitation of the deposed king of Leinster.
Anna’s two
grandfathers fought together in the 10th Tennessee Infantry of the
Confederate Army of Tennessee, an all-Irish unit nicknamed the Sons of
Erin. For at least a time, the Sons of
Erin served in Irish Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s Division. The two former comrades moved west together
to still open lands of Arkansas, from which Anna’s parents moved to the Holy
Land of Indiana.
Grandpa
Hamilton, David M., may have come from Famine Irish as well. For all I know, the surname Hamilton could be
Anglicized from O’Hamill. His father,
John, died in a coal mine accident when he was just five and his mother, Ida,
of pneumonia a few years later. His
grandmother, Henrietta Van Winkle, left him standing on a rail station platform
with a quarter in his hand as she boarded the train going off with her sixth
husband around 1903. He joined a circus
for several years which eventually made its way to Muncie, where he met and
fell in love with single mother Anna Roach some time in 1914.
Legally,
as far as state records go, David M. Hamilton is Robert Charles Sr.’s
biological father. What the records
don’t say is that the birth certificate wasn’t recorded until my grandfather
was six and needed one for school. Nor
that his “parents” hadn’t even met until he was three.
Before the
Famine, all those who came from Ireland, no matter what their religion and
ancestry, were considered Irish. In the
18th century when the Great Migration took place, there was no
Orange Order of all non-Catholics. There
was just a Protestant (Anglican) Ascendancy lording it over a population of
Catholics and Dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants, including Scottish Episcopalians as well as Presbyterians).
For
instance, the Protestant (loosely, anyway) Doc Holliday considered himself every
bit as Irish as his very Catholic cousin and love interest Mary McCarthy, just
as Anglican Pat Cleburne, scion of an Ascendancy Anglo-Irish family in Co. Cork,
considered himself every bit as much Irish as his Catholic soldiers in the 10th
Tennessee Infantry.
Doc’s
cousin Mary eventually became Sister Mary Melody at a convent, where she
befriended a younger cousin named Margaret Mitchell and became enshrined in
literature as Melanie Hamilton, while her romanticized cousin became Rhett
Butler.
When
refugees from the Famine in Ireland came flooding into America in the 1840’s,
many of their predecessors invented the notion that they themselves were not
Irish but rather “Scotch-Irish”. To
distance themselves from the wretched newcomers who were often Gaelic-speaking,
desperately impoverished, and, God forbid, Catholic. They were aided and abetted in their
self-delusional pretensions by the Anglican Ascendancy in Ireland.
The
Ascendancy had realized its precarious position of being a wealthy 1% on top of
a poor tenant 99% population united in its hatred of its gentry. It therefore opened the doors of its
exclusively Anglican Orange Order to not-so-well-off Presbyterians,
Episcopalians, and other disreputable Nonconforming Dissenters. Kind of like when South Africa gave more
freedom to “mulattoes” vis-a-vis their full African fellow non-citizens, or
would have had the South Africans pretended the mulattoes were white under
their laws.
Before
that, Dissenters had suffered nearly as many legal disabilities, though usually
in different areas of law, as Catholics.
The Orange
Order was founded in 1795 as the Ascendancy’s defense against the United
Irishmen, the first group in Ireland to advocate republicanism. The United Irishmen, ancestral to the Irish
Republican Army, were founded by two Anglicans and nine Presbyterians in 1791,
inspired by an English-born American, Thomas Paine.
Partly
because of the sectional divide and partly because most Famine Irish landed in
the North, the custom of using “Scotch-Irish” didn’t make it pass the
Mason-Dixon line until the late 19th century at the earliest. Its use became more widespread after the
birth of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 and the rise of “hooded
Americanism”.
Sean Connery, whose family’s roots are in Munster, is a proud Scottish nationalist, and James Connolly, the famous Irish republican, was born in Edinburgh.
Sean Connery, whose family’s roots are in Munster, is a proud Scottish nationalist, and James Connolly, the famous Irish republican, was born in Edinburgh.
A few
years back, I began to learn that no matter what their family’s ultimate
origin, nearly all my ancestors, with a couple of exceptions, were in Ireland
before coming here to America. Most
crossed during the Great Migration of the 18th century, others
during the Famine of the mid-19th century. That bit of interesting information began to
integrate with what I had learned earlier about the identity and origin of my
biological great-grandfather. After
nearly three decades of me thinking I’m Scottish, I find out I’m Irish.
It took me
a while to get my head and my heart wrapped around that one. I don’t think it finally clicked into place
until I went to the Coolin bar in Paris.
It’s right off the Mabillon station of the No. 10 Metro line. It’s not your typical bullshit touristy
Irish-themed joint with manufactured quaintness. It’s the real thing.
Good food,
balanced between Irish and French cuisine, and good selection of beer and wine
and Irish whisky, single malt Scotch too.
The inside is like an Irish pub, the outside like a French brasserie. The staff has one Aussie and a couple of
French but is mostly Irish. Great
people, all of them.
I also
recommend the Cours du Commerce Saint Andre in the Saint Germain-de-Pres
neighborhood and the Place de la Contrescarpe in the Fauborg Saint-Médard area near the Latin Quarter. And the cafe Le Bouqet de Grenelle brasserie on the northwest corner of Avenue de la Motte Piquet and Rue de Pondichery.
On the Rue
de l’Odeon in Paris where Thomas Paine lived for several years, there is a plaque
that reads: “Thomas Paine. English by
birth. American by choice. French by adoption. Citizen of the world.”
Seeing
that plaque in person was one of my favorite moments during my first trip to
Paris, at least of the touristy variety.
I would have to say that seeing the Eiffel Tower light up at night beats
it though. The boat ride on the Seine
River as the American with the Iranian, the Palestinian, and the Israeli was
more memorable too.
Geneaology
and family history are interesting, but regardless of what my DNA is and where
it comes from or where I was born and raised, I am a Terran, a citizen of
Earth. The whole world is my home, and
all its people my brothers, sisters, and cousins.
Keep the
faith, my friends, our day will come.
4 comments:
Impressive story and history of your family Chuck.
Thanks, Alan.
Cordelia Smith married Jackson W Ellis in 1885 and had five children before she died in 1901 in South McAlester OK. Jack Ellis was a lawman, prison warden, lighthorse man, and it is recorded in publications and records during that time and forword that the chief's daughter Cordelia was his wife. She was my great grandmother. Check out the Dawes packets. She died during her roll application period but there is still the record.
There were four Cordelia Smiths around at that time and the one on the Dawes Rolls in Oklahoma was not Jarrett Smith's daughter. Since she was a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, Jarrett Smith's daughter is listed on the rolls of the Eastern Band, along with her older sister Mary and the rest of her siblings.
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