Posted on 09/15/2012 8:39:44 AM PDT by Davy Buck
But this attitude by the Veterans Administration is not necessarily confined to Confederate soldiers. An article in the most recent issue of Civil War News explains that the current V.A. has "reinterpreted existing law." This flies in the face of a policy which has been in place since 1906 and which allowed--even encouraged--the placing of appropriate headstones, without preference, for both Union and Confederate Veterans . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com ...
Ah, you have to understand that a racist black man is the current president. Confederate veterans are also recognized by the Dept of Veterans Affairs as US veterans to be afforded every right and honor given to veterans. This too will be changed by the racist in chief. Mark it down. Now never forget this is the man that wanted to bring everyone “together”. He’s the biggest joke to ever be elected president of this country.
I have direct ancestors and other relatives on both sides and am pleased that most of them have military stones on their graves. This policy should continue. These men were all part of our common history.. If the VA or Obama don’t like that, they can go to hell.
Actually, having had experience in the matter ~ unmarked graves ~ there are some American families who DO NOT WANT IT MARKED.
We upset a good number of relatives by marking the Great and Great Great Grandparents who'd belonged to an obscure church that didn't mark graves ~ made our own stones, carved the names and dates ~ there were Union vets among them. Then there were the Revolutionary War soldiers ~ same problem.
Which raises a question ~ does anyone know what to do if we should run into a marked but decrepit Queen Anne's War vet's grave? The stuff I'm digging into is probably going to lead me to one or more such graves.
I hadn’t thought of the unmarked grave sensibility. But I was in New Harmony, IN, once and the cemetery of the original settlers is all unmarked. So I can see how that could be a sticky issue.
As far as the apathy goes —I do a lot of genealogical work, and I run into a lot of people whom no one has researched and no one has bothered to remember. They pop up once or twice and then vanish from the records. I value the past and the every-day people who inhabited it, and I do what I can to document that those people lived. Practically nothing would exist for some of my own direct relatives if I hadn’t done the work.
Some are listed elsewhere; most are not. Things didn't settle down until the 1620s ~ finally the death rate dropped to an early 17th century norm of something nearer 10 to 15 percent per year, give or take 5%. Indian rates tended to be about the same ~ led to a lot of raiding for children.
North America was a really rough place to live in.
Marking a grave tipped off surrounding enemies of your ability to put armed men on guard or on the march. That went on long enough that the early Euro-Americans simply adopted that as a rule and thought up reasons to justify it.
A gentleman for you to look up is Ebenezer 'Indian' Allen or Allan. He was the first permanent white settler known in Rochester NY area. Originally from some unknown place in New Jersey he was quite a rugged guy. I think he had a black wife, an Indian wife, a blond wife and a red head wife. The red head demanded her own cabin ~ she had 6 children by Ebenezer.
He's not my relative. At roughly the same period of time one of my ancestors, who was born earlier at an Iroquois village not far from where Ebenezer Allen moved in, did what seems to be a trade route up and down the Mississippi and up the Oregon trace. Our last count was he had about 24 different wives, all different sorts too ~ just like this Allen guy.
These men were the fathers of our nation. When we marked our ancestors site people popped out of the woodwork upset about that ~ they just didn't do that!
does anyone know what to do if we should run into a marked but decrepit Queen Anne’s War vet’s grave?
_______________________________________________
I have at least one of those...
If you come across the grave of my 7th great grandfather Johann Georg Kast, Palatine German, veteran, Quenn Anne’s War, 1711, please mark it...
Its probably in Herkimer County, NY
Signed
Tennessee Nana
The VA should thank God for War Between the States Bets. All entitlement programs should. Their benefits are the forerunners of the Welfare State.
The vicinity of Herkimer, Palatine, etc. et al Cherry Valley, had two varieties of Lutheran ~ first there were the German Lutherans, and then, since this was the North end of the expansion area for what used to be known as New Sweden (way to the Souf' in Eastern PA , MD and Delaware, the others were actually Swedish Lutherans ~ or even Old Apostolic Lutherans (If you want to get picky)
For the Swedish Americans this was just part of the old homeland~ called America. For the Germans this was a new homeland~called America.
My dad found information that demonstrated there wasn't a single marriage between a Swede and a German, or a German and anybody, in that area, until well into the 1800s!
I don't have any German ancestors there but plenty of Swedes and for a long time a whole bunch of converted Oneida, and possibly other Iroquois.
My current research focuses on the Swedes ~ where they were, when they got there, who they were (and names are few and far between for them) and where in America did they live earlier ~ before getting to the Mohawk/Unadilla area.
The earliest Swedes seem to have simply been a survey team hired in the early 1600s to demarcate the line between Acadia and Virginia. That's the state line between NY and PA There are several benchmarks for that line including a start point at the tip of Cape Cod ~ there's an old brick wall there ~ covered with about 3 ft of earth blown or tossed in since then. That was part of the Plymouth colony which was part of Virginia as identified in the Treaty of London 1604.
The Swedes, and the Belgians, who were not at war with Spain, began carving up and using the NE area while the King of Spain was the sole claimant ~ so genealogical records really, really, really get thin for these guys. One East coast archaeologist said there are another 30 early settlement sites that are known but not worked ~ but i think there are a few more ~ maybe a dozen in the midwest in addition to the 30 he knows of, and maybe as many as a hundred around New Jersey. Somebody was busy there.
You bring up a good point. This area (New England) seems to be one of the few of the colonies able to preserve the stones. I really don't have a good reason why.
There were about 10,000 Palatine germans living in the parks and fields in and around London...
They were Lutheran refugees from Germany whom Queen Anne had allowed to come to England during a time of draught and religious war...
(The Catholics were not allowed to land in England)
When there were so many that the local people started complaining, and it was hard to feed all of them so in 1709/10 she sent some to English colonies, 3,000 to Ireland and 3,000 to the Albany area of NY state...East of the Hudson River...
In NY they were suppose to cut down pine trees and make pitch and tar to seal the wooden warships ...she was in another war in Europe with the Frennch ...
However the pine tree needed didnt grow in NY too cold...it was found down in the Carolinas...
They year after they arrived many fought the Indians and French in her war, my ancestor included..
Then the Germans being farmmers and knowing good soil looked west across the river and saw all the great land of the wilderness and wanted to go over there...
She gave them permission so they started to carve out of this unclaimed land wonderful farms and a great living, building their Dutche farmhouses and barns, growing crops, and raising cattle and children..including my 6th great grandmother Sarah Kast McGinnis..
after a few years a group of English speaking and writing men in Albany (5 to start and then 7 “The Albany Seven”) decided that all that land and those prosperous farms should not be owned by those ignorant uncouth Germans.. and they acted just like Occupiers...
When they turned up at the door of the 30 odd German families the Albany 7 were met with guns and a big fat NO...
and so they wrote to Queen Anne who was in the midst of yet another war and couldnt be bothered and said that it was their land and the Germans were merely squatting...
She sent them clear title documents to land that had never been theirs...
and finally the Palatine Germans had to leave their own farms...
My disgusted ancestor declared that he was going to go so far into the wilderness that no white man would ever desire to steal his land again so he took his family weay westy along the Mohawk river about 100 miles and started a trading post with the Indians...
His children grew up amongst the Indians and learnt their laguages and their lifestyle...When the Morovian missionaries came into that area they asked Johann to interpret for them with the Indians and be their guide..He was trusted by the Indians so he did so...In their diaries the Morovians described him as a big rough man whom they could trust...
and young Sarah ??? Well she married Timothy McGinnis (Teddy McGinn) who had come with his family from Ireland as indentured servants to Livingstons Manor and was now a fur trader and owned quite a bit of Indian land himself...
Timothy went on to be a captain in the Provincial army and a Leatherstocking hero in the Battle of Lake George and was killed there on 8-9 September 1755...He has a marker with his name on it right there on a big rock...
20 years after that the rebels burnt down Johanns trading post and arrested Sarah and her children and grandchildren and put them in Fort Dayton but thats another war...
About the marriages between Germans and other nationalites...
The Lutheran Germans hoped to return to germany some day and wanted their children to marry only Germans so that they would want to go to...
My Timmy McGinnis was from ireland and when he first asked Johann for the hand of 16 year old Sarah he was turned down...
But he worked on Mama and as he is said to have been goodlooking and Irish charming, Mama was smittened and she won over Papa...
The only family I had in MA arrived with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630 but the man was banished later and went into NY..
(One of my ratbags)
He was whipped for stealing corn anmd grain during a starving time...he did it again and was whipped again and banished and his 7 year old daughter was put in servitude until she was 21 to pay for his crime ...made a slave...
She was sold a few years later to another man and then finally was free...
While Obamas ancestors were slave owners and traders, I have a real slave one...even if she was WHITE...
Some folks have suggested that since the Germans abhored slavery the slave owning habits of their Oneida, Swedish, Dutch and Scottish neighbors drew them apart. Still, in the earliest days the Germans and Swedes used the same church building.
Stones aren't important under those conditions ~
Anyway a McGannon guy who is ancestral to my cousins over on one side married an Indian and settled down with her just as soon as the militia was able to clear out the Shawnee ~ who really hated the Iroquois.
A whole host of unadilla folks followed the McGannons to that area which was right on top of two other intriguing settlement ventures ~ one was called New Wales ~ most historians will tell you it came to nothing but it was bought up by a bunch of Welsh investors who spent the next 3 or 4 decades moving all their relatives there. The other venture was started by a Swede ~ sometimes he's called Mr.White and other times Mr. Shields ~ and in either case he's mistaken for a White and a Shields elsewhere ~ this guy was a Silverschold ~ and he arrived with half a dozen other rich Swedes who fled Finland as the Czar's men took over in 1810.
There are three major periods of Swedish immigration ~ 1638 to about 1720 ~ mostly to New Sweden, then to a series of settlements West from York PA. The second thrust is about 1805 to maybe 1816 as the Swedish Empire is falling apart, They lose Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and then finally the sectors near Denmark, in Germany and then Norway!
The third thrust is from about 1850 on to about 1880. There are a couple of famines in there and the economy went bust. Today over half the people in the world of any Swedish ancestry live in the United States.
Still, to give you a clue of who was on top in Scandinavia, about 90% of all the people of Sa'ami ancestry live in the United States. They easily mistake their ancestors for Swedes ~ but modern genetic research reveals the Swedes aren't even close relatives! But the Swedes teamed up to give the Sa'ami a FREE RIDE TO AMERICA! That was whether or not they wanted to go too.
Well I have at least one Tory scum ancestor from Albany who was killed by other scum along the Mohawk River during the Revolution...
Wouldn’t you think that Obozo, as a Chicago Demonrat, would have more respect for the dead as a core constituency group in every election?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.