A Legendary Journey

From a vista in the center of San Francisco known as Twin Peaks, you can look down on a spot in the Mission District with the Bay glimmering to the east.

For a few years in the early 1860s this was known as Camp Alert, a race track-turned-Union Cavalry training facility.

I’ve always wondered how Thomas K. Messersmith, one of my maternal great-great grandfathers, who was a fourth-generation Southerner and native Missourian came to enlist to fight for the Union and train there, so far from home.

Tracing genealogy is a journey, often beginning by tracking down documentation for family legends.  But even when found, each revelation usually still leaves a loose end or two, that once tied open yet another revelation.

By the 1860 census, my great-great grandfather, a few weeks shy of 26 years old, was bunking with two other miners who were well into their 30s, T.H. Wilson from Virginia and N.F. Scott from Maryland.

They were living in a boarding house in Virginia City, Nevada which was then a part of Utah Territory and the site of the Comstock silver discovery only a few months earlier.

I doubt he came out to the California Gold Rush a decade earlier because the census then shows him still at home in Missouri.

But Virginia City had not only been named by Southerners, it was a hotbed at the time for secessionists who were gloating at having defeated a proposal for statehood because it included a prohibition of slavery.

My great-great grandfather had somehow formed a friendship with Samuel Clemens, who was a year younger and yet to adopt his famous pen name “Mark Twain,”

Because they were born and raised in very different parts of Missouri, I suspect they had formed a bond once Twain arrived in Virginia City with his brother, probably as much over as shared prowess for playing cards as briefly sharing a mining claim.

These fragments can be pieced together from references in collections of Twain’s letters from that time, which also confirm that my great-great grandfather would often be referred to be “Smith,” a truncation of his last name, Messersmith, just as my great-grandfather Ralph would later do.

This discredits another family legend that the truncation was the result of discrimination during World War I. 

My great-great grandfather gave up on mining around the time he crossed paths with Twain or shortly thereafter and headed up and over the Sierra Nevada’s and down to Stockton to enlist for the Union on October 3, 1861.

Interestingly, Twain had already served a two week stint with a Confederate militia back in Missouri and still had Southern sympathies at the time.

This and the dissention back in their home state must have led to some interesting conversations between the two Missourians.

The California into which my great-great grandfather rode had been in deep turmoil since a deep spit the year before in the Democratic Party, which had resulted in the election of President Abraham Lincoln with just a third of the vote.

Rampant secessionist conspiracies had compromised local militias and more than a few law enforcement official, especially in Southern California, leading to public demonstrations by both sides.

At the same time, regular Union Army units were being withdrawn to the east and several new Union regiments of California Volunteers were being enlisted to protect communications and critical ore shipments needed to fund the war effort from sabotage and attack.

My great-great grandfather made a conscious decision which to my prior understanding was contrary to his both native state and his friends.

But digging further I have learned that it was me that was very much misinformed.

It took me a while to track down that he initially enlisted in Company A of the Third Regiment which was an Infantry unit, but that didn’t jive with family legend that he was Cavalry.

Nor did the date of that unit’s arrival in Salt Lake and its various assignments align with the date and place he eventually mustered out of the army at the end of his tour.

Finally, I found a small reference in one military citation that read, “see Company L Second Regiment Cavalry.”

After being outfitted at the Benicia Arsenal, he may or may not have participated with Company A in the Bald Hills uprising that ended at Fort Baker before being transferring to Cavalry.

It is more probable that he was moved to Cavalry training in San Francisco almost immediately.

A hint is provided in one of Twain’s letters, dated May 17, 1862, where he asks another friend to send a pair of Spanish spurs hanging back in his office out to my great-great grandfather.

Between late that summer and early fall, with Cavalry training at Camp Alert behind him, at least a part of my great-great grandfather’s company in detachment with another had joined Col. Patrick Conner in Stockton.

From there, along with 1,000 other Cavalry and Infantry, they moved in phases over the Sierra Nevada’s and out into the Great Basin along the Overland Trail.

They rode first to Fort Churchill about 30 miles east of Virginia City and then proceeded on to secure Fort Ruby, near, coincidentally, where two other of my great-grandparents would drive stagecoach a few decades later.

Eventually, they based at Camp Douglas (later re-named Fort Douglas,) a newly created installation on a bench of the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City, where, again coincidentally, my father would be inducted into the army during WWII.

From there, my great-great grandfather’s Cavalry company would deploy to protect wagon routes in mountain valleys to the west where they were under constant attack.

This was all during the period when the Pony Express was phasing out and the first Transcontinental Telegraph was being completed along a major freighting corridor to the east carrying bullion and supplies for the war effort.

It is hard to relate just how broadly and intensely these facilities were under attack during the Civil War from warring bands of Paiutes and Shoshone-Bannock peoples, stretching in a “T” up the Upper Snake River Valley to what would become my birthplace eight decades later.

So I will insert this link as background.

Because so much of the family legend surrounding my great-great grandfather’s Union Cavalry experience has now been documented, I have no doubt that one day I will find verification of another part.

As the story has been passed down, the scar through his trademark mustache was the result of deflecting a Shoshone arrow that would have struck Colonel Connor.

My initial skepticism, at least of this particular hand-me-down family legend, has repeatedly proven groundless so far.

When digging into family history it helps to remember that legends are traditional stories regarded as historical but unauthenticated, usually because those details have been lost as the stories were passed down.

My great-great grandfather was notoriously quiet and solitary, spending weeks at a time herding sheep up into several of valleys along the Oquirrh Mountains where he had once patrolled near the end of his stint as a Cavalry trooper, including Rush Valley where attacks were especially frequent.

(Another, Cedar Valley, where he settled, is shown above.)

He became a Mormon and spent the remainder of his days alongside the very Overland Trail he had help protect as a means to hold the Union together never revealing what I now know of how he came to choose that side.

But in researching this blog, I think that has become clear.

Missouri, it turns out, may have had a very vocal population who had migrated from slaveholding states but by the time of the Civil War, while a neutral border state, it was firmly Unionist in sentiment.

It had its share of secessionist scheming.

But given the opportunity to vote for secessionist candidates to a convention, it overwhelmingly instead voted for Unionist representatives who voted 99-1 against secession and 70-23 against solidarity with Southern slave states.

Most telling about my great-great grandfather’s decision is that those fellow Missourians who enlisted to fight for the Union outnumbered those who enlisted to fight for the Confederacy by nearly 4-1 (110,000 to 30,000.)

Mystery solved at least for my great-great grandfather.

Unfortunately, far too many Americans are still fighting that war.

Scraps From an Old Portfolio

Before he died, my maternal grandfather gave me a vinyl portfolio, the kind popular as promotional giveaways in the 1980s with the spring loaded closure.

It was filled with personal papers that had been retrieved from his youngest son’s apartment after he was killed in 1973 while flying near the border of Mexico as a special agent for what is now the DEA.

We called him by his middle name, Ferd, and just seven years apart, we grew up more like brothers, similar in interests and appearance as well as temperament including a way of minimalizing how we express emotions in order to mask how strongly they are felt.

My grandfather hoped I could make sure my uncle was remembered which, in part, is the purpose of this and similar posts.

If they are interested, he would want me to also pass these papers along to his two children should they ever be located one day.

His daughter would be in her mid-50s by now and his son by a different mother, in his early 40s.

I’ve continued to add items to the portfolio as I’ve come across them including his wallet retrieved from when he was killed, along with some details of an arrest, which were found among my mom’s papers when she died earlier this year.

The image above shows his appearance when he was killed.

The arrest record gives a hint of his personality and sense of humor as well as the fact that profiling by law enforcement isn’t new or exclusive to ethnicity.

Six years out of high school in Montpelier, Idaho, Ferd had already completed undergraduate pilot training for the United States Air Force by December 17, 1964, a year after completing enough credits to graduate the previous summer from Utah State University.

His papers include his seat time in T-37s and T—33 Shooting Stars, a lengthened version of the Korean War-era F-80, scale models of which we had built together a decade earlier around our kitchen table on the ranch.

After some seat time in F-105s, Ferd qualified to fly F-4 C Phantoms by October 14, 1965, a state-of-the-art, twin-engine combination jet fighter interceptor and fighter bomber.

This was during a three month period that his 389th Tactical Fighter Squadron (TFS) was flying out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska.

Flying fighter jets along with the altruism of serving his country were his passion.  He had found his calling at age 23, coincidentally, about the same age I would be when I found mine the year he was killed.

But by the time I was recruited to Anchorage in 1978, it was F-15s I was watching take off and land from my office overlooking Ship Creek near its mouth into Cook Inlet and I had forgotten I wasn’t the first with my DNA to live there.

It was the month after the 389th TFA returned to Hollomon AFB, a few miles outside Alamogordo, New Mexico and two months before it began operations over Vietnam that Ferd was arrested.

Alamogordo was just over 20,000 people back then and hot-shot fighter pilots were conspicuous, especially one in a brand new, sky blue Mustang convertible.

Today places that size have about 40 police officers on patrol but I’ll be it was half that number in January 1966 when a Sgt. Baker observed my uncle driving along a street and then suddenly stopping to back up and accelerate down a side street 10 miles over the posted speed limit.

When the officer pulled Ferd over and asked about his actions, my uncle quipped “I was in a hurry.”  When the officer noted that he would have to cite Ferd for reckless driving, my uncle quipped “Well go ahead and write the ticket I’m still in a hurry.”

Probably enough smart ass to go around on both parts, but the officer escalated the situation by saying that he would then have to take my uncle into the station as “a good object lesson.”

After being reprimanded by his commander, Ferd appeared in court the next morning where he apologized, pled guilty and paid a $50 fine.

Less than 60 days later, Ferd was flying missions over South Vietnam out of Phan Rang Airbase in support of ground troops.

By October, after flying home to attend my grandmother’s funeral, Ferd was flying out of Da Nang Airbase on what would be more than 300 missions (sorties) over heavily defended North Vietnam.

Combat fighter pilots were limited to 100 “out-of-country” missions over North Vietnam per tour.  His personal life troubled, Ferd kept “re-upping” for additional tours, where he excelled in combat flying.

Flying a fighter plane, no matter how hazardous the conditions or how many friends were shot down, was what he was meant to do.

Highly decorated with a Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with 26 oak leaf clusters, and even a Bronze Star, Ferd was discharged from active duty on December 18, 1968.

It was brought about the month prior when President Lyndon B. Johnson placed North Vietnam off limits to U.S. fighter aircraft.

While he could never understand why I repeatedly tried every avenue I could to follow in his footsteps between 1967 and 1971, but was turned down, he admitted that he had never felt as alive as he did in combat over North Vietnam.

For 10 months he flew for Thompson Air Service in Utah which did business as Interwest Inc. but it didn’t feel like flying.  His kindred spirit would have been its founder Tailspin Tommy, a stunt pilot who was killed piloting a United Airlines DC-3 when it crashed into San Francisco Bay in 1937.

During his time at Interstate/Thompson, Ferd was repeatedly turned down by commercial airlines due to a combat injury he received while crash landing in Vietnam.

Dejected, he even worked a year in marketing for Mountain Bell Telephone Co. in Salt Lake, but he felt numb.

Then in January 1972 Ferd got on with the DEA as a special agent.  He could fly again with a purpose.

It was dangerous undercover work along both sides of the Arizona border with Mexico, infiltrating and disrupting the notorious Dominguez Family.

Fifteen month later when he was killed, he had just turned 31.

This was a few months before my daughter and only child was born.  It has been more than 40 years now but I still think of him often, as does my younger sister, especially.

The portfolio spans much more of his life than the 9 years from when he discovered his passion in life and his death.  Every time I go through it I learn something new about Ferd as well as myself.

Am I Really Transplanted If My Roots Predate North Carolina?

Between 1640 and 1650, my earliest North Carolinian ancestors made their way down the Chowan River (pronounced cho-WONN) from Virginia to an area known as Salmon Creek, across from present day Edenton.

It is near where the Chowan empties into Albemarle Sound and approximately where my 8th great grandmother Mary Jane was given birth, almost exactly two hundred years before me.

She eventually gave her birthplace as Bath, which, further south. became the first town here by the time she was in her 50s.

Of course, these ancestors weren’t the first people here.

Having migrated from the north, Native Americans including paleo-ancestors of the Chowanaoke or Chowanac people for whom the river had been named by explorers in 1584, had already been living here more than 10,000 years by then.

Listed simply as “Bay”, the Sound was not yet named Albemarle, nor was this area called Carolina at the time my ancestors ventured down,  let alone North Carolina.

It was the northern reaches of what was simply referred to by Virginians as the southern province or plantation, which had only become a colony itself less than two decades earlier.

Officially it was known as Carolana at the time.  It included what is now North and South Carolina, as well as Georgia and was stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean a little more than a decade later.

Shown in this essay is a very Virginia-centric map created the year after my 8th great grandmother was born in Carolana.

East to west, it depicted the continent clear to the Pacific, something famously reprised by a cover to The New Yorker in 1976 parodying the view of the continent from 9th Avenue in Manhattan.

General notions of this span had been created when Spanish explorers rode across North America a hundred years earlier.  Ironically, the first was Estevanico, an enslaved African-American, who made the journey in part, as the main guide, all the way from Florida to New Mexico and Arizona.

The other was Hernando de Soto who crossed into what is now North Carolina in May of 1540 near what became Tryon, NC and explored across the Appalachians where Asheville is now and all the way to the Mississippi River near what would become Memphis.

I suspect my 8th great grandmother’s parents when she was born in North Carolina in 1650 were French Huguenots who had settled along the Virginia headwaters of the Chowan and had begun by the time she was born to venture down to trade in furs.

My hunch is because she married a Huguenot and because in the 1630s, this area had been intended for resettlement of large numbers of Huguenot refugees who had fled murderous religious persecution in France.

The grant was disputed and the idea eventually entangled in the English Civil War by 1642 just after some Hugenots had landed near Jamestown.

Huguenots are a branch of Protestant Calvinism and I have that heritage on both sides, though separated by 197 km in western France, the other settling near that time in Massachusetts.

My earliest Tar Heel roots eventually merged with the lines of an ancestor, James Shelton, who had arrived in Virginia in 1609 with a cousin and fellow London Company investor, Lord De La Warr.

This heritage was passed to me from my maternal great-grandmother Lizzie Shelton, whose grandfather Sebert had migrated first from Virginia to Illinois and then over my native Rockies coupled with a stint in the Mexican-American War before ranching in Northern California.

A life-long westerner and fifth generation Idahoan, I soon learned a part of me was coming home when twenty-six years ago I was recruited to North Carolina, a two hour drive west from where my ancestors gave birth to a baby daughter 339 years before.

In 1728, the border between Virginia and North Carolina was first jointly surveyed, with each side alternately measuring two mile segments.

But after the line had been run inland for 73 miles, the North Carolinians went home, refusing to believe that anyone would settle that far inland, let alone the more than 100 miles further where I would settle 261 years later.

It took twenty years before all 327 miles would be fully mapped.

One of my first purchases when I arrived was a newly published text to which I still refer today entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

Little did I realize how personal it would become.

Lakeside Context

If it clears due diligence, I may be writing some of these essays at a retreat on Mayo Lake which, as I will describe, is very unique.

By the way, being drawn to lakeside getaways, like being a morning person, is probably one of those contexts that researchers have found to be predictors of relationship longevity.

Even if you didn’t grow up along lakes, as each of us did, like being a morning person or a night owl, it is just something in your nature.

Mayo Lake lies 35 miles and change north of our house in Durham.  The most scenic route, for me, will often be astride the Harley Crossbones up and over Mt. Tirza.

That will add a couple of miles to the route but will be well worth it after cutting up Moores Mill Road from Quail Roost in Durham.

Mt. Tirza is the location and namesake of a church where good friends of mine, Eddie and Nita Hill, were first posted after he graduated from Duke Divinity.

Nita helped us jumpstart Durham’s community destination marketing organization 26 years ago.

But the crossroads there predates the church by three or four decades, when it was established by a Revolutionary War veteran, Lt. Colonel Stephen Moore, in 1777 and 1778, two years before he famously led the Caswell County Regiment at the Battle of Camden in a losing cause.

The rest of Moore’s family had sided with the British so after the war he inherited the family’s estate at West Point overlooking the Hudson in New York, which he negotiated to sell to the newly created U.S. government beginning in the late 1780s for use as a military academy.

The Battle of Camden has significance to me because along with Moore, my fourth great grandfather, James McCrory, was captured there after seeing earlier combat at Brandywine and Germantown and serving a stint in General Washington’s select guard.

At Camden, he and Moore along with 1,000 other American soldiers were captured during the battle.  Moore was imprisoned on a prison ship in Charleston Bay while my fourth great grandfather was imprisoned on a ship near Wilmington.

Moore was held until a prisoner exchange in late summer 1781, but after only four months as a POW, my great (x4) grandfather was earlier released in only his underwear and without shoes upon taking a vow that he would never again take up arms against the British Crown.

Moore returned to a noncombatant commission in Hillsborough, a 20 mile ride from his home on Mt. Tirza and retook his seat in the North Carolina legislature there, then the capital.

But instead, just four months after his release, my fourth great grandfather McCrory rejoined the war in combat at the Battle of Cowpens where his British captor Tarleton was thoroughly routed, marking a turning point in the war.

A few months later he was fighting in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, a place to which he had immigrated from Northern Ireland just as the Revolutionary War began.

The British Army retreated to the Virginia coast and seven months later surrendered to American General Washington bringing the Revolutionary War to an end.

While Moore was settled back on Mt. Tirza, my fourth great grandparents McCrory headed up and over the Appalachians, eventually settling on the frontier along the Tombigbee River southwest of Tuscaloosa.

The old soldier lived until 1840 at which time his daughter and son-in-law, whose grandparents had migrated from North to South Carolina before ending up on the Tombigbee, headed into the Rockies.

James McCrory’s great grandaughter, my great grandmother was claimed by the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1919 while visiting the ancestral Idaho ranch where I would be born three decades later and spend my early years.

It is from her parents and two other lines of ancestors that I derive my 5th generation Idaho roots.

Moore, who had been in the lumber trade in Canada before the war, was proud that his home on Mt. Tirza was “where the ax had never been laid to a tree.”

He would be greatly dismayed today by clear-cut timbering now laying waste along Mt. Tirza’s northern slopes not far from his home.  It is a lazy way to timber, fueled by technology, compared to the equally lucrative but more sustainably way of selective cutting.

Moore had a grist mill on the Flat River, just over what would become the Durham County line, thus the name Moores Mill Road, which I will take past Hill Forest and Mt. Tirza.

He died in 1799 while visiting friends in Durham at Stagville Plantation, now a state historic site, and is buried up on Mt. Tirza in a family cemetery along the route to Mayo Lake that bears his name.

Like the lakes that dot northern Durham - two to provide the city’s water and one to provide for Raleigh’s further to the south and east -Mayo is a reservoir, but not just for drinking.

It has 85 miles of shoreline that encompass its 2,800 acres lined with homes on the southern half that are very secluded compared to other lakes.

The shoreline while accessible for boating and swimming has been uniquely set aside as a wildlife habitat dating back to the late 1970s when Mayo Lake was created to cool a steam power plant on the far northern end near the Virginia border.

It finished filling in the 1980s, a few years before I arrived in Durham.

Mayo, both the lake and the stream that was dammed to create it, are named for Major William Mayo, an Englishman who immigrated first to Barbados in the early 1700s and then Virginia.

He led the survey teams that mapped the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains through which my Messersmith ancestors traveled soon after immigrating to settle along a creek feeding the South Fork of the Holston River.

It is where the southern and northern tips of the Jefferson and Cherokee national forests, respectively, nearly touch today.

In 1728, Mayo also led one of the teams jointly surveying along each side to map the border between Virginia and North Carolina, guided, in part, through the area north of what is now Mayo Lake.

It was a prequel to officially dividing North and South Carolina the following year.  Mayo was guided by Native Americans in that area known as the Sappony (aka Sapponi) who had migrated down from the foothills to avoid Iroquoian raiders.

Sappony is derived from Monasusapanough, one of three villages they inhabited.

They were thought to be eastern Siouan cousins to the Eno and Shoccoree in what is now Durham and the nearby Occaneechi who had also migrated down from Virginia.

All of these tribes traded with the Catawba nation down the “Great Trading Path” remnants of which can still be seen where it cut diagonally across northern Durham near Stagville.

It is actually a spine or mainline for a network of countless other tributary trading paths along its route.  It was created first by buffalo, then by Indians following game, then for trade.  Then came pack horses and settlers, followed by wagons.

Signaling the road building savvy of buffalo, today, it is roughly the route of Interstate 85.

However, it appears the Sappony didn’t really migrate permanently across into North Carolina around Mayo Lake until after the Revolutionary War, in which they had fought on behalf of the colonists against the British Crown.

Their slow migration down into North Carolina had begun after the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.

At the time, only coastal counties in Virginia had been organized along with only a handful in the very northeast corner of North Carolina, including Bath near where my eighth great grandmother had been born twenty-six years before.

Yes, my Tar Heel bonafides stretch back to when there were fewer than 1,000 settlers in all of what became North Carolina, long before there were counties.

But a line of my ancestors, the Sheltons, had already moved into the interior along the border northwest of what is now Mayo Lake.

The migration of the Sappony had hastened by 1746: nine years after Mayo had laid out the city of Richmond and two years after his death, when Lunenburg County was created along the Virginia side.

At the time Granville spanned along the North Carolina side.

Their flow had quickened even more by 1752, when Halifax was carved from Lunenburg in Virginia across from Mayo Lake, while Orange County spanned North Carolina side by then.

At the time, there were fewer than 53,000 white settlers in all of North Carolina and another 19,000 enslaved African Americans.

In 1761, my fifth great grandmother Miller was born in Orange County before relocating with her family to a point in South Carolina along the Old Trading Path.

It was her grandson, my third great grandfather Graham who had later married a McCrory on the Tombigbee before heading westward to the Rockies.

The crossover by the Sappony into North Carolina had begun in earnest six years later just as western Halifax in Virginia was divided to create Pittsylvania.

It had become a steady stream by 1776 when my ancestors, the Shelton’s, petitioned to carve off Henry County further west along the border of Pittsylvania.

The next year Caswell County was carved from Orange on the North Carolina side which is why Lt. Col. Moore led a regiment from that county.

Person County, where both Mayo Lake and Mt. Tirza are located today wasn’t carved from Caswell until 1791; the year after Moore had sold West Point to the government.

It was five years later that the town of South Boston, Virginia was created in Halifax County just across the border from Mayo Lake. 

As with other nations of Native Americans across the country, we didn’t keep our agreements with the Sappony regarding land.

By the time Mayo Lake was created, the bottom land for the reservoir, which averages 30 feet in depth as well as the surrounding embankments were purchased from subsequent settlers.

There will be a lot to contemplate from lakeside and a lot to learn, but all of this is to say that it will seem like coming home.

Family History’s Link to Civic Engagement & Tourism

Only 47% of Southerners know what both of their grandfathers did for a living, more than twice the percentage nationwide and astonishing given that 3-out-of-4 Americans express interest in knowing their roots.

But only a small percentage are what are called family history enthusiasts, people who have done at least 40 hours of research on their family roots.

A study published last year by The Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, just south of Durham where I live, found some significant correlations to family history enthusiasm.

It found that “higher levels of involvement in family history research positively correlated with self-reported volunteerism, civic engagement, charitable giving and community involvement.”

My interest in family history dates to my earliest memories of being lifted over the fence from the ancestral ranch where I was born to explore the headstones in a small cemetery in view of the Tetons where generations of ancestors had been buried.

A generation ago, the average family history stretched back 149 years but thanks to the ability to mine records online, it has grown in the U.S. to 184 years.

On both sides, mine now goes back now much further, in some cases more than 1,500 years.  I’ve been fascinated with a new interface that compares your family tree looking for any links to those of famous inventors, writers, athletes, clergy, even U.S. Presidents.

Relative Finder shows me my distant familial connect to Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemmons, Walter Chrysler, the Wright Brothers, Bing Crosby and Hall of Fame Quarterback Steve Young.

It also shows connections, long before they were Mormon leaders, to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and a hand full of others, including David O. McKay, who was the leader as I grew up.

I am also distantly related to Alexander Hamilton, 5th cousin 9 times removed to George Washington, as well as a distant relative to Jefferson, Adams and 15 other Presidents before I lost count including 7th cousin 5 times removed to Ulysses S. Grant.

Others included both Roosevelts, Truman, Nixon, Ford and President Obama through his mother’s side, 12th cousin 1 time removed.  Of course, most of these relationships relate to common ancestors long before those who who would immigrate here.

Obviously I am an underachiever.

Last year, a separate study reported that online family history research has grown in the United States by 14 times over the past decade.

Today, my alma mater BYU is known for its acclaimed Family History Technology Lab in the Computer Sciences Department, where students developed the now certified Relative Finder.

But it was two students earning degrees in public policy and mechanical engineering who first laid the groundwork in 1986 for what is now online genealogy.  It was a computer program intended to index text information in publications.

But it was soon integrated by Novell into its then dominant network operating system. Soon, two other BYU students used this technology as the backbone for what became Ancestry.com.

It was started as a publishing company in 1983 to aid people doing family history the old fashioned way.

But by 1996, two students with degrees in Russian and International Relations leveraged a start up in electronic publishing into what is now a huge subscription repository of records used to build family trees.

I mentioned the majors of these pioneers at the forefront of online genealogy to make the point that they didn’t have degrees in science or technology, something often lost on policy makers today obsessed with STEM.

According to the Ancestry Global Family History Report, interest in family history has doubled since 2008 and will again by 2025.

More than half of us (54%) were drawn to family history from looking through old photographs, letters or documents that our parents kept. 

Nearly a third of us (29%) have been to visit places where our ancestors lived while 14% have visited a museum, library or archive to conduct family history research.

In the U.S., 81% of those of us researching family history have come across old photos and two-thirds have come across birth, marriage or death records other than church records and 47% of have discovered old letters.

Only 10% of Americans trace to those who arrived on the Mayflower, but a quarter of those of us researching family history have used other passenger lists and immigrations records.

The report also provides a typology based on how close or distant families are in each nation.

Many times, I come across distant relatives who have chosen to share their DNA results on various websites including Ancestry.com.  Researchers are also now able to use DNA results to unwrap the composition of entire countries.

Ancestry.com has digitalized or obtained 15 billion digitalized records to date including 3 billion uploaded by users.

It is just one of several online family research sites, some of which such as Familysearch.com are now allowing an interface.

Significant is that across the six countries studied in the Ancestry Global Family History Report is that 60% people “feel a personal responsibility to act as a guardian of their family history.”

Possibly more important is that 62% of younger people ages 18-24 are being inspired to learn more through talking to older family members.

Just remember to capture every bit on a digital recorder or smart device.

My mother died in January at age 86 but my sisters and I were astonished at how much information she would share in her last few years that we had never heard before.

It was priceless.

Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

When Equal Just Isn’t Fair

Mentioned often in these posts is that I was born and spent my early years on an ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, the only son of an only son, a fifth generation Idaho rancher and sixth generation westerner.

But while delving into why that all came to an end, I’ve formed strong opinions about familial succession and distribution of estates.  Fairness often doesn’t mean equal.

More than 100 years ago next month, my great grandparents and grandparents migrated from both sides of the Idaho-Utah line and upper Cache Valley to that nook, about a half a century before I was born, so that their children would have access to land.

Accessible land in Cache Valley and Bear River Valley, part of a 7,500 acre watershed linking three states had already become difficult to find or too expensive.

So the family hitched up four wagons with teams of four horses each, along with a white-top buggy pulled by two horses, several saddle horses, and a hundred head of cattle and headed off on the 15-day, 200-mile trip north.

Between Spring and Snow Creeks, a mile west of the Henry’s Fork River, my great grandparents bought a ranch and homesteaded another while my grandparents and three of my grandfather’s siblings homesteaded others.

Within a decade, my grandparents began buying these parcels up as my grandfather’s siblings decided to turn to other pursuits or ranch somewhere else.

My great-grandfather had remarried two years after my great-grandmother died during the 1918 Great Influenza Epidemic, and inherited a step-family in the process.

As he neared the end of his life in 1936, he appointed my grandfather executor of his estate. But nine years earlier, my great grandfather and his second wife had begun selling parts of his land to my grandparents beginning with what we called the “Hole In The Ground” place.

A third was paid up front in cash with my grandparents paying off the remainder including interest of 7% by supplying half of the annual harvest each year after expenses and taxes.

Having to resolve issues among siblings and step-relations as well as having to buy and reassemble much of the ancestral holdings nearly crushed my grandfather’s spirit for ranching.

It also deepened his reticence for conflict resolution when it involved family.

Due to my grandfather’s health, after that my dad ran the ranch beginning in his teens and well into the 1940s.  After finally being permitted to serve in WWII, he returned to my mom and the ranch in July 1946.

Dad had been able to mechanize the ranch before he left and over the objections of my grandfather to meet the steep production quotas levied as a crucial part of the war effort.

He and mom continued to modernize the ranch after dad returned based on my grandparents commitment for them to inherit the ranch when they were gone.  This included leveraging tens of thousands of dollars of investment in new equipment and buildings.

But in the late 1950s, one of my dad’s three sisters began pressuring my grandfather for “her” share of the ranch, although she had never been much for that way of life or invested any time or effort other than growing up there.

My grandfather backed out of his commitment to his only son and daughter-in-law, inexplicably not even facilitating its affordable sale to them as his father had done three decades earlier for him.

Before her death in January, I took the opportunity during a Thanksgiving visit to ask my mom something more to the story: how she and dad came to the difficult decision to pick up and start a new life elsewhere, leaving those ancestral lands, friends and a generational way of life.

His dad wouldn’t even compensate them for their investment in the ranch because he had not been in favor of modernization in the first place.

Within a year or so, he would sell the ranch leaving it for my grandmother to distribute the estate after he died in the 1964.

I idolized my grandfather, who from the day I was born would travel up from my their house in Saint Anthony to the ranch each day to pal around with me doing chores.

I had only glimpses of how stubborn he could be, second-guessing my dad’s decisions, even insisting on raking hay with a team of horses, while dad and I idled along across the meadow behind him with a tractor and bailer.

It was probably as much that my parents knew they would never be able to run the ranch as they wanted as it was the distribution of the estate that was the final straw.

Relatives were often critical of their decision to leave, including those who stood to gain as well as other branches.

In hindsight, my grandfather could have handled things in many different ways.

As I have seen done here in Durham, even without selling it to my parents he could have granted shares in the ranch to each of his children but a greater share to my parents indexed for the sweat, tears and risks they had in operating it while growing the value of the other shares.

This is an instance where insisting that all shares be equal isn’t really fair.

My parents may have been too young to see or propose alternatives, but in the end, I think they wanted a new start, one where they could call their own shots.

They may have already had inklings that even though I loved the ranch and the history, my inclinations were not toward ranching, nor were those of my two younger sisters.

After leasing a place and being ripped off by a broker, they showed even more resilience by refusing to file bankruptcy and taking on entirely new lines of work, not only paying off the debt but going on to successful careers.

In our last in-person visit, my mom reiterated how much my dad had dearly loved ranching and he was very good at it.  But our parents were clearly more intent on propelling their three children further into the middle class.

Though frequently nostalgic for the ranch, my parents didn’t pine nor did they hold grudges.  Throughout their lives and our time growing up, visits with grandparents and aunts and uncles continued as though nothing had happened.

Memories of ancestral lands and my ranching heritage are romanticized for me now.  Somehow things worked out for the best for everyone involved.

But parents who are facing distribution of estates and businesses need to think very carefully about how to accomplish this, especially if some children are predisposed to the family business and willing to do and invest what it takes to sustain and grow it.

As my dad would often repeat while also applying it to doctors and bankers, “Don’t trust lawyers.”

For me, I have it easy.  Just one kid, and a pretty great kid at that who doesn’t have an entitlement bone in her body.

One Last Gift

We just got back from a quick weekend trip to the Pacific Northwest.  Actually, it takes seven hours each way by commercial flight, about eight hours including the drive north to where one of my two sisters and brothers-in-law live in Snohomish County, Washington.

It is also where my Mom lived the last few months of her life.  The trip had been planned before her passing to celebrate what would have been her 86th birthday.  Instead it was now in part to honor her life but also so I could process a gift she had left with my name on it.

It left an impression on my grandsons to see how much the gift meant to me as I sorted through and re-boxed sixty pounds of family history papers and undiscovered family photos for shipment to Durham, North Carolina where we live.

Many of these items I had never seen before.

Included were the names of each of the schools she attended and her last report card, given just before she dropped out of high school to elope with my Dad who was leaving to join a tank battalion in WWII.

She was 16 years old and he had just turned 21.  Seeing the name of one of the witnesses who accompanied them up over the continental divide to Bozeman, where she listed her age as 18, gave me insight into the urgency they felt.

Frances Bowman had been married to my dad’s cousin and best friend, when six month before the B-26 in which he was flying as tail gunner was blown up by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing run just north of Venice, Italy to cut German Army supply routes.

To my parents at the time, life had obviously taken on a very short horizon.

Included in the material she left for me was a WWII ration card from where she had gone to live with her maternal grandmother Lizzie Messersmith in Denver where her youngest uncle, John, was playing and teaching guitar.

I found some humorous things as I sorted through the materials before re-boxing them for shipment including a note in my Mom’s handwriting reminding us upon her death to cancel auto shipments of shampoo etc. from QVC.

There were also several letters I had written home to my parents dated 1968 and postmarked in the months just before and after my 20th birthday that my daughter, and only child, got a kick out of reading.

It is priceless to have such a personal glimpse of your parents lives prior to your birth.

There was also a small card given to my parents immediately after my birth, labeled “Baby Boy Bowman” and giving the hospital room number, time of birth, weight at birth and the name of the doctor, Joe Hatch.

My parents had rushed fifty miles south of our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, down the Henry’s Fork River to the nearest hospital in Idaho Falls, just south of where it joins the South Fork to form the Snake River.

There is as much regarding my Dad’s history as hers in the papers she left for me to preserve for posterity, including a photo of him (shown in this post) when he was twenty one that she had carried in her wallet until they dissolved their 36 year union when all of us were grown and out of the nest.

Many of the photos dating to her youth include priceless negatives.

I have begun to do something my parents inspired with my grandsons now that it is clear they have a passion and respect for heirlooms, passing down a huge elk antler I found during my first cattle round up, a pocket knife my grandfather gave to me, currency and coins their great grandfather brought back from WWII.

Likewise, my Mom had already distributed some family artifacts to my sisters.

The huge box of papers and photos on their way cross country to me comes with a responsibility.  She wanted me to digitize them for broader access by my siblings and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well as posterity yet to come.

She also expected that I would use them to weave narratives around the ancestors they depict, including her final call to me reminding me to write the history of her youngest brother who was less than seven years older than me.

For good measure, she had also had my sister follow up to reinforce the promise I had made to my grandfather when my uncle was killed flying for the DEA in 1973 the year after I graduated from college and just before my daughter was born..

He was more like an older brother to me, teaching me to ride his hand-me-down, rusty, balloon-tired bike down the steep graveled hill that ran from the family cemetery my great-grandparents had deeded to the county to the gate into our ranch.

Working part time on the ranch one summer just after the Korean War, he had taught me how to build model airplanes and later interested me in marketing, a degree he earned at Utah State University in 1963 while working his way through school by delivering milk to homes each morning.

But flying a fighter plane was his passion, and he did just that as a highly decorated F-4 squadron leader while flying more than 300 missions over heavily defended North Vietnam during three tours during that war.

It was his phone calls and letters as well as heart to heart talks between tours that finally blunted my relentless drive to also fight in that war, warning me that American atrocities there were not limited to My Lai, turning me against that conflict while in college.

Within six years of that war’s end, an effort was made to recast that war as a noble lost cause, just as the South did immediately after the Civil War.

But today, we know from documentation in the book entitled Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam that my uncle was right.  Atrocities there were a failure of command and touched every unit deployed.

Our revulsion at the atrocities of ISIS and a commitment to face down this criminality should be fueled not only by righteousness but by a sense of our own past rationalizations.

I promise this is not the history I promised to write about my uncle who a few years after he left the Air Force became only the 18th DEA special agent killed in the line of duty as a pilot while fighting the Dominguez cartel.

Hidden away in the papers my mom left for me was his wallet from the day he crashed including papers he was using undercover and a photo of the way he looked taken for a special permit to fly back and forth across the border with Mexico.

He was not yet 31 years old but the history I will undertake will go far deeper than his heroism to the unrequited love of a black sheep including the flaws that make him so complex.

It may take me years to properly digitalize as well as mine the treasure my mom left for me and put it in context for future generations.  My uncle’s story will be one of many.

May I be as prescient and generous on behalf of future generations as she was.

A Rare Pedigree of Orneriness

My father and paternal grandfather shared the same middle name, Melvin but the name is in honor of my great-great grandmother, Amanda Melvina Poorman.

In America, her first and middle names were popular in the late 18th and early 19th century among descendants from Ireland, Scotland and England due to their literary use.

But I was intrigued recently to learn that her father, John Poorman had been only the 31st person baptized into the Mormon Church barely two months after it was organized as the Church of Christ and nearly two years before Brigham Young.

He was baptized by immersion on June 9, 1830 at the northern end of Seneca Lake a few miles from his farm by his neighbor David Whitmer famed as one of the witnesses who had actually laid eyes on the ancient “golden plates” from which the Book of Mormon was translated.

Whitmer had been baptized a year earlier and was one of the six founders of the new restorationist Christian religion, today the third largest by affiliation in America.

But those first eight years from mid-1830 to mid-1838 were tumultuous as much internally as from external persecution including several name changes as the new church rapidly grew to nearly 18,000 members, up to half in Great Britain.

My great (x3) grandfather Poorman followed church leaders to the area around Kirtland (northeast) Ohio in early 1831, fighting off a mob of 40-50 men a year later who tarred and tried to suffocate church founder and prophet Joseph Smith.

By 1833, Poorman was among the first  couple of hundred Mormons who settled in northwestern Missouri along the western banks of the (Big) Blue River which at the time was the edge of the American frontier, long before the existence of Kansas City.

Mormons including my ancestors there were defending themselves from mobs of vigilantes.  These Mormons were from the northeast, with abolitionist sensibilities, when it came to slavery.

The mobs were from the upper south and worried that voting as a block Mormons would threaten Missouri’s status as a slave state.  Little did they know the discord and internal friction among Mormons at the time.

The battle took place in an area along the I-435 beltway, an alternative route from I-70 around downtown Kansas City and one to which I will pay much more attention whenever future cross-country road trips with Mugs (my English Bulldog) take us along that route.

The Blue River flows out of Kansas and just before it flows into the Missouri River near Independence, Missouri is where Poorman was involved in the Battle of the Blue in November of 1833 to fight off mobs of vigilantes.

A few miles north, across the Missouri River in Liberty is where Poorman married my great (x3) grandmother Nancy Botkin Davis three years later, apparently four or five months after my great-great grandmother was born (ahem) and help to raise her children by a previous marriage.

However, internal strife and power struggles were beginning to take a toll.  Two years later, in 1838, his friend David Whitmer, who had headed the church in Missouri, suddenly resigned.

Refusing to defend himself, Whitmer was then excommunicated ostensibly as part of a coup to topple Joseph Smith over the then secret practice of polygamy as well as the word of wisdom.

But many times subsequent to parting ways, including on his deathbed, Whitmer reaffirmed his witness of the “golden plates.”

My Poorman ancestors had lived in the same Kaw Township settlement with Whitmer.  While there is no record they were involved, I am sure it distressed them to see their long-time friend ostracized.

Politics had taken a toll.

Ironically, a little more than fifty years later and thirteen years after Whitmer’s death in Missouri, Mormon leaders would disavow polygamy but without reinstating those who had resisted it from the beginning.

That fall of 1838 the Mormons were expelled from Missouri after the governor signed an extermination order.  But my great (x3) grandparents were among a few who stayed, relocating about fifty miles north and a bit west to Washington Township, a few miles west of St. Josephs.

Until then, this “nose” of Missouri had been set aside in treaty as Indian lands but by just as my Poorman ancestors sought sanctuary there, the area was being annexed into the United States as part of Missouri with Platte Purchase.

Records show that the Mormon church lost track of the Poormans after 1840 so they would not have met many of my other ancestors then gathering in Nauvoo, Illinois as recent converts.

But as the Mormons were also driven out of Illinois after the murder of Joseph Smith in 1844 and across Iowa in very early 1846, it is possible the Poormans were contacted by Mormon agents sent into Missouri to buy supplies.

They may have also met members of the Mormon Battalion including several other ancestors as it marched through St. Joseph in route from Iowa to Fort Leavenworth in preparation for marching southwest into the war with Mexico.

Mormons talk as if its members had all gathered in Winter Quarters, Nebraska or back across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs but these places were only major staging areas for the nearly half of all members preparing to head west beginning in 1847 when three of my ancestors paved the way.

Approximately 15,000 members who were gathered along the river were scattered in 90 settlements, some only 20 miles from the Missouri border and only 60 miles from where the Poormans lived.

Sometime around 1853, my great-great grandmother Amanda Melvina Poorman traveled up the Missouri and caught a wagon train west to join Mormons gathering in the Rockies, probably upon the death of her father.

Her mother died the following year, just as Amanda, out west, was marrying George Washington Kent, someone with whom she had played during her early years in Missouri.

She died in her early 40s and was buried in Richmond, Utah near the Idaho border, less than four years before her daughter Margaret would marry Hyrum Edward Bowman, two decades before they would head up into the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho to a ranch where I was born and where they are buried.

When my ancestors established the first settlement in my native Idaho, the Mormon Church had just surpassed 61,000 members.  When great-great grandmother Amanda died, it has just surpassed 100,000 members.

It reached 180,000 when my paternal grandfather Mel was born and 231,000 when my grandmother Adah was born.  It crested 300,000 before they and my great grandparents homesteaded our ancestral ranch along the Henry’s Fork.

Mormon membership reached 576,000 the year my dad was born on that same ranch and 664,000 when my mom was born.  By the time I was born it had just passed 1 million.

When my daughter was born and involvement lapsed more than forty years ago, membership was well past three million.  When my grandsons were born it was surpassing 12 million and today there are more than 15 million, counting the 40% who are lapsed.

It not only gives me pause to think my great-great-great grandfather was among the first 31 but I can empathize that the internal politics took their toll.

The same occurred to my great-grandfather who married into that line when a Mormon Apostle and neighbor refused to take back a defective piece of equipment he had bought and then refused to let my great grandfather be buried in the clothing in which he had married my great-grandmother.

Their son, my grandfather, famously caught a church Bishop stealing water while others were in church services.   As the story is told, using he old Winchester hanging on my wall, he fired into the air as a warning.

By the time I entered grade school, classmates had exaggerated the story giving me a reputation for toughness.

My dad tried to be active as we were growing up but politics intervened when he was released after insisting there be no swearing during church ball games.

Yet we have all lived lives intertwined with that culture and its values.

I have other ancestors who joined shortly after John Poorman, most by 1840, and all had become Mormons by 1855 when there were fewer than 64,000 members.

For several years after the Mormons settled in the Rockies, membership declined, in part, because of radicalization during a movement by hardliners called the Mormon Reformation.

Several ancestors were dis-fellowshipped for speaking their minds when they disagreed with local church leaders over civil issues and controversial decisions and one or possibly two were required to undergo re-baptism.

Nearly all of this family background was unknown to me when my own involvement lapsed more than four decades ago.  Genetic expression is different among decedents but some traits are apparently very consistent.

There are very few with my pedigree today in that spiritual tradition and possibly even fewer with a legacy of such orneriness.

But I wouldn’t trade those genes or my heritage or my cultural values with anyone.

Why Curators and Archivists Make Good Community Marketers

History, it turned out, was the perfect background for community marketing.  Or maybe it was just that community marketing was appealing to a person with a degree in history.

Marketing communities involves leveraging for economic and cultural development the three general types of place-based assets distinct to a particular place:

• Culture and Heritage
• “Built”
• Natural

I don’t just mean the date and event type of history told through documents although that is useful because learning to see patterns and connections - the essence of historical analysis - is also key to marketing innovation and strategy-making.

But also valuable to community marketing are related studies such as:

• Economics:  history viewed through commercial transactions,
• Geology:  history told through rocks and physiography,
• Archeology: history told through artifacts and material remains,
• Anthropology: history told through societies, languages, and values,
• Environment: history told through human interaction with the natural world,
• Genealogy:  history told through family relationships and DNA.

There are others but hopefully these are enough illustration for those who haven’t thought of community marketing as a career or marketers who view it far too narrowly or were taught it only from a commercial perspective.

I’m a little slow.

For all that preliminary background in history, it still took me over half a life-long career to connect those dots.

It also wasn’t until my third startup that I even more formally embedded archives.

Perhaps this is why I was amused to learn recently, the history of my first startup was apparently rewritten exclusive to a much later addition of a word to its name and the second one seems also to have written a revisionist notion of its founding.

Fortunately, should anyone care, I still have personal documents proving my existence there and the roots of each of those organization including their pre-history fingerprints. (smile.)

Frankly, many marketers, even those trained in communications, often seem to play a bit fast and loose with facts and context either because they are too lazy to fact-check using what archives were kept or to make a political statement or even to flatter later executives.

Even more troubling, journalists often pick up these reinterpretations, further contaminating the public record with anecdotal hyperbole.

Thus, the “Research Triangle” is misattributed in a 1957 state brochure as the “brain child” of a later state governor.

And some of us involved in later stages of community turnarounds are flattered with in inaccuracies proclaiming that until our charge these places were a “sleepy backwater,” of that “tumbleweeds blew down empty streets,” or working there was “a death sentence.”

Not true, of course, but that is how history gets polluted.

Part of the problem is that Durham, North Carolina where I finished my career and now live in retirement, while arguably blessed with the deepest, most diverse history of any community, still lacks a full-fledged museum of local history.

This source of resident frustration is indispensable, not just as a cultural amenity but as a touchstone-repository to help newcomers and future generations gain, regain and keep perspective.

Even commercial enterprises, according to Advertising Age, now grasp the importance of “curating, cultivating and preserving the histories of their brands,” not only to inform marketing efforts but because “employees are looking for that heritage and lineage – how they fit into the family tree.”

Many CEOs, according to an article in the Portland Business Journal last summer understand that “the past is a powerful tool in public relations, marketing and branding.”

Or that ultimately they can perpetually “mine the past to recharge the present.”

Dr. Paul Bloom at Yale is often quoted from presentations and papers that “we are obsessed with origin and history…things get value because of their history.”

Consulting archivists at The Winthrop Group, Inc., quote Pendleton’s CEO Mort Bishop as relating “Our heritage is a lot more than a simple matter of using historical materials in marketing…It’s our DNA.”

Others wrote couple of years back in the Harvard Business Review, “A sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping the future.”

A McKinsey executive noted that it is “essential for every one of our partners and colleagues to understand our history and how our values were shaped over time.”

Even Entrepreneur Magazine’s startup-rich content heralds the value this depth can bring to storytelling's role in creating brand value.

So why are so many community marketers pinned under the thumbs of those who don’t get it?

In past essays, I’ve frequently noted research showing that even among visitors who skew more to fantasy activities such as shopping, sports, performing arts or amusement parks, destinations that preserve and cultivate authenticity foremost are by many times over the most appealing.

Yet so many elected officials, enabled by their community’s marketers and propelled by “edifice envy,” have, or are quickly surrendering, the authenticity of their particular places.

Maybe my sense of urgency is because it took half a career to dawn on me, and many places won’t have that luxury.

A Priceless Little Leather Pocket Book

My concern that Durham, North Carolina, where I live is losing valuable artifacts and records every day that passes without erection of a full-fledged Museum of Durham History is personal.

One of my great (x2) grandfathers and a great-great-great-grandfather selected in 1846 as part of a small vanguard to blaze a largely new pathway into the Rocky Mountains kept a diary.

He wasn’t the official diarist for the company, but his notes shatter some stereotypes of what it was like as they marked and created infrastructure along the 1,100 route that others would follow through territory of the United States yet to be organized.

Before I touch on some of his revelations, I must note that when I was growing up, both sides of my family were pretty mum about my ancestral involvement on that wagon train.

I’m sure they were aware, but even as we passed through from Idaho to see family, my parents neglected to mention that the names of these ancestors were inscribed on a monument that was then centered at the Salt Lake intersection at Main Street and South Temple.

But none of us realized my great-great-grandfather had kept a diary until someone unrelated who had read it growing up, turned it over to family members in Idaho the year I graduated from college.

After memorial copies were made and distributed to descendants, the small little leather pocket book was placed for safekeeping in the Mormon Church Historical Department where then one of my professors was an assistant.

His prominence in the vanguard group was only as chief wheelwright due to being a carriage-maker back as a sixth-generation Quaker-American in his native Upper Providence, east of the Schuylkill.

In his diary, he describes being chosen as one of ten people to hunt buffalo along the trail when provisions were needed and standing as guard during stops.

But he was also one of the head cooks chosen by his group of ten men (they organized into 14 groups but there were only three women and two children.)

Meals included a hot breakfast and dinner with a cold lunch prepared in advance for a midday stop to feed, hydrate and rest the livestock.

The wagons weren’t all uniform and they didn’t travel single file like they do in the movies unless required by the terrain.  They traveled five vehicles abreast, some buggies and smaller wagons, some covered wagons, but not the big Conestoga wagons.

The diary covers several years including this four month journey, and a trip back to visit his mother prior to departure.  It includes a journal of services provided, detailing the date, for whom, the repair and payment if any.

These tended to be primarily converted farm wagons.  Usually people walked or rode alongside.  Mostly they used huge teams of oxen as draft animals to pull the wagons.

Oxen are mature, castrated male cattle, as compared to milk or breeding cows and bulls or beef cattle which are steers.  But at the time, a steer who reached four years old was considered an ox.

American oxen were generally 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of pure muscle, standing about six feet tall, about that long and eight feet around.  Oxen were preferred to draft horses because they were better in muddy conditions including when teams doubled up to cross rivers.

They could also survive on little food of poor quality which was common as they crossed the Great Plains of Nebraska and the High Plains of Wyoming, especially where overgrazed by huge herds of Buffalo that would stretch for a day at a time.

This vanguard unit circled their 73 wagons when possible at night with the livestock inside the loop, including 66 oxen, 52 mules, 93 horses (mostly saddle,) 19 cows, 17 dogs and some chicken.

A bugle sounded wake-up at 6 a.m. and when it was time to retire each night at 8:30 p.m.  Often they danced, played cards and sang at night, sometimes according to my great-grandfather, a little too loudly.

His dry sense of humor comes through when he mentions speeches that were sometimes “rather long” or “ not very edifying.”

He also describes in a passport application soon after this journey that he stood 5’8”, a little bald with grey eyes, a Roman nose, full mouth, ruddy complexion and oval face.

This ancestor’s favorite song was “leather breeches,” a jig danced with “controlled abandon” across America at that time.  But it would have been without musical instruments which were deemed too heavy to bring along.

Although these wagons could carry up to a ton and a half, the uncertainty of this vanguard journey would have meant they were kept as light as possible.

If they sang about their final destination, they would have used California, the term at the time for anything over the Rockies.

I’m sure an a cappella version of Come, Come Ye Saints, a hymn penned a year earlier and put to the music of an older camp revival melody earlier by a member along for that journey, was already as popular as it is still today.

Another was probably Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.

The diary records that the party stopped to help others traveling across the Platt River on the California Trail and that some were fellow Missourians who had some members of the group out of that state less than a decade earlier.

Each member of the vanguard was required to have a rifle primed and ready to fire (flintlock) at a moment’s notice, with a piece of leather to keep the firing mechanism dry.

They often encountered Nation Americans including Otoe, Sioux and Pawnee, the former at war with the latter, as well as Arapaho, Cheyenne and Shoshone.

The diary records a visit to a burned out Pawnee village and the huge size and construction of lodges.  Sioux visited and stayed overnight inside the circle of wagons one night.

But others bands often attempted to extort food and other supplies.

We are blessed to have this account, written in the hand of an ancestor, but I wonder how and when it slipped away for so long?  As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, this makes me concerned that families with deep Durham connections may be losing sight of the importance of artifacts and records so important to preserve.

Hopefully, officials in my adopted hometown will soon realize the same sense of urgency for a Museum of Durham History long shown among residents in public opinion polls.

Heritage is perishable.

Reflections on The Landscape of A Heritage

As I noted recently, I am the only son of an only son, born midway between my dad and his first granddaughter but as hard on him as he was on his father.

If he were still with us or if he is looking down now, he would be even more proud of her than he was at her birth, now a single mother, lawyer and chief privacy officer for a major healthcare concern spread over dozens of cities and towns across our ancestral landscape.

I was the end of the line of more than a hundred years of ranching but in the late 1840s, these ancestors didn’t begin as ranchers.  They came to the Rockies as carriage makers, saw mill operators, molasses manufacturers, cavalry troopers, miners even a dirt farmer or two (smile – rancher humor.)

But collectively they understood that settling and homesteading and building communities from scratch involved commons such as that where his granddaughter ranges in another way.

He’d also be the first to remark at what a perfect blend she is of each of her parents, but equally important would be what she has done to express those equal sets of genes including molding a career blending law, management, technology and innovation.

My dad also would give a smiling nod at the pride my urbanite grandsons and daughter take in our Idaho ranch heritage.

On our final leg to an annual lakeside family rendezvous in the northern Rockies last month at the hospitality of my youngest sister and her family, they took delight when a cowboy hat they picked out for me turned out to be identical to one their great-great grandfather wears in family photographs.

Already with enough cowboy hats and boots to last several lifetimes, I couldn’t help but wear it as we rode up into the Bitterroots that day, smiling at how frustrated my dad—their great-grandfather—appears in that same photograph at having to dismount.

Not yet 30, in an act of defiance, he refused to keep his hat on, revealing a rancher tan and a look of disgust I’ve seen in the mirror from time to time.  I see far more diverse evidence of his nervous system in his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I wish I could tell him every day how much I love and miss him and how I know I was hard on him.  We both eased up as I turned 30 years old, but we didn’t really clear the air until I was nearly 40 and he was a year younger than I am now.

My emotions were ambushed a few day ago when I first heard a new hit single by Garth Brooks interpreting a brilliant composition co-written by Marc Beeson and Allen Shamblin entitled “Send ‘Em On Down The Road” as I recalled that day when we too “…just threw that baseball back and forth till dark…:”

“he wanted to protect me but somehow my father knew

that you can cry for, live and die for,

you can let them find their wings but you can’t fly for

cause if they are not free to fall

then they are not free at all

and though you just can’t bear the thought of letting go

pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off and send ‘em on down the road”

Some of my favorite Garth Brooks’ songs include references to rodeos such as the iconic “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” echoing a variation of a quip my dad would repeat in the 1950s whenever he was greeted with, “How are you?”

It was co-written with a friend and rodeo rider Randy Taylor in Stillwater, Oklahoma where Brooks first performed it in 1986 at a club called Bink’s with his band Santa Fe.

Less than three years later, it was the singer’s debut hit single, just as I relocated to Durham, North Carolina in 1989 and where I still live in retirement.

But historically, true cowboys, aka Bedouins of the American West, were fast fading when Prescott, Arizona staged the first rodeo in 1888, inspired in part by the success of the Wild Bill Cody shows.

Until then, westerners viewed tourism as a way to recruit settlers and investment.  But Cheyenne, inspired by the “potato days” celebration just south in Greeley, created its Frontier Days Celebration in 1897.  By 1901, Denver added one to its local celebration.

By the time Pendleton, Oregon created its famous rodeo in 1910 and Idaho’s first rodeo, the War Bonnet Roundup, was organized in 1911 fifty miles south of our ranch, a circuit was forming.

When Tucson started its rodeo during the Prohibition, it was a tourist event, and when Old Tucson Daze began the year before I was born, it was, ironically, held on an old movie set.

The father of one of my classmates in high school is hall of famer Deb Copenhaver, a contemporary of my father, who won back to back world championships in bronc riding in the mid-1950s when I was 7 and 8 years old just younger than my grandsons now.

Rodeos are emblematic of the time when Westerners began to reflect what visitors from the East expected.  By the time I was born, it had become firmly embedded in Western identity, reinforcing that authenticity is a negotiation.

My parents married young at just ages 22 and 16, eloping over the Bitterroots to Bozeman, as my dad left to join a tank battalion propelling across France.  Initially, his dad had held him out of the war as an only son so the ranch could aid the war effort.

But when his same-age cousin and best friend, a tail gunner in a B-26, was shot down over northern Italy, my grandpa finally relented and allowed the ranch to go fallow as my grandparents put their only son in harms way.

Dad’s unit was part of Patton’s third army sweeping into southern Germany, liberating Dachau, the first concentration camp established leading up to the war, then changing to horses and spotter planes to patrol for Nazis fleeing into the Alps.

Coincidentally, one of the prisoners liberated there handed a young soldier from North Carolina what looked like a rock, and told him never to forget what happened there.

It was actually molten ashes from human beings incinerated in the huge ovens used by the Nazis to cremate prisoners who died or were gassed because they were unfit,

The day before this past Memorial Day, those ashes were laid to rest in a Hebrew Cemetery here in Durham where I live, which dates to the 1800s.

By the time I came along, my parents were still kids too at just 25 and 19, and they had grown incompatible in some ways while apart.

They were still “two hearts on fire,” to borrow a line from a Shenandoah song written by Hugh Prestwood, but researchers now know that what held them together for more than thirty years was a shared style of parenting.

Its something researchers have just found in successful parents that is “distinct from their romantic relationship.”

In the typology of four parenting styles, my parents were “authoritative,” the mix of “authoritarian and responsive” practiced by 32% of parents.

I know now that researchers find that this style correlates to the “concerted cultivation” common to middle class parents or parents who successfully keep or move their children up into the middle class.

More wealthy parents are often negligent or permissive including many so-called “helicopter parents” today who mistake over controlling and frenetic hyperactivity with cultivation.

Researchers have pinpointed that a natural or more free-range style or permissive style of parenting found among many who are poor is one of factors that perpetuates poverty in their children and differentiates them from poor parents intent on breaking that cycle.

One of my siblings seems only to recall my parents as “authoritarian,” perhaps because she didn’t witness the differences two of us saw in the parenting styles of parents who truly were.

Regardless, I am incredibly grateful and credit my parents for any success I enjoy as well as the legacy I see in their grandchildren and great grandchildren.