Your greatgrandfathers the coalminers are rolling over right now

[lostnfound]

I haven't posted at DU for a while mostly because I've got 1 or 2 hours per day of "my time" and I've been digging into my ancestry a bit, and into the ancestry for a couple of friends of mine, also. But DU, you're not far from my mind. I read the Greatest page just about every day but haven't been in a position to post.

Pick up one thing in the universe and you'll find it's hitched to everything else. I want to share with you where the genealogy has taken me.

I don't care about being connected to some great 'conqueror' in France or even some famous writer. I want to know about the earthen people, the strugglers and endurers, the wretched and desparate ones who refused to give up. I still want my son to know that he's his own unique person, free to shape his own life as he sees fit. But history and culture have lessons for our generation and his.

Simple census records, fleshed out by a bit of history: I follow a strand into a part of Denmark taken over by Germany, where a newly married young couple fled their homeland long disrupted by war, a land where some young men were being drafted to fight in the foreign conqueror's army. I follow another strand to the Irish immigrant farmers -- their former homeland soon to be in the midst of a famine -- who came to a new land and cleared tracts to farm. They lived literally in a community of their brothers, and the farm life was hard but frequently long... Long lives compared to where my searches took me next: Liverpool and Manchester.

To be told in high school history class of the misery experienced in the Industrial Revolution or the labor struggle is one thing; to see its results in the census records just 3 or 4 generations back from your own middle class life is another. A widowed man is living with his three young children in one census, ages 3, 5, and 6; ten years later, I find the 2 girls as domestic servants and the boy as a coalminer, age 16, living in different neighborhoods.

The coalminers die young. This one escaped, and came to America.

I want to tell everyone I know:
Your great-grandfather escaped from the coal mines, but the owners want to march you right back in.
The GOP wants to kill the child labor laws that your grandparents appreciated and to take away the union protections that your great-uncle got beaten trying to obtain.
The "free-trade" fairytale concludes with somebody's children slaving away on plantations or in sweatshops.
Your freedom to speak up or to help shape your government will all but end when a twist of fate lands you in the middle of a famine or an economic collapse or working dawn to dusk in a textile mill as cheap labor.
Let's not even mention the part about your ancestors escaping the tyranny of a king.

Don't be deceived by silver tongued storytellers trying to persuade you to trade up. These gifts from your forebears -- the strugglers and endurers, the wretched and desparate ones -- were hard-won.

[guitar man]

1. amen

You bet they were hard won. My grandfather was a union man, painter, during the great depression. At one point, because he didn't have a car, he walked 11 miles each way to work and back after he started a new job until he could afford one.

Standard depression wages were typically a dollar a day for unskilled and general labor in many places. There was a filthy rich aunt in the family back then that hired my grandfather to work on her farm for that dollar a day. One day, she asked him to paint the barn and he stopped her and said, " I'll do any work you have here for a dollar a day, except painting. At that trade, I happen to be a card carrying journeyman and a highly skilled professional, so I'll need scale, which is a dollar an hour. If you can't pay me that, you'll have to get an amateur hack to paint for you, and live with what it looks like"

That took a lot for a man with a family to feed in the middle of a national crisis to stand up and say. My Dad learned well, and as a truck driver was a proud Teamster.

I'll be passing the stories and lessons on to my daughter, I hope she takes them to heart.

[Bitwit1234]

2. You know what a brick wall is then???

One of my ancestors was an orphan he either took the name or it was given to him by whoever raised him. How's that for a brick wall. The best we can hope for is an accidental DNA match.

What we want to do is get a present day male in the direct line, give us a DNA and then see if Family Tree will match it up with the DNA list they have, maybe it might match one of the other DNA samples they have and we could find his real name. Pretty sure he came from England. First record is in the early 1700's. A marriage record.

Isn't ancestor chasing very intriguing. You search and search for a great grandparent. Nothing..one day you happen to come across a mis spelled name and there it is....they whole family in the census. I love it. I am going to pass my volumes of photocopied marriage license, death certificates, social security applications and my genealogy file on to a relative who wants to keep the file going. I am getting too old to hold on to it myself.

[knowbody0]

3. my grandfather was a rebel rousing trouble making

union organizing Irish democrat whose father fled his emerald homeland due to activities with the IRA. We honor our ancestors by telling their stories, and living in appreciation of the fight. My great sadness is in knowing that twenty years of apathy from my own generation rendered us george bush and his corrupt band of non humans. This fight we're in now is only just beginning.

Cheers!

[Porcupine]

4. Kick for the workers. nt.

.

[Stargazer99]

5. The powers that be have our society manipulated to their desires

The young have bit into the BS the wealthy have spewed out. The more uneducated citizens are the easier they are to manipulate.

[WinkyDink]

6. Wrong generation here; it was my FATHER and UNCLES who mined anthracite coal in PA.

Coaldale, Lansford, Summit Hill, Mauch Chunk (Jim Thorpe), Nesquehoning, etc., and still collect recompense for Black Lung.

In movies, I always root for the Molly Maguires.

[WritersBlock]

7. K&R - excellent post! Genealogy can really make history "come alive."

To learn so much from just two census images... amazing and sad, isn't it? (The tutor on the family history course I took awhile back would have loved you!)

Just as an aside, I think it would be extremely interesting to come across a message like this on some of the genealogy mailing lists or surname message boards. What a "discussion" that could start - and it might just open a few eyes.

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. Interesting to note...

that over half of Americans are descended from immigrants who came to this country after the Civil War.

Which puts me squarely in the minority; only three of my ancestors arrived after the Revolution. Most of them came in the 1600's, and most were from the British Isles; some came as indentured servants; some were the younger sons of English gentry families, or of the London merchant class, looking to make their fortunes; some were Puritans, some were Cavaliers; there were Quakers and English Catholics and French Huguenots seeking religious freedom, Scots escaping to America after the end of the Jacobite Rebellion at Culloden, Palatine Germans fleeing a war-torn land in hopes of a better life; some of them were university-educated, some were illiterate, some were rich, some were poor; some were Royalists, some were Cromwellians...and so on. And their descendants were farmers and plantation owners, military officers and common soldiers, slaveowners and abolitionists, Confederates and Unionists, Protestant ministers and Catholic priests, industrialists and factory workers, doctors and lawyers, novelists and artists and photographers and actors, journalists, politicians, schoolteachers and university professors, Presidents and Senators and Supreme Court justices...some of them stayed where their ancestors lived, some went West, to settle the frontier, drawn by the lure of open spaces and land for the taking; some became Baptists or Methodists in the great revivals of the 1800's, some fell under the spell of Joseph Smith and became Mormons, and later followed Brigham Young to Utah. With centuries of intermarriage, their descendants are "white" and "black" and even "Native American", and number in the millions or even tens of millions.

The most important lesson I've learned from genealogy is that there is no "us", there is no "them, there is only "we". We're all connected (often much more closely than we might think).