Ancestors and abolengo

Tim Brown answers Christopher Jones:  I'm not sure what Mr. Jones' harking back to his forefathers has to do with anything. But since we're calling forth our respective legions of ancestors for the record, my own family on my mother's side goes back to Samuel Yeamans (b. Haverford, Mass. 1655) and Sarah Ellis (b. 1666, Boston), daughter of Samuel Ellis, b. Jamestown in the 1630s, a century and a half before DAR-time, this according to the records of the DAR itself. 
 
Of course, my wife's family's presence in the New World makes both of us look like newcomers, since it dates back to the first Vice Roy of New Spain, Don Antonio de Mendoza, in  1535,  although she herself is much too kind and gentle to remind those of us who merely go back to the mid-1600s that we areactually  late comers.(I learned this from Spanish friends while in Madrid in the 1960s. She had never mentioned it before.)
 
I suppose the real difference between Mr. Jones and me is that I normally try to speak well of my country whereas, as I infer from his snippy and factually nonsensical last crack, he believes that "real governance" in the United States was stolen from the people in 1862 when the Union failed to collapse, suggesting that his real angry is centered on the fact that the South lost. Again, and or whatever it's worth, I had family on both sides of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, not just one, although after the Civil War my family  fought only on the American side of WWI, WWII , Korea, Vietnam and a few Cold War dust-ups.
 
As to Mr. Jones crack about neo-McCarthyism, surely he can do better that that.  I'm amazed that this all too shop-worn epithet still being hurled by left extremists at people like me who dare challenge their dogmatic ideas,  as a way of telling us to shut up. Well, guess what? Since I have been called a Fascist by hard leftists and a Communist by hard rightists, I figure I'm just about exactly where I want to be - in the radical middle - vocally pronouncing poxes on both their extremist houses.
 
Finally, as to what Mr. Jones thinks is "anti-Americanism", since I read or hear every day much of what is reported as being said in Europe and the Muslim world about the United States, and it is invariably called anti-Americanism.  I fail to see how his remarks can be anything less, since he is usually even more critical of this country than they are, as re-reading even the mildest of Mr. Jones many recent diatribes will clearly demonstrate.  If he truly believes everything he has been saying, I suggest he stand up for it and not try to dismiss it by deconstructing the term itself.

RH: This discussion of one's ancestry is really very old Europe.  America is a country of self--made people. Condi Rice was not much liked at Stanford because of her steely attitude toward the faculty, and affirmative action was a factor in her career, nevertheless  her remarkable story is an extraordinary and heart-warming example of the American dream come true.  Christopher Jones can relax.  Wise observers view the recent elections as a continuation of the Civil War.  This time the South won. The North, reduced to slivers along the northeast and west coasts, is gloomy.  Some have said that the only solution is for them to join Canada.
 

Daryl DeBell comments on the discussion about their ancestry between Christopher Jones and Tim Brown: Pursuing genealogy can be fun; it certainly can be amusing. ( i once found a book which allowed me, through the medium of one of my ancestors being one of the hordes of Irish kings, to trace my ancestry back to Adam himself! Your can hardly do better than that, Collecting ancestors is a bit like collecting stamps. You can get innumerable ones, and occasionally sn 'important' one, like Charlemagne or Alfred the Great, but it is all meaningless unless you know them personally or have a verbal tradition connecting you to them. I have a little sense of that for Robert Deble, who was a founder of Windsor, Conn. in 1635, but when I read how those people lived and treated each other. any pride I might have is moderated considerably. It is interesting a nd instructive to find that I descend from Spanish, Italian, French, Welch, Irish, Hollanders, Russians, Scots, etc. but no Orientals or Africans, or Arabs so far as I know, although some of the Crusaders may have had dalliances that were not mentioned.

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