Category: Genealogy

Asser Levy in New Amsterdam

Asser Levy in New Amsterdam

by Justin Durand

Leading up to Thanksgiving, a post on Twitter reminded me of Steve Brodner’s 2013 piece on Asser Levy (?-1680). 

Asser Levy is the first documented Jew in North America, and his been called the Founding Father of American Jewry. He might have been one of the Jewish refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil. He does not appear in surviving records of the Jewish congregation there, but the timing is right. He was in New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1654, when Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, opposed the settlement of Jews from Recife. Stuyvesant was eventually defeated by an appeal to the directors of the Dutch West India Company, Then, over the years, Levy routinely challenged policies that put Jews on a lower legal footing than gentiles.

I got interested in the Asser Levy story maybe a decade ago when I was looking at the idea my ancestor John Moses (c1616-1693) was Jewish. I’m skeptical but if he was Jewish he’d be the earliest known Jew in British North America. He was in Maine by 1638 as an apprentice to George Cleeve and Richard Tucker, of Casco Bay. His antecedents are unknown. I believe he entered Cleeve’s service about 1636 when Cleeve was in England on business. Some researchers believe Aaron Moses was a Sephardic Jew, originally from Amsterdam, but there is no evidence except what can be guessed from his name and the fact he named his son Aaron. The yDNA of his male-line descendants does not support a Jewish origin.

I was also interested in Asser Levy because–supposedly, according to Geni, who knows how reliable anything there is–I have Dutch ancestors who came to New York from Recife. Margrietje (Meyerinck) Wiltsie (1635-1704). Her mother’s mother is said to have been a native Brazilian woman.

Still another reason for my interest in Asser Levy is an idea among some of my relatives that the Howerys were originally Jewish. I thought for a time that if John Moses was Jewish that might account for the story. Another connection I once thought might contribute to that idea is a connection to Solomon Israel (c1710-1795), of Wilkes County, North Carolina. His grandson married Nancy Alloway, a 2nd great aunt of Grandma Bertha (Alloway) Howery. That wouldn’t give the Howerys a direct Jewish descent but might have been enough, I thought, to account for the vague idea of a Jewish connection.

Now, I attribute the “tradition” to a poorly understood British Israelitism, popularized by Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. I don’t doubt that there was also some influence from the brief popularity of Ray Banks’ theory that part of yDNA Haplogroup G2a (to which the Howerys belong) was spread through Europe by Radhanites (Jewish merchants).

Back to Asser Levy. Normally on Geni there would be one profile per person, and where there is a reasonable doubt or dispute about a person’s ancestry we deal with it by accepting only the proved information. That is, we don’t link the profile to any parents but instead describe the pros and cons in the notes for the profile. That’s not what we see there now (2019), nine years after I started work on his profile.

Because of the vanity of a particular curator we were pushed into a situation where Geni has two versions of Asser Levy. This curator needed to have a duplicate to serve as his ancestor’s brother. We were not able to resolve the dispute because he was not willing to consider the other, conflicting theories about Asser Levys’ origin and ancestry. He promised to work further, but never did.

Now, years later, both profiles are in the charge of a curator who recently argued aggressively that genealogical forgery and invention are not something to be concerned about or even necessarily corrected. Pam is not likely to fix it. And anyway, she’s more interested in Southerners gutting each other with hunting knives. Very colorful.

I’ve been wondering lately if I ought to pick up this project again. I’m still thinking but on the whole I think it’s probably a good lesson about the limits of collaborative genealogy.

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Sometimes people cite Wikipedia for things that are false, and they get offended if you question them. Other times, people go around the Internet chiding everyone who cites Wikipedia for anything.

Honestly, it makes me think people in general don’t understand either Wikipedia or citations.

Really, there are times and then there are times. If you understand what citations are and what Wikipedia is, you should be able to figure out when to cite and when not to cite. And I’m going to leave it there.

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Updated Nov. 28, 2021.

Adoption

Adoption

by Justin Durand

Adoption plays an often quirky role in genealogy. First, there’s the problem that people often disagree about how to handle adoptive lines when a biological line is also known. And second, there is the problem that modern adoption is a formal, legal procedure, while historic adoption was often informal and can be indistinguishable or almost indistinguishable from fosterage. 

“To the early Greeks and Romans, the goal of adoption was to perpetuate the family based on the male line of descent and to ensure the continuation of the family’s religious practices. Thus, the adopter originally had to be a male without a legitimate son. Adoption also served the purpose of cementing political alliances between families and continuing political dynasties. Later Roman emperors, however, did permit adoption by women to “console them for the loss of children” [citations omitted]. 

“Roman adoption practices never took hold in England. Statute law first introduced adoption to England in 1926. English concerns with the integrity of blood lines and the desire to ensure that property was inherited by legitimate biological descendants meant that there was no adoption law to be received in postrevolutionary America. In the United States, adoption laws developed in response to the needs of dependent children, not infrequently poor, orphaned, or handicapped. Statutory schemes regulating adoption were first enacted by the states after the middle of the nineteenth century, the earliest probably being in Massachusetts in 1851“[citations omitted].

What this means in practice is that we’ve had only a relatively few generations to think about adoption. Not enough time to reach a cultural consensus. At bottom is a very basic understanding about what we mean by genealogy and family history. Is it an essentialist world where there is a biological absolute, maybe with a cultural overlay? Or is family history entirely cultural, where perhaps it would never be possible to make a rule about which facts best present the history of different families?

It bothers me to see the DNA commercial where the guy turns in his Lederhosen for a kilt. It implies culture is biological. You might have grown up in the German part of town, speaking both English and German, eating German foods, and thinking of yourself as German-American, but if you don’t meet some minimum threshold of German biology, it doesn’t count. Adopted? No one cares. It’s not who you are.

That seems far too harsh to me. But if I twist the question just a bit, and ask about a White family that believes they’re Indian–is that different? I think it is, for reasons I’ve talked about in other posts, but my own answer can’t settle the question for everyone. The examples of White Indians and Ethnic Imposters leaves us wondering how far we can go and be within the “acceptable limits” of “family history”. And our answer there has implications for how we handle adoption in genealogy.

And finally, the unanswerable fact that we cannot bring some kind of scientific precision to these questions shows without doubt that we’re dealing with concepts constructed by culture.

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Blizzard of ’49

Blizzard of ’49

by Justin Durand

From time to time Mom mentions a memorable blizzard sometime during her childhood. Her parents took in the Dack family. Ray and Marjorie Dack, with sons Bud and Douglas, were a local family who lived north of the Swanstroms. They were stranded on the highway and couldn’t get home. For a week, the two families ate and slept in shifts. Grandpa had to tie a rope to himself when he went out to feed the cattle, so he could find his way back to the house.

I’ve been curious to find when it was, and tonight I came across it by accident, while listening to a YouTube piece from Wyoming PBS about the Lincoln Highway. It was January 2-5, 1949. Mom would have been 12.

Then, as if that wasn’t a jackpot sufficient for one day, I came across another video about wildlife migrations around Pinedale, Wyoming, where the Swanstroms lived and near where the Luces lived in Big Piney.

I’m pretty sure the word Wyoming is etched on my forehead right now. I attribute it to getting a Wyoming cowboy sticker from Mom last week and putting on my laptop yesterday. 

Now I want to find something about the Blizzard of ’63, the big one I remember from my childhood; and the Blizzard of ’82, when Missey and I were stranded in Denver and coulnd’t get home to Salt Lake City; and maybe the Blizzard of 1887 that changed Wyoming forever.

Revised to add names of the Dack family.

Rules of Genealogy

Rules of Genealogy

by Justin Durand

James Tanner often writes about the Rules of Genealogy. These aren’t rules in the sense that you must follow them. They’re common sense parameters for doing genealogy. Natural laws rather than rules of the game, if you will.

  • Rule One: When the baby was born, the mother was there.
  • Rule Two: Absence of an obituary or death record does not mean the person is still alive.
  • Rule Three: Every person who ever lived has a unique birth order and a unique set of biological parents.
  • Rule Four: There are always more records.
  • Rule Five: You cannot get blood out of a turnip. 
  • Rule Six: Records move. 
  • Rule Seven: Water and genealogical information flow downhill
  • Rule Eight: Everything in genealogy is connected (butterfly)
  • Rule Nine: There are patterns everywhere
  • Rule Ten: Read the fine print
  • Rule Eleven: Even a perfect fit can be wrong
  • Rule Twelve: The end is always there

The video version explains each point.

My favorite is the first one: when the baby was born the mother was there. The first time I read that, I got a rush. Such an easy way to phrase something so obvious, yet so widely overlooked by genealogy newbies.