Ancestry and Identity

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. My maiden name is Irish in origin and he always said he was part Cherokee. 

I once read part of a family history or genealogy for my father's family and the only thing I remember is that he was also part French, something he never told me.

Around the same time, my husband and I also got a copy of his family genealogy. I learned that Traylor is Anglicized French and was originally something like treilleur and meant something like soldier.

His French ancestors were Huguenots who fled France for England because they were persecuted and anglicized it to try to fit in better. Hundreds of years later I continue to be routinely aggravated at trying to explain the name because people who see it routinely call me Taylor and people who hear it routinely spell it Trailer.

Most surnames are real words, often derived from a place or profession. Taylor is such a surname. Traylor is gibberish to anyone adequately familiar with the English language and culture even if they can't quite say why.

My mother was the seventh of twelve kids and talked nonstop. She refused to join the modern world and didn't get a cell phone but had a twenty or twenty-five foot cord on her landline because she was constantly talking to SOMEONE while cooking and cleaning.

She was on the phone so much, I had trouble calling her myself when I lived in Kansas. If she didn't call me, the line was almost always busy.

She had wanted to be a physician and was generally knowledgeable about health topics. So as part of her non-stop patter, I knew which allergies ran in the family and other pertinent health details that were enormously helpful to me in navigating my health issues and raising my children.

Me ex husband's family was not like mine. When our youngest came home with chicken pox, his father couldn't remember having it.

I was like "Oh, boy. Chicken pox is not something you forget. Either he had it in infancy and his idiot family never told him OR we are about to have a big problem because chicken pox in adults is MUCH worse."

Yes, we were in for a big problem.

I saw a movie once about a woman who was raped as a teen and ended up pregnant and raised the child. She goes back home to try to identify her rapist from a circle of friends that were the likely source of the assailant because her adult child has a serious medical condition and they need to know if some medical condition runs in the family to figure out the best way to treat it.

Everyone speaks of financial reparations for Black Americans who have been shafted for hundreds of years. No one speaks of reparations for some of the other egregious harms which help foster poverty.

I would like to see a project that tries to trace the genealogy of Black Americans to their African roots AND European roots because it was common for slave owners to rape their female slaves in order to make more slaves. (I have read that about seventy percent of Black American DNA is European in origin.)

This is the reason America has such bizarre definitions of race where someone who is ONE EIGHTH African is "Black" in America though Brazilians would see them as White.

It's because we defined race historically in a manner that served the evil goals of slave owners and then they did not admit to fathering those children.

Most likely, Frederick Douglass was fathered by his mother's owner and probably knew it but couldn't say it. I infer this because he spoke at times of the likeness of slaves being an offense to the wives of White slave owners because you could TELL her White husband was the father just by looking at some of them.

Surely there MUST be SOME records somewhere in Africa indicating which tribes were the source of slaves shipped to specific ports in the US and records of who owned them where you can infer that odds are good the owner was the father of most slaves born to his slaves.

Because most Black Americans couldn't write a piece like this telling you something about their ancestry going back hundreds of years. If nothing else, it deprived them of vital MEDICAL information, though I think the harm to their identity is likely extremely significant.

Because currently all most of them can tell you is "My ancestors were egregiously victimized for generations by slavery, then by Jim Crow laws and it continues with systemic racism that actively criminalizes Black Americans without necessarily admitting that's what it does."

And I would like to see us try harder to actively ramp that down.