But have you ever thought about what the back story is to your Blacksheep ancestor? What was his or her crime? Was she a victim or the perpetrator? What was the punishment and how would you judge the punishment in today's times?
One of my husband's ancestors was arrested in Ireland for stealing potatoes. The year was 1841. A famine year. All over Ireland families were starving. Those who could afford it were leaving Ireland in droves but many of those were dying too on the so-called Coffin Ships.
This poor woman who stole potatoes had young children. No doubt the family was hungry. She didn't go to jail for her crime but she was fined. I have no doubt she could not pay. She may have ended up in jail for lack of payment, but the records do not show what happened to her.
One of my ancestors seems to have been quite a horrible man, one you would not want as your friend... or relative. He was always in trouble for fighting with his neigbours, burning down their fences, destroying their crops and generally making quite a nuisance of himself. He tried to burn down his son's house with his son in it! Eventually the courts were fed up with his behaviour and ordered his sons to keep him in line or they would banish him from the town. This was in the 1680s and 1690s in what is now New York.
We can dismiss him from our thoughts with a "what a horrible man!" or we can think about what might have been happening. He was an older man then, in his 70s and 80s. Could he have been suffering from dementia? Senility? There would not have been any resources to diagnose or care for him. Think of the hardship on his family and the stress they were under.
I started making a list of my Blacksheep ancestors and was quite surprised by how many I have. Adding those of my husband, one of my daughters-in-law and my sister-in-law brought me up to over 30 individuals who were involved in some way with criminal activity. One was a victim, attacked by an axe-wielding neighbour. The rest were perpetrators and they ranged from stealing that potato, to stealing cows, to selling liquor without a licence, to indecent exposure, to attempted murder.
Over the next several months I will be blogging about each of these individuals. I hope you will follow along and write about your own Blacksheep ancestor, either on your own blog or in a comment here on mine.
My son will be linking to any stories from his blog Blacksheep Ancestors at http://blacksheepancestors.com/
I am also taking part in a survey by the creator of A Criminal Record - a compilation of historical legal and crime resources for genealogists, historians and students.
I appreciate your deeper regard for the acts of Black Sheep ancestors. Much of what they did in the times before adequate social safety nets, early identification of learning disabilities, the understanding of PTSD, and even how the human body works, could now be avoided or mitigated. I think of the people who were addicted to alcohol and opiates who were judged "weak" and unwilling to clean up their act, among whom was an alcoholic son of John Adams.
ReplyDeleteBut of course there were genuine scoundrels, one of whom was my g-grandmother's kid brother, Milton Oliver McClellan (1881-?). In Tenino, WA at the age of 32 he married the young daughter of the owner of the boarding house where he lived, the 19 yr. old Martha Sarah Pollman (1893-1964). This was on Christmas Eve 1913. On 25 Dec 1914 they had a son. By then Milton, a miner by trade, had dragged young Sarah down to Kennett, CA, a busy copper mining town flooded by the creation of Shasta Lake/Dam decades later. It was there Sarah gave birth and he either abandoned her and the infant there or he allowed her to return to her family in WA to show off the new baby and bolted from Kennett while she was gone. No one ever heard from the guy again, not his three surviving sisters, not his widowed father, none of his uncles, aunts, or cousins.
In studying Milton's timeline and those associated with him I've become more aware of the ripple effect of such betrayals. Martha held out for several years waiting for Milton to surface, possibly holding some hope he'd enlisted for WW I and would return a changed man. There's some evidence Milton's father and possibly his sisters may have hoped the same thing. In reality Milton was too old for the draft barring an actual invasion of U.S. soil, in which case men in their mid-thirties might have been called up. In reality his WW I Draft Registration Card, filled out in Sept 1918, shows he was in the last such class registered just 60 days before the Armistice was signed. There's virtually no way he was ever drafted.
But his son had to endure not only the lifelong questioning about why his father ditched him, but the unfair treatment afforded him most of his childhood and adolescence by his step-father, a man of limited mind and compassion. Forever being compared to his younger half-brother by his mother's second marriage, he grew up reckless, probably depressed based on some family lore, and became an immature man who burned through two marriages and failed to stick around to raise any of his own four children.
So one man's cowardly behavior prompted a no-doubt devastated and humiliated young mother to make and stick with a second marriage even though it disfavored her firstborn, who then went on to cause wreckage in two more families.