I WAS JUST READING Charles Mann's book 1491 on Native American Indian history before Columbus, and he mentioned that there are companies now that can trace a person's genetic heritage back to the world's major ethnic-racial groups:  European, African, Asian, and Native American Indian.  I got to wondering about my own genetic make-up.  I've always been curious about why my siblings and I have such dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and dark hair.  My mom always attributed it to the "black Irish" in us.  There are two kinds of Irishmen, she explained:  black Irish, and red Irish.  We were black Irish.  Simple as that.

            But what about that "black Irish" side?  What does that mean, exactly?  In fact, scholars have proposed various theories about the "black Irish":  (1) that they were the descendents of African slaves shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland who swam ashore and were absorbed by the natives; (2) that Spanish and Mediterranean buccaneers used to raid Irish seacoast villages, raping and pillaging; and (3) that settlers from Spain or the Mediterranean colonized a small section of the Irish islands, and over time melded into the larger population.

            So, after reading Charles Mann's book, I thought, why not test myself?  Am I of 100% European ancestry?  Is there some African blood?  Asian?  Native American?  I just got the results in the mail a couple of days ago.  What do you suppose they said?

 

♣

 

            As it turns out, according to the test, I am – ready?   91% European, 9% Native American Indian.  Do you believe it??  Nine percent??  That's quite a surprise, if it's true.

            Is it?  At this point I honestly don't know.  Maybe the test is bogus, though it appears to be authentic.  The company is reputable, and its test is based on fairly sound science, in the view of experts in the field.  Basically they look for genetic markers that typically appear in major ethnic-racial groups, of which they identify four:  European, African, Asian, and Native American.  Evidently it is based on neither mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA, which traces the maternal line exclusively) nor the Y-chromosome (which traces the paternal line exclusively), but on emerging techniques that search for non-sex specific genetic markers mentioned above.  It's a pretty contentious field, and from what I can tell the jury is still out on its reliability and authenticity.

            Let's assume, for now, that the test is accurate.  As you've already calculated, if I'm 9% Native American Indian, that makes you about 4.5% Indian.  What do you think about that?

 

♣

            I wonder whose side of the family it came from, assuming it's real.  It's a fairly large number.  Look at it this way.  If one of my parents was half Indian, I'd be one-quarter Indian.  If a grandparent was half Indian, I'd be 12.5% Indian.  So it's pretty close to having one of my great-grandparents being a full blooded Native American Indian.  It's a pretty big percentage.

            I'm 99% sure it doesn't come from the Schroeder side.  I'm not absolutely positive about Harold Schroeder Sr.'s wife Hazel, but it seems really unlikely (I'll explain why another time).  So that leaves the Delehanty-Sullivan-Kinsman side.  It's not the Sullivan's.  Cornelius was 100% Irish, no doubt in the world.  And it's definitely not the Kinsman's.  By the time we get back to Sheldon and Louisa Kinsman (Ellen's parents), we're too far back in time to bring the percentage up to 9%.  Besides which, it's all really well documented along that branch of the family, all the way back to the 1790s at least, as we've seen.  Even if Ellen Kinsman's biological mother (Eliza Tuthill) was 50% Indian, the percentage for me would be 1.56% (0.5 divided by two, five times).  Way too small

            That leaves only one other possibility.  One other person whose ancestry so far is a total blank:  my mother's father, John Delehanty.

 

♣

 

So I did some more digging on John Delehanty, and what I found out is pretty amazing.  Instead of reproducing the material I gave you guys for Christmas here on the web – material that's outdated at this point – it'd be better if you just read the essay on that appears on the Contents page.

In the time since I gave you this book for Christmas, Tom and I also uncovered a lot more about Ellen Kinsman Lang's life in Minnesota, which I also won't get into here, except to say that we finally learned that she lived until 1927 and the ripe old age of 78.  Amazing.  There's also a lot more on Frank Lang.  As it turns out, the 7th Michigan Infantry, Company K, in which Frank was a private, saw a hell of a lot of battlefield action during the Civil War.  They fought in dozens of battles, moved all around the Eastern and Southern U.S., and had a casualty rate of over 50% (of which Frank, with his hernia, was one).  I'll spare you the details here.  Frank's paperwork, which says he was "employed continuously" as a nurse in the regimental hospital, seems to have been no exaggeration.  Evidently he saw an enormous amount of blood and guts during his four years as an army nurse.

There's also recent research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Civil War veterans that seems to apply pretty well to Frank's experiences.  It seems pretty clear that the guy was traumatized pretty severely by his Civil War experiences, and that he took it out on his wife and kids.  The best we can do for now is point to the transcript of the 1871 divorce proceedings, which makes for some pretty harrowing and revealing reading (tons of stuff on the Documents pages).

 

♣

 

Tom thinks that, overall, the Sullivan's were a pretty dysfunctional family.  Ed was a lifelong alcoholic who couldn't hold down a steady job.  Tim ended up in prison, where he died.  Grace was a lunatic.  Maime, from what I recall Sue and my mom saying, was also a lunatic.  Neal lived with his parents into adulthood.  That leaves Ella and Genevieve.

As Tom see it, Genevieve ended up as she did mainly because of all the deaths in her life, especially her two husbands, her sister Neal, and her nephew Bernard.  And, Dolly's abandoning the whole bunch in the mid-1930s.  He remembers Mom saying that Genevieve was never the same after Bernard's death – that it changed her in deep and lasting ways. 

In short, Tom thinks that Genevieve was the exception among the seven Sullivan siblings – the only really normal and responsible one of the bunch.  To me that seems entirely possible.  If Jennie, as a small girl, had seen her mother treated so abusively, she'd tend to grow up being afraid of men in general.  My sense, and Tom's too, is that she was very timid and meek as a wife and mother, and pretty much let Cornelius rule the roost. 

The evidence seems to show that Jennie never really taught her children how to become responsible adults.  And, that neither did Cornelius.  All of the kids ended up having major psychological problems of one kind or another later in life – except, again, Genevieve, and perhaps Ella and Neal.  We just don't know enough about the latter two.

All we really know is that Genevieve ended up being extraordinarily loving and kind, and that she passed those attributes on to my mom.  My mom, I've no doubt, learned to be loving and kind as a small girl, lessons learnt from her mother.  So, was Genevieve really the beginning of this "transmission of love" with which we began these genealogical journeys?  Was she, and she alone, really the source of it all? 

Maybe.  But again, it seems clear that those kinds of deep personal-psychological attributes don't just form by themselves, aren't just created out of whole cloth, in a single generation.  My gut still tells me that Jennie Lang Sullivan learned how to love from her mother Ellen Kinsman.  She was just screwed up by her father's abuse of her mother, and her father's abandonment.  None of that precludes the strong possibility that Ellen taught her daughter Jennie some profound and indelible lessons about the power of love, that Jennie then passed onto her children, including Genevieve.  Or, that Ellen (Nellie) herself was not instrumental in the process.

Uncle Ed, for instance, was an irresponsible drunkard, as we've seen.  He was also a fundamentally kind and decent and loving man.  Those are my very strong memories of him.  What's more, if he hadn't been fundamentally kind and decent and loving, it's very unlikely that his niece Betty would've been so devoted to him.  But she was – she loved her Uncle Ed very, very much – even after living with all his irresponsible behaviors when she was a girl.   The same is true of Grace.  Betty wouldn't have loved Ed and Grace as much as she did if they hadn't been deeply loving and caring and decent people. 

So maybe Jennie taught her children how to love, all right – maybe she just didn't teach them how to be responsible adults.  Funny, but that's what your mother and I have been trying to teach you.  Why?  Because we're jerks?  No.  Because we're obsessed?  Afraid not.  It's because she and I want nothing more in this world than for you to be happy. 

 

♣

 

So we end as advertised up front, with lots of loose ends dangling, lots of questions unanswered, lots of puzzles unsolved.  Lots of roads yet to travel!  I hope reading it has been an interesting journey, because it sure was a marvelous treat to write.

I love you guys so very much.  Merry Christmas!

 

THE END.

---