thevalleyfamily.org

I was born and raised, for the most part, in Iowa.  Now, I’m not so naive as to truly believe that nothing ever happens in Iowa, but after living there and visiting there for so long, it certainly seems like it.  So, today, I’m researching the Dutton family connection.  My wife is a descendant of Fred Pratt and Mary Dutton.  Mary Dutton is the daughter of John Dutton and Hannah Walters.  John Dutton is the son of Russell B. Dutton and Mary McDonald.

While I’ve know for a while how the Duttons came to be here, Mary McDonald’s ancestry was always a bit of a mystery.  I’d gotten second-hand information from a Dutton family researcher that Mary’s father was a John G. McDonald, and that he’d been born in 1799.  So, I started there.

It didn’t take too long before I found John G. McDonald in a few books about the history of Jackson County, Iowa.  John was a surveyor for the state, prior to Iowa being a state, so he naturally showed up (along with his friend and fellow surveyor, Colonel Thomas Cox) in a lot of books about this history of Iowa.

What I didn’t expect was information on a war, fought in Iowa, between a bandit army and a vigilante army.  You see, there is a little town on the Maquoketa by the name of Bellevue.  Back when Bellevue was just starting up, it happened to be situated conveniently near some limestone caves that lined the river.  These caves were the hiding holes for a large group of bandits known as the Brown Gang.  For a great deal of time, the well organized gang would dabble in extortion, smuggling, and general highway robbery.

Now, John G. McDonald and Thomas Cox were more than just surveyors:  John was a US Army veteran, and was a part of the US Cavalry Rangers, a volunteer unit of men who supplied their own rifles and horses, and helped to patrol the wild borders of the burgeoning United States.  By the time he was fully retired, he’d been honored with the rank of Brigadier General.  Surveying the land was their appointed duties, but they still carried their weapons, and they still did what they could to keep the law.

Around 1840, John, who had an appointment to survey some land in Bellevue that day, started out from his home at Farmers Creek.  Unfortunately, his horse was unavailable (for some reason), so he was forced to walk for 2 hours before he reached the town.  Upon reaching the last hill, he spied a great deal of violence and gun play coming from the town.  Unbeknownst to John, the citizenry had formed a vigilante posse to defend themselves against the bandit gang.  The amount of people that died that day are not counted the histories that I’ve read, beyond stating time and time again that it was a “great number”.  The vigilantes are supposed to have numbered at least 100 armed individuals, and they were outnumbered by the bandits.

When John finally tracked down Colonel Cox, he spied him behind cover, reloading his gun.  Cox couldn’t see Brown’s man creeping up behind him, pistol drawn.  John, acting out of friendship and duty, dove in front of Colonel Cox, shielding him from the gunshot.  John took the shot to his right hip, recovered, shot the assailant, and went on to continue fighting that day.  Later that day, he took another wound to his left hand.  He survived the battle, which happened to have taken place 2 days after he’d gotten married to his second wife, Margaret Hildreth.

Ten years later, John would figure prominently in the city’s criminal history as well, as he lead a sheriff’s posse to capture two murderers on the run.  In 1850, he caught gold fever, and headed off to California.  Unfortunately, he would die 3 months after arriving there.

Connecting up previously unknown information into your family tree is always fun, but this one was a delight.  Along the way, I learned the following gems:

• The only other Dutton family researcher I’ve found had marked John G. McDonald’s birthplace as South Carolina.  The profile written down at the end of the 19th century gives his actual date of birth, and some personal history, and sets his birthplace as Scotland.  So, that part of the family has Scottish history, and no one ever made the connection before.
• John’s daughter Mary Ann, my wife’s ancestor, married Russell B. Dutton in Hancock County, Illinois, just across the Mississippi river.  The Justice of the Peace for their ceremony was a little known lawyer out of Springfield, one Abraham Lincoln.
• Mary and her new husband had to leave Hancock the very day of their marriage, because John Smith, the leader of the Mormons, had been murdered that day.  Being part of a well known anti-Mormon organization at the time, they didn’t want to be around in case there was going to be a backlash against the murder.  A little while later, the Mormons were kicked out of the area en masse.
• David McDonald, Mary’s brother, was later found to have been taking part in a counterfeit ring in Jackson County.  He was almost exposed once, by one of the partners, but then that man was found in the woods with a bullet in the back of his head.  Upon the discovery of the body, some time later, McDonald fled the county.  It was later rumored that he was in Missouri, posing as a preacher, and travelling with…the Mormons.

While all of this is very interesting, there are still some big questions to noodle through:  Who were John’s parents?  Where did John die, and how?  And so many more…

If you want to read more about the Bellevue War, I would suggest Susan K. Lucke’s “The Bellevue War: Mandate of Justice or Murder by Mob”.

I just read a great post over on BB:

To Feldman and his colleagues, the genetic evidence suggests that modern Samaritans are descended from Hebrew men, left behind after the Assyrians conquered ancient Israel, who went on to marry non-Hebrew women. It’s probably not just coincidence that Samaritan ethnicity (at least, the official social recognition of that ethnicity) is traditionally passed to a child through its father–exactly opposite from the way Jewish ethnicity has been traditionally passed down.

In that way, the evidence suggests that both the Jews and the Samaritans are right, sort of. If you believe ethnicity is something passed down from the mother, then the Samaritans probably aren’t Children of Israel. But if you think ethnicity comes from the father’s side (or, you know, from both parents) then the Samaritans have a good case. It’s all about how you use culture to interpret the science.

Not only is this an excellent piece because of the science, history, religious and genetic implications, but it brings to mind some concerns I had nearly a year ago over cultural identity.

You see, it’s always worried me that I was basically wrong about certain preconceptions in my life.  One of the goals I set for myself when I began my research is that I would finally know the truth about my heritage, and that, while calling myself a “mutt” was technically correct (and charming in a self-deprecating way, or so my wife would have you believe), I felt that the details of my heritage were a large part of how I identified myself to other people.

Looking at it Technically

To satisfy my curiosity, I created a small application called Mutt.  It took any individual, and walked through their family tree, finding the oldest relative on any branch with something filled in for the “location of birth” field.  So, if I had a 16x great-grandfather who was born in Ireland, and I didn’t know who his parents were, I’d qualify him as 100% Irish.  Likewise, a grandmother who had no parents listed, but I didn’t know where she was born, would be listed as 100% Unknown.  A child of one of these 100% people would naturally inherit 50% of their place of origin, independent of where they were born themselves.  That way, someone born in Pennsylvania with 2 100% German parents would be 100% German themselves.

For my personal makeup, certain things were easy, but the roadblocks kept me from getting the full picture.  My maternal grandfather was 100% Norwegian, as both of his parents were first generation immigrants from Norway.  His wife, however, is another matter.  Adopted at only 6 months after her birth from an orphanage in Roseau, Minnesota (having been born in Minneapolis) in 1921, Ruth never knew who her biological parents were.  I’ve started the paperwork to try and track that information down, but it’s going to be slow-going.  All we know of her is that she was given over to a Lutheran orphanage, and her adoptive parents found her through the church.  So, this leaves me with a big fat 100% sitting at the level of my grandparents.  Doing the math, that means I have at least 25% of me that remains an ethnic mystery.

My great-grandfather on my father’s father’s side had a similar issue.  Adopted at an early age from a catholic church in Ogdensburg, New York, all attempts at finding his biological birth information have failed.  And, unlike my grandmother, it’s not the government or historical societies standing in the way:  For all we know, no birth record exists.  So, add his unknown information to my mix, and I’m sitting at 37.5% Unknown.

Of the things I know about my heritage, I can say that I’m 25% Norwegian, 25% Swedish, and I have muddled traces of Scottish, German and English through my paternal great-grandmother.  Everything else is unknown.  So, how do I identify ethnically?  My father’s family never really celebrated anything ethnic, beyond my grandmother’s ability to make an awesome Swedish meatball dish.  My mother’s family has/had Lefsa for every holiday meal, and since my grandmother was raised by a Lutheran Norwegian minister, it came naturally that they’d all consider themselves 100% Norwegian as well.  My name, however, is of French origins, and relates back to my great grandfather, who grew up in a large family of immigrant French-Canadians.  Oddly enough, I think that’s how I identify my heritage the most.

My wife identifies strongly with her Irish heritage.  The interesting thing is that’s she’s mostly one background or another in greater percentage than Irish (like me, she’s 25% Norwegian, making our Gaelic and Celtic-named children all 25% Norwegian as well).  But, like me, her name is her connection to her heritage.

Conclusions and Meaning

After working through all of my math, and finding some interesting results, I realized that it didn’t mean too much for me, personally.  It didn’t matter that I had more Viking blood in me than anything else, I still see a scruffy French guy staring back at me in the mirror.  Even if my only connection to my French heritage is from a man who was adopted into a French family, it’s still part of my identity.

The story of the Good Samaritan brought up a lot of questions on how people identify ethnically, and what that means to them and to those around them.  I don’t think those questions can be answered universally, and they certainly can’t be answered with a small piece of automation that examines my family tree.  The program fails to understand how the populations of places like the United States and Canada are filled with immigrants.  Even the people that lived here before the immigrants predate the creation of those countries, and so therefore wouldn’t officially be identified as “American” or “Canadian,” either.

After a good deal of thinking on this subject, and how to come to some consistent conclusion that would apply to everyone, I decided that we’re all either Babylonian or Sumerian.

If I see one more Babylonian move into my neighborhood, I swear, I’ll take it up with the city council.