Hemmings’, hillbillies, Jews, and Cherokees – not to mention the blacks, to whom my daughters are not directly relatied -
turn out to have a lot in common. They have each been the subject of mockery, been degraded in the American mind, and have suffered from to different extents from bigotry and discrimination.
Inherited as a bundle, they do not fit into any of the categories currently determined by the U.S. government as officially sanctioned minorities. What else can you call them but Americans?
This book was originally supposed to be a small project intended only for my daughters; but the more material I found, the Robert Liftig
more historical patterns I saw which hinted at the possibility that others might be interested as well. Then, about a year ago, the implications of the family trees I was assembling began to hit me; and it exploded into epiphany.
Westport, Ct.
Most of my wife’s ancestors were well settled in Virginia im the middle of the 17th century when the white population of that January 13, 2013
state was barely 18,000 – many of whom were already related to one another. Almost all of my wife’s East Kentucky hillbillies are traced herein to the Tidewater elite. This was the first of the revelations.
Second, not only did many of the descendants of the elite eventually become hillbillies, but along the way they married into the Cherokee, the Mattaponi and the Cree ), and with the Jews (ancient, colonial and modern) - and different related families intermarried with the descendants of former slaves (eg. Thomas Jefferson)
Studies about what the average American knows about our history and their own genealogy are mostly embarrassing; studies about what the average hillbilly kid (say, the ones on the contemporary show, “Buckwild”) knows about his or her ancestry are impossible to find. Though family genealogists are aware of the facts as they are presented on the internet and in their family Bibles, this has traditionally been the interest of the “finer people” among us – probably because the wanted to find the still finer.
I suggest that if the average American understood that the mountain people of Appalachia are descendants of anyone other than what they imagine them to be – their sisters — the attitude of the average American toward the Appalachian people, the image mountain people have about themselves, and the demographic picture of the American colonial population presented in our history books today, would change.
The Jefferson family, which, like so many of the Tidewater elite, produced many descendants, most of whom disappeared off the screen of the “elite” within two generations. Some of them married into the Cherokee, some of them became the mulatto descendants of the families Jefferson and the Wayles, but a significant number of direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson and his relatives, eventually settled in the mountains and the hollers of Eastern Kentucky where they became my wife’s people – the Hillbillies.
Some of whom even intermarried with Jews – as Jefferson’s ancestors did.
This would have been just a braggable curiosity on my wife’s family tree, until I came to understand that the Jefferson family itself was descended from, and related to: the Randolphs, the Blands, the Blairs, the Washingtons, the Lees, the Rolfes, the Bollings, the Bushes, the Harrisons, the Custis’, the Alexanders, and to Pocahontas – all of whom are First Families of Virginia.
These families produced at least eight presidents of the United States, including: George Washington, James Madison, the two presidents Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Thomas Jefferson, of course, and both presidents Bush, and two First Ladies – Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan. They also sired Robert E. Lee, Merriweather Lewis (Lewis & Clark), John Marshall, and the actor Robert Duvall. All of these famous Americans are in close relation with my wife’s famil, and of course, with the rest of her
“people.”
But her people are also related to some really raw-boned pioneers, renegade rabble rousers, and other truly American originals such as Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, the Austins, and the Houstons; and THEIR descendants are related to the moonshiners, convicts (“Lock-up Raw”), and the “Honey Boo Boo” people that the media makes so much fun of – and so much money from.
And among her ancestors is also the ggggggg-grandmother of Samuel Langhorne Clemens – truly a prince of men who fits no category, except that of Great American.
This book is not to be confused with all the other other books about the founding gentry and their proud descendants. Their descendants don’t even know about where they come from. Neither my wife nor my daughters knew they are direct descendants of Mary Jefferson (Thomas’ older sister), Pocahontas (Mattaponi tribe), and John Rolfe; neither did they know they are direct descendants of Ashkenazi Jews and the Tribe of Levi - related to Moses, St. John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Christ. They only knew they were distantly related to Ian Ziering, the actor. But that’s not all bad – as I will explain later in these chapters.