If You Don’t Your Know History, Then You Don’t Know Anything.
Where Were Your People in 1776?
Where Were Your People in 1776?
(Matthew Conard, The Abbeville Institute) - The quote attributed to Karl Marx, “If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded,” also applies. As does Orwell’s “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” We get the idea. If you live in a constant present timeframe, only seeking a sequence of sensorial experiences to get through your life, you have been, are, and will be manipulated. To many alive today, nothing of significance happened before you were born.
This article is a call to arms leading to the 250th anniversary of our republic. However, it is a different sort of call to arms. I want to get you invested in the 1776 revolution beyond just the ideals of that era. There will be many well written articles citing the founding fathers and their principles, documents, unprecedented actions, and immense bravery and suffering. I welcome it all. Many educated and articulate writers will surely do the subject justice. I will take a moment to go in another direction, and that is to get you invested in the revolution at the familial level – the genealogical level.
In our hyper-mobile, nearly ahistorical society, family history seems irrelevant. This article is for those who do not know their family’s history beyond their grandparents. According to a 2010 Ancestry.com press release, they claim 60% of modern Americans are descended from the colonial era. While that number seems high, you must note I state, ‘are descended from’, not can trace lineage to. And that’s because so many people have not traced lineage to the colonial era but can and now should.
I contend that along with celebrating the…
My sons know both sides of their family going back as far as possible so they know that they are descendants from the Mayflower and Sir Walter Raleigh on their mothers side but I tell their grandfather that we were watching our French Croatian side coming up and the Cajun side coming down river for the first time so they have it all on paper to them and room for their families my father in law is serious about the family tree’s and I have my last name and family crest framed