Looking at a Tree Again

The morning of my uncle's funeral my mom hurt her back while getting ready to go. I had to help her with that situation. Neither of us made it. I was disappointed but not devastated. It was too early in the morning and too long a drive anyway. It would have been a hardship. We're planning to visit the grave one day

I have some Christian books I read when I have a few minutes. One of them is this one that I got for free. I started it a while back and read a few pages at a time, when I'm waiting for my cat to come back inside. It has a lot of stuff about the Greek gods and such. I've never been into Greek literature. I figured out in elementary school that the stories were all the same with no satisfying endings. That's when they lost me forever. At one point the book mentions one of the Vanderbilts. That got me curious. In my family tree I have a Phebe Vanderbilt(1731-1793) daughter of Jacob Vandr Bilt(1692-1760) and Neeltje Denyse(1689-1770). Phebe married Christopher Garrison(1729-1810), and they had a bunch of kids with Bible names such as David, Ephiram, Adonija, Sarah, John, Ebeneser, Thomas, Darius, Elezabeth, Eleanor, Mary, Hanna and Jedediah. It turns out the Vanderbilt in the book is a descendant of Jacob, too. That was neat. It also turns out they're the rich and famous Vanderbilts. Ah. That's fun.

This was all before the Vanderbilts became rich and famous. It's suspected the Garrisons are from the Netherlands, but they might be from France or possibly from England before moving to France to avoid persecution. It depends on which family tree you look at. There are several ministers in the Garrison line, the opposite of the Vanderbilt in the book. No wonder they lost touch over the centuries.

What does this have to do with anything? I don't know. It's fun to play around with. If you haven't looked at your family tree, check it out. You'll find all kinds of neat little things. I have this one line that goes back to France to Judhael Berenger(891-930). They eventually became the Green family, and one of the Greens married into the Hatcher family, etc., and then here I am.

So anyway, around election time the press will dig into family trees and "discover" how the presidents are pretty much all related to each other in some way. This is how it happens. If they married early enough in American history, the connections are there to find. It's not a big deal. It just makes for a good news story.

One of my grandmothers was a Dodson. The Dodsons go back to John Dods(1599-?). He was one of the survivors of Jamestown. He wasn't rich or famous, so he's never mentioned on TV, when they talk about it. A lot of them died that fateful winter of 1609-1610. Some survived by cannibalism. I feel very, very, very strongly that John Dods was undergoing a process of finding himself at that time. Perhaps, he was questioning what he really believed. 1609 was very, very, very likely the year he decided to experiment with vegetarianism. He very, very, very probably didn't eat meat that whole winter. I suspect he only began eating meat again late in the summer of 1610. When archaeologists find human bones in Jamestown with human teeth marks on them, I'm very, very, very sure they don't match John's.