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About Americana Journeys - Snootyville
The intent of this site to present a picture of family histories that can relate to a wide number of people, and hopefully will banch out across a spctrum, but here's a note about the family genealogy which forms the basis of this project.
My brother lives in Snootyville. At least that’s what my sister-in-law explains is what some of the locals in a smallish California foothill town call the neighborhood where they live. Just a development among developments, with trees and large land plots and slightly bigger houses. In fact my brother was one of the first there, when it was just roads through the oaks. He built his house. My father built his house, or at least hired a contractor to build it. My grandfather built his house, though with a recently discovered story explaining a family mystery, got sued over it. It seems I come from a long line of pioneers. Family who left one place and went to another, finding an empty piece of land and building a house on it, maybe a farm or ranch. Though I might risk the charge of being snooty in the family ancestry sense, where some folks like to claim connections to great important historic figures or ancient potentates, my family seems pretty much a long line of mostly farmer types, going way, way back. Well, everyone’s family goes way back, it’s the nature of life, but few people are able to trace it back though centuries and generations. Royal families perhaps. But in America we don’t allow titles, we dismissed that with the county’s founding when we’d had enough of the privileged hereditary ownership of everything. Of course as is human nature, we created a new royalty, a new snoot.
Organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution had made a great deal of tracing ancestors to the colonial period. Some anti-immigration sorts like to think of “real Americans” as the Euro-Americans who came on the sailing ships of the 18th and even 19th Centuries, though the earlier Euro American immigrants from the 1900’s from England, Germany and France would later turn up a snooty nose at the European immigrants of the 1800’s, the Irish and Italians, and they, of the immigrants of 1900’s, and they of immigrants of other languages, and so it goes, to shouts about building walls to keep out the next group. I bear this out because I have to confess that my ancestry can trace its American roots back to just 20 years after the Mayflower.
Tracing family genealogy has become a pastime for many Americans, the decective work of following a parent to a grand-parent to a great grand-parent and so on, filling in the blanks of who we are and where we come from. Television shows now follow this interest. I hadn’t thought a great deal about my own ancestry, until my aunt got interested and my mother turned up a miraculous “fan chart” which went back 10 generations – from her grandmother. A rather rare thing. Apparently, I have to thank the meticulous record keeping of the Dutch Reform Church, for being able to trace the record back to the snootiest of American families, the Schermerhorns of New York, or New Amsterdam. Though my relatives came from the less grand branch of the family from upstate, rather than the city aristocrats. In fact, it was such a recognized bit of snoot, there are lines in movies about it – “Do you know Mrs. Schermerhorn?” - asks the proper dowager of the country bumpkin girl putting on airs and thinking of marrying the Patroon in “Dragonwyck”, and a Schermerhorn was respresented in the Scorcese movie “Gangs of New York” played by in "six-degrees of seperation" fashion by my late personal friend, David Hemmings. Mr. Scorcese knows a bit about anti-immigrant bias and it was the theme at the core of that particular film, though just for a bit of irony, a movie about the “real Americans" of English and Dutch descent anti-Irish prejudice was shot on a sound stage in Italy.
I write this as an explanation, a disclaimer perhaps, that although thoughout the pages to be found here, I trace some relations and family lines back to the founding of America, I hope not to fall under the label of being snooty. My ancestors and their stories I endeavor to uncover and tell is not an expression of self-worthiness. In going on this journey myself, I discovered my past was made of pioneers, hardy people who set out with precious litte to find new land and a new life. America is made of immigrants, whether they came 300 years ago, or last week. Whether they spoke Dutch, German, or Spanish. Like many Americans, I trace some ancestry to the Cherokee Native Americans, and I can also trace a line to a relative who forced them on the Trail of Tears. I set about this to trace many threads of the discovery and settlement of America, Indians and Indian fighters, Mormans, Irish and French Hugenots, Italian Soldiers and religious refugees, an illustrative patchwork of the Americana story. All mostly just dirt farmers or laborers, brewers and carpenters. My father was the first to go to college on the GI bill, a pioneer of a kind, which put my brother through college – which gave him the chance to build his house in Snootyville.