I reflected on this and that on this day, about how although it is not the way in these days, family groups and even cousins have traditionally intermarried. Though we consider this to be genetically risky, it is natural old instinct. Indians, Moslems, tribals, they do it. Our royals and aristocrats did. Egyptians did. There is some intuitive reason for this which we now disregard. Evolution comes about through the constant inbreeding of similar types. Tribes with their own characteristics fight to eliminate other types that do not conform. A biological basis is there for prejudice and annihilation of others in war and conquest. Your DNA strands win and others lose. Some peoples are still needed for fresh blood if problems with ones own DNA are encountered. Weaknesses are weeded out. This is like a garden. In a garden one has to be ruthless with the thorns and the weeds. Some of us see kindness as good evolution and we overcome the old impulses of the ancestors, but then dangers arise, because it is kindness which lets in foreign threats. Once strong, that former minority may revert to the same old conquering and annihilation. Biology has both old and new ways. And it is the newer ways which are more fragile. It is DNA which takes on its journey upon the stage of all our dramas. Every cell, within the commune of the shared life force of our bodies, has genetic intent. We are guardians of these great bodily colonies. They divide and live onwards and we serve, the great commune depending on our wise decisions. Our choices are so important, so vital. Survival is the ultimate instinct. Not even always personal survival, but tribal. Sacrifices are made. And egos are always to be sacrificed. But the evolutions of DNA carry on. Much of humans seeming irrationality may serve this. Although kindness is fragile, in this modern age it is the ultimate for the survival of our DNA, though we may be slow to realise it. Destruction always of this or that threat in the race of the selfish gene is on course to annihilate every single one of us. Humans bullying and all that, this is not an abnormality, as those impassioned with the subject of narcissism would have us believe. It is in every school playground, and is precisely normal human behaviour. It has served evolution, up to a point, and is the survival of the fittest, by might or right. Limits can be seen to arise though, with our planet being trashed. Only kindness and caring now can counteract that. As guardians of our DNA it is for us to make wise choices. But are we even capable of that, or are we to be like the dinosaurs, huge for so long and then gone. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees.
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![]() Pieter, a Dutchman at market, talked with me about how ancestral traces still affect us. He has a fear of incoming tides that can trap people. His grandfather helped Canadians in the war, guiding them in the safe ways through such dangerous terrain. Much further back, when Spain owned the Netherlands, his ancestors were cruel Spaniards sent to Holland, and from them comes his surname Jacobus. These Spaniards became trapped by these treacherous tides, and heavy with horses and weighed down, they became victims to the sea. Pieter still feels it and he stares for hours at such scenery. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() Back to the genealogy and a discovery that my ancestor John William Harrison was for a while in Barming Heath Mental Hospital, which is where the word 'barmy' comes from, just like 'doolally' from the soldiers of the British Raj who had lost their sanity and were sent to Deolali in Maharastra. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() In the night I had one of those dream states along with a kind of wakefulness too. It was as if the ancestors were reaching out to me from way back, as before when I had dreamt of mothers from my matriarchal lineage. This dream was from long, long, long ago in early Judaic times, when Moses was trying to force the people to focus on just the one great male god. My people had come down from the mountains to serve the holy places, gilding with gold the holy cow that the people naturally were drawn to worship, just as they had with other sacred animals. For up to this time they were known with repute for their connection to the golden fleece. Sacred animals in those times were as gods, like in the Egypt of old and the India of today. This was so familiar to my people, which has led to my own love for animals today, and this is how I am all for respecting the cow which bestows her milk on us, who nourishes our children and our civilisations. The golden sheep of the mountains and the golden cow of the hills and plains. People had their spiritual bliss opened up and my ancestors played a part in it. This is how Ganesh the elephant god is so easy to love now, and back then it was the same. A considerable community of our people came to teach and nurture this instinct in others. But Moses turned on them and forced them out. Either they were slaughtered or exiled and this I couldn't quite see. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Researching, researching, and putting it slowly up on my website, it's so interesting. Those old mariners, both fathers of Eleanor Barton and John William Harrison, who had some of their children dying young. Well, from what I understand in genealogy, losing one or two children was pretty much the usual way. This was a grief most had to take on, for which religion came in handy as a balm, to help one carry on, like Jesus chose my child to be with him in heaven, my child has gone to a better place, he or she is an angel now. If some more children die it can contrarily seem like a curse. There are three main reasons why many children can die. Other than which most children are capable of surviving their poverty and the rounds of illnesses. Inherited disabilities are one reason for dying. But more often it was the big two, tuberculosis and syphilis. And the latter, the Great Pox, was at one time very common and particularly had an association with mariners. I wouldn't want to insult my ancestors, by assuming what was never even so, nevertheless it cannot be discounted as a possibility. There was no cure for syphilis until the discovery of antibiotics. Mercury was often used, which had its own severe effects upon a persons being. When I think of poor John William Harrison, son of a mariner, being by his early 60's recorded as an 'imbecile', I do know this is one of the potential later reactions of the Pox. As for the mariner, Philip Barton, even those of his children that did survive their infancy, didn't make it beyond their 50's or 60's. One does have to wonder, though maybe it is not so. And how could one like to think that one's own family may have had the Pox! I remember when a homeopath in Stroud told me we all need to be treated for miasms of syphilis and tuberculosis. 'But why?' I asked. And he replied that our ancestors had all at some time had these ailments. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I worked on my website, trying to put together a piece on the hardships which my Greenwich ancestors had to experience, which involved having to download supporting papers and documents. There in the workhouse had gone a lineage of my women, Maria Harrison as child and grown-up, Eleanor Barton in an orphanage, Hannah Bunney in the Blackfriars workhouse, giving birth to one of her children there, which I now realise was at the time when her husband had departed central London for the care and comforts of the Greenwich Hospital. So he too had left his family, temporarily, in destitution, after which they came to live by him, living outside the hospital while he was within, as so many ex sailors families apparently did. And I do wonder, was the workhouse always such a rock bottom humiliation of the people anyway. Pregnant girls whose lovers failed to marry them would find a place there to give birth. People were clothed and fed. Sick people were given medical care. The discipline and regimes were hated, but still people in need would go there. When I see Maria's children going in there for but one hour, may she not even have designed it to get a good full meal in them for once. Who is to know what was really in the hearts and minds of all these people. The workhouse was equivalent to the modern old peoples home too, and in that manner it carries on, as too for a free medical facility, like our National Health today. We look back on it all so bleakly and fail to see what an invaluable support it was to those who were passing through hard times. Before the workhouses, the parish's gave handouts to the struggling poor and saw that they were clothed and fed, like the dole now, not even any work being required and no rules to follow. So I understand the workload and regimes were generally an irritating sacrifice one had to comply with, an exchange of sorts. One irritation would be the harsh discipline within the workhouse schools. A poor child would learn to read and write, but would get whacked about in the process. For girls it may have been easier. Eleanor Barton's orphanage taught her to read and write and how to be thoroughly and efficiently domestic, to be a good and valued servant girl, which was the path most women took before they found themselves a husband and became queens of their own household, he working tirelessly long hours, and she creating a brood of children. If he strayed for a while, if he was unable to work, there was the workhouse, the last resort. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() It was time to do my DNA testing, the last time my son George having done it, and now me. Two toothbrushes to scrape the insides of ones cheeks. And then to town to post the DNA samples off to America. In the post office along came Val and I excitedly told her about this Genographic Project, which she herself was curious about. She has read up all about matriarchal DNA, though has not tested to see what type she is. She believes her origins to be Basque because of her red hair and rhesus negative blood. 'And they descend from the gods' she says, whereas rhesus positive blood is of those descended from monkeys. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Back to researching, I try to order a death certificate for Eleanor Caroline Harrison nee Barton, with no success, after three wrong attempts to put in the numbers my card being withdrawn. And I so want to know why she died so young. Women tended to die young from childbirth complications, so I have thought this, but this is presumption and the need is really there to research. She left her daughter, Maria, an orphan at the age of 5. So, I had found out that this Maria, was as a grown up, destitute, in the workhouse and even in prison. Well, I now discovered she had also been in the workhouse as a child, her own father, John William Harrison, at that time having a spell in prison too. When he was released he joined her in the workhouse. I start to understand that the contrariness of family experiences has impacted on me. The traumatic lives they led, the weight of the world on them, tough survival, and the unfairness of it all, I feel I have come into this world with these imprints. I have royals in my tree and I have destitutes, a total medley, and maybe I am and have been all that too. I carry it all, somehow. The emotion and sensitivity is in me. This is actually very interesting. To somehow understand it, at last, feels so very therapeutic. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. My godfather Chris, my mums cousin, sent me photocopies of the wartime passes of my great grandparents, D'Auvergne and Mary Ann Bane. Both blue eyed, he fair haired, she a brunette. And photos of them are on there, wow. A photo of Mary, other than as an old lady. I can see that her son, my great uncle Dick, takes after her in his looks. As the photos were unclear I wrote to Chris asking if it was possible to get clearer ones. Its so good to receive something like this. I was genealogised out though by the end of the day. I need a break from it. My mother is keen to get those wartime passes off Chris to donate to the Harwich Historical Society. On the passes, it had mentioned that four of Mary Ann's brothers were fighting in the war. I sent both mum and Chris information of how one of them had died, Ernest Seagrove, on the continent from war wounds while in action. Trying to find anymore on him or his family, I indeed found information that quite surprised me. Well, firstly I saw that two of the other brothers, Philip and John, having survived the first world war, perished during the second world war, along with Susan, the wife of James, another of the brothers, all on the same day in their homes in Greenwich, being next door neighbours, bombed by the Germans, wartime civilian deaths. And not only did I find this out, I was shocked to discover that Mary's mother, Maria, had in the year of 1900 been destitute, so that she and her children had to resort a few times to the workhouse, with no sign of Thomas whose duty it was to support them and keep them alive. A note was there, in one of the workhouse entries, for young Ernest, saying that his mother was in prison. Oh, what a shock it was to see that. If indeed it was true it could not have been for long, because the next time the children were recorded as being in the workhouse, due to apparently having been home alone with no parents around, Maria turned up but an hour later to take them back home with her. This is all very curious. Like, what was Thomas up to in abandoning them for a year, and how desperate Maria must have been to not only keep going to the workhouse, but also to get on the wrong side of the law. There is quite a story there, if only one could know more. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I have sent off to do a DNA test for my autosomal and mtDNA, even though this latter I'd done already through my son George, I nevertheless want a second opinion that it is indeed correct, as well as for my percentage of Neanderthal and Denisovan (rather intriguing), all to be done by the National Geographic, a vast ambitious survey, also supporting research, and not cheap, oh dear! AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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