Did my ancestor need to apologize to the Indians?

Posted on 29. Nov, 2009 by kchristieh in history, religion

If my kids were to construct a physical family tree to reflect what we know of their ancestors, it would be incredibly lopsided. My husband can barely trace his ancestors back to his great grandparents, whereas I can trace at least one branch of my family tree back to the late 1500′s. One of my more famous ancestors was Everardus Bogardus, who was the second minister of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam, which we now know as New York.

So it was with great interest that I read that Rev. Robert Chase from Collegiate Church, which is the current incarnation of the Reformed Dutch Church, recently apologized to descendants of the Lenape Indians for the church’s role in their massacre and displacement. (see the AP photo to the right)

“We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land,” the Rev. Robert Chase told descendants from both sides. “With pain, we the Collegiate Church, remember our part in these events.”

As a center of the new colony, it’s not surprising that the church would have played a role in persecuting the Indians. Still, it was disappointing to envision an ancestor of mine playing such a big role in it. Fortunately, I found an article about Everardus Bogardus that says that he actually was kind to the Indians.

Before arriving in New Amsterdam in 1633, The Dutch minister had served as a ‘ziekentrooster’ (comforter of the sick) on the Guinea coast. While there, he developed a concern for the spiritual condition of Africans that carried over into his dealings with New Amsterdam’s West Africans. In 1636, Bogardus pleaded for a schoolmaster to be sent from Holland. As New Amsterdam’s minister, he routinely married African men and women and baptized their children, and made a great effort to welcome Africans into New Amsterdam’s Reformed Protestant Church.

…

Everardus Bogardus was a controversial figure in more than one way. He was at odds with one of the settlement’s first leaders, Willem Kieft. Bogardus denounced Kieft from his pulpit due to Kieft’s decisions to initiate wars with the local Indians.

I wish I could meet my ancestors. It’d be amazing to see firsthand what their lives were like and why they made the decisions they did.

I found a website dedicated to tracing descendancy to Everardus Bogardus and his wife Anneke. It says there are probably a million people who can claim them as ancestors. I wonder if this is true. If so, it shows that many of us are more related than we ever imagined. The website also puts to rest rumors that Anneke was descended from King William the Silent in Holland. I always wondered how I could descend from someone who was silent. Instead, it turns out she was born in Norway. That adds yet another country to my list of Northern European countries I descend from, so that’s cool.

Hate is here

Posted on 28. May, 2008 by kchristieh in my life, politics, religion, startling statistics, things that bug me

Here’s the Los Angeles section of the Hate Groups Map from the Southern Poverty Law Center. I’ve overlaid it on top of a more detailed Google Map so you can see city names:

If you go to the official map, you’ll be able to click on each symbol and see what it stands for. It’s scary that there’s a Neo-Nazi group only one town away from me, in Glendale. Hopefully they’re losing members, not gaining them.

Some of the groups have surprisingly benign names. For example, there’s the OMNI Christian Book Club in Palmdale. Sounds ok to me. But here’s part of the description from the Southern Poverty Law Center site:

That’s mild compared to the offerings that grace Omni’s book catalogue, including Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die? (published by neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel); Henry Ford’s The International Jew, available abridged or in a deluxe, four-volume set; Arthur Butz’s Holocaust-denying The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (“a must read into the biggest hoax in world history, who’s behind it, how they’ve profited from it, and what can be done to put an end to it”); several issues of the late Father Leonard Feeney’s Jew-bashing monthly The Point; The Judaic Connection, describing a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy against the Catholic Church; and even defenses of Hitler.

I don’t understand why someone would hate a group of people, let alone dedicate so much energy to that effort. Don’t they have better ways of spending their time, even if they do hate so much?

When I was young, my Mom always told me it was ok to say I hated what someone did, but I should never hate the person. It was her way of interpreting Matthew 5:43-48 for me.

You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I try to teach my kids the same thing, and find myself saying, “You can hate things, but you shouldn’t hate people.” It’s hard sometimes. I’m lucky I don’t come across many people I’m tempted to hate in my personal life. In fact, I’ve told people that if I say I don’t like someone, it probably means they’re pretty evil.

If I were a parent of one of the girls mentioned in my previous post, I’d definitely find it hard to love Gregory Serrano.

UFOs seen over Red Bank, NJ

Posted on 31. Jan, 2008 by kchristieh in history

I grew up thinking that UFOs were a Western phenomena, perhaps because of Roswell, NM. The recent sighting of UFOs in Stephensville, Texas confirmed that theory. I had no idea that UFOs had been spotted in my own (former) little corner of New Jersey, near Red Bank, on March 15, 1950.

I discovered this when I was poking around on Footnote.com. This site allows people to upload original, historical documents, adding them to an already existing archive of public and private collections. It’s searchable, and there are discussion forums about various topics.

My first searches centered on names. I quickly found some of my stepfather’s ancestors, but I haven’t found mine yet.

When I started typing in names of places I’ve lived, I quickly hit paydirt. A search for “Fair Haven” directed me to this 13-page document from the National Archives. It includes interviews and the results of an Army investigation into a UFO sighting by at least five people south of Red Bank, NJ. The people interviewed came from various towns and professions, but each claimed to have seen three flying objects with trails behind them. Several people said they looked round. Mrs. Lewis Prentiss of Rumson said she saw the following while driving on Ridge Road in Fair Haven:

Three port holes with lights behind them, or lights that might be viewed through a fog. The weather was very clear and early evening daylight. Around these three luminous round forms there seemed to be a density of ‘sky-blue’ colored gas. The objects were not disc-like in form.

The Army concluded that the people probably saw contrails from high-flying aircraft.

Maybe. But it seems odd that they were round. I wonder what they really were? I wonder if they had a utopian vision of the future?

Tapestry pre-dates computer art

Posted on 29. Oct, 2007 by kchristieh in art

Elaine Reichek explains the continuum from tapestries to modern computer art in this week’s New Yorker magazine:

“I think that what makes tapestry so topical is its relation to computer art,” Reichek said recently over lunch at her studio, in Harlem. “They both involve patterning, and reducing or enlarging an image to a charted form. A stitch, in essence, is a pixel. With any pixellated surface, whether it’s a tapestry or a difital photograph, the more pixels you have, the higher your image resolution.”

So impressionism, and in particular, pointillism, would be between tapestries and computer art in this timeline.

I never thought of it this way. Now I feel more like an artist. :)

Great spy novel / historical fiction

Posted on 27. Mar, 2007 by kchristieh in books

I just finished Restless by William Boyd. It’s a work of historical / current fiction about a British woman whose mother reveals that she was a spy during World War II. The most fascinating passages are where the mother describes her spy training. As a result, I’m looking at the world and people differently this week! The flashbacks are definitely more fascinating than the current day story.

It’s a quick read, with a somewhat suspenseful ending. I highly recommend it.

The best time machine I’ve ever seen

Posted on 29. Sep, 2006 by kchristieh in articles, cool websites, my life, sports

Yesterday the New York Times sent me an email saying that their archives from 1851 – 1980 are now online. I had a blast searching for old names and dates. Here are a few things I’ve found so far:

• Birth announcements of babies that were born the exact same day and year that I was. The freakiest thing is to do a Zoominfo search on them and find out what they’re doing today.
• A wedding announcement that shows that one grandfather was the best man for his cousin’s wedding on March 7, 1941. I never even knew this cousin existed!
• I got tears in my eyes when I found articles about girls joining Little League in Tenafly, NJ in 1974. I was one of those girls.
• An August, 1937 article saying that my mom’s father was awarded an assistant teaching position at Fordham, and a June, 1952 article announcing that he was promoted in the advertising department at a pharmaceutical company.
• My grandmother’s brother’s obituary from 1971.
• A July, 1898 story about the sinking of La Bourgogne. It says the only passenger listed as dead that survived was Charles Duttweiler. Any relation to my stepfather? Some of the surviving passengers alleged that the French crew made sure they got lifeboats, leaving women and children to perish.

I’m sure there are many more amazing things I’ll find in the archives. I wonder if there’s an obituary for microfilm?

French Military Victories

Posted on 26. Mar, 2006 by kchristieh in international, politics, technical

Have you done this one yet? Type
french military victories
into the main Google page and hit “I’m feeling lucky.”

You’ll get the following response:

Did you mean: french military defeats 

No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.

Your search – french military victories – did not match any documents.

——————————–

May 3, 2006

I just found out that this is actually a parody page created by a Canadian student. You can see it at http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html. I still think it’s funny.