Lineage

Ancestry and lineage is one of my long-time fascinations.  I started doing research many years ago, starting with those who came to North America. I have a huge list of the names of early ancestors, but no context - no understanding of where they came from other than the name of the country: England, Germany, Holland, etc.

This year I'd like to begin to dive deeper into those lands of my roots to understand my origins a little better. 

 

1. Read "Root and Ritual"

2. Map it out

3. Dig a little deeper

4. Study more genealogy

1. Read "Root and Ritual":

I'm reading again from "Root and Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self," by Becca Piastrelli (2021). I'm on Part 2: Lineage, about tapping in to our ancestral memories to activate our connection to our line of descent. Or to our "affinity" ancestors.

Chapter 4 is called No Matter What, You Have a Lineage. She lists out a variety of ways to explore your lineage: DNA tests, public records, historical studies and getting to know the topography of your homelands. 

"I encourage you to zero in as much as possible ... see if you can pinpoint a village or group of towns. The more you can identify a specific bioregion (with it's lakes, mountains, valleys, and so on), the easier it is for you to transport yourself to the experience of your ancestors living there." 

2. Map it out:

I've just finished a map of the origins my British ancestors from my mother's side. I started with my British ancestors, because there are so many of them - and just put dots on a map.

Next I'm excited to start on maps of Germany and Switzerland!

3. Dig a little deeper:

I noticed that a fair number of my British ancestors came from West Yorkshire (the big dots near the top middle), so I decided to do some historical and bioregional research. 

The indigenous people of Yorkshire were the Celtic Brigantes, ancient Britons who controlled the largest section of what would become Northern England. Their territory is often referred to as Brigantia, and the Briga probably refers to the British goddess Brigit. The Brigantes are referred to as tribes, and were probably a federation of smaller states, sometimes independent, sometimes uniting under a single tribal banner.

Brigantia was centered in the Vale of York, a dry, pastoral area in the center of Yorkshire, that would have been extensively cleared for farming and small scale cropping before the Roman era. 

Brigantia also encompassed the peaks and foothills of the South Pennine Mountain range, in the western half of Yorkshire. The Pennines are rugged, and divided the region north to south, with hilly terrain and steep sided valleys, and a wealth of open moorland, wooded ravines and craggy outcrops. Some lowlands were suitable for growing cereal crops, while most of the land was used for grazing livestock. 

In Late Iron Age Brigantia, the most common type of settlement was the fortified homestead, typically circular or sub-rectangular in shape and enclosed by a timber palisade or bank and ditch. They usually covered an area of two acres or less and contained one to four separate structures. The Roman Britain site says, "The homesteads were well fortified, which suggests that there was no centralized military force to provide protection against small-scale raids or suppress internal conflicts. This pattern of fortification also indicates that there was no readily available place of refuge outside of the individual homestead. Additionally, the relatively similar size and wealth of the homesteads suggests a diffuse society without significant social differentiation. The fact that most craft production was limited to the individual homesteads further implies limited economic specialization."

Based on the difficult terrain, the varied agricultural practices, cultural differences, limited economic specialization, and lack of social differentiation, it appears that Brigantia was a dispersed society made up of self-sufficient and isolated units, in clusters of fortified homesteads. 

The Romans defeated the Brigantes in the 1st century CE, and garrisoned the town of Eboracum (now York). 

After Roman rule ended in the early 5th century, much of Yorkshire seems to have remained under the control of the indigenous Britons, whose kingdom of Elmet maintained its independence until the 7th century, when the Germanic Angles conquered most of Yorkshire. The Danes conquered Yorkshire in the 9th century, and Yorkshire remained strongly Anglo-Scandinavian in culture until the Normans crushed all resistance to their rule in 1069.

Now the region has a population of well over 2-million people, large scale urban areas, and is crisscrossed by several major motorways. Much of the landscape is impacted by its industrial past. Many of the old coal mining workings have been re-wilded and turned into nature reserves and the network of canals that once served the woolen mills have been cleaned up and provide useful wetland habitats for wildlife.

The average DNA in Yorkshire is 41.17% Anglo-Saxon and 19.28% Irish.

Then I found this post: Seeing West Yorkshire as a Bioregion: "Bioregionalism isn’t asking for a pure fantasy world, but it asks how society can become more in-sync with the dwindling natural features which enrich our lives. Not in a vague sense but by engaging with local businesses and their positive impact on high streets, by seeing the link between social mental health crises and our diminished connection to our natural world and addressing the social deprivation risks of building new homes on flood risk land. Loosening our grip on economic growth, and embracing the current state of contamination is the way to secure a future liveable for our descendants and fellow species.

4. Study more genealogy:

Continuing with the focus on West Yorkshire, I found out that my ancestors Maximillian (born in 1607) and Joseph (1609) Jewett grew up in Bradford, West Riding, Yorkshire, England. Bradford was a busy market town where wool spinning and cloth weaving was done in cottages and farms, and the boy's father, Edward Jewett, owned a cottage industry making wool cloth.

As young men, Joseph and Max were part of the congregation of the Rev. Ezekiel Rogers, a non-conformist (Puritan) clergyman, and rector of Rowley in Yorkshire. In December 1638, after seventeen years of service, Rev. Rogers was discharged from his post after he refused to read The Book of Sports, which listed the sports and recreations that were permitted on Sundays and other holy days without violating rules of the Sabbath. Puritans saw it as a blasphemy; to them, the Sabbath was a day of worship, not frivolities. King Charles the First ordered that any minister who refused to read it would be deprived of position: This was a part of the Royalist pushback against Puritan ideals.

So in 1638, Rev. Rogers - believing the future of Puritanism was at stake - left on the ship John for the New World with the members of twenty families of his congregation, including Maximilian Jewett, age 31, and his wife Ann (Cole) Jewett, his brother Joseph Jewett, age 29, Joseph's wife Mary (Mallinson) Jewett, and their infant son. (Maximillian is an ancestor of my Grandpa Jones and Joseph is an ancestor of my Grandma Jones.)

My ancestors Edward and Ellen (Newton) Carleton with baby John, were also in this Puritanical company. They came from nearby East Yorkshire, at Hornsea.

Side note: As the Puritans gained power in Parliament in the lead-up to the English Civil War, hostility to the Book of Sports grew. Attempts to enforce the declaration came to an end with the fall of Archbishop Laud in 1640, and Parliament ordered the book publicly burned in 1643.