Capturing Grandpa

(Authors note: Sometimes these tales are just for fun.)

As always, unapologetically unedited...

Okay, as you might have guessed, I get bored.  While the big wild world of family history is always fascinating, seriously though, just how many Pilgrims or witches can one hope to shake out of Ye Olde Branches without going to sleep? And all those very distant connections to Hollywood notables, dumbass serial killers or superheroes, or, God forbid worse, (gross) politicians, well, in a word after a while they just kinda make me "snore." 

Nah, what I've been needing these days is to find one of those epic tales. You know, one of those "ancestral trips" that make you say, Aha! Now it all makes sense! I have to believe that there are plenty of these stories out there among the branches and that with a little luck and elbow grease, they can be found.

So where to begin? 

I figured to "get there" I'd needed to shuffle the deck a bit. I wanted to go at it a little blindly and to see (randomly) just who might catch my eye. So I perused "the tree" and hopped back and forth from various names, lives, and geographic locations. It was about then that I heard a distant voice "calling to me from the cairns." It was the that I saw the name of James McCall high up in the branches and I noticed a little place called Dunbar.               

Now I've always had a thing for Scotland. I can't tell you why. Maybe I've been watching too many soppy episodes of Outlander, or it's the latent wannabe William Wallace in me, or even the wish to emulate Agent OO7 that drives it. I cannot ken. Nevertheless, while most of my friends were honoring Eerie and their ties to shamrocks and the Snake Charmer of the Emerald Isle, I was musing about the damn Vikings invading Inverness and the Loch Ness Monster. So maybe it should come as no surprise that it would be my ancestor James McCall 1620-1660 - there in my own DNA - that would try to call me home.               

                    My most significant DNA ancestral origin as of July 2024 - per Ancestry.com

I'd seen "Grandpa Jim" before, but it had always been his great-great granddaughter Anna MCall (1752-1819) who'd caught my eye. Anna McCall married Eliphalet Murdock (1748-1822) and their daughter, the lovely and talented Clarissa (1776-1851) married Alfred Young (1770-1832). They were the "generations before" what was the start of my Mayflower ties through the Young family. But Grandpa Jim had always escaped me. It wasn't that he was so far back in time as to only be anecdotal. It was more that, like a dumbass, I failed to see an ancestor who was way freaking interesting. 

As usual, I digress.

So the other day, after stumbling upon Grandpa Jim again, I did a quick Google search for him and his wife, the hauntingly beautiful, Mary Farr. I followed the line down to their grandson,  another man who (wouldn't you know it) was called "James MCall" (1690-1755) and to the descendants of this second James' two wives, Rachel Turner and Hannah Greene. 

It was then that the image of a well researched website came into view: 

Holy shit!

(Okay, obviously I geeked out over the thought of a new lineage society to explore.) But there he was, our immigrant ancestor, "the original" JAMES MCALL aka "Grandpa Jim" right smack dab in the middle of them - and connected to the Battle of Dunbar where he was fighting against the great pretender of that age, the terrible and most reviled Oliver Cromwell.                    

Could I get more Scottish than that? Yeah, not much.

So it looks like things went kinda bad at Dunbar, and suffice it to say Grandpa Jim got caught as a prisoner of war. He was then placed on a prison chip called Unity and sent to Massachusetts where he was sold/indentured out for somewhere between five and thirty pounds. This was nuts to me - to have an ancestor who was a POW in a foreign country and then basically sold into slavery here in the soon to be U.S. of A - crazy.

I decided that I wanted to know more about the original James McCall, so I started looking further at the lines extending off of his grandson, the next "James McCall," (the III) and his two wives. 

This "Grandpa Jim" was married twice (and) my branch extends paternally through his second wife Hannah Greene to my dad. It was about then that I noticed something odd - another name extending off the descendants of his first wife, Rachel Turner. The name caught my eye because it was also connected to my family - albeit indirectly to me. The last name was Ward and it meant that these two guys below were also connected to James McCall - not once - but twice making them not only (obviously) brothers to each other and cousins to me - but in this instance cousins to each other and some might say "a cousin of themselves."

Yeah, I know. Weird, huh?

Anyway, in case you weren't wondering who I am talking about, here you go:      

 

Yes, my first cousins (l-r) Kerry Record and Todd Record, (and obviously in addition to being brothers) are also something like our ninth half cousins, and in addition to this, also a cousin to each other and, at least impractically speaking, "a cousin to themselves."    

The genealogy shapes up like this:

Now this is kind of weird, but honestly it isn't all that unusual. You see, if submitted family trees are to be believed, both of Todd and Kerry's grandmothers, Nancy Eloise (Ward) McMinn and Katheryn Elizabeth (Ogle) Record are both also descended from Mayflower passenger John Howland. This means a similar chart could be shown for the same lines from John Howland and doubling up all these relationships once more.

Okay, so maybe it's not all that earth shattering. And you can save all the "incest is best jokes." Hey it happens. I just thought it was really cool to have a Scottish Prisoner of War show up in the tree. So there you have it. This week's useless tale about people who lived a long time ago and how they relate to us today.

Yeah, but I gotta go.

Outlander's on the telly.

☮