sandbox redux

Anna at her preschool

handicraft

Marta came home the other day with this masterpiece, an oven mitt that she knit herself at school. It was a present for Epp. She also passed the office on another day with her classmates. They were going down to the lake to make reed flutes. And they really found reeds and made flutes out of them. And, as for non-handicraft-related things, Marta took my new smartphone in about two minutes figured out how to send her friends messages, which she typed herself. I hadn't even figured some of the phone features out. "It's easy," she said.

tom

This is the last family history/DNA-related post I will bore you with. But I have this information floating around in my head, and this seems like the best place to put it so I can move on with my many things to do. It concerns my great grandfather Tom Pittman, and his ancestry.

As a child I was obsessed with Native Americans, and of course would have loved to have joined any random tribe just so that I could have an excuse for my obsession. As I have found out doing genealogy, a lot of other people are just like me, and wonder about their links to a fabled "Cherokee princess" (and they are always Cherokees and always princesses, by the way). So, searching for Tom's ancestry, I immediately come across people researching similar surnames in the same region who also talk about Native American roots. I am not unique.

I am not sure if Tom really looks like an "Indian." He does to me, at least a little. He does to some other people who have seen his photo. And, obsession aside, most of the images I have of him leave me thinking, "That guy is just not English." Maybe there are a lot of Englishmen who look like that, but I haven't met them. So I have spent a lot of time researching this guy's ancestry, trying to find out anything.

The truth is that he really is English, at least mostly. Tom's father's side, the Pittmans, Battles, Scoggins, and Majettes, is, as far as I could trace it, completely of English extraction, maybe with some Irish, Welsh, or French Huguenot settlers mixed in.

What is so great about this kind of research is that it puts you in touch with history that you know very little about. A great deal of the settlers to the Virginia colony arrived in the mid-17th century. Why? Because there was a civil war going on in England. Especially when the cavaliers lost to Oliver Cromwell, the colony absorbed men. Coincidentally, the royalist stronghold was in western England, so many of the families from which Tom descended came from places like Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. It's one of the reasons why the Tidewater Virginia accent and the West Country accent sound similar.

There's something else you should know. There were a lot of men in the colony, but not a lot of women. One historian estimates it as one woman for every eight men. More on that later ...

So, that was his father's side. His mother's side is the one that gets all those Native American hits, especially surrounding his mother's maiden name, Collins.Tom's mother's name was Martha Lydia Collins. She was about 20 years old when he was born in 1896. Her father's name was Hugh Collins. He was a captain in the Virginia cavalry in the Civil War. Hugh's father's name was Graham Collins. He was born in about 1800 on the Virginia side of the Virginia-North Carolina border, near the Great Dismal Swamp. Graham's parents were Thomas Collins and Anna Russell. That's as far back as I can go.

The stories about the Great Dismal Swamp are fascinating, Supposedly it held thousands of runaway slaves who formed their own towns. Don't forget, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion occurred in Southampton County, Virginia in the 1830s, just one county to the west. That's what I mean, when I say that this family history stuff can rope you in.

Graham Collins had two brothers, Elvy and Thomas. On all documents, they are listed as white, except Elvy's death certificate, where he is listed as "colored." It's the same story with their uncle, one Elvy Russell (1792-1857), who is white in every census but "colored" on his death certificate. When I saw that second certificate, I thought, "Okay, this wasn't just a clerical error."!

Here is another interesting issue -- ideas about race in the South. It wasn't always so, well, black and white. In the 17th century, there were free, slave-owning landowners of African descent. "Colored" was anybody of color -- Native Americans, Africans, workers brought from the East Indies. And, yes, at that time, there were some marriages with Native Americans, because the Native Americans owned the land, and if you married some one of significance's daughter, that could make you very wealthy overnight. One day, you are some poor English chump, the next day you've got it made. Think about it.

Some of these marriages were recorded, others are speculated about ("Hey, how did that guy get all that land right next to the reservation?") The truth is that the records from this era are very poor. The courthouse in the county where Tom's ancestors were mostly located burned in the American Revolution and in the Civil War. I'll probably never find something that says, "Yes!" or "No!" And local memory has eradicated all traces of the native population. They are "extinct," and have been for quite some time, end of story.

The local native populations were fascinating in themselves. There were three linguistic families in the region: Algonquians, Iroquoians, and Siouans. The land in the vicinity of where Tom's ancestors came from was populated by Algonquian-speakers. Two very large tribes, the Weapemeoc/Yeopim and the Chowan/Chowanoke, managed to vanish within a span of about 70 years. The official story is that they intermarried with the local communities, some became "white," others became "black." The problem is that there are almost no records to show it, and two hundred years of racist social divisions in the South kept many mouths shut, which leaves people like me, searching in vain for that "Cherokee princess."

So, to end, I honestly don't know if Tom had native ancestry or not. I probably never will. But he does kind of look like an Indian. At least I sometimes think so.

emma ericksen

Please welcome our newest relative, Emma Newell Ericksen, born May 16, 2012, somewhere in New Jersey. Welcome to the world little Emma!

adventures in dna

Taking part in National Geographic's Genographic Project has led me down some interesting paths, deep into mists of time. The Y-chromosome test traces your paternal lineage (father's father's father ....). The farthest I have been able to trace this is to Antonio Petrone, who was born in about 1795 in Acri, Italy. Acri is a town in the hills north of Cosenza in the northern part of Calabria. I honestly don't know much about the place. When I went to visit Italy in 2009, I wanted to visit, but because buses in southern Italy stop running after noon, it was basically impossible.

My Genographic result showed R1b1a2. As Wikipedia informs me, this is found mostly in the western part of Europe. The frequency is about 71 percent in Scotland, 70 percent in Spain and 60 percent in France. In parts of the rest of north and western England, Spain, Portugal, Wales and Ireland, it is as high as 90 percent; and in parts of north-western Ireland it reaches 98 percent. But in Calabria its frequency is quite low.

So this was perplexing. I ordered a Deep Clade Test, which tests for additional markers. I was negative for every marker tested except for one called P-312. This was significant because I tested negative for markers associated with certain populations: for instance, I tested negative for U152 and U106 which are associated with Germanic populations, including those in northern Italy. I tested negative for markers associated with the Irish and Scottish. My haplotype, it seems, is found mostly in "Iberia" (Spain and Portugal) and southern France. The locus seems to be somewhere in the Pyrenees. When I compared against others in the database, I came up with a list of people from northern Spain and Portugal, even some from the Azores and Canary Islands.

According to my grandfather, the Petrones came from Genoa. He didn't explain how they got to Calabria. But, here, have a look at what we are talking about.

There are several theories here: a) My forefathers passed through Calabria on the way to Iberia, leaving some "genetics" behind; b) My grandfather was right, and the family came from Genoa, perhaps arriving with the silk trade in the 16th-17th centuries, it is conceivable that people with this haplotype moved from southern France into northwestern Italy, Genoa is the first city over the border; or c) We are the product of some other historical event. Acri was ruled for a time by the Aragonese in the 15th century -- Aragon is a province in northern Spain, near the "epicenter" of this haplotype (where it is found in its highest frequency).

Honestly, there is no real way to figure this out. But, still, it's been educational and interesting.

UPDATE: There are seven other individuals in the Italy DNA Project that had the same results as me. Five provided their ancestors place of origin, specifically: Giusvalla, Grosseto, Savona, Potenza, and Perledo. I have marked these places and Acri and Genoa on the map below:

mein kleines dorf

I have a tendency to overdo it at Christmas, so last year I put away some of the gifts for another day when they would be more useful. Anna -- either out of manipulation or sincerity -- complains about not having enough "beautiful things," especially when compared with cousin Ilona. I had set aside this gift for her at Christmas -- "Mein kleines dorf" -- "My little village." These are little wooden buildings and trees and people, made in Germany, I guess. I thought she wouldn't like it because it isn't "princess" (meaning pink, made out of plastic, and easily breakable) enough, but to my surprise she was very happy - she has told me 'thank you' several times and likes to play with it. Last night she sat next to me and explained everything that was going on in her little village.

seto idyll

I took a nice stroll with Maria Leena in Setomaa over the weekend. It's a beautiful part of the country, rugged and wild. She fell asleep half way, surprising given we walked across a bumpy field. I like these moments with her. She is just becoming aware of nature. She stares at trees, at streams, at our pet bunnies. And she doesn't have to wear a hat! Think about it. This girl was born in September. Other than trips to Egypt and San Diego (and what a lucky kid she is!) Maria has never really been outside without a hat.

sleeping, speaking

It's amazing what some sleep and proper nourishment can do. I feel much better since Tuesday's nosedive into the abyss. I forget sometimes that my children are children and that they need attention and a soft touch. I missed Marta's "kuupidu" (this is a monthly presentation, for lack of better words, at the Waldorf School) because I was sitting at EMT for two hours getting my new smartphone. She was sad that neither of us came. We made up for it by going to her music concert at he Viljandi Music School. Maybe I am biased, but I think she has a stage presence. And she plays well, with feeling.

Anna is my little "speed demon." She rides her Like a Bike to and from preschool everyday. She doesn't want to be called "speed demon" though -- she wants to be called "princess stallion." Anna hasn't gotten the whole act under control. She's run two people off the sidewalk in the past two days. And she doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with that! Her language is always improving. You remember that she couldn't say the letter 'k' until she was about three years old. Pink was 'pint,' milk was 'milt.' She speaks Estonian just fine, but she relies on Estonian grammar to construct her English sentences, ie. 'What this is?" (Mis see on?) But ever since our trip last October to the US, she has completely switched to communicating with me in English. It's not easy being bilingual.

Maria Leena is happy because we found the little bouncy chair that you hang in the doorway, so now she has something to do. This was also Marta's chair and Anna's chair. Her hair is coming in, it has a slight reddish tinge to it, and it seems coarser than the other girls' hair. She crawls everywhere, but still has no teeth. This is interesting because Mingo (our friends' son, who is a month older) has eight teeth and doesn't crawl. Bottomline: children develop differently. We shouldn't expect them to all develop at the same rate.

wednesday hits like the atomic bomb

It's sunny and semi warm, but I am tired. I got five hours of sleep last night. Now I have stepped back into the whirlwind of life. Each day I cross things off my list of things to do, each day the list regenerates itself. But do we put our children on our "lists of things to do"? I don't. Everything else takes precedence. I feel quite bitter today; I think it's because of the lack of sleep. I want to be a good everything, but I am spread too thin. And yet others around me accomplish much more; they think I am slacking. So much of my life revolves around tedious bullshit -- fix the computer, fix the curtains. Anna has been asking me for days to go to the beach but, you know, there are so many other "important" things to do. But in the scheme of things they are trivial and give me no kind of life-affirming sustenance. And we still haven't gotten to the beach ...

metal rabbit

Chinese astrological discussions seem to float around us. People volunteer their assignments. Aunt Reeli is a rat. So is Riinu's Dad Mart. Rats collect things. This is why Mart's summer house has lots of antiques and pieces of wood and rocks lying around. Okay. Epp is a wood tiger. I am an earth goat/ram/sheep (it is translated differently). Marta is a water goat. Anna is a fire pig. And Maria is a metal rabbit. Anna is very fond of being a fire pig. She tells everyone that she is one. I like the idea of Maria being a metal rabbit, like she has springs on her feet and metal jaws. Maria is also getting the nickname "termite" because she likes to eat paper.