Reflections on my own ancestors' stories on this Fourth of July, and how they now apply to Europe

Long before July 4, 1776, every single one of my direct ancestors were already in the territory of what would become the United States. I know this from the paper trail my parents, myself, and my wife traced back, and it is confirmed by DNA testing.

Their stories tell a part of the story that is America, and I thought today was an appropriate one to share some of them. Let’s start with where the main branches of my family were on 4 July 1776.

One was a French Canadian who may have fought under Montcalm as an artilleryman, and was now in New York in George Washington’s Continental Army as part of Henry Knox’s artillery. He stayed with the Continentals through Yorktown, and became a career Army officer.

Another branch, also French, had fled Canada after the British conquest and migrated down the Mississippi to become some of the first European settlers in Missouri. One of them fought at the Battle of Kaskaskia under George Rogers Clark of later Lewis & Clark fame, or notoriety, depending on one’s perspective.

Later, they founded Arkansas Post, a spot of the planet now underneath the Mississippi River, but it was the first European settlement in Arkansas.

The most recent immigrants arrived in North Carolina in 1715 from England. One of his grandsons held a deep, dark, family secret that I helped my mother figure out. In 1783, he signed an oath of allegiance to the United States and was allowed to keep his uniform and weapons. Family legend said he was at King’s Mountain. The man was almost certainly a Loyalist.

Others, coming over in the 17th Century from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, had already followed Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap and were living in the future Kentucky and Tennessee. The Revolutionary War mostly passed them by. These people wanted nothing to do with governments, tax collectors, aristocrats, or anyone else who demanded their authority be respected.

And the only way to get away from those people, at the time, was simply to move west. Here we run into one of the first ironies in my own family history, for in those parts they met another people who had done the same thing for centuries—the Shawnee. The Shawnee legends of their travels across the continent from Alaska are as full of conquest, triumph, defeat, loss, flight and the quest for freedom as any that my people told around their fires.

The only branch of my family whose arrival date is unknown, but old, was somewhere else, probably in the South, and another deep dark family secret that my mother chose not to explore. In 1776, an ancestor whose people had originally come from Angola was almost certainly a slave.

His, or her, descendants were in Tennessee after the Civil War, one of whom was classified as “Negro” in the 1940 Census, but enlisted in the Army in 1941 as “white” and stayed that way for the rest of his life. Things that make you go Hmmm.

The things they have in common are the same things most of us have today. They all wanted to have better lives for themselves and their families. Most wanted to live as they saw fit without some pompous ass who had done nothing to deserve it telling them what to do. They were so motivated by that desire, in fact, that they risked everything to accomplish it.

It takes a lot to motivate people to leave everything and mostly everyone they know to pack up and move into unfamiliar lands, often at great personal risk, and try to start over. They don’t do this for no good reason, but because of very powerful material circumstances.

I try to remember that and teach others to do the same, and if one looks at what’s happening in France and other European countries right now, one can see similar hopes, similar dreams, similar desperation on their streets. People who felt they had to leave their homes, and went to a place where they thought they at least had a chance to live well.

If things had been all hunky-dory in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and France those ancestors of mine would have stayed put. The same applies to every single Arab and African refugee in Europe right now.

I take pride in my ancestors’ courage, endurance, perseverance, and inherent disrespect for established authority. On this Fourth of July, I can do no less for those in Europe trying to accomplish the same thing for they and theirs right now.