They Only Came to Pillage

The government of Denmark has apologized for the unseemly behavior of its Viking forebears in Ireland.

The apologetic gesture came as a replica Norse warrior ship arrived in Dublin after a voyage across the North Sea.

Danish Culture Minister Brian Mikkelson said his country was proud of the ship, Havhingsten (The Sea Stallion).

"But we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," he said. [Link]

Those "damages to the people of Ireland" did not involve the wholesale transfer of DNA. A genetic study by Trinity College scientists of a "cohort of Irish men bearing surnames of putative Norse origin" found "little trace of Scandinavian ancestry."

Your Ancestors Were Delicious

Descendants of Papua New Guinea cannibals who dined on missionaries in 1878 have apologized to the people of Fiji.

The ceremony marked 132 years since Methodist ministers and teachers from Fiji arrived in the New Guinea islands region in 1875 headed by Englishman George Brown.

In April 1878, a Fijian minister and three teachers were killed and eaten by Tolai tribespeople on the Gazelle Peninsula. [Link]

One Last Check Before Leaving

Ralph Lung Kee Lee came to Canada when he was 12, and paid the $500 head tax all Chinese immigrants were then required to pay. Lee finally received an apology from the Canadian government and a $20,000 redress check on March 10—his 107th birthday, and five days before he died.

"It was almost like, 'I waited this long, here I am. I'm going to stay alive to get it,"' Lee's daughter Linda Ing said of her father, who received his apology and compensation 94 years after coming to Canada.

Lee had a fun and loving personality, Ing said, and he was quite tickled when he finally received his redress cheque.

"I said, 'You're going to be 107,"' Ing recalled telling her father the day before his birthday.

"He said, 'Me?' I said, 'You,"' Ing said in mock wide-eyed amazement. "'You're going to get your cheque.' And he just laughed." [Link]

All Apologies

Here's one Englishman who takes the sins of his forebears very seriously.

Mr Andrew Hawkins from Plymouth, the United Kingdom, who claims to be a direct descendant of England’s first slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, will don yokes and chains at the forthcoming Roots International Festival in The Gambia to apologise for the actions of his famous ancestor.

He will be joining the lifeline expedition team, which has been journeying around with whites wearing yokes and chains while Africans and descendants of enslaved Africans accompany them. The Africans are also ready to apologise for selling their brothers and sisters to the European traders. This action is also a means of raising awareness of ongoing slavery and racism at the present time. [Link]

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

Late Night Mudd-slinging

While interviewing Harrison Ford last month, Jay Leno mentioned that former TV newsman Roger Mudd had spent years trying to clear the name of his ancestor Dr. Samuel A. Mudd—imprisoned for tending the wounds John Wilkes Booth suffered the final time he took to the stage.

Trouble is, it wasn't Roger Mudd but Dr. Richard D. Mudd of Saginaw, Michigan, who spent all those years of name-clearing. Dr. Mudd's son couldn't let the error pass, so he sent a letter to Leno, receiving in return a telephoned apology from the Tonight Show host himself.

"He could have had his secretary call," says Thomas B. Mudd, "if anyone called at all, but no. He called me directly and said, 'This is Jay Leno. I want to apologize.'"

This egregious error corrected, Thomas is now steeling himself for the release of Manhunt, a movie in which Ford will hunt for Lincoln's assassin.

"I'm getting ready for battle," Mudd said. "There is not one shred of evidence linking my great-grandfather to a conspiracy plot, and all of this Mudd-bashing is not funny to me." [Link]

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

California Does the Least It Can Do

From Scripps Howard News Service:

Mass eviction to Mexico in 1930s spurs apology

By PETER HECHT
Sacramento Bee
28-DEC-05

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Carlos Guerra was only 3 years old when Los Angeles County authorities came to his family's house in Azusa and ordered his mother, a legal United States resident, and her six American-born children to leave the country.

It was 1931. The administration of President Herbert Hoover backed a policy that would repatriate hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans, more than half of them United States citizens.

Amid the economic desperation of the Depression, Latino families were viewed as taking jobs and government benefits from "real Americans."

[snip]

On Sunday, Senate Bill 670 — the so-called "Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program" — becomes official. It acknowledges the suffering of tens of thousands of Latino families unjustly forced out of the Golden State that was their home.

[snip]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the bill Oct. 7, but vetoed a companion measure — Senate Bill 645 — that would have created a commission to study paying reparations to survivors of the 1930s repatriations.

[snip]

Jose Lopez Sr., was a factory worker at the Ford assembly plant when his family was ordered to Mexico after nearly two decades in the United States. He wound up cutting sugar cane and died in poverty in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

"I think an apology is the least they can do," said his son, Jose Lopez, 78, a retired autoworker in Detroit who came to testify on behalf of the California bill.

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree

N.C. Woman Apologizes to Dead Relatives

From The Kinston (N. C.) Free Press:

Smithsonian to examine Kinston caskets

July 29, 2005
Lee Raynor
Managing Editor

An occasional breeze tickled stalks of green bamboo and crickets chirped at the night sky while Susan Burgess Hoffman sat quietly at the foot of the cemetery.

"I wanted to tell them why we were going to do what we did," she said. "I wanted them to understand."

Hoffman is the five-times great-granddaughter of Gov. Richard Caswell. Historians believe Caswell family members are buried on the hill behind the parking lot between Kinston Clinic South and the Bentley. Two graves in the old cemetery were to be excavated the following day. Hoffman wanted her long-dead relatives to know why.

[snip]

The graves were opened five years ago when [Kinston businessman Ted] Sampley offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find Gov. Caswell's grave.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

As a general rule, scavenger hunts should not be conducted in graveyards.

Update (Aug. 5, 2005): The graves have been opened. Find out what was inside.

Update (Sept. 8, 2005): And now they have been reburied.

Buried Among Enemies

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Pierce City apologizes for dark past, refuses to pay for moving remains
Associated Press
06/14/2005

PIERCE CITY, Mo. (AP) -- More than 100 years after this southwest Missouri community's entire black population was run out of town by angry white mobs, city officials have apologized for the dark chapter in local history.

But they're drawing the line at paying to move the remains of a Civil War veteran who died three years before the Aug. 19, 1901, riots and lynching that forced his family to flee to Springfield, The Monett Times reported.

Charles and James Brown of St. Louis were researching their family's history when they learned of the 1901 events in Pierce City. They also discovered that their great-grandfather, James Cobb Sr., was buried in a cemetery there.

"It causes the family grief to think of him down there; alone, in a hostile, unrepentant environment, where he and members of his race were hated, maltreated, and where many were run out of town for nothing more than being black," Charles Brown wrote in a letter to Pierce City Mayor Mark Peters.

[snip]

Cobb's remains were unearthed on June 2 and taken to a cemetery in Springfield where other family members are buried. Afterward, Brown requested that Pierce City -- which remains a largely white community -- apologize for its treatment of blacks and pay the costs of moving Cobb and for a tombstone to mark his new grave.

[snip]

Peters, in his response to Brown's letter, agreed the community owed an apology for the atrocities committed on its former black residents -- but not any money.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]