'Missed His Mistress' Myth Dismissed

A grave in Hornsey, England, is said to contain the remains of Harriet Long and her servant Jacob Walker.

A folk tale tells that after Harriet's death in 1841 "an old black servant she brought with her from Virginia was found dead on her grave a day or two after her funeral, so the grave was opened that he might be buried with his mistress".

But an English Heritage report dismisses the old myth about Jacob's romantic passing saying his death certificate records he died of smallpox after vaccination. [Link]

Sometimes a Pile of Rocks Is Just a Pile of Rocks

Children have long been told that a mound of stones in First Presbyterian Church cemetery in Concord, N. C., marks the resting place of a Native American chief. Truth is, the rocks were put there by university president William Macon Coleman in 1910.

On his visit to the cemetery of his Mahan ancestors, he found it full, abandoned (the old church had moved to the corner of Spring Street and West Depot Street, which is now Cabarrus Avenue) and rundown, seedy and jungle-like.

Coleman, [E. Ray] King wrote, decided to honor his Mahans, so he brought big rocks from across Cabarrus County, perhaps some even from old Mahan dwellings, and left them in the garden. (King didn't know how he planned to use them.)

Then, without explanation, Coleman left town, leaving no directions as to their use.

"Public memory is short," King wrote, and during a later cleaning of the graveyard, a worker dutifully tossed the stones into a pile.

Voila! Instant mound. [Link]

Colonial Women Not Combustible

J. L. Bell at Boston 1775 says that colonial women didn't catch on fire as easily as one might think.

I have a pet theory that the danger of open cooking fires was played up in the 19th century by people with a financial incentive to do so: stove manufacturers. But like so many pet theories, I don’t have any evidence to back it up.

Once Upon a Time There Were Three Brothers...

I was once a student of comparative mythology, so the notion that some family legends might spring from the unconscious mind appeals to me.

The legend of three brothers emigrating together to America and then splitting up to settle in different parts of the country is a common myth. Some ascribe the myth to genealogical laziness, but it may have roots in the "three brothers" theme found in medieval folk tales, "in which an aged king sends his sons on a quest for some magic, rejuvenating water in a distant land." Professor E. Washburn Hopkins traced the story back to "Fountain of Youth" stories told in ancient Persia, Ireland, and elsewhere.

The Persian version substitutes for three brothers two brothers and a sister; the Keltic version turns all three into girls. Elsewhere the three are brothers, the trio still preserved, perhaps, in the numerous American families (of eight or nine generations) who independently trace their origin to "three brothers who came to America in the seventeenth century to seek their fortune." How widespread this myth is, may easily be learned from casual inquiry. I once sat at table with half a dozen unrelated people, four of whom stated that this was their "family legend." Of the four, three admitted that it was a legend without historical foundation, "a myth"; one insisted that it was certain. [Link]

We're More Dead Than Alive

Nancy Bovy sent a link to a cool SciAm article that debunks the myth that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive.

To calculate how many people have ever lived, [Carl] Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City. [Link]

I wonder how many of those 106 billion people left enough evidence of their existence that they may be genealogically (and not just genetically) linked to persons alive today, and how many are ancestors we will never find.

How Little We've Grown in 1,000 Years

Despite what you may have heard, your medieval ancestors were not dwarves. After examining 3,000 old skeletons, scientists have concluded that people have not grown substantially in the past millennium.

From the 10th century through to the 19th, the average height of adult men was 5ft 7in or 170cm - just 2in below today's average.

Women were an average of 5ft 2in or 158cm - just over an inch shorter than today.

But what about all those low doorframes in medieval buildings, and the tiny suits of armor cluttering museums? Sebastian Payne, chief scientist for English Heritage, explains:

"The reason why you get small pieces of armour is they are the ones made for rich small kids which didn't get heavily used and so survived.

"Small doorways are more to do with heating efficiency than anything else." [Link]

They Weren't All Working on the Railroad

While poking holes in the quilt myth, history professor Martin Hershock notes that this is not the only far-fetched tale of the Underground Railroad.

"Any time you're dealing with the Underground Railroad, the myths are monumental," Hershock told me.

"Virtually any house that dates from the antebellum period is going to have a claim affixed to it that it was part of the Underground Railroad. If every house that had such a claim attached to it were actually a part of the Underground Railroad, there would have been a giant sucking sound as every single slave from Kentucky was instantaneously drawn out of the South." [Link]

A Warm and Fuzzy Myth

The New York Times yesterday covered the debunking of the quilt code myth—the legend that patterns stitched into quilts guided escaping slaves to freedom in the North. The myth stems from a story told by quiltmaker (and able saleswoman) Ozella McDaniel Williams to Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, who repeated it in a 1999 book.

According to “Hidden in Plain View,” slaves created quilts with codes to advise those fleeing captivity. What looked to the slave master like an abstract panel on a quilt being “aired out” on a porch in fact represented a reminder, say, to be sure to follow a zigzag path to avoid being tracked when escaping. In Ms. Williams’s account, there was a sequence of 10 panels to guide an escaping slave, beginning with a “monkey wrench” pattern meaning to gather up tools and supplies and concluding with a star, a reminder to head north. [Link]

The story is no more substantiated than the lawn jockey legend I wrote about last September. Today at Boston 1775, J. L. Bell provides a plausible explanation of why these myths take hold so quickly and firmly. Here he quotes Roberta Gold:

It seems to me that the spread of the quilt myth is part of a larger popular “domestication” of African American past, in which the complex, bleak and tragic dimensions of black history are softened and smoothed into something that isn’t too disturbing to teach to kindergartners. . . . The injustice is not erased, exactly, but it’s air-brushed with a disproportionate amount of heartwarming, feel-good interpretation. In the case of “code quilts,” it’s literally made into something warm and fuzzy. [Link]

Polish Plaid

Poles living in Scotland now have their own tartan, which incorporates the red and white of the Polish flag.

"I want to buy a kilt because I am living in Scotland," Sebastian Flasza, owner of Rock and Roll Tattoo and Piercing in Edinburgh, told The Times of London. "But I am a Polish Scot. I feel this represents me. Oh, aye."

Poland and Scotland have a long common history. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the ill-fated Stuart heir, was half-Polish, and there is also a myth in Poland that Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement, is descended from Sir William Wallace, the Scottish nationalist executed by the English in 1305. [Link]

DAR Targets Myth-Guided Beliefs

A new exhibit opens Friday at the DAR Museum in Washington that promises to make our early American ancestors far less interesting.

"People were shorter then." "This is a 'Chippendale,' chair, named after the furniture maker who designed it." "George Washington personally gave this set of china to this family." Chances are, if you have visited a museum or historic house, you have heard one of these statements or something very similar. The DAR Museum exhibition "Myth or Truth? Stories We've Heard About Early America," which runs from October 6, 2006 - March 31, 2007, examines these types of statements and the reliability of history through word-of-mouth.

Some early American myths prove to be so lasting that they even repeat themselves in the context of contemporary society. Marvel at the tiny waist of a 19th century corset and your guide may tell you "some women had their lowest ribs removed surgically to achieve the fashionably thin waist." It may almost sound believable to you because you "heard Cher did it!" [Link]

Breeds Bred to Battle Bunkers

Every History Channel fan knows that the Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed's Hill. According to AP writer Allen G. Breed, the misnomer still bugs his family.

Cousins have fired off letters to the editor when some hapless columnist makes the mistake of calling it the Battle of Bunker Hill. My youngest brother briefly attended Bunker Hill Community College, and whenever a piece of mail from the school arrived at our home, Dad would scribble "and Breed's" into the name.

In 1975, at the bicentennial battle re-enactment in Charlestown, I watched with a 10-year-old's mixture of pride and mortification as my father nudged his way up to the Bunker-laden reviewing stand, reached up and tugged on the sleeve of one of the town fathers. "The Breeds are here, too," he announced and, sure enough, the mayor told us to come on up. [Link]

Mayflower Myths and Missteps

Dick Eastman's article on Mayflower Ancestors is good, but neglects to mention the passengers supposed to have arrived on the Mayflower who did not.

My own ancestor Deacon John Dunham was a member of the Separatist community in Holland, but had the good sense to take a later boat. That didn't stop Isaac Watson Dunham from finding a place for him on the Mayflower. He wrote in his 1907 Dunham Genealogy that "It has been found to be a very difficult task to establish this John Dunham, of Scrooby, and reëstablish him, as the Plymouth John Dunham, who, as a Separatist, fled from England, escaped from his pursuers by assuming the name of John Goodman when in Holland and America."

A "very difficult task" because it is completely untrue. John Dunham was living happily with his wife and children in Leyden while the Pilgrim John Goodman was living out his short and miserable life in Plymouth.

Or consider George Carr, who, we are told, "married Lucinda Davenport and came to America in 1620, on the Mayflower, as a ship carpenter, bringing his young wife with him."

He located with the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and his wife was one of the unfortunate forty-one who died the following winter and early spring. [Edson I. Carr, The Carr Family Records (Rockton, Ill.: Herald Print. House, 1894), p. 12]

To support this theory, the book presents one of the most obvious forgeries ever printed: the purported diary of George Carr's sister-in-law:

Husband says he had a brother George Carr, who went to America in 1620.

[snip]

Next morning the boats were lowered and we landed, but what was my surprise! Lucinda, George Carr's wife, had died early in the spring before. My husband and George his brother and myself went to view her resting place. [ibid., p. 10]

See Caleb Johnson's old website for some other Mayflower hoaxes, fakes, and forgeries.