It is Rodeo in Houston, Texas and there are loads of cute cowboys and cowgirls all dressed up and ready for school celebrations where everyone gets costumed in their bright bandana colors and Cavenders boots. Beautiful to behold each and every one.
A new season of TLC's Who Do You Think You Are? genealogy series begins March 8th so be sure to tune in or watch episodes online. These family investigations seem to regularly turn up some type of odd pattern across generations.
Odd or eerie, you choose but it appears when we see Oprah discovering that her love of schools and education actually began with her great-grandmother, an initial trustee of the venerable Buffalo Rosenwald School in Attala County, MS circa 1929, a deeply dangerous era in which to found a school for Black children anywhere in the South.
Or Steve Buscemi learns that a favorite NYC 7th Ave restaurant was once the address of the maternal grandmother he lost from suicide.
Or Sarah Jessica Parkers stars in the 1993 Halloween movie, Hocus Pocus, and then finds out years later courtesy of TLC, that her 10th great grandmother was tried for witchcraft in the infamous Salem, MA hysteria. High Strangeness Indeed!
The TLC investigations are not about celebrities attempting to tie some additional pedigree to their stardom. Instead, these real people are helped by good researchers to uncover nuggets about character, bravery, passions and the progress of those who came before. This is what geneaology study truly entails and not simply settling for a superficial strut about, over the Irvine ancestral pile near Drumoak in Scotland.
If you've read through my Irwins Old and New blog posts, you begin to see patterns of cvic involvement. Curiously, this ancient lineage keeps popping up in the middle of important political events. They buddy up with Robert the Bruce and Braveheart their way through a very dangerous period in Scotland's fight for independence.
After getting run out of Scotland and County Antrim Northern Ireland for their trouble, they then show up in the USA supplying Washington's army with the soldier necessities for waging our Revolutionary War against their favorite enemy, England. They use the finances from their bank in Cincinnati to help bail out the U.S. Treasury and two generations later, they send three sons off to the Civil War losing one to a Reb lynching and the other to the battlefield of Antietam.
Only you can decide how any of these old and new Irwin adventures inform your life 2016.
John and Hannah Combs Irwin are certainly an interesting pair to consider. He is Celtic to his core and she is a rich pioneer mix of Anglo-Saxon, Native American, African American and who knows what else. He probably saved her life by taking her out of his high society life in Cincinnati where she could have been kidnapped by slave-hunting patarollers or marched out to Oklahoma on The Trail of Tears. Take your pick but both options made a farming career in Lawrence County, Ohio look like a pretty sweet alternative. And perhaps Hannah saved John's life in return by providing him a family life with their eight children far away from the stress and dis-ease of making a living in a raucous riverfront/riverboat city.
The strangeness returned when I learned that John had served in the Mexican American War which took him directly to, you guessed it, TEXAS of all places. Hence the establishment of Camp Irwin/Erwin or Camp Placedo, then located 12 miles west of Port Lavaca. John's 1825 marriage in Adams County, Ohio, his farmer hood in Lawrence County, Ohio and his life and death in Berlin Crossroads Jackson County, Ohio prefigured my community organizing years during the War On Poverty where I stomped across the bones of my bloodline repeatedly, never knowing they were guiding my feet every step of the way. Wonderful revelation!
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