Ancestors- The excitement and thrill of finding yours #1- Newsletter- December 17, 2022

15 Dec Ancestors- The excitement and thrill of finding yours #1- Newsletter- December 17, 2022

ANCESTORS- HENRY LOWRY THE ROBIN HOOD OF ROBESON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

The Confederate government used conscription to force many locals to work on the construction of various forts around the Cape Fear River area for very little pay. Several Lowry cousins, excluded from military service because they were free men of color, had been conscripted to help build Fort Fisher. The Lowry Gang was initially started to aid those hiding from conscription. Other residents resorted to “lying out” (hiding in the region’s swamps) to avoid being rounded up by the Confederate Home Guard and forced to work for low wages. As the Civil War approached its end, the Lowry Gang aligned themselves with Union soldiers who had escaped from Confederate prison camps. They conducted guerrilla warfare against the Confederacy.

On December 21, 1864, James P. Barnes, a neighbor of Allen Lowry, accused him of stealing hogs. Lowry’s son Henry killed Barnes. In January 1865, Henry Lowry also killed James Brantley Harris, a conscription officer, for allegedly mistreating the women of the Lowry family. In March 1865, the Home Guard searched his father Allen Lowry’s home and found firearms, which free people of color had been forbidden to own since 1831, and Nat Turner’s rebellion. The Home Guard convened a kangaroo court, convicted Allen Lowry and his son William, and executed them in March 1865. Henry reportedly watched from the bushes. After that, young Henry came to be regarded as the new leader of the Lowry band. Although Lowry’s crew was composed chiefly of Native Americans, among his chief lieutenants were the black man George Applewhite and the white youth Zachariah McLaughlin. The Lowry gang committed many robberies with atypical conditions. Victims of the thefts were treated respectfully, considering the circumstances, and the victims could potentially avoid being robbed if they could show that they could not afford it. The Lowry gang often returned certain stolen items, such as horses and wagons, when they no longer needed them. The band, at times, was known for sharing their profits with the poor. Examples would be distributing corn to the hungry.
Henry Lowry led a gang in committing a series of robberies and murders against the upper class, continuing until 1872. The attempts to capture the gang members became known as the Lowry War. The Lowry gang consisted of Henry Lowry, his brothers Stephen and Thomas, two cousins (Calvin and Henderson Oxendine), two of his brothers-in-law, two escaped slaves, a white man, and two other men of unknown relation.

Lowry’s gang continued its actions into Reconstruction. Republican governor William Woods Holden outlawed Lowry and his men in 1869 and offered a $12,000 reward for their capture: dead or alive. Instead, Lowry responded with more revenge killings.
On December 7, 1865, he married Rhoda Strong. Immediately after the wedding, and in the presence of several hundred wedding guests, Lowry was arrested by former members of the Confederate Home Guard turned county militia and under the charge of murdering James Barnes. He was able to escape by filing through the bars with a file. The file had been smuggled to him by members of his gang. The governor at the time, Jonathon Worth, placed a $300 dead or alive bounty on his head. Still, the band would go on to evade captivity for another three years despite many efforts made by the militia to apprehend him. A few notable events include fending off a search posse while using a boat for cover and eluding troops from the United States military sent to North Carolina precisely to capture him. In 1871 Francis Marion Wishart became colonel of the Police Guard manhunt and had the wives of the Lowry band held hostage in prison. Henry Berry Lowry and other band members sent the colonel a letter with an ultimatum, either the release of their wives of the Lowry Gang or “the bloodiest times will be here than ever was before—the life of every man will be in jeopardy.” Their wives were abruptly released.
Lowry’s band opposed the postwar conservative Democratic power structure, which worked to reassert its political dominance and white supremacy. The Lowry gang robbed and killed numerous people of the establishment. Because of this, they gained the sympathy of the non-white population of Robeson County. The authorities could not stop the Lowry gang because of this support. As a result, the conservative Democratic party was replaced by a more moderate Republican party with ideological similarities to many Lowry supporters.

In February 1872, Henry Berry Lowry disappeared shortly after a raid in which he robbed the local sheriff’s safe of more than $28,000. Colonel Wishart called the reports of his death “ALL A HOAX.” The $12,000 reward for his life was never collected. It is claimed he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his double-barrel shotgun. As with many folk heroes, the death of Lowry was disputed. He was reportedly seen at a funeral several years later. Without his leadership, every gang member except two was subsequently captured or killed. Reverend Patrick Lowry, as a delegate to the Republican state convention in 1872, announced that his brother (Henry Berry) was, in fact, dead. However, Henry Berry’s wife, Rhoda, insisted until her death in 1909 that he had escaped, even though she remarried a few years after his disappearance.

Up above- L to R- Thomas Lowry, Calvin Oxendine, Henderson Oxendine, George Applewhite, and to the left Henry Berry Lowry.

ANCESTORS- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S INVENTIONS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The link below is worth clicking on to see a 7-minute video about the original American Ben Franklin.

Ben Franklin: The Original American

ANCESTORS- THE SPOILS OF WAR FROM THE TRAGIC BATTLE OF FORT WAYNE

The article was entirely written by a bot.

ChatGPT is a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which specializes in dialogue. The chatbot is a large language model fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. It is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model, an improved version of GPT-3. ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and has garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers, although its factual accuracy has been criticized.

ANCESTORS- SPEAKING OF BOTS

Lots of news lately about the Twitter Files and censorship.
Dancestors Genealogy originally was Dan-cestors due to the domain name already being in use for a Japanese cartoon character.
After about two years on social media Dan-cestors was removed from Twitter and Facebook within weeks of each other.

We could not reach a person at Twitter to find out why, but eventually we were told by Facebook that “cestors” was not a “community word”. Obviously if you substitute “in” for “an” when combined with “cestors” you can see why the bot might struggle. We solved the problem with Facebook by switching over to DancestorsGenealogy. We never went back to Twitter. Somehow, I doubt this will be headline news.

KAWANANAKOA, THE LAST HAWAIIAN PRINCESS, DIES AT 96

Read more on the following link:

https://apnews.com/article/royalty-hawaii-honolulu-bec8d344ab375990aea103f00521ddcb

ANCESTORS- SO WHEN I GO TO PLAY IN THE “SQUID GAMES” HOW OLD WILL I REALLY BE?

Countries in the East Asian cultural sphere (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and their diasporas) have traditionally used specific methods of reckoning a person’s numerical age based not on their birthday but on the calendar year and with one’s age considered one at birth. These methods currently see only limited use in certain contexts and areas, mainly in South Korea and Taiwan. A person’s age will always be one or two years greater than his or her age in the international norm. In the context of South Korea, this reckoning is often referred to as Korean age, but in 2022, the government of South Korea announced plans to switch from this Korean age system to the system used by most other countries in the world.

South Koreans also use a third system sometimes called year age, especially for administrative purposes, determined by the difference of the birth year and the current year.[3] To put it simply, the equation is given by marking a person to be zero years old at birth, or: Korean Age − 1 = Year Age

ANCESTORS- BITCOIN VS. THE TULIP BUBBLE

Some are comparing the Crypto implosion to the 1630’s Tulip Frenzy.
Here’s an example of what a single Tulip Bulb cost back in 1636- four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, 160 bushels of wheat, 320 bushels of rye, four casks of butter, thousand pounds of cheese, two oxheads of wine, a silver pitcher, and a bed.

ANCESTORS- YOUR ANCESTORS ARE WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED!

Reach out to Dancestors and let us research, discover, and preserve your family history. No one is getting any younger, and stories disappear from memory every year and eventually from our potential ability to find them. Paper gets thrown in the trash, books survive! So do not hesitate and call me @ 214-914-3598.