** I thought a couple of articles from the past would help us look through their lens of the times at the specter of war.
The top article is from 1918 when the Central Powers of Germany and Austria Hungary had their eyes on the Ukraine. The second combines the campaign for prohibition into indicting those in the liquor business as being indirect supports of Germany in WW1.
The bottom Canadian article predicted the Confederacy was doomed just due to the simple math of war.

WHO SHOULD GET THE CROWN JEWELS?

Italy’s Former Royals Demand Return of Crown Jewels 75 Years After the Monarchy Was Abolished.

https://people.com/royals/italys-former-royals-demand-return-crown-jewels/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-royals-make-bid-for-return-of-crown-jewels-from-bank-of-italy-k8jtczslw

Elena of Montenegro served as Queen of Italy, Empress of Ethiopia, and Queen of Albania. Some of the Italian crown jewels below

IN HONOR OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Continuing from two weeks ago- The next day some of the white men took all the white women to Red River County, and we stayed in that County for about three weeks. By that time, General Tarrant had made up about four companies of men, brought them up to what is now known as Fannin County, and stationed them right where the Court House now stands to protect those who had settled on the frontier. The women were then brought back from Red River County, and those men, with some others of the settlers, built a fort about two hundred yards from where Judge Inglish then lived on his land. General Tarrant then divided his four hundred men into two companies. He would send one to hunt the Indians, and he would keep the rest on guard at the fort. He would send the others to the west to meet the Indian on the warpath when the first returned. General Tarrant appointed my boss Colonel of that army, and he and General Tarrant would take it time about with the men going out west. The Captain of the first company was Thomas Journey; the second company was Mr. Washburn. General Tarrant took the first trip west with his men, ran on a little Indian village of wild Indians, and scattered them. There was no man in the village; only a few women and children left. He caught one woman and a boy. All the men were supposed to be out on the warpath. Our men took all the horses that were left and the woman and the boy and brought them back home, and when the General had rested a few days, he started to go home and take the prisoners, the woman, and the boy. At that time, there was no road through the country as there is now, and he had to go from here to Red River and take the trail leading from there to Bowie County, and he had to cross at the Rocky ford. The day that he left here, he stayed all night at the Rocky ford on Bois d ‘Arc and some time that night the Indian woman lay down and watched the General and his Captain until they went to sleep, then she slipped out and cut the General’s fine horse loose, jumped on him and made her escape. The General’s horse was a very fine, large, black one, but he never got him anymore. It left the General afoot. After he lost his horse, it seemed to break him up. He never went west with us anymore after that. The next trip out west was made by my boss and Captain Washburn and his company of soldiers. I went out west with them. When my boss came back from the Mexican War, he brought me a gun and taught me how to shoot it. I was small, but I could shoot all right. It was a short gun, and I could handle it easily. When we started from here on an Indian hunt, my boss told me that if they got in a fight with Indians, I must kill one, and I was in hopes every day that we would find some Indians so that I might get a chance to shoot one. We marched on several days. After a while, we struck the plains, found some water, and struck camp for the night. The next morning we took the plains and traveled in the hot sun. It was in July, and you know how warm it was. Not a shade to go under to cool a little. We traveled all day without a drop of water. About dark, we stopped. The Colonel gave orders for every man not to take his saddle off, as we were liable to be attacked by Indians at any time. He then told the men to form a line around the horses and hold to the ropes and guns. No one to strike or speak loud. Well, we all sat there all night, suffering for water. My mind changed that night. I had been hoping for two or three days that we might find some Indians so that I might shoot one, but that night I was afraid that they would come. I was suffering from a lack of water, and I did not wish to see him until I could get some water. We traveled the next day until about three o’clock. About that time, we all rode right up to a creek – a good big creek, running right through the plains; not a stick of timber to be seen, and from the looks of the bottom of the creek, it had been six months since it had water in it. It was the driest creek I ever saw. We were then worn down and so weak that we could hardly get up again when we got off our horses. The men all stopped on the creek bank and talked with each other about what course to take. They decided to follow the creek down to see if they could find any water. We followed it all that evening. About sunset, we came to where there was a fall in the creek’s bed, and it had washed out a large basin, and it was about half full of water. It was about twenty feet wide and about fifteen feet deep in the middle of the hole. It was miserable and horrible-looking water. The wild beasts had watered there for quite a while. It was a sand rock in the bottom of the creek, and the bank was so steep that nothing could get out after it got down to the water. There were about a dozen dead animals in that hole. On top of the water, the scum and foam looked an inch thick, and it was working with live worms from side to side. The Colonel called to the men and said, you must not drink but one swallow of that water; that they had been starving so long they must only drink a sip at a time. A sip at a time will not hurt you so much. But that did no good; the men pitched into it and never stopped until they got through. My boss would give me a sip at a time till I got enough. The men began to throw up and groaned all night long in an hour. We never unsaddled our horses and expected to be surrounded by Indians at any minute. They would have had an easy time taking us in if they had come that night. We sat up all that night, holding our horses. Some of the men were too sick to set up. The next morning, we wanted to leave that place, but some men were too sick to ride, and we stayed with them until about noon. By that time, they were all able to ride, and we struck out for the head of the Red River. We traveled until near sundown when we struck the timber of the river, and then we found some good water. That night we camped there, but we were very much exhausted and half sick. From there, we started home. We got back here to Fort Inglish all safe. We were not bothered by Indians the whole trip, and it was a blessing to us, for we could not fight them. After we had starved two days and one night without water, and having to use the water we did made us all feel feeble and bad. But we had the good luck not to be captured by the Indians while in that fix.

I WAS ALWAYS CURIOUS ABOUT WHERE HER NAME CAME FROM, AND HOW DNA TELLS THE STORY

Caryn Elaine Johnson was born in Manhattan, New York City, on November 13, 1955, the daughter of Robert James Johnson Jr. , a Baptist clergyman, and Emma Harris, a nurse, and teacher. She was raised in the public housing project, Chelsea-Elliot Houses, in NYC.
She has stated that her stage forename (“Whoopi”) was taken from a whoopee cushion: “When you’re performing on stage, you never really have time to go into the bathroom and close the door. So if you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, ‘You’re like a whoopee cushion.’ And that’s where the name came from.”
About her stage surname, she claimed in 2011, “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—it’s part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black,” and “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” She has stated that “people would say ‘Come on, are you Jewish?’ And I always say, ‘Would you ask me that if I was white? I bet not.'” One account recalls that Emma Johnson thought the family’s original surname was “not Jewish enough” for her daughter to become a star. Researcher Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that all of Goldberg’s traceable ancestors were African Americans, that she had no known German or Jewish ancestry, and that none of her ancestors were named Goldberg. A DNA test revealed in the 2006 PBS documentary African American Lives traced part of her ancestry to the Papel and Bayote people of modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Her admixture test indicates that she is of 92 percent sub-Saharan African origin and 8 percent European origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoopi_Goldberg

THE ARTICLE TO THE RIGHT WAS FROM 1910. THE STORY BELOW IS FROM A CLIENT’S ANCESTRY WHO HAD UNEXPECTED PORTUGUESE ANCESTRY IN HIS DNA

William A. Cooper was born in 1725 on the James River in VA. William was an Indian Trader who lived amongst the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee.
William was documented in 1750 Granville Co., NC tax list, with two enslaved people, Ben and Sam, again in 1755. In May 1769, Daniel Boone first set out for Kentucky from Hillsborough, NC, with William Cooper (Cool) as his guide when he was hired by Cohen & Isaacs to survey lands that eventually formed Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1775, William accompanied Daniel Boone to Kentucky from Rowan Co., NC.
Spanish Records in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville as “a colored man of Portuguese extraction…working on a fort on the upper Tombigbee River.” Colored designates a mulatto, which legally meant anyone born of an Indian mother, not African ancestry, during colonial times.
Richard Henderson employed William to assist Boone and others in clearing the Wilderness Road. On July 8, 1775, he was listed as a member of Blanford Masonic Lodge in Bute, NC, Captain Weatherford’s District. He raised a corn crop in 1775-1776 on the left bank of Otter Creek above Clover Bottom near Boonsboro, which is said to be the first corn raised in Kentucky. He received a Revolutionary War Pension.
After helping the Cumberland settlers continue the road to what became Nashville, Tennessee, William died on January 12, 1783, in defense of Fort Nashborough, Cumberland Settlement. Due to his defense of Nashville, the heirs of William Cooper deceased, obtained a preemption of 640 acres of land in Sumner Co, TN.
William’s children lived on Copper Ridge (a corruption of Cooper) in the heart of the Melungeon territory (see below story), then later moved to Grainger, TN, and Wayne, KY. According to DNA sampling, this line of Coopers were Portuguese and Jewish. The Portuguese were merchants, Marranos, who became British Citizens in the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary immediately following the Jew’s re-admittance into Britain. This is not an uncommon feature of Cherokee genealogies.

ARCH GOINS AND FAMILY, MELUNGEONS PICTURE FROM THE 1920s

**Melungeons are groups of people of the Southeastern United States who descend from European settlers and Sub-Saharan enslaved Africans. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

Tri-racial describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African, and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.

FILLING IN THE GAPS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS SEARCHING THEIR ANCESTRAL ROOTS

Since the days of the Alex Haley’s Roots series, which inspired TV shows today like “Finding Your Roots” and “Who Do you Think You Are?” These shows reveal the success of African American celebrities finding their ancestors and learning of their origin.
But what about those that are not celebrities? Dancestors Genealogy is pleased to announce that this past year we added to our research group the Reverend Dr. Terry Turner, who has written two books on discovering your slave ancestry.

Dancestors and Dr. Turner can help you, and your friends of African descent find your ancestry.

Here are links to a clip of an interview Dr. Turner and myself, did late last year and to Dr. Turner’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvi8Nr-WsnI
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYpK6pKuNPxVfJaycwUiKBQ
A link to the headline article:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/family-trees-fill-gaps-black-people-seeking-ancestral-roots-rcna13998?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab

IN HONOR OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH

We start a series About the Trials of the Early Pioneers of Fannin County. By Anderson Rowlett (on left), Bonham, Texas.
By request of some of the white people of this city, I will relate a little history of some of the first settlers of Texas, I being the only one now living who came to Texas in 1836. I was a servant of Dr. Rowlett, who brought me and my mother and sister, a baby, to Texas. We came from Kentucky to Memphis, where we took a Red Riverboat for Texas. We all landed at the mouth of Bois d ‘Arc and then moved up Red River to where the Rowlett place is, on the bank of the river, fifteen miles north of Bonham. My boss built it on the bank of the river. He cut some logs and built a little cabin, and we fenced in a little roasting ear patch, and then my boss went to the Mexican War and left my old mistress, my mother, and myself. Both the women had a baby.
The first raid made on the people who settled in this place, known now as Fannin County, was made in April or May 1836. We heard them whoop, and we knew they were Indians. Then the women packed up their babies and ran down into Red River bottom, with me right behind them. They kept right down the river and never stopped until they ran into a lake of water up to their knees. I called them and told them not to go further into the lake, where the water is deep, to come back. My old mistress said, “Lord, have mercy; what shall we do? I have lost my shoes in that lake; I am barefoot, and my feet hurt so bad”. Then she turned to me and asked me if I knew where we were. I told her, “yes, mom.” Then she said if I was sure, I could get before, and they would follow me. When I turned, she said, “You are going right back to the house.” I told her we had to go back to get across the lake. “Don’t you take us back to the house,” she said. I told her that I would not go back home, that I would take them to Mr. Fitzgerald’s. She said, “Well, try to get there, for I am suffering so much with my feet.” Both women were wet up to the waist and trembling with cold. Then, there were no roads; a small path blazed out from house to house was the only guide. I got out of the bottom, found the path, and took to Mr. Fitzgerald’s. When we got near the house, we were afraid to go up.
We thought they would be on the lookout and were afraid they might think we were Indians and shoot. So, we stopped a little while, studying what we should do. I told them I would creep up close enough and call Mr. Fitzgerald, and he would know my voice, and somebody would come. So, I got up close enough to make them hear my voice. I called Mr. Fitzgerald several times before he answered. Finally, he asked what was the matter. I told him we were running from the Indians. He said, “Where are your people?” I replied we were all here. Then he came to us and took us to the house. He had three boys and two colored men. he put them all out on guard and then made a good fire for the women to dry themselves. By that time, my old mistress took a hard chill and was very sick; she never had any better health from that night until her death. She lived several years after that night, but it shortened her days.