I think we know where Conor gets his sense of style ...
Monday, September 10, 2012
A dapper young undergraduate
WH Markley as a sophomore at UC Berkeley, April 1904.
I think we know where Conor gets his sense of style ...
I think we know where Conor gets his sense of style ...
Our pasty white ancestors...
As I write this, I have spent countless hours working on our family genealogy and scanning in boatloads of family photographs. Am I doing this for my own health? No! I'm doing it for posterity! And on the off chance that posterity has absolutely no interest in this, I'm doing this for anyone who has any interest at all in the family of Gertrude and Harold Markley and the generations of ancestors who came before them.
If you are reading this, I am assuming that you are a descendant of Gertrude and Harold. If so, I should tell you that you come from a family of striking homogeneity. With very few exceptions, every family line I have traced back has its roots in northern Europeans (mainly English, German and Swiss) who arrived in America in the 17th century. That is not a typo. By the time the Revolutionary War came around, our forebears had been here for 4-5 generations. None -- I repeat, NONE -- of our ancestors came through Ellis Island. None were displaced by the potato famine. Instead, our family tree has its roots in the centuries-old religious persecution of quakers, puritans, and French huguenots who arrived on these shores 250-300 years ago. A snapshot of these ancestors would show that they were virtually all pale protestants from northern climes. Kudos to Uncle Bill for being the first to think outside of the box and realize that it was actually possible to marry someone with a southern European heritage. His sons are the first Markleys EVER not to be cursed with the pasty white pallor that the rest of us have been genetically destined to live with.
Don't believe me? Check out the tree:
Ancestry Family Tree
Note that it is a work in progress, and I still have a few dead-ends (most notably with the Markley line, which I can't quite work out prior to 1769. There's a whole slew of Markleys in another part of Pennsylvania, but they're not OUR Markleys).
Although I can't get past John Jacob Markley (1769-1841), his wife, Mary Springer, is another story. Mary's grandmother was Comfort Dyer (1710-1736). Comfort's great -grandmother was Mary Barrett Dyer. Mary and her husband William were married in London in 1633, and arrived in Boston in 1637. What's so interesting about Mary Dyer? She was one of four Quakers hanged in Boston Common in 1660 for refusing to comply with a puritan law forbidding the preaching of the Quaker faith. There's even a statue in Boston Common erected in her memory. Check it out. She's even in wikipedia. (Yes -- wiki-fricken-pedia!). So, we may have to go back over 300 years, but we have at least ONE interesting ancestor (assuming martyrdom is relatively interesting). More ancestor vignettes to come.
If you are reading this, I am assuming that you are a descendant of Gertrude and Harold. If so, I should tell you that you come from a family of striking homogeneity. With very few exceptions, every family line I have traced back has its roots in northern Europeans (mainly English, German and Swiss) who arrived in America in the 17th century. That is not a typo. By the time the Revolutionary War came around, our forebears had been here for 4-5 generations. None -- I repeat, NONE -- of our ancestors came through Ellis Island. None were displaced by the potato famine. Instead, our family tree has its roots in the centuries-old religious persecution of quakers, puritans, and French huguenots who arrived on these shores 250-300 years ago. A snapshot of these ancestors would show that they were virtually all pale protestants from northern climes. Kudos to Uncle Bill for being the first to think outside of the box and realize that it was actually possible to marry someone with a southern European heritage. His sons are the first Markleys EVER not to be cursed with the pasty white pallor that the rest of us have been genetically destined to live with.
Don't believe me? Check out the tree:
Ancestry Family Tree
Note that it is a work in progress, and I still have a few dead-ends (most notably with the Markley line, which I can't quite work out prior to 1769. There's a whole slew of Markleys in another part of Pennsylvania, but they're not OUR Markleys).
Although I can't get past John Jacob Markley (1769-1841), his wife, Mary Springer, is another story. Mary's grandmother was Comfort Dyer (1710-1736). Comfort's great -grandmother was Mary Barrett Dyer. Mary and her husband William were married in London in 1633, and arrived in Boston in 1637. What's so interesting about Mary Dyer? She was one of four Quakers hanged in Boston Common in 1660 for refusing to comply with a puritan law forbidding the preaching of the Quaker faith. There's even a statue in Boston Common erected in her memory. Check it out. She's even in wikipedia. (Yes -- wiki-fricken-pedia!). So, we may have to go back over 300 years, but we have at least ONE interesting ancestor (assuming martyrdom is relatively interesting). More ancestor vignettes to come.
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