2022 was a life-changing year — a year of pain, a year of growth, a year of personal discovery, and a year of endings and beginnings.
I must stay vague here, and it's ridiculous to compare this intense personal upheaval to my semi-neurotic habit of genealogy, but genealogy has also been a long journey for me. About 30 years ago I first interviewed my Grandpa Alfred over the phone, which helped me see how colorful stories of the past make the long-gone and dead come back to vivid life. I was hooked, and I never stopped.
So I'm still going. It's an investigation that will never end, because just when I'm sure every trail is spent, there's a new family branch, a new digitized resource, a new email from an intrigued relative who came across my blogs. My research finds a way to keep going, just like life.
So here are some of the new trails I uncovered in 2022!
Cracking the Divinskiy Code!
Solving a riddle I never expected an answer to was BY FAR the genealogical highlight of my year! Check out my Davis family blog for the full story of how I found the original surname and hometowns of my Davis ancestors, who were Russian Jewish, but long story short I'm grateful to genealogist P.Y. Mund for his example of microblogging about family history on Twitter, and genealogist Michael Waas's comment for leading me to the Ukrainian records digitized by Alex Krakovsky!
It's almost like my great-great-grandfather Paul Davis and his siblings had a conspiracy of silence, to avoid mentioning that their last name was originally Divinskiy, that the family came from Korsun and Kanev, and from its earliest days from Bila Tserkva. So it took a whole new team of people, on Twitter, JewishGen, and other corners of the internet, to rediscover the truth.
Honoring the Africans
This will be a long process: I added in October to my family history blog a new entry on my anonymous African ancestors and the recorded ancestors of mine who owned slaves. I'm unlikely to learn the specifics about my enslaved ancestors, so I created space to discuss my West African genetic markers, and the many West African cultures represented among the 12 million captives brought to the New World.
I also wanted to preserve the names of the people who my slaver ancestors claimed to have owned. I've combed notarial records, last wills and testaments, historians' writings, and baptismal, marriage, and death records labeled "Esclavos" (Slaves). It's a slow process and my findings become more and more disturbing.
The worst development is definitively linking my 4th-great-grandfather Juan Cohen (more on him here and here) to a massive crime against humanity. In March I found a notarial record from Santa Marta, Colombia, dated January 30, 1821, naming my ancestor Juan Cohen and a Jamaican planter, Richard Bruce Kirkland, as the owners of El Centinela, a corsair brigantine in the Gran Colombian Navy.
In November 1821, this same ship, El Centinela, captured La Pensée, a French brigantine smuggling 240 enslaved Africans. Shortly afterwards, a U.S. brig named the USS Hornet captured El Centinela and brought the Colombian ship, French ship, and the enslaved Africans to New Orleans.
Next, exactly 200 years ago, came a court case before a New Orleans district court judge, in which “Kirkland and Cohen, of Santa Martha” claimed to be the legal owners of the African captives aboard La Pensée. The judge agreed, ruling that Kirkland and Cohen were legal privateers, entitled to own these hundreds of abducted people, and presumably sell them.
So Juan Cohen won the legal rights to own human beings captured twice, once in Africa and once in the Caribbean.
President James Monroe personally intervened in the case (anticipating his Monroe Doctrine of 1823!) and ordered La Pensée and the enslaved people be sent to France. Historian Jonathan Bryant said by the time the French legal system condemned the illegal slavers in July 1822, "only 160 captives remained alive of the 270 La Pensée loaded in Africa."
As for Juan Cohen, he used the fig leaf of legal privateering to raid multiple ships while commanding a Colombian schooner, the General Padilla, which was originally a slave ship owned by George DeWolf, the infamous slaver of Bristol, Rhode Island. Cohen finally settled in Cartagena and then Barranquilla, Colombia, where he engaged in smaller-scale human trafficking for over two decades.
With all this horrifying knowledge, I have found scattered stories of Afro-Colombian resistance. Pablo Mayorga (died 1771) of San Gil and Rafael Godoy (fl.1822) of Cartagena were both sentenced to death for crimes committed in self-defense. Pablo, a freeman, killed a man who had assaulted his wife. Rafael, an enslaved man, injured the man who claimed to own him. Hopefully my research can contribute toward a better understanding of Colombian and Latin American slavery and its impact which survives to this very day.
Gathering Clippings
A lot of family history research is slowly plodding through resources. On and off this year I've combed through FamilySearch's Catholic vital records from the early 1600s, squinting at difficult handwriting to find mentions of my de la Parra ancestors of Azuaga, Spain and Uribe Salazar ancestors of Bilbao, Spain.
A more fun resource is Newspapers.com, which has provided a wealth of forgotten family stories on my Jewish American side. The best account tells how my Great-Grandma Adela Fingerhut fought off a burglar in her New York City apartment in 1909! The article, written in that wonderfully embellished and completely subjective tone typical of early 1900s newspapers, describes Great-Grandma Adela as "a mite of a woman, but she showed her one hundred pounds of avoirdupois is mainly pure grit."
Newspaper articles can be wonderful little time machines. To my astonishment, I could listen to my 32-year-old great-grandmother, talking in defiant English only a few years after she passed through Ellis Island. She said of the burglar: "He only got one or two little ornaments, worth about $5, but I was not afraid of his stealing anything; I was only afraid he would harm my children. The moment I thought of that, I didn't care how big he was, and I wasn't the least bit afraid of him."
Interestingly, this Newspapers.com article came from a Kansas newspaper, indicating that this was a news wire story. I hope I can track down a local New York write-up of this story, with more details of the scene.
I've collected a number of lovely family history hints through Newspapers.com. My Great-Great-Grandma Fannie Davis had an unknown "aunt" in Milwaukee and cousins in Toledo, Ohio? I finally tracked down my Grandpa's cousin, Edward Gray, a TV ad executive who worked in a field full of anti-Semitic Don Drapers, and had changed his name from "Irving Goldberg."
One of the richest stories I've pieced together through dozens of clippings is that of Jack Karasov, my Grandma Frances's uncle, who was a professional boxer under the alias Jack Williams (in honor of his father, William Karasov). Uncle Jack's boxing career started in England in the late 1900s, and then through the 1910s and 1920s he fought in bouts in western Canada and the western United States. I may write a separate blog entry about Uncle Jack next year. He claimed to be the "featherweight champion" of Canada, which I first thought was an exaggeration by my Grandma, but this year I finally saw that assertion repeated in print. God bless Grandma Frances, she always spoke the truth about her family history!
Meeting the Inca
This last highlight is just for fun. An ancestor on my Rueda side, Francisca Inga (c.1515?-c.1550?), was said by the chronicler Juan Flórez de Ocáriz to have been the niece of the Inca Emperor, Huaina Capac. Feel free to dismiss this as a cringe "Grandma was a Cherokee princess" story, but this unverified tale of Indigenous ancestry goes back at least 350 years.
Anyway, this week I was visiting the Brooklyn Museum, and to my delight I saw their "Visible Storage" gallery displays 14 colonial-era Peruvian portraits of the 14 Incas, from mythological founder Manco Cápac through ill-fated Inca Atahualpa, who led Tawantinsuyu, the "Realm of the Four Provinces," into civil war and died at the hands of conquistador Francisco Pizarro.
I've seen my share of feature stories of gringos posing next to portraits of distant royal English forbears in ruffles... I'm honored to have my moment of ancestral homage with artwork depicting some of the mightiest Indigenous rulers of all time.
Unfortunately, a table currently blocks the portrait of the most accomplished Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who led vast military conquests, composed surviving poetry including hymns to the sun god Inti, and commanded the construction of Machu Picchu. Hopefully the Brooklyn Museum can give these Inca portraits a little more love in their presentation!
Thanks for reading this little summary. Here's to all the insights I will gain in 2023!
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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