The interest in genealogy is gaining popularity. The fascination with ancestry has yielded surprising results for almost anyone whose past is dug up through the genome's four-letter combinations of A-G-C-T. I got to be friends with a Taiwanese gentleman where we both swim at the same fitness gym. One day he showed up with a grin on his face. He had some interesting news to tell me. His wife sent his DNA sample for testing a while ago and the result just came back. He couldn't wait to tell me the fascinating news that he is 3% Filipino. Apparently, the technology is so good at breaking down the make up of our ancestry as to identify which attributes come from which parent. He was tantalized to find out that the 3% came from his mother's side. Of course, the odds for this ancestral connection is not that far fetched, considering Taiwan and the mainland of China are in close proximity to the surrounding areas in Asia. The Philippines and Taiwan are separated by a mere strait - the Luzon Strait - an overnight voyage even by wooden-hulled sailing ships of centuries ago.
Fredericksburg, TX is a small town in the hill country, west of Houston and Austin and north of San Antonio, that has a fascinating history. We went there last week for an overnight sojourn, part of a group that visited a couple of museums and took part in a little wine tasting. Not quite well known, yet surprisingly true, there are vineyards in Texas that produce good wine. Then there is the story about how the town came to be which was intriguing in itself. But why is one of the most extensive Museum of the Pacific War located there? And it would take more than a day to view all the actual (not copies) artifacts and read the well crafted narratives, documents, and historical footnotes housed in a huge indoor and outdoor facility right along the middle of its main street that is much too wide for a town of a little over 11,000 people. Story was that the street was designed to be wide enough for a wagon train to make a u-turn on it. The latest data recorded that English was widely spoken by 73 per cent of the population, 15 % Spanish, but that 12% spoke German at home. A German tourist visiting today would surely be fascinated by that and if he or she took a trolley tour of the town would be thrilled that Betty the tour guide spoke fluent German. Thus I must muse about how this little nuggets of history came to be.
Fredericksburg, TX is a small town in the hill country, west of Houston and Austin and north of San Antonio, that has a fascinating history. We went there last week for an overnight sojourn, part of a group that visited a couple of museums and took part in a little wine tasting. Not quite well known, yet surprisingly true, there are vineyards in Texas that produce good wine. Then there is the story about how the town came to be which was intriguing in itself. But why is one of the most extensive Museum of the Pacific War located there? And it would take more than a day to view all the actual (not copies) artifacts and read the well crafted narratives, documents, and historical footnotes housed in a huge indoor and outdoor facility right along the middle of its main street that is much too wide for a town of a little over 11,000 people. Story was that the street was designed to be wide enough for a wagon train to make a u-turn on it. The latest data recorded that English was widely spoken by 73 per cent of the population, 15 % Spanish, but that 12% spoke German at home. A German tourist visiting today would surely be fascinated by that and if he or she took a trolley tour of the town would be thrilled that Betty the tour guide spoke fluent German. Thus I must muse about how this little nuggets of history came to be.
I mused about "As Luck Would Have It" last year in May where I wrote about ancestral "entanglement" - a phrase I made up to describe that at some point in the very distant past people had to have come from a narrow band of ancestors if we dig long enough. The analogy I use is that every living person today had to have come from an unbroken chain of cell divisions that went on for millennia; otherwise, if there was even one break in your ancestral chain, you will not be here. Imagine an extremely huge pyramid where we, the current living population in the whole world, are represented at the base of that pyramid. Going up the pyramid would be akin to traveling back into our past and it would appear that, as we keep moving up, our ancestry narrows to a handful of people as we get near the tip. We can make up a few pyramids - say the pyramids of the various races, and it is conceivable that it will take a mere two or three separate pyramids to get an entangled relationship with someone now living at the opposite side of the globe, or even at places we cannot imagine to have any ancestral connection.
It is said that DNA of Neanderthals are identifiable in a lot of folks' ancestry predominantly in people of European descent, but not precluding the other races. Ancestral entanglement could be a ball of strings collected over eons of time where the outer layer and the core may have come from just a handful of original yarns made with strands of particular dyes that leached into every section of string in myriad degrees of tint and coloring.
Let me get back to Fredericksburg, TX. The town's elders first proposed a museum to honor the famous World War II admiral - Chester Nimitz. Nimitz who was then retired and living in California at that time was asked about the idea but he refused; that is, to call it the Nimitz Museum. He countered that it should be called the Museum of the Pacific War. And so it was built. But also alongside it today is the Admiral Nimitz Museum. Admiral Nimitz's ancestry, like every person living today, began from far away - a very long unbroken chain of cell divisions.
I asked Betty - our German speaking tour guide - if she had looked into her genealogy. Actually, she said her father did exactly that. Their ancestry was traced back to a village in Germany that no longer exists.
Mid 19th century Europe was a period of discontent with the political climate and economic conditions that were pretty much held over by monarchy and nobility. Many Europeans, Germans included, heard of a new system that was growing out of a former British colony, where the hopes of ordinary people were lit by a new political experiment - democracy. One German nobleman denounced his nobility to lead a group of German immigrants to resettle their lives at a place called America.
That nobleman, Baron Otfried Hans von Meuseback, who later changed his name to John O. Meuseback, was credited with founding the town by keeping the German settlers from falling apart from despondency, discouragement, hunger, diseases and death as they faced unimaginable hardship in a hostile and unfamiliar land. Meuseback named the town after Prince Frederick of Prussia. The human spirit and will to live and flourish prevailed.
Chester Nimitz was born in a hotel owned by his grandfather in Fredericksburg on Feb, 24, 1885. His father died before he was born. Much of what he learned in life came from his grandfather, who was a retired German sea captain. After high school he got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated 7th in a class of 114 in 1905. He commanded and led to victory the Allied forces in the Pacific during WWII.
Imagine this. His father lived just long enough to have sired him to keep the ancestry chain going. It could easily have been broken had his father died before he was conceived. His career too could easily have been broken when he was court marshaled and reprimanded for running aground the Navy Destroyer, Decatur, while under his command in the Philippines. That would have been a career ending episode in a young naval officer's professional life. He was relegated to commanding a submarine, then almost a career dead end, but he excelled in four consecutive submarine commands. WWII in the Pacific theater cemented his place in history. He commanded the Pacific fleet that won the pivotal Battle of Midway. The Japanese surrendered, formally signed on the deck of the Battleship Missouri to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz later signed the peace treaty with Japan - the formal end to the entire war.
History is indebted to the unbroken chains of ancestry. The world today would be so different if not for the continued survival of ancestral chains - both famous and the not so famous lives that are linked together, transcending eons of time over landscapes from across the world. But for every linked chain we also must acknowledge the broken ones. Those who saw the movie, "Saving Private Ryan", would have recognized a fictional attempt to keep one chain to continue after Pvt. Ryan's brothers were killed in separate theaters of war. A much truer story, a very sad and tragic one, was that of five Sullivan brothers who served in the naval cruiser, U.S.S Juneau. All five brothers perished when their ship sank in 1942. The only sibling spared from that tragedy was a sister. The loss of the five brothers all at once was one huge broken chain.
More pain had to be extracted in the island by island re-taking of the Philippines.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur's famous pledge to return after leaving the Philippines to re-group and re-strengthen his forces in Australia was fulfilled when he did return to liberate the country.
That Admiral Nimitz, of German ancestry, must fulfill a destiny to play a role halfway at the other side of the world from where he was born but whose ancestry originated from another is indeed such an ancestral entanglement that is hard to fathom, but worth knowing.
Below is a photo of a wagon train. That is what Fredericksburg's main street should be able to accommodate if it must turn around.
Ancestral entanglement reminds us all that as large as the earth is, it is a world that is just the right size as to allow, over time, the inevitable connectivity of humanity. Decoding our genealogy seems a tantalizing chapter in our quest for knowledge but perhaps, more importantly, it is a signal that beacons us to look back at our origins because if we do not, the fate of humanity will not only be uncertain, it is going to be fraught with peril.
It is said that DNA of Neanderthals are identifiable in a lot of folks' ancestry predominantly in people of European descent, but not precluding the other races. Ancestral entanglement could be a ball of strings collected over eons of time where the outer layer and the core may have come from just a handful of original yarns made with strands of particular dyes that leached into every section of string in myriad degrees of tint and coloring.
Let me get back to Fredericksburg, TX. The town's elders first proposed a museum to honor the famous World War II admiral - Chester Nimitz. Nimitz who was then retired and living in California at that time was asked about the idea but he refused; that is, to call it the Nimitz Museum. He countered that it should be called the Museum of the Pacific War. And so it was built. But also alongside it today is the Admiral Nimitz Museum. Admiral Nimitz's ancestry, like every person living today, began from far away - a very long unbroken chain of cell divisions.
I asked Betty - our German speaking tour guide - if she had looked into her genealogy. Actually, she said her father did exactly that. Their ancestry was traced back to a village in Germany that no longer exists.
Mid 19th century Europe was a period of discontent with the political climate and economic conditions that were pretty much held over by monarchy and nobility. Many Europeans, Germans included, heard of a new system that was growing out of a former British colony, where the hopes of ordinary people were lit by a new political experiment - democracy. One German nobleman denounced his nobility to lead a group of German immigrants to resettle their lives at a place called America.
That nobleman, Baron Otfried Hans von Meuseback, who later changed his name to John O. Meuseback, was credited with founding the town by keeping the German settlers from falling apart from despondency, discouragement, hunger, diseases and death as they faced unimaginable hardship in a hostile and unfamiliar land. Meuseback named the town after Prince Frederick of Prussia. The human spirit and will to live and flourish prevailed.
Chester Nimitz was born in a hotel owned by his grandfather in Fredericksburg on Feb, 24, 1885. His father died before he was born. Much of what he learned in life came from his grandfather, who was a retired German sea captain. After high school he got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated 7th in a class of 114 in 1905. He commanded and led to victory the Allied forces in the Pacific during WWII.
Imagine this. His father lived just long enough to have sired him to keep the ancestry chain going. It could easily have been broken had his father died before he was conceived. His career too could easily have been broken when he was court marshaled and reprimanded for running aground the Navy Destroyer, Decatur, while under his command in the Philippines. That would have been a career ending episode in a young naval officer's professional life. He was relegated to commanding a submarine, then almost a career dead end, but he excelled in four consecutive submarine commands. WWII in the Pacific theater cemented his place in history. He commanded the Pacific fleet that won the pivotal Battle of Midway. The Japanese surrendered, formally signed on the deck of the Battleship Missouri to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz later signed the peace treaty with Japan - the formal end to the entire war.
History is indebted to the unbroken chains of ancestry. The world today would be so different if not for the continued survival of ancestral chains - both famous and the not so famous lives that are linked together, transcending eons of time over landscapes from across the world. But for every linked chain we also must acknowledge the broken ones. Those who saw the movie, "Saving Private Ryan", would have recognized a fictional attempt to keep one chain to continue after Pvt. Ryan's brothers were killed in separate theaters of war. A much truer story, a very sad and tragic one, was that of five Sullivan brothers who served in the naval cruiser, U.S.S Juneau. All five brothers perished when their ship sank in 1942. The only sibling spared from that tragedy was a sister. The loss of the five brothers all at once was one huge broken chain.
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| Photo of Mrs. Sullivan holding a copy of the letter she sent to the U.S. Navy inquiring about the fate of her five sons. |
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| The letter should be read by everyone. It is a profound expression of courage and patriotism from a mother who clearly tried to suppress her grief. No mother should be asked to offer such a heavy sacrifice. Upon hearing the story, Pres. Roosevelt wrote to Mrs. Sullivan (below)   Below: A most painful episode in American military history was Gen. Wainwright's surrender of Manila Bay. That and in countless tragic moments throughout history millions of ancestral chains were broken. |
More pain had to be extracted in the island by island re-taking of the Philippines.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur's famous pledge to return after leaving the Philippines to re-group and re-strengthen his forces in Australia was fulfilled when he did return to liberate the country.
That Admiral Nimitz, of German ancestry, must fulfill a destiny to play a role halfway at the other side of the world from where he was born but whose ancestry originated from another is indeed such an ancestral entanglement that is hard to fathom, but worth knowing.
Below is a photo of a wagon train. That is what Fredericksburg's main street should be able to accommodate if it must turn around.
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| A footnote to Fredericksburg history is that at one time, while it was struggling to survive a group of 150 Mormons on their way west stopped by to rest and recover at an area four miles away. The Mormon community of Zodiac constructed a water wheel to harness the energy of flowing water for a gristmill and a lumber mill. This helped Fredericksburg greatly which was, in a way, a just reward for their inherent tolerance of other people, particularly those who fled persecution. The Mormons did eventually move on. At the town plaza is a replica of the water wheel to commemorate the Mormon's contribution to their community. |
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| Among the other challenges the German emigrants had to deal with were the indigenous Native Americans. This statues, located in the town park depicts John Meuseback accepting a peace pipe from a tribal leader. |
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| This is Betty, our German-speaking trolley tour guide, in front of John O. Meuseback's bust, explaining his life and the history of Fredericksburg. |
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