[Looking at why our area has its unique political and religious attitudes.]

Who were your great grandparents?

You do not know?

A few weeks ago, the Pastor discussed heritage and cultures who venerate and respect elders and past generations.

Our contemporary, new technology society discards heritage and tradition as quickly as the two-year old, out-of-date electronics device. The Native American culture does much better at respecting the traditions of the elders.

If we look at physical attributes, a child is often more similar to a grandparent than a parent, because of recessive genes which combine to show-up. Like our physical characteristics, our mental and emotional values trace back generations.

History is not a sequential event, but is the confluence of numerous parallel ventures.

How many great-great-great grandparents do you have? 32. Just stopping there means you have 32 families which converged in time and space to produce you.

You are the funnel of history.

Being inveterate historians, researchers, and scientists, why not trace back a few generations. Ancestry.com is an excellent resource, if you do not trust the family trees. Those are what someone posted and may, possibly, but not probably, be totally correct. However, you can search myriad records and get a better story. In our case, my sister has spent years searching courthouse records, and we have been chasing the history backstory for decades.

It is time for a road trip. Head south down the Indian Nation Turnpike. Cross the Red River into Baja Oklahoma. Take the Great Spanish Road (1786, which no longer exists) direction southeast. Head toward the Sabine River, leaving the Republic of Mexico (Texas), crossing into No Man’s Land (Louisiana), we are time travelling to circa 1820. Encounter Ft. Jessup (1822, photo), the anchor of the military road between the old west forts including Ft. Towson (1824) and Ft. Gibson (1824). Pass Los Adaes (1719), the Spanish capital for province of Texas, firmly within Louisiana, arrive at the quaint French town of Natchitoches (1714) on the picturesque Cane River Lake, formerly the Red River channel.

Plan a few days in one of the most historically significant towns you never heard of. It was the anchor of exploration before the Louisiana Purchase, into what would become Indian Territory in another hundred years. The architecture is distinctively Old French wrought iron and brick. Many of the old plantation homes and sharecropper shanties still are intact. Some of both are still residences. Others are museums.

Every trip down, we encounter some of the rich and famous, this time the guy across the hall was a Dallas Cowboy. He went to university there and plans to come back and retire. Yep, it is that kind of place.

We go back across the Red River at the noted Grand Ecore bluff, into the heart of central Louisiana. On the south side are my mother’s Native American families. Our target today, on the north side, is a group of “what is more rural than rural” Baptist Church cemeteries. There is one about every five or seven miles. Why? How far could you reasonably travel in 1840 by wagon on dirt trails? They have names like Sardis, Union Hill, Hargis, and Mars Hill.

Ah there are my grandparents on the Baptist Church side. Her parents and grandparents are on the Methodist side, seriously they are separate. Light-bulb: those are my great, great grandparents. Hi, nice to know your name.

Move up the road to my grandfather’s dad. Then back a trail, literally, to grandfather’s grandfather, an appropriate old British name. Hum, nice to put a name and date with a space on a genealogy chart.

Next day, we go further into the pine forest and swamps to find more monuments to the people we never knew, but without whom, we would not be here. Finding monuments in 200-year-old cemeteries are a challenge, but Find-A-Grave is a fabulous resource. Just do it before you go, since we left cell service half-hour ago.

Interestingly, every one of these huge old monument grounds are well-maintained by individuals from the 30-person country church.

There is the arch for great, great grandparents. Ah, a nice Scottish name. Now we are looking for… oh there it is. A proper Irish name from Ulster. These are great, great, great grandparents, born in 1800!

I had no idea who they were or their contribution to me, until we did the research. This young man came as a missionary to the frontier. Who was even there? Oh yes, he was the same religious tradition, which the family has followed for how long? Well, we will find out.

We tracked back. Each of the first five generations was frontiersmen since arriving from the old countries. They came as dissenters, who moved from Virginia because of religious persecution by the state church. What religious radicals would be subject to such maltreatment? This “radical reformation” descendent group is now, the largest non-Catholic, free church tradition. Who is that? See the clues above.

The intellectual decisions made by those early colonial frontiersmen, before Daniel Boone, still carries forward to our grandchildren today, 10-generations later. Along the way, we found no slaveholders among our paternal family line. Well, that is interesting. It seems the public narrative about most of these old British subjects is in error, again.

Genealogy is not just people names.

History is not just events.

These were real people, with real lives, living in the real world.

Find your family. You will be surprised to learn why you think the way you do.

Think about the traditions passed down. We cannot change who they were or what they did. Then realize we are each personally responsible for our choices and the consequences.

Excerpts from our book:

No Man’s Land Pioneers, Louisiana’s Wild, Wild West, ISBN: 9781694632128.