Ask a genealogist.

I am not a genealogist. I am invoking an opportunity for genealogists to comment on the premise I bring here. I think that they would really relate to what I am about to say.

If you are a genealogist, then you understand the process of looking up family trees. You are very aware that in the process of exploring genealogy through tools like Ancestry.com, and many others, that sooner or later, you will come across a member of your direct lineage that would not be in the "politically correct" list that we have developed over our history. This person could have been what we would deem a "mover and shaker" in their respective time, a famous person who perhaps even radically changed the world in business, government, religion, science... and had great rank or popularity in their time, but they were also perhaps a slave owner, Confederate general, Nazi sympathizer, bootlegger, drug smuggler, or religious zealot... the true identity and history of which perhaps even only recently revealed.

The premise is, that they were so important and/or influential in their respective time and if they were not there, or did not achieve the fame and fortune that they did, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE And that means YOU, and all of your present family that you have brought up in the world.

These people you find, CHANGED HISTORY, for good or bad, they CHANGED HISTORY. Many have monuments, buildings or statues that commemorate the time that they were here on this Earth, and those were put there by people of THOSE TIMES that deemed them worthy of such honor.

In essence, right or wrong, you owe your very EXISTENCE on this Planet to people that many self-righteous people in these new times would just throw under the bus and destroy their very history by attempting to erase any knowledge of them. Are you one of them?

Many successful people, your progeny , along with significant others that would be part of this present day lunacy, will also go on to become very positive and influential people. Many are presently attempting to change the world for good or have already achieved great things that have become a mainstay in our present lives. Without our questionable ancestors and their deeds or actions, this would not even be remotely possible because they would not exist.

So, in this light... can you accept that history is paramount and idols and statues are indexes into this history? They should not be destroyed, but instead, understood and preserved. Somewhere in your lineage, YOU would not be here unless THEY were.

originally posted by: charlyv
I am not a genealogist. I am invoking an opportunity for genealogists to comment on the premise I bring here. I think that they would really relate to what I am about to say.

If you are a genealogist, then you understand the process of looking up family trees. You are very aware that in the process of exploring genealogy through tools like Ancestry.com, and many others, that sooner or later, you will come across a member of your direct lineage that would not be in the "politically correct" list that we have developed over our history. This person could have been what we would deem a "mover and shaker" in their respective time, a famous person who perhaps even radically changed the world in business, government, religion, science... and had great rank or popularity in their time, but they were also perhaps a slave owner, Confederate general, Nazi sympathizer, bootlegger, drug smuggler, or religious zealot... the true identity and history of which perhaps even only recently revealed.

The premise is, that they were so important and/or influential in their respective time and if they were not there, or did not achieve the fame and fortune that they did, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE And that means YOU, and all of your present family that you have brought up in the world.

These people you find, CHANGED HISTORY, for good or bad, they CHANGED HISTORY. Many have monuments, buildings or statues that commemorate the time that they were here on this Earth, and those were put there by people of THOSE TIMES that deemed them worthy of such honor.

In essence, right or wrong, you owe your very EXISTENCE on this Planet to people that many self-righteous people in these new times would just throw under the bus and destroy their very history by attempting to erase any knowledge of them. Are you one of them?

Many successful people, your progeny , along with significant others that would be part of this present day lunacy, will also go on to become very positive and influential people. Many are presently attempting to change the world for good or have already achieved great things that have become a mainstay in our present lives. Without our questionable ancestors and their deeds or actions, this would not even be remotely possible because they would not exist.

So, in this light... can you accept that history is paramount and idols and statues are indexes into this history? They should not be destroyed, but instead, understood and preserved. Somewhere in your lineage, YOU would not be here unless THEY were.

We honor our father and mother and their father and mother and on down the line to British Israelism to Father and Mother God. Thank you.

That who;le argument has so many damned holes, I dunno where to begin.

For starters, I don't owe my existence to anyone. I owe my ancestors nothing. They did things for their own benefit, not mine. I did not ask them, nor anyone to bring me into existence. I'm here, regardless of them. We are all here people for thousands of years, people have been having sex and making kids. So no, I feel no special thanks, reverence, or need to even acknowledge people simply for screwing another being and creating another link in my chain.

What the hell do statues have to do with genealogy or ancestry? Statues and monuments are there to honor or reflect upon something or someone very important. You want to learn about history? There's these things called books. In places called libraries. Don't like reading? There's these nifty places called museums and similar institutions that actually have artifacts from these people.

That our ancestors were a bunch of bloodthirsty, racist, murdering rapist savages and we are here because of that fact, is common knowledge. In fact, the reason the world is so screwed up today is because our ancestors were unrepentant assholes for thousands of years, spanning every continent. We don't need statues or idols to remind us of this.

So no, they are not paramount. They aren't even relevant. The statue debate isn't about preserving history, but preserving a highly emotional interpretation of it. And in this case, bad ones.

a reply to: Skadi_the_Evil_Elf

That is unfortunate. I guess you are one of those people I was referencing. Good luck with your future.

Perhaps you might understand the short version.

"The world is the way it is, because if it was not, you would not be here to observe it."

a reply to: charlyv

If a genealogist were to examine a statue, they would only be able to trace it back to rocks and mountain ore.

If you descended from evil folk and are a decent person yourself, your existence is a monument, far better than your ancestors deserve.

The older I get I realize that the statues are something to substanciate the past our government has told us happened,the media and all glorifying soldiers,we are the industrial machine we were warned about,we are conditioned to be ok with killing,as long as the US says so,and in truth the UN is nothing more then the NWO's army

I have a question for a genealogist.

My brother had twins and one is deathly allergic to peanuts. No one in my family has that and no one on his wife's side of the family has it. So my question is how is that possible?

I have my theories but they are more conspiracy type theories then actual facts. Complete speculation.

a reply to: charlyv

In essence, right or wrong, you owe your very EXISTENCE on this Planet to people that many self-righteous people in these new times would just throw under the bus and destroy their very history by attempting to erase any knowledge of them. Are you one of them?

Thank you, but no. I'm human descended from the humans before me. I hardly hold myself accountable for some of their actions. How could I, I never even met them. Genes have nothing to do with actions, ideology and beliefs.

As far as history , I'm not really interested in both sides of the story, I want the truth.

To get at that we need the records as intact as possible for individuals to review.

Studying geneology is not what I do. I do have the ancestry DNA done and try to find my ancestors and on my mothers side it is easy. On my fathers side, male line, it is very difficult. It seems that my fathers line had a mostly girls and very few boys. On top of that, during conflicts in Finland, lots of churches were bombed, so there is missing information. I know who my great great great grandparents are, but not which of the kids had my great grandfather.

If I hired a geneologist, they would just grab the most obvious person, the one from the closest town. But I do not think that that is the one, based what is written in the bible and what my uncles told me years ago. Either way, they were brothers, and each one only had a couple of kids. The female line seems to keep going, the male male line is dying off. My wife's father's family line is also dying off, she is the last one from a breakoff three generations ago. She has lots of relatives though, her dad's other relatives were pretty active so she has lots of forth cousins.

I guess they destroyed the mold on the paternal DNA in our family. I appear to be male haplogroup NO or closely related to that and most of them have died off. The major difference is that NO's excrete a lot of salt, I can find no other genetic snps that have any relevance to health. Oh well, I will just keep eating a little more salt.

a reply to: rickymouse

Rickymouse, there are some books which have been destroyed but those are just a few. I might be able to hep you.. you can IM me if you like.. i am a member of finnish genealogical society and have access to churchbooks which ancestry, myheritage etc webpages do not have access to.

I was only talking a couple of days ago about the same thing but I emphasized the doom merchants stance.
When all these doom merchants go on about the ice age, the different plagues, massacres and all the things that was supposed to eradicate humans and I said the bottom line is our ancestors lived through all of that because we are proof that they did.
A lovely example especially for Dolluka :- "Lo there do I see my father, Lo there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers, Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning, Lo , they do call me, they bid me to take my place among them, in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever".

With my father's help, I have been able to trace his mother's ancestry as far back as the 1400's in Scotland.
The problem that I am having here in the US is with my father's father's side of the family. I know who his grandfather was and that he came from England. However, that is where the story ends as no one on the England side of the family will help us with the ancestry.

Any thoughts?

a reply to: LookingForABetterLife

Search records

You need to know your lineage 100 years back when searching birth records and marriage records. Death records 50 years back.

originally posted by: charlyv
a reply to: Skadi_the_Evil_Elf

That is unfortunate. I guess you are one of those people I was referencing. Good luck with your future.

Perhaps you might understand the short version.

"The world is the way it is, because if it was not, you would not be here to observe it."

I understood the short version very well.

The world is the way it is due to our ancestors and their #ty history and action. In case you haven't noticed, the world is an incredibly #ty place, full of #ty people doing #ty things. That we are here to observe their #ty handiwork, and often suffer from it, drives home the point that not only do we not owe these people anything.

So what if a bunch of #ty people in the past had enough sex over the generations to make us here in the present. The world they created, and the world we live in, is a steaming #hole. And I am not grateful to be here to see their handiwork. I owe them nothing. If I wasn't here to observe this #ty world, I would not care. I'd not exist. Big deal.

I've been doing my ancestry DNA and family tree for a year now. Funny thing I learned about all these ancestors of mine: they lied. My DNA, however, doesn't lie, and has told me the truth. Another thing in this whole ancestry quest of mine: I've been able to successfully track and learn about them without having to one look at a statue. Because we have these things called historical records. Things like census records, military records, criminal, local legal transaction records like property records. Church records and registries of births, marriages, and deaths. All of these records that I have looked at have given me names, dates and places of birth, marriage dates, occupations of my ancestors.

No statues required. Statues do not record history, the memorialize or immortalize people or concepts important to the people that erected them. However, values change. And just as often than not, statues are errected by egomaniacs trying to warp and glorify themselves and their place in history.

Take the statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They were erected my an egomaniac dictator to worship himself. They got tore down. Miraculously, the majority of Iraqis were not sad to see this part of their "history" and "heritage" go. And miraculously, even with the statues of Hussein gone, everyone still remembers who he was, what he did, ect.

It's called history.

Some very interesting comments thus far. The human tendency to over-react when tensions reach a pinnacle is what interests me the most and I think it is one of our biggest problems.

The current situation with the Confederate Generals statues still bugs me a bit as well.

We all know that they lost the war, but they have remained standing all of these years, because basically, they had lives and actions before the war that defined them beyond the context of those terrible bloody battles. They got wrapped up in the politics of the day, and picked a side. The wrong side, especially considering slavery, but for them the decision was based upon where they lived and grew up, the loyalty to their friends and family and of course, their strong convictions as to what was good or bad for this country. Some of them fought in the Mexican war. Lee was a commandant at West Point and his father was a Revolutionary war hero.

Many of us today, could not hold a candle to the diligence and honor that these leaders held themselves personally accountable to. Yet we put black shrouds over them in reaction to a stupid, racial hate skirmish that never should have happened.. and now we want to cart them away.

This irrational, instantaneous and self-righteous behavior will not stop here unless we collectively take stock of why we are all here and recognize that we all learn from our mistakes.

originally posted by: charlyv
Some very interesting comments thus far. The human tendency to over-react when tensions reach a pinnacle is what interests me the most and I think it is one of our biggest problems.

The current situation with the Confederate Generals statues still bugs me a bit as well.

We all know that they lost the war, but they have remained standing all of these years, because basically, they had lives and actions before the war that defined them beyond the context of those terrible bloody battles. They got wrapped up in the politics of the day, and picked a side. The wrong side, especially considering slavery, but for them the decision was based upon where they lived and grew up, the loyalty to their friends and family and of course, their strong convictions as to what was good or bad for this country. Some of them fought in the Mexican war. Lee was a commandant at West Point and his father was a Revolutionary war hero.

Many of us today, could not hold a candle to the diligence and honor that these leaders held themselves personally accountable to. Yet we put black shrouds over them in reaction to a stupid, racial hate skirmish that never should have happened.. and now we want to cart them away.

This irrational, instantaneous and self-righteous behavior will not stop here unless we collectively take stock of why we are all here and recognize that we all learn from our mistakes.

Diligent? Honorable? You are the one with delusions here, and maybe need to take off your rose colored glasses.

They were no more diligent or disciplined or honorable than people are today. There is nothing honorable, nor respectable about them in the grand scheme of things. Confedederate generals, did more harm than they did good, and their harmful legacy overshadows what little good they might have done.

Did you know Hitler was a vegetarian, who basically created the 40 hour work week we love, built freeways, and helped create a solid German Middle class. He was a big proponent of animal and childrens rights. He was also a decorated war hero! That must mean he's a great guy! he did some nice things, did some wonderful things for Germany, and even the world! Why don't we put up a statue to this great guy, champion of families and animals?

Oh right. Because whatever little good things he did, the fact that he was a genocidal maniac who had millions of people exterminated, and started a war that killed over 100 million people and destroyed so much more. That's why we don't have public statues to Hitler. His legacy to humanity was overwhelmingly negative and destructive. We have monuments not to commemorate him, but his victims.

While the confederates didn't quite hit the levels of depravity of the Nazis, and the effects of their negativity were confined to the U.S. and within, their overwhelming legacy is a negative one. Whatever minor local acts of good they might have done, they chose to commit treason, break away from, and declare war on the U.S. They were fighting to keep a large number of people in chains, with the legal status of property. They were not simply "caught up in politics". They were stubbornly committed to the course of treason, to the course of fracturing, breaking up, and destroying the United States. And because of the actions of the Confederates, we ended up fighting the most brutal, bloody, costliest war in American history. And they lost. Thankfully.

I can learn all about the complicated lives of the confederate generals by reading one of a multitude of books written on both sides of the argument, by historians who have spent their lives pouring over personal letters, diaries, documents, and other things from the era. Without ever once having to visit a statue or a monument.

The purpose of a statue or monument is to recognize and remember a person whose accomplishments or contributions to their country or humanity have been overwhelmingly positive. Humans being humans, even the best of us have done some pretty #ty things. When we commemorate someone, however, it is because their personal flaws and mistakes are overshadowed by the amount of good they have done for people.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners. However, they were also revolutionary thinkers who created the very framework for a better, more just country, and brought into being a form of government that would actually spread across the world and inspire modern, rational thinking. The things they spent their lives fighting and defending were overwhelmingly good, and were of great, lasting positive effect for humanity.

Robert E. Lee, despite being an awesome general with a stellar record, still fought for and defended the states that continued to practice an utterly immoral and divisive institution. We already have a giant monument in this country to General Lee and his legacy: Arlington Cemetary. We turned his slave driven plantation into the country's largest graveyard for fallen military. His front lawn, for over 150 years, has been covered with tiny little white monuments of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who died defending this great country. And the first soldiers buried there were the ones who had died in the war that Lee and his Good Ol Boys started.

Monuments to victims are a better way to remember history than monuments to the bastards who victimized.

There's your monument. There is your history. Put in it's proper perspective.