A Little Paternal History

My father died when I was a baby. He was only 19 or so. My parents had a shot gun wedding. I once made the mistake, about 20 years ago, of asking my mother where I was conceived. My mother is a simple soul, quite romantic, and she got all misty eyed and soft voiced, and she moved in close to tell me: "Under the pine trees, on the front lawn of the high school."

She was 16, it was 1957 in rural America, and teen pregnancies were opportunities for lots of guilt and shame. As if the fact of the matter was not bad enough, my father was from an Italian family. My mother comes from Dutch/German/English/French stock that has been in America for 13 generations, some of the first off the boat. These are people who often did not look too kindly on the newer immigrants, especially darker skinned ones. It is just as well, then, that my maternal grandparents did not know the rest of my young father's geneaology. His mother was French-Canadian and Mohawk Indian, something also called, around here anyway, French Indian because the French, unlike the English and the Dutch, shared the land with the natives, lived right alongside of them rather than shunting them off to their own neighborhoods. The Catholic church in Quebec created mission lands centered around a church parish where the native peoples lived, but it was all very much part of a larger community. Her grandfather came from there, born of a Mohawk mom and a French Indian dad. Talk about non-white! But definitely not newcomer upstarts to the continent.

Anyway, after the shot gun wedding, they went off to an Air Force base to live. By all accounts it was not a happy marriage. Eventually my dad was sent to another base in a cold northern land, and my mother and I stayed stateside. My father was killed in an accident. We went back to my grandparents' house. They saw to it that I never had contact my father's family, ever, after that. The shame was that huge! I never saw a picture of my father. I have a whole side to me that remains unknown. Thanks to the geneaological resources of the internet, and fellow geneaologists who share their findings very generously, I was able to figure all this out. I also know my Mohawk family slipped over the border into the states around 1840 to blend in and be 'white' Americans. They anglicized their names. That is a side of native life most people do not talk about. But it is true, economics and social realities being what they are. Some people just take off and don't look back.