My 4th Great Grandfather pardoned of his crimes
John Pugh is my 4th Great Grandfather who lived from 1744 to 1819. His daughter was Peninah Pugh, whose daughter was Matilda B Nichols, whose son was John Franklin Austin, whose daughter was Minnie Mae Austin, whose daughter is Wilma Juanita Carr, whose son is me.
I forget what I was reading, but it mentioned the 1819 novel by Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. I realized that I had not read this novel which was a little surprising as I love the literature of the 1800s. Two of my favorite authors, the Englishman, Charles Dickens, and the Russian, Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote in this time period.
So I checked out the audio book, Ivanhoe, from the library and I have been listening to it. The novel is set in England after the Norman Conquest. As an aside, that conquest is the primary reason there are so many French words in a Germanic language like English. The novel has mentioned several times the English King, Alfred the Great, who lived from 849 to 899.
Out of curiosity, I hopped onto the FamilySearch.org website to see if I had some connection to this king. The genealogy site is stating that he is my 26th great grandfather. I take all this sort of thing with several grains of salt for a couple reasons. First, while FamilySearch is very well thought of in genealogy circles, it is a crowd source site. I have stumbled on to a few errors. For a while it had me connected to Pocahontas, but that would come and go. Two contributors are arguing about one individual in the chain of descendants. One would put him in, the other would take him out. The second reason is that at the 26th generational level everyone has 2 to the 28th power grandparents. That is a big number. I will let you grab your calculator.
I then started tracing the chain backwards from ancestors that I knew were right when I came across this statement on John Pugh’s record:
I for one, could not go on without learning more. Attached to his FamilySearch record was this source document:
This document mentions the Hillsborough Riot, an episode of colonial history that I have never heard of. All this happened in North Carolina in 1770. Essentially he was part of a political action group known as The Regulators. For various reasons, they were protesting the local government when the protest got a bit out of hand. A year later there was a “battle” between The Regulators and the colonial militia.
You can read about this interesting bit of side history here:
Searching the genealogy/family history has me gleefully stumbling across all these gems.