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Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Family Ties-

Recently, Mike was posting about family history, so I decided to do my part-

On my father's side my ancestors were good, hard-working English folk, although they sometime had differences of opinion with the authorities (and their wives) as to what contsituted "hard work"...


Having listened to enough criticism of his chosen lifestyle, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Jedidiah Colonel, sailed for the New World in the middle of the 17th century. Upon arriving in Boston he did what any enterprising, red-blooded young American would do- fell in love and took himself a bride.

Unfortunately, at some point the local authorities were informed by the English authorities that he had, in fact, already done the same thing in England, and his English bride was wondering where he was. Since Brigham Young was still a century and a half from being born and polygamy was not yet a legitimate lifestyle choice, the ugly word "bigamy" surfaced and they cut off one of Jedidiah Colonel's ears.

Such is the life of a pioneer.

A few decades later, one of Jedidiah's grandsons ran afoul of another set of authorities in Salem, Massachusetts and got himself executed as a witch.

Obviously, the Colonel family has had "issues" with authority over the years.

Nothing much of interest happened to the family for a few hundred years, until the 1890s when my great-great grandad, Horace Colonel, decided to go into the airline business about 30 years too soon-


On my mother's side, the relatives came from Germany in the mid 19th century, and their sole claim to fame is having a quarrel with their cousins; the cousins (after breaking all ties) went on to found the Poland Spring water company...


oh well.





7 comments:

Mike said...

Your family history is so much more interesting than mine. Nobody got their ears cut off in my family.

Phoebe Fay said...

If the crime is bigamy, it doesn't seem like ears would be the targeted anatomy.

Joey Polanski said...

Yer cousins & my cousins is competitors.

My cousins startd a watr company too.

Ts calld Polack Flow.

Forrest Proper said...

Mike- thanks. My uncle, the family historian who turned up this piece of information, has always been quite proud if it. That and the ancestor who was hanged as a witch. Things have gotten duller since those days.

Phoebe- ouch. I'd never thought of that.

Joey- I think I saw Slim Whitman do an infomercial for that stuff a while back.

Mike said...

Slim Whitman doesn't "do" infomercials. He IS an infomercial.

Forrest Proper said...

A Slimfomercial?

Catalyst said...

Oh heck the worst I could come up; with was a privateer (officially sponsored pirate.)