Family Stories: Dead Branches on the Family Tree

One St. Patrick's Day while my mom was a high school Principal, someone noted that she wasn't wearing green. My mother's response was something along the lines of "I've got some Irish blood, and I'm not happy about it." Mom was probably having a tough day and thus dumped a bit more on the unsuspecting woman than she bargained for.

Our family tree has a bunch of dead ends and question marks. Some of them are due to American Indian women who married Black men. Others are due to sketchy slave records. Plus, one of my grandfathers was orphaned at a very young age and never had a birth certificate. That's a pretty tough branch of the tree to figure out.

When I retire, I might try pushing on these dead ends, but other branches are kinda dead to us.

I remember my grandmother telling me (when I was about 10) that a confederate soldier named Hawes "inserted himself into our family tree." This is probably the Irishman my mom used as a blunt object against that poor woman at school. Well, thanks to the marvels of DNA, we have pretty high confidence that the Hawes to whom my grandmother was referring was a son of the 2nd confederate governor of Kentucky. 

A couple people from that branch have reached out, but my mom has never been particularly interested in pursuing those connections. Recently, I started to poke around in that part of the tree on Ancestry.com, but when Hawes' page came up and the relevant media included a confederate flag, I stopped in my tracks. 

We don't know which Hawes brother sired my great grandmother Willie Ervin Jones, but the degree to which we have narrowed it down is sufficient for me because it turns out that I'm not particularly interested in that part of the tree. They are related by blood, but our familial relationship is not one I value, and I don't accept either their cultural heritage or legacy as a part of who I am.

Willie Ervin Jones (center) with her daughter Georgie (ca. 1936)

Like my mother, I am not interested in digging into the confederate branches. I'm much more interested in the people and stories that actually molded my family. Aunts and uncles and grandparents and marriages and connection points are all interesting. Distant cousins whose stories aren't my family's stories hold little interest for me.

Maybe my thoughts on this will change as I get older, but right now I am fascinated by a relatively small number of ancestors and their stories. The Cape Verdean whaler. The orphan. The man who bought the freedom of his children. Every American Indian. Every man and woman who had to navigate the transition from slavery to reconstruction or through Jim Crow. The deep, dark, unknown stories can stay that way. If they seek me out, I will probably engage with the conversation, but I probably won't actively look down those branches.

Family Stories: The Whaler

Enos Pedro Goncalves was born in San Antonio, Cape Verde, Portugal on 16 May 1816. 

He was a whaler who came to Newport, RI in 1836 on the ship Roman. Upon arriving in the United States, he found that few people could pronounce his last name, so he used his middle name as his last name (with the first syllable having a long "e" sound like the word "pea"). 

Around 1840, Enos was a charter member of the first colored church in Newport, RI, the Union Colored Congregational Church.

Union Colored Congregational Church; 49 Division Street in Newport

Enos sailed the world. He sailed to Maui on the whaling ship Roman in 1843 and departed on the whaling ship Florida (both of which were later lost to Arctic ice in the Whaling Disaster of 1871). In 1850, he sailed on the brig Hallowell from Providence to San Francisco, where he might have done some prospecting for gold in Calaveras County. 

That's one trip across the Atlantic and then at least three (and likely four) trips around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Pretty remarkable travels.

Enos Pedro at his shoe shop in Newport (ca. 1888)

He eventually settled down in Newport and opened a shoe repair shop. Along the way, he and his first wife Cornelia Nokey had nine children in 15 years (only one of whom lived to adulthood) before she passed away in 1866. He married Experience Watson in 1868, and they had two more children (neither of whom lived to adulthood). Enos lived to the ripe old age of 90, and left a legacy of hard work, determination, and adventure that has inspired generations.