Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
A "brick-wall" DIY genealogy podcast that features your questions and Kathleen Brandt's answers. She wants your stories, questions, and “brick walls”. But be ready to add to your "to-do" list. As Kathleen always says, this is a Do it yourself (DIY) genealogy podcast. “I'll show you where the shovel is, but I'm not digging up your family.”
Maybe, you have no idea where to start searching for an ancestor. Or, perhaps you want to know more about your family folklore. Host Kathleen has 20 years in the industry and is the founder of a3genealogy. She's able to dispense genealogy research advice and encouragement in understandable terms that won't get you lost in genealogy jargon. Along with her husband and co-host, John, she helps you accomplish "do-it-yourself" research goals, learn some history, and have a bit of fun along the way. Light-hearted and full of detailed info, Hittin' the Bricks is your solution for your brick-wall research problems.
Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen
Hidden Identity: Women's History & Irish American Heritage
Most family trees contain unexpected branches, but few conversations address the complex relationship between Irish American and African American heritage as candidly as our latest episode.
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the mighty Moe, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. I am John, your humble hubby host, and today we'll be talking to Kathleen about Irish American Heritage Month and women's appreciation and more of our March Madness. There's a lot to cover, so let's start hitting the bricks.
Kathleen:So can we ever have a normal beginning instead of you being weird?
John:I mean, that's a question you're asking me and I don't think I'm really in charge of normal beginnings. Hey, baby Kathleen, you are so weird. Kathleen, it's April 2nd. It is April 2nd. We only did one of these in March because I had a headache. I think that's what happened.
Kathleen:That's what happened.
John:I had a migraine the day we were supposed to shoot one of these and in March and that was not happening in the condition I was in, and let's see what's happened We've had chewy projectile vomiting in the meantime.
Kathleen:I'm not sure our listeners care about chewy eating too much sweet potato.
John:A little too much sweet potato, and then projectile vomiting while we all slept.
Kathleen:You said it twice now.
John:Yeah, because one of these cuts is going to get in.
Kathleen:At some point we need to draw a line on what we share with our listeners.
John:Okay, go ahead and write in and tell us where you think the line should be drawn on what we share with you. In the meantime, we'll keep stretching. I have of those. Is that going to be one of the lines? How come? I think you might have your finger on the pulse of your listeners so, john yes, kathleen, hey baby this past month, march yes, what about?
Kathleen:it. It was a very exciting month and I was extremely busy answering questions. I did in blogs and I did also in emails and on client reports. So that was the whole idea of doing the second March. One was to tell our listeners exactly what we've been doing for both Women's History Month and Irish American Heritage Month.
John:Two of my favorite celebrations, to be honest with you.
Kathleen:John, you don't have a drop of Irish blood in you. No, I don't. No.
John:Really not much. If I do, you have more than I do. Yes, I do.
Kathleen:You have far than I do.
John:Yes, I do, you have far more than I do, because you're like in the 2% range or something, aren't you?
Kathleen:15. Oh, the 15% range, and I have not my brothers and my mother are in the 25 to 30% range. So that's exactly where I wanted to begin is with the Irish American Heritage Month and, as you mentioned, my family, an African-American family, has quite a bit of Irish, as does a lot of African-American.
John:So you're not. You're not irregular in that there are a lot of African-American families that have a great deal of Irish in them.
Kathleen:About 15 percent of our African-American men have an Irish bloodline, a DNA. Percent of our African-American men have an Irish bloodline, a DNA. In that whole region of England, scotland, ireland we have. Most African-Americans do have it and a lot of our clients want to know why African-Americans have so much Irish bloodline and our white clients are related to them.
John:Well, I would have assumed that would have been a slavery thing.
Kathleen:That is correct and what has happened is in the Irish American Heritage Month. The definition of it, the purpose of it, was to recognize and celebrate the significant contributions of Irish immigrants and their descendants to the.
Kathleen:United States, both historically and culturally. Well, just like as many Americans, white Americans might say, I'm German, I'm Irish and so forth, african Americans also know that they are African and German and Irish, and those are also the influences of their culture, because of enslavement and because of community. Now, one of the things I wanted to mention in all of this is many of our clients want to know what line did their Irish heritage come from?
John:So is it from my mom's side or my dad's side?
Kathleen:Exactly Maternal or paternal? Which grandparent? What I want to make sure people know is that one of my last clients, for example, it was through an enslavement. But we need to go a step further when we talk about the heritage. So I had a case that I did write about of William O Mosley, who not only claimed all of the children, he educated them and named them in his will, and his sister was the witness.
John:So this is a white Irish owner of people.
Kathleen:Yes, Matter of fact, john William O Mosley was a slave trader.
John:Okay, so he was hip deep in the sale of human beings, but he had a few that he had a special favor for, and he educated them, two women in particular. Two women.
Kathleen:One. He named something in their will to the children that was begotten by him.
John:Oh, so he actually supported the children of the women he raped, that is a way to translate that.
Kathleen:But he also took seven of them and made sure that they were educated, moved them to Ohio, put them in Oberlin College. One of them and this is in Jackson Mississippi. One of them came home and during the Reconstruction era was a state representatives. The others, including his male and female offspring, were educated and in 1870, you see them living next door to their white dad.
John:So was this just an early biracial marriage, or was this? He never a white person told them where they could go, what they could be they all called him dad uh-huh the children were named in his will.
Kathleen:They were asked to be the administrators of his will, and this is mississippi uh-huh.
John:So he had, he had definite fondness for his children.
Kathleen:His daughter took care of him when he died in the 1870s or 80s. His daughter next door took care of him and his son-in-law.
John:And was his son-in-law, I'm assuming was black or white. Everybody else is black, so did he just end up marrying into people humans that he owned.
Kathleen:The mother of these children. One of them was born at the very end of the war, and in his will he even said if this particular one was I don't remember his name is Tim or Tom was? I don't remember his name was Tim or. Tom, if the last one is mine and the mother says so, please include him.
John:Okay, so he was making sure that anything he had a hand in birthing was going to be named in his will. Is that true?
Kathleen:That is correct, yes, and he said all the children begotten by me. His brother did the same thing, but he only named one child.
John:On the same plantation.
Kathleen:The brother was on another plantation in Mississippi.
John:Okay, so two plantations. They like cream with their coffee From there. We have Irish Heritage Month.
Kathleen:Well, my point on all of this is this heritage and their descendants. So imagine the influence of my client, who is African American and he knew some of the story but he didn't have the facts. And I was able to find all these documents to prove that this. Not only did this happen, they were educated in Oberlin. It also said in his will of William O Mosley that they had a choice of going to education or he would also pay for them to go to Liberia if they preferred which Liberia was Lincoln's fever.
John:Dream of that, if you gave all the slaves in America freedom, that you could also give them a one-way ticket to Liberia. Wasn't that the idea?
Kathleen:it was a black. It was a a black colony, basically for black African-Americans to go there and have their own colony.
John:I want to reserve a little spot here just for a real heavy sigh, Because I'm, you know, just. I mean.
Kathleen:Are you done?
John:I just needed to have that, john, as it is.
Kathleen:I'm tongue-tied because it's hard to explain that this is an extreme case, but not an unusual case. We see it a lot in Louisiana. We see it a lot in the South. This particular family was from Virginia and that's where we see it. A lot also is in Virginia just like President Jefferson.
John:Okay, hang on, hang on, wait, wait, wait. You said this is Virginia, but you were saying that this was Mississippi, right, the?
Kathleen:family was from Virginia, moved to Wait, wait, wait. You said this is Virginia, but you were saying that this was Mississippi.
John:Right, the family was from Virginia moved to Mississippi the white family. So the family was an old family, so they had been in the United States for quite some time.
Kathleen:Oh yes, they're Scotch-Irish, that's correct.
John:Okay, so they've been here for a long time.
Kathleen:They end up in Mississippi as plantation owners two brothers side-by-side plantations and apparently the family had no problems with it because, as I said, when he died and the black son was named the administrator, he had no white children. The sister was to witness. This is his eldest son and it's all in the court records. It's not like it's a question. This happened and is recorded as is at the time.
John:See, and that really does make you wonder. Well, I don't know if I can wonder that in any sort of polite terms, the idea behind somebody owning somebody and then fathering children with them, that right there to me is a poison.
Kathleen:Well, it is.
John:There's no way to look at it other than these are the children of rape. Okay, even though I could understand at the time that rape is one of the smaller indignities that may be suffered by women at the time, the point I'm saying is those children had to be totally influenced by their Irish ancestry.
Kathleen:Had to be totally influenced by their Irish ancestry because their mother, who was enslaved by William Moseley for over 20 years because the children were 20, from the oldest to the youngest had a 20-year span those children lived in this community and was influenced by these Irish people who were their ancestors. So they also had, of course, their African-American ancestors, which of course we all celebrate, but it clearly states in the purpose of it is Irish immigrants and their descendants to the United States. It's not about what was necessarily going on, except the Irish influence within the African-American community because, literally, we were descendants living on the Irish plantations.
John:Right.
Kathleen:So that was one of the biggest. That was the biggest conversation I had on my blog spot and in um and extremely interesting. Wrote in yes, they're quite concerned of why they're related to black people. Right, and why did black people actually? Why were they okay with saying that they had irish blood? So, john, I wrote a whole blog on it because it was almost, I bet you did.
John:I bet you did write a whole blog on this. I did.
Kathleen:It's called Researching the American Black Irish by Blood. I did talk about some vocabulary that people aren't familiar with, and I also talk about the William O Mosley case and his son George, who served as a Hines County representative. So one of the other things. I'm just going to mention a couple things. I thought it was a fun one because people kept asking me were Irish really slaves? I had about a dozen questions around that topic.
John:Yeah, there's a lot of that. I've heard that a bunch Instagram feeds you're looking at, but go ahead.
Kathleen:Well, a lot of people want to say no, they were indentured servants. They were indentured servants, and that's true too, but there was a time that they were, of course, brought in as slaves, and then they decided it was distasteful for white people to be slaves, and so they turned some to indentured servants. But during this large period of time before 1865, the. Even in America we had Irish people kidnapping Irish people to both sell them into slavery on the earlier years or as selling them as indentured servants.
John:So I wrote an article. Sounds like slavery to me.
Kathleen:Well, they only had to serve seven to 21 years, depending on the contract.
John:So they were only slaves for seven to 21 years. Yeah, we've had this conversation before. You don't get too far with me on that. I'm like, yeah, okay, so you were only a slave for a contracted period of time. You had no right over your own autonomy. Yeah, I got that much better than Okay, John. Open-ended.
Kathleen:Thank you. So I wrote. I put up a few articles and some information on looking for the Irish, kidnapping the Irish. That was the title of the blog. And I did well, quite a bit, of course. I mean I've done research with clients who had the same scenario, especially in the Northeast, especially early on when we had the sugar rum slaves time Okay. So I did a couple of articles and some examples on that timeframe as well as some of the kidnapping cases, if that helps anybody research their own family tree.
John:I think it'd be worthwhile to run through if you have an Irish heritage.
Kathleen:So, john, one of the other things that's in that article is I just kind of embedded it because I had a lot of questions about social media and how do people know this is true or not? Where do they get it?
John:from.
Kathleen:So I talked about the social media of yesteryear, which was the newspaper they were. It was just as feverish as it is now. Messages were sent into newspapers. People fought through the newspaper instead of facebook and they would be tried by the public, pretty much just like we do it here, whether or not there's someone's innocent or had bad intentions just the speed was different papers that is correct. It didn't have a wildfire effect.
John:It was just a slow burning fire that crossed the united states okay, yeah, yeah, the, the speed of the speed of transmission was slower. Now, that was always one of my favorite things in media was understanding those cycles. Now it happens on an hour-to-hour basis as opposed to a week-to-week or month-to-month basis. Exactly, but I, what was it I said the other day, but I digress.
Kathleen:Madam please.
John:You can reclaim your time.
Kathleen:May I so the Irish? Those are the two articles I really wanted to mention on the Irish American Heritage Month.
John:And.
Kathleen:I also wanted to mention.
John:Women's.
Kathleen:History Month? Yes, indeed, so, as you know, what I like to do is bring out the things we might not be thinking about, but they could have caused a brick wall in our research. Ok, there's these other scenarios. If we are only following what we know and not some of the other facts, we may never find our ancestors, our ancestors. So one of the things I brought up for Women's History Month, also last month, was researching your lynched female ancestors.
Kathleen:And it was not just for African Americans, of course they were. The highest number of demographic that was lynched, were lynching women, especially out West, a lot of Latin and indigenous women and there were Mexican girls that I talked about in an article entitled researching your lynched female ancestors. There was a black woman I mentioned. I mentioned a white woman who was a brothel owner.
John:Was that lynched or hanged?
Kathleen:They actually used the word lynched in the newspaper.
John:Wow. So they just went in, Because to me lynchings are typically, you know, mob sort of thing. It's not like a due process going on.
Kathleen:That is absolutely correct.
John:Okay.
Kathleen:And so those are the examples I put in this particular article, and so those are the examples I put in this particular article. And then I do give advice on how to look up these ancestors. And were your ancestors part of the lynch mob?
John:Oh OK.
Kathleen:Right.
John:That would be interesting.
Kathleen:So one of the big things to go with that is, if you're looking to see if your ancestor was part of the lynch mob, you want to look at the Republican paper versus the Democrat paper, because the Republican paper would name all the people who were trying to lynch someone because they were sympathetic to the person being lynched at the time.
John:This is the Republican Party of Lincoln, not the Republican. Party paper of today, which I'm just going to put a pin in that real quick. If you don't know your history, go back and see how the parties flipped. We might see something again similar, but the extremism of the Democrats of the 18, mid-1850s and 60s basically reversed with the Republican Party through the same time frame, until Lincoln's Republican in essence turned into what we call now the Democratic Party.
Kathleen:John, you're giving people educational views that people probably thought hmm, I didn't know, that guy was that smart.
John:He's not. He's not. Don't believe a word I say without checking it out, but you're going to find out, if you check that out, that that's true.
Kathleen:The other thing that I noticed that people, when they're doing their women research, that they think women changed their names. That was not a thing until more recently in history. So I did an article on March 6 on researching women who kept their maiden names. These were women who, for different reasons whether they came from a higher society than their husband, they were more prominent or actors and I'm talking the 1800s they often kept their maiden names. So if you're looking for them after they were married you're looking for them using their husband's names you might not find them.
John:That's a really good tip.
Kathleen:So that article is called Researching Women who Kept Maiden Names. I might have already said that, and I do talk about it from the colonial times all the way up to the late 1800s.
John:Well, what else do you have for us there, Ms Kathleen?
Kathleen:So I am teaching on April the 12th A Revolutionary War and again I'm giving the participants more tools that are normal tools, like what keeps you from finding them or how can you quickly work through a brick and that is being sponsored by the Missouri State Genealogical Association and the Midwest Genealogy Center here in. Independence. But, anyone in the nation or anyone. I don't think it has to be a nation, I think you just need Zoom can register and participate because it is a hybrid class.
John:Oh fun, so you're going to be on site, but they're going to be hybridizing it and sending it over the Zooms.
Kathleen:And I will have an audience with me also Bill Edelman from Moscow. He will be talking about the Civil War and there's, I think, two other workshops, but you can find all of that on either my social media or on their websites. Oh, okay, so registration is required, John.
John:Okay, so you need to register so you could go to the Midwest Genealogy Center's website, register there. That should be no must, no fuss and anything else.
Kathleen:If you don't know what's going on with 23andMe and you have that particular DNA, you want to download your data. Just go to our blog site and I give you the steps on how to preserve and save your DNA and how to protect your data if you don't want it to be sold.
John:Anything else.
Kathleen:No, that's it, I promise. Are you sure?
John:I'm probably sure that's the recap. That's apparently what we've been doing for the last month. I'm glad I don't have a headache and I'm glad our dog's not projectile vomiting anymore.
Kathleen:Oh my goodness, he's doing fine, by the way.
John:Everybody. If you're worried about Chewbacca, he's doing absolutely fine.
Kathleen:They're probably more worried about why you keep saying projectile vomiting.
John:Well, congratulations, you made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to listeners from Canada, Mexico, Australia and, of course, America. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brandt, our part-time duvet tester and full-time projectile vomiter, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hittin' the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fistknuckle and the Morgans Watch for their next appearance at the General Store in Strawberry. You can find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? Drop us a line at HittintheBricks at gmailcom and.
