Richard III is Found

I don't know about you but I find this whole thing absolutely fascinating. The news conference today confirms that the body dug up under a parking lot in Leicester, England is indeed the remains of Richard III, confirmed by a DNA match with a Canadian descendant of Richard's sister.There was a lot of history lost when George III decimated the Catholic church in England but it is nice to know that some is still discoverable.

A True Gentleman

I was reading about this morning and with all the stories about Rmoney and his misadventures as well as  his duplicity something triggered a memory of a bit of Virginia history. John Walker Wayland was a Virginian and while he spent many years teaching, his true interest was in genealogy and especially Virginia history. Oddly, he is most remembered by a short piece he wrote for  a contest in The Baltimore Sun for the best definition of a true gentleman. "The True Gentleman" won and since has been adopted as the creed of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
This is something I think the Mittster needs to read and understand. It probably wouldn't hurt Paul Ryan to give it a going over as well.

"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."

- John Walter Wayland. Virginia, 1899

An Old Book on the History of the New River Settlement

While I was in Virginia last week Madam and I spent some time at Mom's cleaning and straightening up. Years and years ago the public library in the little town of Narrows went belly up and my Dad bought a bunch of the books that were sold. One of those was "A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory" by David E. Johnston published in 1906. I had seen it before on the shelves and I had already 'rescued' all of the genealogical books but somehow had skipped this one. This time I brought it home and have begun reading it. As I may have mentioned here before, my family were original Virginia colonists and some of the earliest pioneers to move into the Appalachians, so this is really a history of mine and the other families that first settled along the New River in Western Virginia and what is now West Virginia.

I knew a little of the history of the area as a result of my genealogy research but never the detail as covered in this book. I'm just barely into it and just now have reached the Revolutionary War. I had no idea that from the 1650's to the 1770's as whites were trying to expand into the area that they met some very serious resistance from the Native American tribes that used the area for hunting. While the Cherokee seemed to be pretty friendly(much to their later regret I suppose) the Shawnee from the Ohio valley were constant raiders of the settlements and these raids continued through the Revolution and beyond. Roving bands of Indians would attack, murder the family and burn farm after farm and many times take children hostage back to Ohio. I had read of the occasional confrontation with Indians but it was evidently a constant burden on the settlers and many a family was lost to these raids. Fascinating reading and it evidently wasn't all turkey dinners and pumpkin pie back in those days.

Update: corrected "wasn't all turkey dinners" from "was all turkey dinners"