Genealogy Forum NEWS
August, 1998
The TreeHouse Has A Celebrity
Genealogy Group Tracks Black Sheep Ancestors
SUBMITTED BY
GFS Lee@aol.com
Nevada Focus
By Brendan Riley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Ax-murderers, ruthless Vikings, traitors or other notorious villains in the family tree? Take heart - you may qualify for the International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists.
Jeff Scism started the group a year ago and launched its website in January. He says membership is booming as people try to join by telling all about bad, bad ancestors.
Entry rules are simple: you must have someone in the family, preferably in your direct lines, who's "a dastardly, infamous individual of public knowledge and ill repute."
Automatic qualifiers include ties to murderers, kidnappers, armed robbers, traitors, thieves who stole "any item of fame," members of infamous gangs, political assassins or expatriates, or anyone on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list or involved in witchcraft trails.
"Weirdness counts," says Scism, adding that a final, catchall category of an ancestor causing "extreme public embarrassment" - Lady Godiva, for example - also gets you into the IBSSG.
Scism, 42, maintenance chief at a San Bernardino, Calif., mobile home park, has been into genealogy for more than a decade. His theory is, "If you do this long enough you will find you have a black sheep in your family that nobody talks about."
Why talk about it at all? "If you're doing genealogical research and you find nothing but blase people, it's really boring and you're going to quit," he says. "But this is the spice on the cake, instead of eating bread all day."
That doesn't go over well with everyone in families. Scism says some people get resentful "even if you put the facts right out in front of them."
"But they're basically in denial," he says. "There is nothing you can do to change the past. There is no need to be worried about your ancestor's misdeeds. It's just history."
Aside from helping one another with research, members also serve as a support group for people "who come onto the list with a problem, something really tragic in their family," Scism says.
"To be able to associate with a group who understands allows them to put it aside and deal with it," he adds.
One society member says he's related to Alexander Macomb, jailed for a late-1700s bond deal and targeted by Congress for treason charges. The secretary of the treasury intervened and Macomb walked away free.
Another member claims Hannah Martin, stepdaughter of "Goody" Martin who was condemned and executed for witchcraft in Salem, Mass., in 1692. And another claims Nathaniel Putnam, a judge at some of the witchcraft trials.
A descendant of John Billington says he came over on the Mayflower and was the first man executed in the Colonies for murder. And another claims as his great-uncle a man who killed his sister with an ax.
In the "extreme public embarrassment" category, another society member says she's related to a mid-1800s Texas preacher, James Durham, whose effort to recreate the miracle of Jesus walking on water was thwarted by tricksters.
Durham secretly put a board barely under water at the scheduled "miracle" site, but two boys who saw him later sawed the board almost in two. When Durham attempted to walk on water in front of a big crowd, the board broke and he fell in.
Nicholas Knapp's descendant describes him as an early-day Massachusetts con man who was fined in about 1630 for selling a scurvy cure that was nothing more than water.
Then there's a woman who says a married ancestor had an affair, later married his mistress and had a child with her, then split up and married the woman's mother - and after she died married her sister.
Vikings? One member says ancestors in her family tree include a Norwegian earl whose nickname was "Skull Splitter." She doesn't know exactly why, but assumes he was "rather bloody."
In Scism's case, an ancestor living in Panama got his young daughter's marriage annulled and sent her back to the United States. A boy from the marriage was supposedly adopted, but the man secretly raised him. His relatives also thought the man had died in a ship explosion, and the boy was without a family when the man really died years later.
"He was not famous, but his activities will show he was different," Scism says.
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