My Wolcott High School Classmates

Many of us have fond memories of our time in high school. So do I. Recently someone posted a copy of the first time that our class had been together. Through our elementary years we were in schools in various part of town (Alcott in the north, Frisbie in the south). But the town had built a new high school in the middle of the town in 1958 and had started having classes there (adding a grade a year) instead of busing high school-aged kids to Waterbury. The first senior class was for the 1961-62 year. They had also added another large elementary school (Wakelee) in 1960. But with the elementary schools bursting at the seams, they put the eighth-grade class at WHS for the 1961-62 year. The below picture is the full 8^th grade class in the WHS gym in the spring of 1962.

[8^th grade in 1962]

 

Our class numbered about 160 students (+/- 10 from year to year). The above picture from 8^th grade has 170 people. Our junior yearbook (1965) has only 144 names, but that’s because there were people missing on “picture day” and since the yearbook staff was primarily focused on the seniors, missing several juniors was not a concern to them. There were about 160 in our senior yearbook, but there were moves during the year that made the final count a few off. In my below analysis, I started with those 144 students, then added on thirteen students who were part of the class (from memory). My memory is surprisingly good, but if I missed a few that will not matter in the analysis as you will see.

 

Challenges

Building out a workable list of classmates presented a few challenges. Among them were:

·       The 1965 yearbook only had a first initial and last name, so I needed to supply the full first name from memory – only had two I could not recall.

·       There were a few misspellings of last names in the yearbook, so I had to correct them as I did my investigation, e.g., Luchinsky instead of Lushinsky, Messina instead of Messino.

·       As much as I knew my classmates pretty well, I knew very few of their parents. Since that was going to be crucial in my building out their family tree, I had to look for obituaries by last name and assumed town where they were interred and where the obituary list the names of the children. Alternatively, if it was a relatively uncommon name, I could just look for gravesites with the right name and age of the parents in surrounding towns.

 

Helpful Assumptions

While the above challenges made this a harder task, it was also helped by a few things:

·       The students in my class were nearly all born in 1948. The cutoff for grade assignment back then was the end of December. So those born in late 1947 would typically have been eligible for the prior grade. However, then as now, some students would be held back from time-to-time – either by repeating a grade, of possibly (but unlikely) by skipping one. So, entering a birth year of 1948 would be nearly always right.

·       Nearly all our parents would have been born in 1920(+/- 10), making them 18-38 in age at the time we entered the world. So, when looking at gravestones I could restrict it to people with a birth year of 1910-1930.

·       Both moving around the country and divorce and subsequent re-marriage were not nearly as prevalent in our parents’ generation as they are today. Thus, if you know the student’s surname, you will quite often find the parents staying in the same part of the country and eventually dying there with the same surname.

 

Methodology

As I note above, by taking the list of names in the junior class of 1965 and adding individuals I could remember who were not listed, I had 157 names. I also supplied the missing first names from memory. I then started using Google to try and find and obituary for someone with the right surname where the first name of the student was included, confining myself to the towns around Wolcott. I also used findagrave.com to try and locate individuals with that surname who were born in 1920 +/1 10.

I quickly found that I was coming up totally empty on many of my classmates using the above. But given the rate at which I was successful, I decided to see if I could find 100 of my classmates and their parents. This would make it relatively easy to see if I could go farther. I decided to aim for finding a total of 100 of my classmates to get a representative number. I built a tree of many subtrees (one for each family) to store the results and I kept a spreadsheet of the categorization, etc. As I built back each tree, I used both ancestry’s hint system as well as looking at actual census records, marriage records, etc.

In the end it took me the better part of a week to get the results for 100 of my classmates.

 

A Few Comments on Demographics

When I did a similar project looking for common ancestors between myself and individuals in our church here in PA, I found that nearly two-thirds of the people were distant cousins of myself. But the population of our church is very much descended from the initial German ancestors in the area who settled here in the early 1700s. And with nearly 300 years of intermarriage with those in the area, there were many instances of families who had roots in some of the immediate surrounding areas (Luzerne County, New Jersey, Maryland) where there were many of English extraction from those early years of the country. This meant that many people had a family line that could be traced back to the colonial English.

One might have expected that because I was looking at a population of individuals in Connecticut, which was settled initially by those who came from England during the Great Migration (1630-1640), that I would find a great percentage of those were related to me. But while the population of the area may have been somewhat homogeneous initially, there has been a lot of more recent immigration that impacted my results.

In particular, the population of Wolcott, being settled primarily by individuals from the cities to the south of it (Waterbury) and the north of it (Bristol). Thus, while the population of Wolcott was increasing dramatically during the period immediately following WWII, it tended to mirror the recent immigration into those two cities.

The countries involved in immigration into Waterbury at the time were Italy, and to a slightly lesser extent, Ireland. In contrast, the immigration via Bristol was highly French Canadian (most commonly through Quebec, and to a lesser extent through the maritime provinces that border Maine. This phenomenon of demographic “clumping” can still be seen today in places like Minneapolis which has a high percentage of individuals from Somalia, or Miami which has many from Cuba.

 

Results

Here are some results of my tracing the ancestry of those 100 classmates:

·       51 Female, 49 Male (a pretty good split)

·       37 are cousins of mine, 63 are not

·       4 of the 37 cousins have passed away (11%), but 12 of the 63 non-cousins have passed away (19%). [Does this mean that being a cousin of mine gives you a longer life?]

·       Of the non-cousin, 21 have Italian heritage, 17 have French-Canadian heritage, 12 have Irish heritage (note that several have a mixed heritage). Other origins of note include Poland, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Lithuania, and Syria.

·       The individual with the most complicated family tree has ancestors from French-Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, and England!

·       Of the cousins, the degree of cousin-ness is 6^th (1), 7^th (4), 8^th (4), 9^th (6), 10^th (13), 11^th (7), and 12^th (2). Up through 10^th cousin is generally a common ancestor in the US (most often the Massachusetts Bay Colony), and a higher degree of cousin-ness generally means a connection back in England pre-1630.

Some other interesting observations

·       Except for a single individual who had a mixed heritage of Italian with some Filipino, there were NO instances of anyone with Asian heritage.

·       There was only a single individual who was African-American. She didn’t actually even live in Wolcott, but her parents, who lived in Waterbury, paid her tuition so she could come to WHS. So, just like Shawn Moore, the only Black in town when we were in 8^th grade (see above picture), she was very much “different” but it never bothered any of our classmates.

·       There was one other individual from Waterbury whose parents paid his tuition to come to WHS.

 

Future Projects

Managing to built skeletal ancestral trees for 100 of my classmates from the WHS class of 1966 has been quite challenging. But, in one sense this is only a partial result. I’d like to do some more work on the remaining 57 in my spreadsheet. Some of these (13) I have contact with through social media, so I’ll probably start with them. And, when I can locate my copy of my senior yearbook, I’d like to identify the remaining few individuals who I could not remember (should be perhaps five of them). So, I have more work to do, but I’m not going to give myself a timeline for completing it – if it’s even possible to do so.

Church Cousins

(updated as of 21 October 2021)

Having identified the fact that about 95% of the members of our church (Bethel Bible Fellowship Church in Emmaus, PA) were connected to each other in a giant web of family connections (see https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bethel-web.html), I began turning to finding out how many of these individuals were connected to me (or my wife). But where our church is primarily individuals of German extraction, how would they connect to me as I have zero German blood flowing through my veins. But the answer is fairly simple, I can trace my ancestry to hundreds of individuals who came to America in the early 1600s. So, all I had to do is find a connection of one of the German ancestors of someone in church where they married someone of English extraction. This turned out to be more common than I would have expected.

 As an example, one of the people from church had an ancestor who lived not too far north of here, close to Luzerne County, PA. But Luzerne County was initially settled by folks from Connecticut. And a hundred or so years ago, a strapping young lad of a German family fell in love with a lovely English young maiden and married her, thus passing along through their children some of that English blood into what otherwise was a German family.

 Thus far, I have been able to document a cousin connection to nearly 2/3 of the people in our church. I have chosen to list them alphabetically by their current last name, i.e., married name for the women. For each I have listed the degree of connection using the code “8C” for 8^th cousin or 9C2x for 9^th cousin, twice removed. If the relationship is to my wife instead of to me, then I will append a “D”, e.g., 9C2xD. If the relationship is to both of us through a shared ancestor of both myself and my wife, then I will append an “*”, e.g., 12C*.

 

·        Atkins, Phil – 11C1x (plus multiple ways to Donna)

·        Behnke, Alan – 12C*

·        Behnke, Libby – 9C1xD

·        Benjamin, Mark – 10C2x

·        Benjamin, Sue – 9C1x*

·        Bishop, Laura – 9C1x

·        Blackman, Leon – 13C, 11C1xD

·        Boyle, Dianne – 10C/11C* (several ways)

·        Boyle, Gerry – 11C1x, 9C1xD

·        Bray, Bryan – 10CD

·        Breish, Joe – 13C1x

·        Brensinger, Sue – 11C* (Mayflower ancestor)

·       Burkholder, Jared – 10C

·        Capri, Mike – 13C1x

·       Cole, David – 9C2x

·       Collins, Katie – 9C2x (2 ways)

·       Coogan, Carol – 9C1x*

·       Davies, Bob – 8C1x

·        DeLong, Karen – 12C2x

·        DeLong, Lisa – 11C3x

·       Diehl, Kevin – 10C

·       Duncan, Jay – 11C, 9C1xD

·       Ebner, Barb – 11C

·       Edwards, Lorie – 10C1x

·        Engle, Dave – 11C

·       Engle, Jerry – 13C2x, 12CD

·       Engle, Sandy – 10C (2 ways), 13CD

·        Fitting, David – 11C

·        Fox, Wendy – 13C2x, 12CD

·        Frederick, Janet – 11C1x

·       Freeman, Paul, 10C2x, 10CD

·       Gavin, Aaron – 8C1x

·       Gavin, Ruth [Schoonover] – 9C2x (6 ways!)

·        Goff, George – 9C2x*

·       Gray, Mike – 13C

·       Gross, Shannon – 11C1x

·        Harley, Alvin and Kenny – 11C1x

·       Harrison, Ed – 10C1x

·       Heater, Linda – 11C*

·        Heckman, Gail – 10C

·       Hilbert, Nancy – 9C3x

·        Hodge, Phil – 13C2xD

·        Hoffner, Chris – 10C2xD

·        Hottenstein, Jane – 11C1x*

·       Howells, Rick – 11C1x

·        Huebner, John – 10C1x*

·        Jarratt, Nick – 10C2x

·        Karch, Gary – 12C1x

·       Kauffman, Becky [Fritz] – 10C1x

·       Kauffman, Rich – 11C, 11CD

·       Kauffman, Wanda – 10CD

·       Keiser, Marvin – 14C1x

·       Kohler, Gretchen – 11C

·       Kuhns, Annette – 13C

·        Kuhns, Liz – 9C2x

·        Labrie, Lou – 9C1x

·        LaFerney, Torey – 11C4x, 12C2xD

·        Lavalva, Susan – 9C2x

·        Lavoie, Shelley – 12C2xD

·       Lowmaster, Jeff – 10C1x, 10C2xD (3 ways)

·        Marks, Diane – 10C1x

·       Martrich, Bob – 9C1x (plus 4 other ways)

·        Mazza, Janet – 10C1x

·        Mehl, Linda – 12C

·       Merrick, Stephen – 10C1x

·       Mertus, Nancy – 10C, 9CD

·       Metz, Margaret – 9C1x*

·       Morrison, Phil – 10C1x

·       Nonnemacher, Holly [Newell] – 10C1x

·       Parker, Brian – 10C1x*

·       Paulsen, Joy, 8C/9C/10C (24+ ways!), 9CD

·       Perrin, Judy – 7C3x

·       Plarr, Barry – 12C

·       Plate, Mimi – 9C2x, 11C1x

·       Pritts, Jane – 12C1xD

·       Reichard, Linda – 8C/9C/10C (at least 8 ways)

·       Renzi, Anne – 10C2x

·       Reynolds, Jon – 9C1x

·       Rigdon, Laura – 9C3x (several ways)

·        Roth, Betty – 12C3xD

·        Roth, Lynn – 10C2xD

·       Roth, Maggie [Campbell] – 11C1xD

·        Roth, Sharon – 12C1x

·        Schenkel, Patti – 10C2x*

·        Schlonecker, Dave – 12C2x

·        Schoen, Dave – 10C2x, 11CD

·       Schultz, Barb, 8C1x

·       Scott, Steve – 13C*

·        Seibert, Linda – 11C2x

·        Sell, Dolores – 10C*

·        Shoemaker, Marlene – 10C*

·        Smith, David – 10C3x

·        Smith, Faith – 9C

·        Smith, Heidi – 9C1x

·        Smith, Leonard and Lyle – 10C1x*

·       Smith, Paul – 11C3x

·        Sorrick, Fred – 10C

·       Sorrick, Wilma – 8C1x

·        Stout, Cathy – 11C

·        Sulzer, Barb – 9C2x*

·       Tarver, Johnawane – 9C1x

·        Weiss, Jim – 8C2x

·        Weller, Dana – 9C1xD

·       Wengryn, Kathy – 12C*

·       Wilson, Scott – 9C1x

·       Williams, Sue – 10C

·       Wimble, Cathy – 9C1x

·        Wood, Krystle – 11C*

·       Zacharda, Richard – 12C

Give Back to Indigenous People?

Depending on where you live (and perhaps your political persuasion), earlier this month we celebrated Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day. While there are many aspects and controversies related to the current “cancel culture” of wanting to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus and renaming the holiday, I’d like to confine my comments here to just one aspect of the discussion – that of giving back the land to the “Indigenous People” who lived in North America before the arrival of the Europeans. You can read more about this in (1).

 [A few caveats – first, since there are so many different tribes of indigenous people and so many different areas they lived in, many of the statements below are necessarily generalizations. I will try to make these clear as I explore the different aspects, but space and available research time means that I cannot address all the various situations. Secondly, I am trying to use the current vernacular by using such words as “indigenous people” and “tribes”, but I recognize that there are still many who use other words. Even in (2), where two of the three authors are enrolled citizens of one of these “nations”, they use the term “American Indians and Alaska Natives”.]

 

Tribal Boundaries

North America is a very large area of land – roughly 9.5 million square miles. There are a number of different maps that attempt to show how this land was divided up among the various tribes prior to the arrival of the Europeans. One such map recently being shared is the following which is circulating on social media.

[Map of Tribes]

 

However, this map is way too simplistic in a couple of ways. For one, it shows the boundaries between tribes as clear lines of demarcation. While not the later rectangular shapes of the US states, there were no such clear boundaries. Secondly, it uses a common color for tribes that may have something in common – perhaps a similarity in language. But many of these tribes, despite having a similar language, frequently warred among each other. So, this use of a common color and without tribal boundaries would be like eliminating the border between Canada and the US, but putting borders around the province of Quebec.

Here is another attempt at such a map that may be found as part of (2) below.

[Map 2 of Tribes]

 

As you can see in this example, there are many more colors, boundaries often overlap, and it gives some idea of the complexity of the interrelationships between the various tribal entities.

On a smaller scale, here is a map of the tribal areas of the various tribes in the state of Connecticut from around 1625 (3). As you can see, there were 19 tribal areas just in this one small state.

[Map of CT Tribes]

 

But even this map is quite contrived (the key is the straight lines forming tribal boundaries). As you can see in a comparison of the two snips below, the area labeled as “Tunxis” purportedly from 1625 is actually the boundary of the early Connecticut town of Farmington (shown here in a 1766 map). But Farmington was not founded until two decades after the alleged 1625 Tunxis boundaries. And a closer examination reveals that the 1625 map was not produced until 1930. So, we really don’t know what the boundaries were in 1625.

[Map of Farmington] [Map of Tunxis Tribe]

 

Population Density

What is not shown on these types of maps is the population density. For an example of that, I’d like to just look again at one tribe, the Tunxis tribe in CT which occupied the area including the town I grew up in – Wolcott, CT. This tribal area is the roughly square area on the above CT map in the center-left. This area is about 20x20 miles or 400 square miles. But the number of members of the tribe in 1640 (the first estimate that was made) was about 100-150 members. It may have been somewhat larger previously, but not likely more than a few hundred individuals (4, 5). But even an optimistic estimate of 400 tribal members would have been only one individual per square mile. This needs to be taken into account as we’ll see below.

Also, the population density was not uniform over the entire area occupied by a tribe. Since the main source of food would be through hunting (small game on the east coast and larger animals such a bison in the middle of the continent), the tribe may have occupied just a few acres and the rest of the area attributed to them would be reserved for these hunting areas. Some tribes would have had a relatively stable area where they made their homes, but others were more nomadic and moved frequently for reasons such as not wanting to over-hunt/fish a particular area, or because the herds that were the source of their food also moved about.

 

Tribal Attrition Through Diseases

Articles about the impact on Indigenous People through the arrival of Europeans often mention the introduction of diseases that wiped out large numbers of these peoples. However, this oversimplification ignores two important aspects.

First, as (6) points out, North America was not a pristine, disease-free environment. Diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis, pertussis, and polio were already prevalent. It was true that many new, much more epidemic diseases such as bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, malaria, and others were not present so that the natives had no acquired immunity to these diseases. Smallpox was a particularly virulent disease.

Secondly, because the Europeans often had acquired immunity, they were not aware that their arrival would be introducing these new diseases. The “germ theory” of diseases was not introduced until several centuries later (7) by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and others. In the story of the Pilgrims (8), we see that some disease was inadvertently introduced by fisherman and traders into Maine where it swept down the east coast in Massachusetts. Thus, when the Wampanoag man, Tisquantum (also known as Squanto) had been kidnapped in 1614 and who then returned in 1619, he found his entire tribe had been wiped out.

However, this introduction of new diseases was primarily inadvertent. Except for a single instance in 1763 (9), the impact of diseases was not used as a method to help “conquer” the indigenous people, and even in that instance, there is no clear evidence that it was successful.

However, even before the arrival of the Europeans, diseases had an impact on individuals in North America just as they did in other parts of the world. But the arrival of the Europeans did result in a “spike” of various diseases, even if inadvertent. However, I do not believe that this cause should be included in the current discussion about “give back”.

 

Concept of Land “Ownership”

As I had noted in a prior blog (4), the Indigenous People generally did not have the same concept of “land ownership” as did the Europeans. Land was owned by the tribe as a whole and not by individuals/families. Thus, in those instances where a tribe “sold” land to a group of European settlers, they often viewed the transaction as simply allowing their new European “neighbors” to jointly hunt in these same extended lands and their original rights to hunt on these lands were retained. Some tribes “sold” their land multiple times.

 

Conquest or War between groups

It is true that there were many instances of outright war between the Europeans and the Indigenous Tribes. Since the Europeans often had the advantages of both numbers and more advanced weapons, they were usually victorious. But those advocating for the land to be given back to those who were conquered/ousted, ignore the fact that inter-tribal wars had been going on long before the arrival of the Europeans.

This leads to an interesting philosophical question. If a large tract of land belonged to tribe “A” in the distant past, but tribe “A” died out or moved on to another hunting ground and the land was subsequently taken over by tribe “B”, then tribe “B” was conquered by tribe “C” who went to war with the Europeans who killed many of them and took over the land, then who should the land be given back to? While tribe “C” had it taken away from them, does it rightfully belong to tribe “B” or even tribe “A”?

 

Other Issues

Besides infectious diseases and conquest through wars, there were other ways that some tribes were impacted.

One was through relocation. Some of these relocations were forced upon the tribe by the Europeans (such as the “Trail of Tears” (10) which took place in the 1830s). But others made the decision to move on their own, including the Tunxis tribe from CT (5) who moved west to NY in 1774.

Some other tribes became smaller and sold their lands for other reasons. As the Europeans introduced new crops and farming methods, the local tribes sometimes adopted these same methods for growing food and relied less upon hunting. Thus, they needed less land to support the same number of tribal members.

Finally, some tribal members made the decision to adopt the Christian religion of the Europeans and became more integrated into the local communities. Since this may have also included adoption of the type of dress and living situations, some even, over time, identified themselves less as Indigenous People and more like the Europeans.

 

Casinos

Some tribes have gotten other concessions such as being allowed to have exclusive casino licenses (30 states now have “Indian” casinos with a total revenue of over $33 Billion in 2018 (11)). After paying taxes, etc. these casinos return substantial sums to their tribal members (in addition to giving opportunities for employment). Two of the three largest casinos are in my home state of CT (Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun). These support the government of the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes respectively.

I have a nephew and two nieces who are members of the Odawa tribe (12). Their casino generated over $40 million in revenue last year. The profit from this casino is used to help support the roughly 15,000 Odawa tribal members. They also work together with the local, county, and state governments to improve the part of Michigan they jointly oversee.

 

Moving Forward or Giving Back

At any rate, because of the number of different factors, including those mentioned above, it is difficult to lump all Indigenous Peoples together and to propose simple solutions such as “giving back” the land. It is a complicated situation and may require complicated and creative solutions. But simply ignoring this part of our history and ignoring the consequences of some of the decisions that have been made in the past is not the right solution.

 

References:

(1)   https://getpocket.com/explore/item/indigenous-peoples-day-comes-amid-a-reckoning-over-colonialism-and-calls-for-return-of-native-land

(2)   https://getpocket.com/explore/item/land-acknowledgments-meant-to-honor-indigenous-people-too-often-do-the-opposite-erasing-american

(3)   https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/outsidetheneatline/2009/08/10/map-of-the-week-connecticut-tribes-circa-1625/

(4)   https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/07/wolcott-history-indians.html

(5)   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunxis

(6)   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659/

(7)   https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/germ-theory-of-disease

(8)   https://wvia.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/americanexperience27p-soc-plague/wgbh-americanexperience-the-pilgrims-european-plague-in-native-new-england-1616-1619/

(9)   https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets

(10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

(11) https://www.500nations.com/Indian_Casinos.asp

(12) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odawa