Smokingboot

Strange dream last night.

Based on yesterday's tarot musings I guess, I dreamed I was looking at two fortune tellers stalls. One was giving ordinary readings and one did a kind of reading I have never seen before; she would see things based on old rusty metal, swords, things like that. She pulled out something like a trowel and started reading the dents and scars it bore. Under her hands I saw a paper inscribed with the word 'Bannockburn'. She then hinted that I was unhappy about something, but I saw no reason to say yay or no to that, and waited for something less like fishing and more direct.

I have not yet looked for any of my ancestors in terms of connections with Bannockburn, though after last night's dream I started a quick fish and there may well be something interesting. This, however, would be proper ironed out check-the-paperwork genealogy, so it will have to wait. This time last year I found some well researched and fascinating family history regarding ancestors in Salem plus connections to the witch trials, which felt like a magnificent Halloween gift (thank you always, Jesse). This year I will remember to drink a toast to those ancestors, to Jesse himself, and to my Grand Uncle John, whose fate in WWII we also discovered.

And this year too, I may have found a little Halloween gift, though right now I can't guarantee that it is solid at all, given its age. Still, I am just going to enjoy it for the absolute cracker that it is, redolent with grand story.

As far as I can work out given Scottish records, my tenth great-grandmother was called Elspett Buchanane. Because my usual approach to this kind of work is to take one strand and pull on it until there's nothing left, I did not pay much attention, trying to follow the MacLachlan line as far back as I could go. I noted that the name resonated with me, that I had dreamed it or heard of it a long time ago, though in my head sat a more modern spelling, Elspeth Buchanan. Maybe someone mentioned it to me way back. I found a father for Elspett, Robert Buchanan, and there the track ran out or I did.

It reopened out for me with new information about Robert Buchanane's father, supposedly Williame 1590. I never found him because the extra 'e' on Buchanan is bad enough, an extra 'e' on William is something I would never have expected. Being realistic for a moment, these dates need much more rigorous examination - I can see some difficulties already - and there I leave all qualification and misgiving in favour of the story, at least for today . Williame's lineage brings me a family line that can be traced right right back through the lairds of Buchanan to the High Kings of Ireland, beginning with Feradach Finnfechtnach Fearadhach, born around 0007 AD died, around 36 years later. And yes, we have entered Legend land.

His father, Crimthann Nia Náir was married to Bainé, daughter of the King of Alba [...] it was said that he went on a voyage with his aunt Nár, "a fairy woman, for a month and a fortnight, and returned with treasures including a gilded chariot, a golden fidchell board, a gold-embroidered cloak, a sword inlaid with gold serpents, a silver-embossed shield, a spear and a sling which never missed their mark, and two greyhounds with a silver chain between them."

Who can resist a fairy tale like that?

His son,Feradach Finnfechtnach, was according to medieval Irish legend and historical tradition, a High King of Ireland. Fearadach Fionnfeachtnach (sometimes called Fioraidhack) is given place number 102 in John O'Hart's list of the monarchs of Ireland, following the line of Heber.

He was given the epithet "feachtnach" by Moran (who was a Brehon or lawyer) for his truthfulness and sincerity. In the Annuls of the Four Masters we read "The first year of Fearadhach Finnfeachtnach as king over Ireland; good was Ireland during his time. The seasons were right tranquil. The earth brought forth its fruit; fishful its river mouths; milkful the kine; heavy headed the woods."

Again, from the Annuls of the Four Masters - in the Age of Christ, 36; Fearadhach Finnfeachtnach, son of Crimhthann Niadhnair, after having spent twenty two years in the sovereignty of Ireland, died at Teamhair. He had died a natural death at Teamhair or Liathdroim, both ancient names for the royal residence Ráith na Rí, the Hill of Tara, Knowth

I am aware of the idiosyncracies of Wikitree and Geni and realise that this line, which is the bread, butter, and honey of bards forever, is based on tales of a time unprovable via dates debatable. Still, as it makes me a descendent of Conn Cétchathach, He of the Hundred Battles, and Cormac Long-Beard, plus a whole host of semi-mythological Milesian heroes, only the unreasonable could expect me to be sensible about it. No, let my head spin with harps, druids, cattle raids and magics, fairy ancestors, voyages to Tir Nan Og and great battles no ordinary warrior could win! I need a new subject to write about, could this be it? I suspect not; for all my swooning enthusiasm, this has all been done before, well and badly.

Still, for today, let wisdom and research hold back a while and let me dream!

I managed to find out a little about my Grand-Uncle. As seems inevitable when it comes to his generation, it's the war of course. Here he is:



Of his service, we know little as yet. The only story we had was about his death, a vague rumour that he was shot trying to leave a POW camp in Italy 1944, but that doesn't add up because the Italian armistice was in 1943. Yesterday the mystery was solved.

War office records place him at Fontanelatto (PG49), where it was demonstrated once again why, if we must ever give account of the glories of European cultures to stern aliens, we may all have to point to Italy. There were many worse places to wait out the war than Fontanelatto. The prisoners were treated well, wine was served with lunch, and each inmate got a ration of Vermouth a day, plus the locals seemed to have been very kind. Prisoners might have faced worse at home.

News of the armistice reached PG49 on the 8th September 1943. Next day they walked past an Italian guard of honour to a hole cut in the wire by order of the camp commandant. Time came when that gentleman paid for his gallantry with hard labour in a German concentration camp, but on that day the prisoners were free.

It wasn't that straightforward however, courtesy of British Intelligence. Earlier that year, M19 had issued Order P/W 87190, requiring all allied prisoners in Italy (about 80,000 in number)to stay where they were in the event of the allies taking Italy. This did not play out well. Following orders meant that after the armistice, something like 50,000 prisoners were immediately recaptured by the Germans and shipped to camps in Germany and Poland, where many died. Of the disobedient, it's estimated that about 5000 went north through the Alps to Switzerland, between 6000 and 7000 went south to try to join up with the advancing allied line, leaving a considerable number unaccounted for. And here we find Grand-Uncle John, unheard of until a report pops up in the Belfast Telegraph, Thursday March 29th 1945; It's a PDF, [edited to add] which I couldn't link to or copy, annoying because I want a record of this somewhere that doesn't rely on my cranky old laptop. But eventually



Five columns from the left, below BELFAST TEACHER RETIRES and flanked by a daffodil sale, there he is; ULSTERMAN GIVEN PUBLIC FUNERAL BY ITALIAN VILLAGE.

Fought alongside the partisans against the Germans, died after a battle, given a public funeral, buried at Bedonia cemetary. Right name, right parentage, right rank, right branch, and now I have it confirmed, right address of his father. He was re-interred and even now his body lies among the rows of Commonwealth graves alongside so many whose stories have been lost. But a part of me wonders if he would have preferred to stay where he was, honoured by those who saw his last days and seem to have cherished him. I wonder how the brutish Thomas Alexander Harrison, himself a soldier, felt about his eldest son treated better in a far-off land than in his father's house. Doesn't matter. If I find out more about John's battles I'll record them here and tell the family. But for now, here ends the tale of the boy whose mother ran away, whose father threw him in the workhouse. Some part of me cried that he couldn't have lived to be happy and old; but there are worse fates to face than dying surrounded by people who love and respect you, who see the heroism in you not for an accident of birth, but for what you do, what you lay down your life for.

Rest In Peace Grand Uncle John.

Friends up at the weekend, snow and icy winds on the Cnoc, cue yorkshire puds and lamb, red wine and too much chocolate. All good, very good.

My MIL writes to complain about another holiday being cancelled. She remarks, 'what a mess the world is in.' Well, we've got people in this country who are angry at the RNLI for saving lives at sea (not cool if they are immigrants apparently; some think we should let them drown) we've got the most corrupt government arguably since 1215, there's looming choice between food and fuel for millions of Brits this Christmas, there's global warming, there's the mass extinction event, there's China closing in on Taiwan and Russia on the borders of Ukraine, there's refugees fleeing everywhere, and lest we forget, yer actual Covid. But hey, holiday gone, and now suddenly the mess of the world is worth remarking upon.

She's a good woman and a fine mother. But by god, she and her husband live in a pretty little bubble of Boomer, and long years have stretched between them and the concept of not getting their way. This was the couple annoyed when the Australian desert let them down by flowering. It is a very rare event but they were not impressed. 'That's all very well,' she said, 'but we wanted to see the desert.' There you go Oz, must try harder.

Anyway, that's my harsh given a little airing. Is it enough? Almost. At the weekend one of our guests lent me a book called The Righteous Mind, why good people disagree on religion and politics I am suspicious because while he's a warm excellent guy, he's also a Tory, and has something of a bee in his bonnet about people claiming moral superiority. One might argue that as a Conservative voter, he might well have regular occasion to be irritated by this, that one way out might be to stop voting for venal mendacious incompetent charlatans, but as my guest and someone I want to see happy, it would be quite wrong for me to say so. I'll read the book if I can get past its initial dryness.

It's not easy though, after the engagement of Salem Possessed . This goes into the socio-economic issues around the Salem witch trials, and our newly discovered ancestors turn up in a couple of chapters, one of them coming across as some kind of Medici in a sugarloaf hat. The book's good but old, published in the 70s and absent in details. I probably could use more recent research.

When I say I could use, it's very unlikely to be useful at all. I don't intend to write about Salem, it's been done to bits, and everybody wants the witchcraft. Looking at the background of Tituba, it's perfectly possible that she picked up knowledge of Barbados folk magic along with whatever she recalled of Arawak customs. Bet that was a pretty heady brew, all mixed up with Christian European traditions. She was a dramatic teller of supernatural tales with good reason; confession escaped the noose far more adroitly than innocence. Later she admitted to making it all up, and being beaten /coached by her owner, Samuel Parris. But that might have been as much of a fiction as anything else. All we can really be sure of is that having been accused, Tituba said what she needed to say, convinced those who wanted to be convinced, and survived.

But all that's a different aspect of the story. One thing seems evident; if you want witch hunters, look for those frustrated about money and prospects. They don't need to be abjectly poor, but they do need to have less than they consider their entitlement. Resentment works the charm better than ignorance though the latter certainly helps, at least among the audience.

That right there is probably a good starting point for the Brexit bubble. I suspect it is of more use than a social psychologist writing about how a selfish human chimp can, via a 'hive switch' become a "groupish" human "bee". But we shall see.

I thought our Porter ancestors had departed Salem before the rubbish started. Turns out I was entirely wrong.

There was Salem Town on the coast and Salem village a few miles inland. Salem town had growing industries, fur, timber, fishing. Salem Village seems to have been almost entirely agrarian, a subsidiary of the town; in the area two families flourished greatly though they appear to have taken to each other like Jets and Sharks. The Putnams were Puritan farmers, conservative, austere, the largest family around Salem village. The Porters had agrarian interests too, but they were more mercantile, more international in outlook. They began trading across New England and in the Caribbean (I haven't seen any connections to the slave trade yet, but I'll keep looking) and they grew to be the richest family in Salem Town.

Not that they weren't cheeky. In 1672, a Porter dam and sawmill flooded some of the Putnam farms. A lawsuit ensued though I don't know who won it. Years later a petition for political independence for Salem village was put forward to the town by the Putnams. The Porters opposed it. Then came the Reverend Samuel Parris in 1689, and things officially got weird.

Better profiling of Samuel Parris can easily be found elsewhere; what I gather from my momentary researches is that the same characteristics that made him appeal to traditionalists made him singularly unable to cope with the fractious politics of Salem. His rigid orthodoxy did not go down well in the ever more relaxed and secular town, but the village gave him support including that of the Putnams. They voted to give him a parsonage, a barn, some land, pay him a salary, bring him firewood... These were not universally popular decisions. In late 1691 a faction of Parris-Putnam supporters were ousted from the village committee, replaced by Porter allies who voted down a tax to pay Parris' salary. The details seem like a Handforth parish council meeting on steroids. Did he own the parsonage and lands outright or were they his only for as long as he remained minister? He thought one, they thought the other, I don't know and can only handle so much of the minutiae. Let us just say that the environment was febrile, steaming with umbrage. And the very next year in his own household, the craziness began.

Parris' 9 year old daughter Elizabeth, her 11 year old cousin Abigail, their 12 year old friend Ann Putnam, and the Parris family slave Tituba appear to have been experimenting with fortune telling. It looks as though they were found out by the reverend himself, and suddenly the fits began, the convulsions, the haunting apparitions that tormented them... The local doctor pronounced them to be 'under an evil hand.' Then came the accusations, principle among the accusers Ann and Thomas Putnam, close friends to the reverend, and parents of Ann Putnam.

I am not going to go over the details of the trials, for all they are the most dramatic part of the story. It's told better elsewhere, and all too absurd and horrible for my Sunday morning. Though the accused varied greatly, they had a couple of things in common; some were not traditional insiders, others were associated in some way with the Porters, who tried to rally resistance only to find that 19 of the family's allies including a son-in-law had been accused of witchcraft.

The Porters were loudly sceptical. Israel Porter signed the petition defending poor old Rebecca Nurse; John and Lydia Porter took the witness stand to speak against 'Goody Bibber' who accused one Sarah Widdes of bewitching her. One of the most vehement, and proof that not every Putnam was a mentalist, was Joseph Putnam, husband to Elizabeth Porter, Israel's daughter (bet that was the wedding of the year!) He spoke to his sister-in-law Ann Putnam thus: "If you dare to touch with your foul lies anyone belonging to my household, you shall answer for it." This Puritanese for touch my peeps and I will end you was fine and fierce, but Joseph was reputed to keep horses saddled at all times in case accusations made flight necessary. And yet, it comes as no surprise that no accusations were levied at him or his. Sometimes even devils can be discreet.

I know it's easier when you have money and influence, but it pleases me that these long lost relatives stood against such shameful rubbish. It doesn't change anything real or now, but I've always hated witch hunters in all their forms. I am pleased that in the depths of family, where many wrongs doubtless lie because that's the way of humans, some stood against such ridiculous sh*te, even when it was very dangerous to do so. Good for you, old fam, I'm right proud of you X

I always assumed that our American connections began out of 18th/ 19th century immigration, spurred by the desperate realities of these islands at the time; destitution facing the post-clearance Scots, famine in Ireland. Pursuit of my paternal line reveals something entirely different, another time another motive. Turns out YDNA and a well kept line of descendants in a US family indicate a close match to an ancestor in England in Elizabeth's time, whose son became part of the puritan migration out of Dorset; said son moved to the new world where he made a life and a family for himself, and had his own son in 1637...

In Salem.

Looks like we left before things got hairy, an instinct that seems to have deserted us in later generations. It's strange to think of my hard-drinking, womanising, fighting, devotedly Roman Catholic father being born from a line of Massachusetts puritans who made their first American home in Witchcraft Central. But real stories are never well behaved.

We have yet to establish which branch of the family we belong to, a pursuit that is going to require a lot of tact and research skill. And I have real work to do as well as lots of exercise to shake off all the hospitality/party based goodies of the past fortnight.

Still, as a Samhain present from the ancestors, this one's a doozy.