While her nuclear family was in a small town cemetery (the same one President Obamas's maternal grandmother is in--a worthless nugget of information that has stuck with me since it seems such a strange coincidence), the rest of her family was in three other Cemeteries in places of considerable isolation. Two were old pastures, and well kept but without tree or bench, one was larger and rambling and full of ancient trees and strangely created family plots and roses and bushes and perennial flowers placed there by families, but also well tended.
In one of the pastures, there were tiny, little sugared stones that said merely a last name or "baby" and one of these was near my grandmother's mothers family. My grandmother would always tell me about the family traveling through to the west and losing a newborn while by them--1870-1880, no date and before her time, so she was passing the stories told to her. She had some good ones, before TV, people told a lot of stories.
Then, during the 3 hour trip back home, I would either annoy the crap out of my parents about those babies or ponder and daydream about people moving across the country and having to bury someone, a baby no less, on their trip. I learned that babies were frequently not even named for months, and that some people would recycle the same name repeatedly till one lived long enough to warrant not using the name again. I learned that a lot of people died on those trips from old home to new home and some were buried not in the small cemeteries of what are now ghost towns but in places that no one could ever find again, frequently with no more marker than a pile of rocks or a cross of two branches. The babies in our cemeteries at least had markers made of limestone that the locals made after the migrating people had left.
But why did they migrate? Why leave your extended family, your childhood home, to travel into a place you have never been, have only heard about and where you can only take small amounts of your belongings. And probably not go back for visits---ever?
Were they poor? Had they lost everything? Had they reached the peak of their success and were still disturbingly poor and hopeless? Did they have a loved one that had health issues that supposedly were not as big a problem where they were going? Were they adventurers? Were they chasing a gold nugget, free land, a vague job offer? Rumors of places so rich the streets were paved in gold, so beautiful it was like living in Eden, so fertile that food practically fell in your lap? Or were they escaping a place changed by a war, by a corrupt local politician, their own reputations after having been a less than charming youth.
Some of them had only been in this country from Europe a short while when they heard of places with cheap land; sometimes whole groups from their homeland would go start a small community that ended up looking and sounding much like the place far away they had left. Sometimes they were prompted to move on by finding the new home even less welcoming than the one they had just left.
The first migrants to this land mostly arrived from Asia, probably via the Bering Strait more than 13,000 years ago but as much as 50,000 years ago. Those migrants were here long enough to be genetically different than those people that did not make that journey.
Their were some isolated tourists in the intervening years, Vikings, Pacific Islanders, maybe even some Phoenicians or Egyptians. Not planned visitors but people that travelled by sea and accidently ended up here either permanently or temporarily. But there were no actual planned migrations till after 1492.
The next wave of migration was from Europe and Africa, Europeans, on purpose (1609-1775) and West Coast Africans against their will (1492-1808 legally but till 1858 under cover of night). This first wave of migration peaked before the American Revolution. It brought to this continent colonizers mostly from England and Germany (which was not yet Germany but a group of Germanic language speakers from places that later became Germany--like Hessians of "SleepyHollow (the movie)" fame and the Palatines of William Penn's planning for great productive farmers, but also France, Holland and assorted others in much smaller numbers. It also brought unplanned migrators that came for the gold, adventure, glory, fur, and other natural resources and left behind their DNA and other marks. And people from the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast that had the misfortune of being captured by traffickers after their own profits.
The third wave from Europe came later and lasted through the mid-nineteenth century and brought mostly Irish (due to the Irish Potato Famine) and Germans due to Industrial revolution effects on rural people. (and by this time, it might have been "Germany" as it became a unified nation between 1860 and 1870.)
The fourth wave came between 1870 and 1920 and this is the Ellis Island Group. It mostly came from Asia, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe.
In 1965 we passed a law abolishing quotas by country. At that point people from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean Islands started migrating in, as well as other people from countries that had previously had complete blocks against or very small quotas for.
Right now, a thing we were warned about in the mid-sixties, has come to pass. Our birthrate, "our" being those of us whose ancestors came here before this country was a country to those that entered before WWII are not reproducing at a rate to maintain the population. Our current population growth is from immigrants.
When thinking tribally, this is horrifying.
When thinking from a reality basis, this is not a problem. Ancestry.com indicates that my two children and I share DNA with craploads of people that are also here so it's not going to be a genocide in the USA.
Of course, that was not what has this in the news. Another word for tribalism is--racism. In this case White Nationalism, and that is the group most worried about not being the majority by enough points, especially since white covers Hispanic and Muslims and Jews--who the white nationalists do NOT consider white.
In 1491, these two continents were 100% Native American. There were a lot of tribes, but the amount of non-native DNA was so miniscule as to be nonexistent.
Today, less than 1% of this country's population is Native American. White non-Hispanic is 61% (and includes people that are not of European ancestry), Hispanic is 18%, African-American is 12%, Asian is 5%.
To White Nationalists, that is not a good enough majority, that is an almost minority.
So now, we have calls for more births of white babies.
We are not underpopulated. We have the highest population of humans on this planet that we have ever had.
Humans: 7,600,000,000
Pandas: 1,864
Grizzly bears: 32,200
lions: 20,000
tigers: 3,890
Gray Whales: 19,000
Bottlenose dolphins: 600,000
Southern White Rhino:20,405
So human beings are much more common than most large mammals that aren't considered our food. We are more like small mammals, rodents, perhaps or even insects.
We are definitely not endangered.
To keep from being endangered, we migrate---we leave places that are threatening to our survival and go to places less threatening.
It's what humans do; we adapt to new surroundings.
We learn to live in new places.
We humans most likely either killed or mated with our competition (Neanderthal, Denisovans) Our DNA says we did both.
But we need to learn to share. Not just with people that don't look like us, but with other creatures.
The dog in the manger is a very lonely being--but he does have that bed of hay all to himself.
We humans don't like to think we are just part of the biosphere, but I fear our silly egos will let us commit suicide by destroying everything else with our big brains. All those plans to migrate to another planet when this one becomes untenable makes us more locust-like than god-like.
Time to just accept we are one species on a planet full of species and try to respect all life.
