Be careful what you look into. You may find yourself hacked to death, or kicked out of the land of chocolate.

I’ve been spending some of my free time lately working on a personal project that has interested me on and off for some time. I’ve always been interested in the family’s genealogy and had been working on it at ancestry.com, but my subscription had ran out, so I left it alone for a while.

More recently, my wife had mentioned it to a couple of her relatives, as I’d found proof for some of the family lore about how township in Minnesota had been named after one of her predecessors who had lost his legs from frostbite, but went on to lead a successful life.

It got me looking again at it, so I renewed my subscription to reactivate my stored information, and put some more work into it.

While the Powers side of the family is tough to research, because apparently the Irish didn’t keep as good as civil records as others, I found that my mothers side has tremendous historic provenance.  So far, I’ve found relatives from the civil war, at least two or more who fought in the revolutionary war, and one who was hacked to death by Indians in Jamestown.

Wait, what?

Yes, apparently I have a direct ancestor who was killed in the Jamestown Massacre of 1622.  John Cordray was born in 1573 in England, and died on March 22, 1622 in when the Powhatan came to settlements in the area under the auspices of trading.

What it ended up being was a coordinated series of surprise attacks by the Powhatan Confederacy that killed 347 people, a quarter of the English population of Jamestown, including men, women and children of all ages. Jamestown itself was spared, but 31 settlements were attacked.

I related it to my daughter who had a thing for the Pocahontas Disney movie when she was a little girl, who found herself horrified at the prospect that our kin was hacked to death by Pocahontas’ tribe. (Sorry. Stuff happens.)

I also found an ancestor – the first from this branch of the family in America – had to come here because he was banished from his native Switzerland in 1731.  That left me thinking “How do you get kicked out of an entire country? And Switzerland of all places. How do you get kicked out of the land of neutrality?”

In researching, according to a book of the Waltz Family History:

“In the seventeenth century the rich and powerful, supported by the crowned heads of Austria, began to usurp authority, and chose for their councils only their friends and relatives. By degrees these families perpetuated their possession of the government: by degrees the council renewed itself annually, until the Sovereign power became exclusively hereditary in the families of the great council.”

“Murmurings against the hereditary power of a few families began to burst forth in open revolts, but the ruling power, supported by decrees from the Pope of Rome and Austrian bayonets, enforced silence. Conspiracies were formed, the prisons, the executioner’s block, and banishment followed.”

“To unmask and expose the hypocrisy of the priest craft, and treachery to the constitutional rights of the people by the ruling families, our patriotic, liberty-loving, and noble great ancestor. Frederick Reinhart Waltz. became a martyr to the cause of civil and religious liberty, for which he was banished from his native Swiss home, in the Alpine range, to the wilds of America, in the year 1731.

“On his arrival in the city of New York, another insult, even worse than banishment, was perpetrated on this noble advocate of the rights of his fellow-men. by the sale of his body into slavery, to pay his passage across the sea, and required to labor eighteen months to redeem himself. To the memory of this man. who suffered banishment from his home and family, and the persecution of enforced slavery for the cause of liberty and justice, the Waltz families of America, especially those of his lineal descendant, owe honor and respect through all ages to come.”

Yeah… no editorial license taken there by the author. But, it does sound like I have a genetic pre-disposition to muckraking.  Although, I only end up getting exiled from Pierre from time to time, and he got kicked out of the entire land of chocolate.

But, the research marches on, and I’m still stumbling across neat things. I believe I found a reference of one of the Waltz family member selling property on Beacon Hill in Boston to John Hancock. And I’ve got a lot more relatives to go.

I’m sure there are many more gems to find. Regardless of banishment, hacking, and other family member misfortune.