My Daddy was a WASP who grew up in Brooklyn. His grandfather lived in his parents house in Brooklyn, who was a Confederate soldier who became a POW in the battle of Petersburg, and after the war, moved to Brooklyn of all things. Anyway, my Dad was a Pub because of the "corrupt" Irish pols like Jimmy Walker, and because he found the Irish tended to be pugilistic, to the point that given his Irish sounding last name, he sometimes found it convenient to pretend to be Irish. After his first wife died, right after WWII he married an Iowa gal, my mother, and moved to California.
That's a really fascinating family history. Were other branches of your family on your father's side also native WASP New Yorkers?
My father's parents grew up on the same block on Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn. His mother's mother was from New England, and I found out recently goes back to the Mayflower via the Averill family, and thus most of the WASP New England elite are distant ancestors, including Barbara Bush (the Pierce family). Other "relatives" are Emily Dickenson, and the Salem witch, Sarah Wildes, who are first cousins of mine, seven times removed in the case of Emily, and maybe a dozen times removed in the case of the witch. Most witches happened to be women of property, which under English law was only possible for women who never married or were widows. Women with independence and money threatened the Puritan social order, and their ownership of land was highly resented. Hanging them seemed to be a good solution. I think a couple of years after she was hanged, they said they were sorry, and gave her son 5 pounds in recompense or something.
My Dad's maternal grandfather grew up in Montreal and moved to Brooklyn (Pacific Avenue). His Dad, my great, great grandfather, was a Scottish engineer who moved to Montreal, and built the steam engine that powered the first steam boat across the Atlantic, the Royal William, and is quite famous in Canadian maritime circles. The Scottish guy's last name btw was Bennet, an odd spelling without the double T, and I have often wondered if I am related to the Senator from Colorado, who has the same last name with the same unusual spelling.
My Dad's Uncle Bennet was an athlete, and got a job as a stunt man in the silent movie Westerns filmed on Long Island, and soon decided that he could do a better job than the directors he worked for in directing them, and moved to Hollywood when the industry did (and directed some 425 films). That is why both my Dad and his brother both ended up in Hollywood, my uncle in the 1920's, and my Dad a score years' later. One thing leads to another. It seems as if almost everyone, on both my mother's and father's side, ended up in California to make their way in the world. I once as a lawyer worked with another lawyer in Los Angeles, and when my mother took me to a family reunion in Pasadena as her "date" after my Dad died, we found out we were third cousins! Imagine that?
And now I am back in NY!
