On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died at his mountaintop home Monticello, near Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, Virginia. On April 26, 1858, Jesse Brock Pickering died at, or at least near, his home in Stranger, Leavenworth County, Kansas.
Thomas Jefferson was a "Founding Father" of the United States of America. Jesse Pickering was a pioneering Kansas farmer who was to become my great-great-grandfather. There are legions of historians who have dedicated their academic careers to studying Thomas Jefferson. There are, at most, a handful of family genealogists recording the bare facts of Jesse Brock Pickering's life. It's not surprising that I know or can discover more about just about any single day in the life of Thomas Jefferson than I'll ever know about my great-great-grandfather's entire life.
But in two similar set of circumstances - one in the life of each - there may be more known about Jesse Brock Pickering than Thomas Jefferson. Both cases involve extra-marital sex, out-of-wedlock children, public exposure and consequences (or, more accurately, the lack thereof.) Even DNA testing, more than a century later, has become part of both stories.
[By the way, from this point, on I'm referring to Thomas Jefferson as TJ and Jesse Brock Pickering as JB.]
Few are ever going to care about JB's story. TJ's, however, rocked the political world of his time, definitely rocked the present-day world of American historians, made the front page of the New York Times at about the same time that a modern-day President's extra-marital affairs were headline news, and will most likely be forever mentioned when TJ's life is discussed. I suspect that TJ's case may even be lurking behind the efforts of the Texas Board of Education's attempts to write him out of their history books.
TJ's case has been brilliantly used to open up historian's and biographer's understanding of the man. It challenged, and arguably has changed, how historians recognize, evaluate and incorporate historical evidence into their analyses.
I am going to attempt, through this blog, to try to evaluate JB's life and the life of my family using the same techniques used to open up the little understood TJ story. I believe these techniques will allow me to tell a more interesting story about a little known man, to explore how one part of my American family lived their lives and, in general, to weave interesting stories for the interested few. It's an experiment to flesh out genealogical story-telling beyond the making of trees with names, pictures and dates.
I have sixteen great-great-grandparents. Eight of those come from my Pickering father. All of those eight, and their parents, lived in America prior to the Civil War, were included in the American censuses and so appear in most family genealogical charts. This enables me to study American history from the Revolution to the Civil War with a personal perspective, asking two questions: 1) What was my family doing during some historically interesting period and 2) what was happening in American history when my somebody in my family pops up into the documentary evidence.
To complete the textile metaphor, I hope to weave a small quilt of stories about Jesse Brock Pickering and my family from the Revolution to shortly after the American Civil War and a large quilt of stories about American history during the same time.
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