An interview by mail with Holden and Laura Doane, 1995

A Bay City, MI hospital in the 20s

A Friends meeting-house in East Fairfield, VT in the 30s

I really have to thank my parents for managing to dig this old homework assignment up, as well as (I presume, this being November of 1995) my fifth-grade teacher Lisa Loichinger for assigning it to me, and of course to my grandparents themselves for answering these questions. Now that both of my maternal grandparents, Holden and Laura Doane, are no longer with us, I not only (and more importantly) really miss them both, but I also miss the opportunity to ask them what life was like back when they were growing up. Thanks to this old homework assignment, I have something of a window into that past, and I am happy to share it with my family so that they can read it as well. I typed these questions out, I am sure, on my old electric typewriter that I purchased at a garage sale from one of our Middleton neighbours for two bucks. Or perhaps not: this may have been a word processing computer printout. I sure was fond of that Matura MT Script Capitals typeface back then. Ahem. Anyway, these were the questions I asked -

Dear Nana and Papa,

Here are sorne questions I would like to ask you. Since I know you can’t come here for Grandparents’ Tea, I wondered if each of you could answer these questions by mail.

1. Did you have pets when you were young? If so, what kind?
2. What was your city like then?
3. Where did you live when you were in 4^th grade?
4. Did you play a musical instrument?
5. What did things cost, like candy, movies, houses, cars? How are prices different?
6. Did you have electricity? Appliances?
7. What garnes did you play? Sports? What did you do for fun?
8. What kind of school did you go to? What was it like? Did you have art, or music, or gym? What subjects? How far was it to get to school?
9. What were your chores and jobs in your household? What was it like to do them?
10. How big was your family? How many siblings? [What were their] names?

Thank you for taking time to answer these questions. I look forward to learning about what your childhoods were like. I hope you have fun writing about it.

With love,
Matthew Cooper

Here was Papa's reply:

Dear Matthew:

Here are the answers to your questions from Papa:

1. Pets - yes, I had lots of pets - we lived on a farm all my life, and we had dogs, cats, and once I had a tiny little turtle. We also sometimes made pets of the calves.
2. Our city - we lived near a small town, not a city, but it was a fairly lively place. There was a biacksmith shop, barber shop, two doctor’s offices. a lawyer’s office, three general stores, a grade school and high school, and two hotels! Both hotels burned before I was 12 years oId. One reason the town was so prosperous was that we had a private High School with an excellent reputation - students came from miles away,and "boarded" in town.
3. When I was in the fourth grade, and all my school days, I lived on the farm.
4. Musical instruments - I began on the piano, but then played clarinet.
5. Prices - candy bars were 5 cents, a small house in the village cost about $ 1500 to $1800; I don’t remember being aware of the cost of cars, but they were probably $700 -$850; as far as movies were concerned, I only remember going to one before I was in 6th or 7th grade and my Aunt took us aIl to see Snow White.
6. Electricity, appliances - no elect. until 1940 - other people had it much earlier, but farms would have to pay for the poles and wire from the nearest "mainline" - too expensive. Our appliances were wood cooking and heating stoves, and an ice box. We had no bathroom plumbing until 1937. (I was born in 1925, so you can figure my age then).
7. Games - in grade school we did little or no organized games mostly tag and rough housing. In upper grades, we did organized team sports with intramural standing over the state, mostly basketball. At home we played many games indoors and outdoors - chinese checkers, dominoes, monopoly, puzzles, erector sets, and outside: sledding, skiing, snow tunnels, fishing - but not much time to play in summer.
8. School - at first (maybe 4 or 5 years) I went to a one room school with abouL 25 or 30 kids. Then they added a 2nd room, and in 7th grade I moved to the Academy about 2 blocks away, until I graduated from H.S. In the first 6 grades we had basic math, reading, English, geography, history, art, music. In a one room school the subjects were integrated in the course of the day. It wasn’t until 7th grade and on that we had art, music, gym, science, math, etc. as separate time periods. We walked just a mile to school every day. If it was really unusual - almost a blizzard - our Dad would hitch up the horse and buggy and take us - a rare occasion.
9. Chores and household jobs - for farm boys, chores meant barn work, and we helped daily with cleaning off and bedding calves, feeding them some (before and after school) and when we were about 12, we began to milk (by hand). In summer we went after the cows and helped in haying and the garden. Our regular household jobs included taking turns doing dishes, and the boys kept the 2 woodboxes filled, and were responsible for keeping our rooms tidy, and from about 13 for pressing our own pants! I really didn't like to do dishes, preferring the barn work, but our mother was strict and we didn’t dare argue about it.
10. Family - there were six in our family, as well as our maternal grandmother who lived with us for several years at the end of her life. Besides mother and dad (Floy and Tennyson), my sister Kathryn was the oldest, then 2 years younger, Holden Tennyson (me), two years younger than I, brother Harrison Marshall, and finally 10 years later, brother Carlton Lee.

I hope this is what you wanted I did enjoy remembering these things.

And here was Nana’s!

Letter to Matthew Cooper, answering his questions:

1. Pets - yes, we had pets when I was young - goldfish, a bird for a while, and several cats, but the most important one was a dog. Her name was Penny, and she was a black Cocker Spaniel.
2. The city where I lived the longest was Bay City, Michigan and it was very much like Middleton, about that size and a very moderate size for the State. It looked considerably different than it does today - the downtown area looks older, buildings were smaller, and not so tall. The biggest difference would probably be the narrower streets, and simple traffic patterns.
3. I lived in a smaller town, suburb of Bay City called Essexville you could not tell when you left one and entered the other.
4. I took piano lessons for YEARS but none of my teachers ever would admit that I "played an instrument". It was very disappointing to my mother, as she and my sisters played quite well, and my father played by ear on his "fiddle".
5. Prices - candy bars and many other things could be bought for 5 or 10 cents. In fact our largest and most popular store was called "The Five and Ten Cent Store". Movies were, I believe, 10 cents for children and 25 for adults. He often went to the Saturday afternoon matinee. About once a week, theaters had "Ladies nite" and gave each lady a dish, cup, or tumbler. Many households had complete sets of these dishes. In the summer, a large outdoor screen was set up in the park, and movies were shown free after dark. These were often series that ran week after week and called cliff-hangers. (Ask your parents). Cars - I don’t recall prices, but the first house we owned was $8000, and my father was very worried that he would never be able to pay for it. My feeling is that prices today are at Ieast 10 times as much, and certain things , much higher.
6. Yes, we had electricity all my life and it was as much of a curiosity for me to visit where they didn’t have it as it would be for you. One grandmother (who lived on a farm) had no indoor toilet, and her water was pumped from a well just outside the "stoop" until I was in high school. The other grandparents (in the city) had all the things I was used to, but their old house still had working (but not used) gas lights on the walls. We had the many of the same appliances you have except for microwave ovens, dishwashers, and dryer. The washing machine was a wringer washer model (ask your mother about that - she has seen it work).
7. Games - we played quite a few board games at home, but I preferred jig-saw puzzles. My sisters both like outdoor games like hide and seek, tag, king of the mountain, but I preferred climbing trees. They did lots of sledding & skating, but I did not like cold weather, I’m afraid. Sports - we had organized teams of softball, some basketball - which I avoided if possible. For fun I read, read, played with my sisters (dolls, mostly or "house"), and read.
8. Schools - I always went to city schools, but never to schools with several rooms of the same grade, like yours. In those days if there were enough students for 2 or 3 second grades, they apparently just built another school in the neighborhood as needed. During my first 4 or 5 years in school, we moved a great deal I went to 8 different schools in those years. It was not very fun - meeting new kids and teachers, making new friends, and some times missing something like long division because of the change of school district. We had art, music, gym, as well as the usual subjects. We had never heard of computers or calculators, and the other difference I can think of is that "social studies" was divided into history and geography. At your age and for several years we walked about the same distance as you do to school. The "country" kids must have been bussed but I don’t remember it. Later I rode a city bus to high school.
9. Chores at home - the ever present job of dishes, hanging up and folding clothes, (no dryer), setting the table and helping a little with cooking. My sisters and I squabbled a little over whose turn it was, but in general we didn’t mind too much.
   
10. Our family conslsted of five: parents Grant and Clara, and three sisters Barbara, the oldest, myself (Laura), and Elizabeth (Betty Lou), the youngest.

I hope these pages give you the answer to your questions probably much more than you ever wanted to know!!

Love, Nana and Papa

I am grateful to both of my grandparents for this fascinating look into what everyday life was like in both Bay City, Michigan and Bakersfield, Vermont back in the 1930s. I still miss them very much. May God make their memories to be eternal.

A handful of Vetter photos, May 1978

During late spring of 1978, my mother, my grandmother Laura Doane and my great-grandmother Clara Burgess went on a trip to Switzerland and Germany to visit family. This was during a year when my mother was doing a year of work abroad for two families in Cornwall as a farmhand, and at the end of her stay there she introduced her mother and her grandmother to the families she stayed with. After that they flew to Switzerland to go on a guided tour of the lakes and cities in Switzerland, including Lake Lucerne and Lake Lugano. However, toward the end of the tour they ditched the tour group and went to Stuttgart in Germany to visit my great-grandmother’s family there, the Vetters.

This is the same Vetter family from which this blog, Featherquake, takes its name (with a little bit of a twist on the wordplay). The name ‘Vetter’, in German, means ‘cousin’, and it appears likely that they were related to one of the landowning families in Württemberg (since the 1950s, Baden-Württemberg). Note therefore the redundancy of referring to ‘Vetter cousins’… At any rate, my great-great-grandfather, Clara Burgess’s father, was named Friedrich Jakob Heinrich Vetter – a blacksmith specialising in custom parts who immigrated to Michigan in the 1890s. He was the son of Lukas Vetter and Barbara Jung (whose maiden name was later anglicised to ‘Young’), both of whom hailed from this area of Württemberg – villages in what are now Leinfelden-Echterdingen and Böblingen, respectively, located in the Schwarzwald region, in the vicinity of Stuttgart (which the locals, in the Swabian tongue, call ‘Schduagert’). Once they were in the United States, in what may have been a bit of an affront to their more Calvinistic neighbours, Clara recounted that her Swabian Lutheran father used to illegally brew beer in the family bathtub in defiance of Prohibition. A man after my own heart!

At some point after Friedrich emigrated, though, the German Vetters moved off northwest into the Franconian-speaking region of Karlsruhe. Back in 1978 they lived in Oberderdingen. When my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother went to visit the German Vetters in May of that year, a cousin of theirs, Adolph Vetter, came to visit them at the train station in Stuttgart. He took them back to his home in Oberderdingen where they met with some more of Clara’s relatives. Adolph was married to a woman named Maria, and they kept a wine cellar in their basement. Making your own booze seems to have been a Vetter knack! Adolph was the only one of our German Vetter relations who was able to speak English comfortably, and the only one of my immediate family who could speak any German was Clara, and she only perhaps a handful of words she overheard from her father. As a result, much of the conversation was mediated by Adolph.

My mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were only able to spend a very brief time in Oberderdingen with Adolph and Maria Vetter – one day and one night – before they had to leave Europe. Even so, this excursion meant a great deal to all three of them – and, I think, my great-grandmother in particular. In any event, here are the photos in question, with a few notes from each on the reverse. I have transcribed the notes exactly, including all of my mother’s original spellings of places and people’s names.

Oberderdingen, Germany
May 12, 1978
Nana, Mom & Adolph sitting in the breakfast room, discussing family

13 May, 1978
The home of Martha & August. Martha is a 1^st cousin of Adolph, Nana, Else, Bertha & Friedrich. Elsa lives upstairs.
Women: Bertha, Else, Nana, Martha
Men: Adolph & Friedrich.
Martha’s dtr. Rose & her husband Rudi were there too - Rudi & August took us to the train in Stuttgart.

13 May, 1978
The wine cellar in Adolph & Marie Vetter’s house in Oberdingen, Germany (near Carlsruhe)
a fabulous house; most hospitable people.

Oberdingen, Germany
May 13, 1978
Adolph Vetter in his brother in law’s hut - where he keeps his tools and things needed in his small vineyard.

Germany
Visited on our Rhine holiday
May 8, 1978
One of our lunch stop restaurants. Eric Treadway & Bert Amerten (?) in background;
Mrs Kale, Marguerita and Cornelius Kale and Mom in foreground.

11 May, 1978
Miniature Swiss village on Lake Lugano, Switzerland.
Clara & Laura.

The Visigoths of Pla de l’Horta

The necropolis at Pla de l’Horta, Catalonia, Spain

One of the genetic-genealogical services I started using recently was a certain one run by DNA Check, LLC, based in Switzerland. I uploaded them the raw files for my genetic results and they were able to compare them to ancient, classical and mediæval DNA samples from various archæological dig sites. The closest genetic match to my DNA that they were able to find – with a genetic distance of 4.168, a certain close cousin and a nearer match than 99% of other users of this service – belonged to a woman who died around 550 AD and is buried at the Visigothic necropolis outside Pla de l’Horta in Sarrià de Ter, Catalonia, Spain. I’m apparently also closely related to two other Visigothic men (genetic distances 6.894 and 9.562) who are buried at this same site, dating from roughly the same time period. The early-mediæval Visigoths are therefore very intimately linked to my family, though whether to the Cooper side or the Doane side (or both) is unknown.

The Visigoths – one branch of the Goths led by the Terving and later by the Balti family – were a Germanic people originally based in what is now northern Poland, along the Baltic coast. There have been various histories of the Goths written, including by the Byzantium-based Ostrogothic notarius Jordanes. Jordanes took the Æneid as a high literary reference and foil for the history of the Goths, whom he wrongly associated with the Thracian Getæ. The Goths undertook a migration from Poland into what is now the Ukraine, and from there into the Balkans (now Romania and Bulgaria). The Romans apparently took advantage of a famine which struck the Goths after their Balkan migration, and bought Gothic slaves at cheap prices from their parents, in exchange for dog meat. Understandably, the leaders of the Goths – particularly Fritigern – did not take kindly to this exploitation. The Visigoths fought several wars with the Roman Empire in both the East and the West, most famously sacking Rome under their king Alaric in 410 AD. Goths fought both for and against the Huns during that people’s invasion of the Roman Empire.

The Visigothic sack of Rome, National Geographic illustration (1962)

The Visigoths who settled in Spain after 418 belonged to three groups of Goths which had previously been independent of each other: the Tervingi, the Greuthungi and the followers of Radagasius, but who were bound together in loyalty to Alaric. These Goths settled in what is now Aquitaine in southwestern France and repeatedly attacked their neighbours to the south and east, expanding into the Iberian Peninsula and into Auvergne. Because the Goths promised lower taxes and protection, many Romans – particularly debtors and those fleeing the Roman tax assessors – swelled the Gothic ranks and aided them in the establishment of a kingdom. The Goths quickly found it expedient to appoint Gallo-Roman administrators and to assure the continuation of Roman law in the areas under their rule… that is, until the reign of Euric, who forged a law-code of his own.

In short: the Visigoths founded a kingdom with its capital at Toledo that, at its height, stretched from the Occitan-speaking regions of southern France all the way across the Iberian Peninsula. It was to this kingdom that the aforementioned ancestors of mine, who were buried at Pla de l’Horta, belonged. However, this kingdom was conquered by Franks from the north, and by Muslim Moors from the south in the early 700s. The Visigothic kingdom fell and its last king Roderic was killed in 721. The Visigoths left few traces on modern Spanish culture – neither their language nor their built culture. Some two dozen Spanish surnames, however, including Fernández, González and Rodríguez, are of Teutonic and thus possibly of Visigothic origin. A number of architectural pieces from antiquity particularly around Toledo also attest to the Visigothic presence.

The Conversion of Reccared, painting by A. Muñoz-Degraín (1888)

The Visigoths at first practised a form of Teutonic heathenry probably similar to the Norse pantheon; however, they had already adopted the hæresy of Arianism by the time they arrived in Spain. Arian bishoprics were set up in various cities all around the Iberian Peninsula, for the express purpose of ministering to the Visigoths. The Visigoths would adopt Chalcedonian Christianity only with the religious settlement forged by Reccared in 587, in which he and his retinue converted to the religion of their Gallic and Hiberno-Roman subject peoples.

The necropolis at Pla de l’Horta was situated about three and a half kilometres north-northwest of the ancient city of Gerunda – now Girona, Spain. Those buried at the necropolis of Pla de l’Horta – including my ancestors, it seems – practised a basic form of inhumation, with tombs dug into the ground and lined with tile or slabs of stone, but with no monuments or architecture standing above ground-level. Those interred were, however, buried with typical Teutonic ornamentation: brooches, belt buckles, fibulæ and so forth, showing a certain level of social status. The necropolis follows the pattern, if not the scale, of other Gothic Reihengräber (or row-graves) found elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula.

This is of course quite fascinating from an archæological perspective. Again, Peter Heather’s excellent book on The Goths is an excellent starting-point for understanding Gothic society, culture and history; I also have his book on Goths and Romans: 332-499 on my bookshelf, as well as his compilation of some primary-source material on the Goths, The Goths in the Fourth Century. I also have Herwig Wolfram’s History of the Goths and of course the De origine actibusque Getarum by Jordanes. I certainly look forward to learning more about these kindred of mine from late antiquity! And now, just for fun, here’s a cover of Manilla Road’s ‘Necropolis’ by the power metal band Visigoth:

From a North Sea tribe

Given the paucity of records that have thus far been immediately available to me (which isn’t to say that they don’t exist or that they have been neglected by other members of the family!), genetic genealogy has been rather instrumental in tracking down some of my Cooper family connexions. In particular, the Y-DNA test (which traces back the direct paternal line ancestry, through mutations transmitted on the Y-chromosome in men) helped me confirm a direct relationship with the line descending from the William Jacob Cooper who left Bucks County, PA and moved his family to the Quaker settlement at Bush River, SC.

The Y-DNA test also helped me to confirm a certain ‘branch’ of my more distant ‘Cooper’ ancestry (though, of course, the surname wouldn’t come into existence until much, much later), to a certain man who lived around 2200 BC somewhere on the continental European coast of the North Sea, likely in what is now Frisia. This man belonged to the Western European R1b Y-haplogroup, and transmitted to his descendants a Y-DNA mutation called R-Z18. Significant clusters of the modern male-line descendants of this ancestor can be found in the modern-day Low Countries, southern Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway), Scotland and the historical region of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. R-Z18 is genetically ‘downstream’ of the ‘Germanic’ (disclaimer: these labels attributing modern cultural characteristics to pre-historic people are inexact and possibly inappropriate) common ancestor R-U106, and descendants of R-Z18 seem to account for only about five percent of modern-day progeny of R-U106. R-U106 is subsequently ‘downstream’ of R-M269, a mutation associated with human remains belonging to the nomadic Yamnaya culture of remote Eurasian antiquity, which lived between 3300 and 2600 BC in what is now southern Russia, Crimea and the eastern Ukraine.

Imagined depiction of a Yamnaya burial rite, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1899

Again, having only dabbled thus far in genetic genealogy, I am not even certain I am representing even this small sliver of the genetic history with anything close to the needed degree of epistemological humility, but it does provide a fascinating glimpse into the distant prehistory of the ‘spear-side’ forebears of the Cooper family.

What’s in a name?

I recently came across one of these social-media ‘challenges’ on Facebook, and, because it seemed relevant, thought I would share my response here. I have added the links and formatting, of course, but what follows the blockquote is my answer more or less unchanged in content. This was the content of the ‘challenge’:

What’s in a name? And what does your name mean, both literally and to you, personally? Does your name, in your mind, tie you to a particular people or heritage, imprinting you as the recipient of a unique chain and legacy, or serve as a mark of your individuality, if you go by a name you’ve chosen for yourself?

Across all cultures, peoples the world over have sought to honor their God or gods, their notable ancestors, or their favourite relatives and friends by naming their newborn children after them. In cultures which practise formal adoption rites, the bestowal of a new name often indicates the acceptance of and granting of a new group-based community identity to the new adopted person, while the retention or discarding of one’s “old name” in this context serves as a marker of group conformity or assertion of lineal genetic individuality.

In all cultures, from the earliest examples we have of autobiographical writings down to today, great import has historically been given to the naming of newborn babies, around which entire elaborate religious rites and ceremonies exist in five of the world’s largest religions involving Scripture recitation, water, fire, honey, flowers, etc. Similarly, for any coming of age / initiation ceremonies, such as confirmation / chrismation for Christians, bar and bat mitzvah for Jews, or hafiz /Qur‘anic memorisation or tariqah initiation for Muslims, the young person will either take on a new initiatic name of a patron saint or holy person of the religion, or be told aspects of the inner meaning of his or her birth name. The hope, in all societies, is that children will grow up in the character and likeness of the names with which their parents bestowed them.

So: what’s in your names? What is the etymology of your first, or personal name, and your surname or family name? Do you have a patronymic, or a clan whose lineage you’ve been told about and kept alive? Are you named for a relative, or is your personal name the first of its kind in your family? What of any saint or holy name you yourself took on? What do these names mean to you?

I was named Matthew by my parents for Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew (and was born on 21 September, which is the feast-day of Matthew for the Western churches – though this was serendipitous; my parents had no knowledge of it being the saint’s day when I was born). Etymologically, the name comes from the Hebrew Mattityâhu מתתיהו meaning ‘Gift of Yah’; its first bearer in the Scriptures was the priest Mattityâhu ben Yôhânân the High Priest of Israel, father of the Maccabee brothers who led the Hebrew revolt against the Seleucids which established the Hasmonean Kingdom. I kept my birth name and consciously adopted the patronage of Holy Apostle Matthew on my conversion to Orthodox Christianity. His approach to the Gospel was to stress the continuity of the Hebrew Scriptures with the life of Christ – and continuity and tradition were then something I deeply valued (and still do). I also sympathised and to some degree identified with his background as a great sinner, and admired his travels in Ethiopia and Persia to spread the Gospel.

Holy Apostle Matthew

Franklin was my grandfather’s name (also my father’s middle name). Franklin Cooper was: a poor South Carolina sharecropper, a navy medic in the Pacific theatre in WWII, and a professional pharmacist who put himself through school with the help of the GI Bill after WWII. My grandfather is sadly no longer with us. I miss him in some rather unexpected ways; for example, I find I wish I could have talked with him more about his life growing up and the experiences he had of the massive social changes he lived through.

A wedding photo of Frank Cooper and his first wife Vera Danzer

Etymologically the name ‘Franklin’ has two possible meanings. It is either a diminutive of Francis, meaning ‘Frank’ or ‘Frenchman’. Or it is an occupational surname referring to a free-born (but not noble) landowner in mediaeval England – as, for example, the ‘Franklin’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. More than likely, however, my grandfather was named after Philadelphia inventor and American statesman Benjamin Franklin.

A sheep pasture in Low Ellington, Yorkshire, England - ancestral home of the Coopers

Cooper is the sixty-fourth most common surname in the United States, and most commonly it is an occupational surname referring to an urban or village tradesman who made barrels. The Quaker Cooper family I descend from – the one which this blog concerns – however, is said to be Lowland Scottish in origin, even though William Cowper emigrated from Low Ellington in Yorkshire (shown above). The occupational etymology, of course, still applies to the Scottish branches of the Cooper surname, but there is another possible derivations as a topographical surname: referring to someone from Cupar in Fife.

Cupar in Fife

Featherquake – by way of introduction

Middletown Meeting House, Bucks County, PA

My name is Matthew Cooper. I’m an Orthodox Christian; husband; father of two; native of Madison, Wisconsin; machinist; schoolteacher; lefty blogger at The Heavy Anglo Orthodox, Front Porch Republic and Solidarity Hall; philosophy buff; and China nerd. This blog, Featherquake, will be my fourth attempt – hopefully my second successful one – at writing a separate blog based on a separate interest from my usual political-philosophical and general history fare.

I have been interested for a long time in family history and have dabbled a little bit in genealogy. I come by this honestly, on my mother’s side at least – though my interest was really spurred after my visit to Qazaqstan (where family history and jüz membership is intensely valued). The Doane family of northern Vermont does indeed have a long and beautiful tradition of closeness to their roots; it is largely due to the careful efforts of my extended family members on the Doane side of the family – which is allied to the equally tight-knit extended Camp family through the marriage of my great-grandfather Tennyson Doane to Floy Camp – that the history, and the individual stories of the people who make up the tapestries of both families, has been so well-preserved and so well-recorded, going all the way back to ‘Deacon’ John Done of Plymouth Colony (and probably originally of Alvechurch, Worcester, England).

As a complete amateur, therefore, I started to undertake research into the Cooper family tree, which is not particularly well-attested – my immediate Cooper side relatives not generally having been as interested in preserving genealogical records. The Coopers were, after all, poor landless sharecroppers in the South Carolina backcountry – specifically, Travelers Rest in Greenville County. However, through some investigations into the connexions between the Coopers and a couple of other allied families – notably the Watsons – I was able to (tentatively) track back the Cooper line. In the broad strokes: the Cowper family – headed by William Cowper – came to southeastern Pennsylvania from Low Ellington (near Masham in Yorkshire) on the passenger ship Britannia in 1699. A convert to Quakerism, he came here with his wife Thomasine (née Porter) and his eight children – all teenagers to adults – seeking a haven among the fellow Friends in the colony founded by William Penn. He had an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and was – it seems – an intermittent member of Middletown Monthly Meeting near Langhorne.

Jonathan Cooper – William Cowper’s third child by Thomasine, who was twenty-three when he made the voyage over the Atlantic from Yorkshire – married Sarah Hibbs in Pennsylvania Colony and had at least seven children, the youngest of whom was William Jacob, born in 1731, who took up trade as a wheelwright. William Jacob married a woman named Elizabeth Ann Clark at the age of 21. It was apparently Elizabeth Clark’s idea to move the family to South Carolina, and this happened around 1770 in advance of the brewing war. Moving to the backcountry likely seemed a good way to stay neutral and well clear of the fighting. There was a haven established in Bush River in Newberry County – and William Cooper is mentioned among the early members of the Bush River Monthly Meeting.

However, Elizabeth’s aim to keep her family out of the Revolution did not seem to have succeeded. At least two of her children with William Jacob were disowned by the Friends for joining either side. Jacob Cooper – my direct paternal line ancestor – was disowned on 27 June 1778; family tradition has it that he was killed by a Tory, but an enemies list compiled by Colonel Brandon for the colonial Committee of Safety indicates that he joined the Tory militia in the backcountry. Two other sons of William Jacob Cooper – Samuel (disowned 1781) and Stacey – fought in the militias on the Whig side. Jacob Cooper survived the war and died in Spartanburg County, South Carolina in 1829.

In the broad strokes, that’s how the Coopers I’m related to ended up in South Carolina, and that is where they stayed. Family records kept by the Watsons suggest my descent from Jacob Cooper, and genealogical DNA tests I’ve done positively confirm that I’m related on the paternal side to a descendent of William Jacob Cooper now living in Texas. Well – that’s a bit of background on me, and perhaps enough for an introductory blog post!

By way of explanation for the name of this blog: Featherquake is a play on words. The fun visual displayed in the blog banner came rather naturally to mind after the name did! ‘Quake’ comes, of course, from the Quakers to which the Coopers belonged. ‘Feather’ is a common anglicisation of the German surname Vetter, which belonged to my Swabian great-grandmother, Clara Vetter, on my mother’s side.