Only Descendants of Black Sheep May Apply
If you actually know them, if you have to live in the same house with them, they are dysfunctional monsters. Decent people wouldn’t acknowledge them as kin. Decent people would blot out their names from the family Bible.
Oh, but when they’re a generation or two or 10 removed, when the taint of the here and now is diluted, and the accumulating dust of time has dulled their scarlet sins to a nice shade of old-rose, it’s an absolute delight to have them on the family tree, even if they do hang from its branches by a lawman’s noose.
I lay claim to a Scottish kinsman who skedaddled over here in 1665 to dodge the tax collector . . .to my three-times-Great-Grandfather Joseph, who in 1817 had to fork over the huge sum of $1,000 to the father of a woman named Catherine, who had given birth to what the legal document called Joseph’s “bastard child, male” . . .to my Great-Great Uncle Webster, who swapped gunfire with the town sheriff over some matter, then joined up with a Wild West show. (He returned for a visit years later, to the dismay of his sister, my great-grandmother, and the goggle-eyed thrill of my grandfather, who got to try on his six-guns and costume.)
Because today’s three-strikes candidate may be yesteryear’s (or the hereafter’s) colorful rapscallion in the making . . .because we adore in ancestors what we despise in contemporaries, Jeff Scism created his genealogy project--black sheep only, please.
There are very laudable organizations dedicated to finding or acclaiming the honored dead. The DAR and Colonial Dames come to mind. As with believers in reincarnation, everyone wants to lay blood-claim to a saint or a hero.
Then there are those who think it’s nice that 10-times-Great Grandfather Barebones came over on the Mayflower--but are tickled beyond measure to find out that he also got keelhauled for shipboard gluttony. Such a one is Jeff Scism, maintenance chief at a San Bernardino mobile home park and founder of the International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists, dedicated to pursuing his question, “When you go back to find all the nicey-nice boring ancestors, there’s nothing about your interesting ancestors, and then you wonder, who’s covering up what?”
His own black sheep were not far distant: a great-grandfather supposedly killed at sea when his boat blew up. His family duly received a death notice. But the old guy happened to be safe in port that fatal day, and used the opportunity to skip out on his old life.
And while Scism’s grandmother was still groggy from the ether after giving birth to Scism’s father in Panama, he says, her father told her she had signed adoption papers giving away her son. When she came to, the baby was gone, and she was promptly shipped back to the United States. Scism’s great-grandfather raised the child.
He was chatting on-line with some other black-sheep genealogy buffs, and someone joked that he should set up a Web site. He did, and the response was overwhelming. “We started calling ourselves the flock; they call me the flock-master.”
To be a full member of the flock [email protected], “you have to be a genealogist researching a black sheep line,” and you have to be in the direct line of descent. Who is baaaaaaad enough? Scism has automatic qualifiers: anyone connected with the Salem witchcraft trials, witnesses, defendants, jurors. Anyone on the 10 Most Wanted list. Anyone guilty of treason. Sundry and notorious scoundrels and rakehells. Any descendant of European royalty, on the presumption that behind every crown is a crime. And anyone guilty of a “great public embarrassment,” like the turn-of-the-century Texas woman who played that legendary tax protester Lady Godiva in a Fourth of July parade.
But when the offender is recent and the wounds are fresh--like one member who saw her mother commit a murder--”There’s not a lot of bragging going on . . .it’s good for them because they can associate with others who have similar troubles and put it in perspective.” Scism’s point is, “Relax, it’s just history. You can’t be responsible for the actions of your forebears.”
He’s learned something about human nature, about why someone would rather claim kinship to Lizzie Borden than Betty Crocker: “Why do all these guys in prison have outside girlfriends they’ve never met desperately in love with them? Because people are fascinated by the bad side of life. It’s the soap opera mentality; it’s like watching Jerry Springer. Who I turned down for an interview, by the way.”
Most of what I know of my family before the mid-19th century was unearthed by a cousin a couple of times removed, a nice maiden lady who, in her middle years, threw herself into the pursuit of genealogy. At first, she turned up at family gatherings crowing over forebears who were offspring of Lord So and So or General Sir Hyphen-Hyphen . . .then she got the records of the bastard, and the child support, and she was never thereafter heard to speak of family history. She was, I’ve been told, a very nice lady. For the life of me, I can’t even remember her name.
