PRESTOPUNDIT -- "Kerry in Cambodia" Wall-to-Wall Coverage

Here is my latest post at the Liberty & Power blog:

War, Murder, History

Ten years ago Harold Ransom was a physicist, sportsman, government bureaucrat. Today he's an historian. No one is more surprised than his family.

Dad got the history bug after his parents died. He wasn't much of a book reader, but he did like puzzles and projects. "Where did we come from" became his new leading puzzle and hobby. And there were some mysteries here. He knew that his grandfather had murdered a man, and his great grandfather on the other side of the family had come alone from German -- then changed his name.

In fact, dad soon learned that men on both sides of the family had changed their names. One name change is still a mystery -- the other soon was explained by the facts surrounding the murder. But just what those facts were wasn't at all immediately clear.

It was known that the man's original name had been Boon -- changed to Brown -- and that he'd come from North Carolina. The murder had involved a bar fight and some ill-chosen words about Boon's mother. So, at least, the official record indicates. Murder, escape, cross-country journey, a new wife, a new child, a new identity in Oregon.

Boon. With that name, an some letters indicating a wife and children left behind in a small town in North Carolina, dad set about reconstructing the history of the paternal side of his mother's family. It wasn't long before folks in North Carolina confirmed that the Boons were part of a family which sometimes went by the name Boone. Boone. Hmm. But North Carolina, not Tennessee. And then came one of dad's significant discoveries, made the old fashioned way with research in church and government archives. These Boone's were directly related to the most famous of all American Boone's -- Daniel Boone. In fact, dad discovered that he was a direct descendent of Daniel Boone's father. Indeed, Daniel Boone had raised the children of dad's ancestors when Daniel Boone's older brother and wife were killed by TB.

By chance and hard work dad had anchored his little story of family drama into one of the great iconographic stories of American history. Not bad for a man once better know for leaving most books unread ..

I'll pick up this thread in a later post.

Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack