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Even in the Face of Injustice | Episode 61 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:01
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family past, present and future.
• 0:09
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:13
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything can change everything.
• 0:28
  Crista Cowan: If you have followed me anywhere online, you've probably heard me refer to the Emory University study that was done back in the early 2000s.
• 0:33
  Crista Cowan: One of the primary findings from that study was that children who are raised knowing family stories have a higher propensity for resilience and self-esteem.
• 0:46
  Crista Cowan: Now Brigham Young University did a repeated version of that study with some additional parameters, and one of the things that they uncovered is that this also applies to teenagers and young adults, and in my 20 years at Ancestry, and decades before that, doing family history, one of the things that I have observed repeatedly is that it's not just children or teenagers and young adults, that anybody who learns family stories has an opportunity to gain increased resilience.
• 1:23
  Crista Cowan: Now I don't know when this particular episode of the podcast is going to air, but as I'm recording it, it is the middle of September 2024, which means we are here in the United States a month and a half away from a presidential election and things are heating up and I have friends and family members that sit solidly on both sides of the political aisle and it's interesting to me as I do my best to listen to both sides because I care about these people how heartbreaking it is to listen to them talk about the others and other one another in this situation, in this current political climate that we're in, and everybody on both sides thinks that, no matter how this election turns out, that it is the end of our country as we know it.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: Well, last night, as I was doing family history with my father, like I do on every Sunday evening and you know that because you heard that episode with my dad we started diving into some of his family history in a way that we don't normally do.
• 2:43
  Crista Cowan: Normally, on our Sunday nights together, we're just looking through our DNA matches and trying to figure out where they fit in the family tree, like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
• 2:52
  Crista Cowan: Well, last night we took a particular turn down a branch of the family tree because of a DNA match and we came back to a set of my dad's ancestors from the 1600s who helped settle New Jersey.
• 3:08
  Crista Cowan: The interesting thing about this is that, like all new people when they first start their family tree, I had made a mess of things.
• 3:19
  Crista Cowan: If you've started your family tree online anytime in the last couple of decades, you know how easy it is to just click, accept on green hint leaves or copy other people's family trees and sometimes end up with a little bit of a mess that you're not quite sure are these really my ancestors or not?
• 3:37
  Crista Cowan: Well, that is nothing new.
• 3:41
  Crista Cowan: That fact has just been accelerated by the ease of things online.
• 3:47
  Crista Cowan: When I was in my teens, my dad and I took a trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City where we discovered a book, and it was a book written about the Park family of New Jersey and the founding of our family in this country on that particular branch of the family tree.
• 4:05
  Crista Cowan: And in my exuberance, I had copied all of the information from that book into our family tree and there it sat for decades.
• 4:17
  Crista Cowan: And so now last night, as my dad and I were chasing down this connection to this particular DNA match, we came across that Park family in the family tree and I realized that I'd made a mess of things.
• 4:32
  Crista Cowan: Dates weren't lining up, relationships weren't exactly what they should have been.
• 4:38
  Crista Cowan: There were extra children that it wasn't possible for this woman to have birthed wasn't possible for this woman to have birthed, and so I asked my dad if we could just pause and clean this mess up.
• 4:51
  Crista Cowan: So as we dug into it, I came across a story that I think has already, in just the less than 12 hours since I discovered it, the potential to really fundamentally change my perspective, especially in the current political climate.
• 5:08
  Crista Cowan: Let me give you a little bit of context for who the main characters of this story are.
• 5:18
  Crista Cowan: Roger Park and his wife Anne are my eight times great-grandparents.
• 5:24
  Crista Cowan: His wife Anne are my eight times great-grandparents.
• 5:25
  Crista Cowan: They were born in England in the mid-1600s and they came to New Jersey because of religious persecution.
• 5:35
  Crista Cowan: They were of the Quaker faith, and Quakers at that time in England were not only being persecuted, they weren't allowed, in some cases, to own property, they were being thrown in jail for their religious beliefs.
• 5:50
  Crista Cowan: There was just a lot of issues in England, and so they came seeking that religious freedom.
• 5:55
  Crista Cowan: Similarly, andrew Smith and his wife Olive they are also my eight times great grandparents.
• 6:05
  Crista Cowan: Their children ended up marrying each other.
• 6:08
  Crista Cowan: That's where this is headed Andrew Smith and his wife Olive, also born in England, also of the Quaker faith.
• 6:15
  Crista Cowan: So these two families come to New Jersey Now.
• 6:21
  Crista Cowan: At the time, now at the time, new Jersey's, that area of New Jersey, was inhabited by the Lenape, who are an Algonquin tribe, and they lived very peacefully with many Delaware River, on what is now the New Jersey side of the river, were two villages called Wissamonson and Minnipennison, and the Lenape gave that land, or sold that land rather it says, for some trinkets and a few bolts of cloth and two kettles to this group of settlers.
• 7:09
  Crista Cowan: These settlers there were mixing with some of the Dutch settlers, so we have English settlers, we have Dutch settlers and we have the Algonquin tribe, the Lenape, who are living in that area fairly peacefully when the British decide that they are going to claim that land as their own.
• 7:33
  Crista Cowan: So in March of 1664, england's King Charles II gave New Jersey, even though he did not own it, to his brother James, the Duke of York, and sent a fleet to seize control of that land.
• 7:48
  Crista Cowan: The Duke of York then gave half of New Jersey to George, who was Lord Carteret, including the right to govern the inhabitants that were living there.
• 7:58
  Crista Cowan: It just seems kind of mind-boggling when you think about it in terms today that somebody could just show up and claim that land like that.
• 8:08
  Crista Cowan: But he did.
• 8:10
  Crista Cowan: Therefore, the British system of government is what then became the rule of the land and the way that they managed the land was based on a system called the proprietary system, which is run kind of like a corporation.
• 8:27
  Crista Cowan: People could buy shares in that land.
• 8:29
  Crista Cowan: Well, there was a doctor in England called Dr Cox who was the royal physician.
• 8:38
  Crista Cowan: He ended up being the royal physician to Queen Anne and he started buying shares in this land in New Jersey that was already owned by these people.
• 8:50
  Crista Cowan: At one point the Lenape actually sold the land again because there was some money to be made, because the British were just pouring money into this place, trying to buy up shares of land as quickly as they could.
• 9:04
  Crista Cowan: Land started passing from person to person and by the 1670s there had been divisions, set up for communities.
• 9:16
  Crista Cowan: They called it the province line between East and West Jersey and they gave control to the Quakers, who had been concerned about that religious freedom that they had escaped decades earlier as they were watching the British start to take over.
• 9:33
  Crista Cowan: Well, in 1677, 230 Quakers from Yorkshire and London came and settled in that area and then, a few months later, another ship came bringing 114 passengers and some new families to the area, and they started a community in those old Lenape villages called, maybe appropriately, hopewell.
• 9:59
  Crista Cowan: Hopewell, new Jersey, 40 miles up the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where William Penn had established the city of brotherly love, was this place of hope where they were going to live out their religion, not just the Quakers, but their Baptist and Presbyterian neighbors, who also had felt some religious persecution from the British.
• 10:25
  Crista Cowan: But the British government continued to buy up land, continued to sell land and continued to make laws that threatened some of the people who were settled there.
• 10:36
  Crista Cowan: And so one of the things that I found interesting was that these Quakers and Baptists and Presbyterians found an Anglican minister Anglican being the US vernacular for the Church of England, minister Anglican being the US vernacular for the Church of England and they would take, sometimes, their adult children to be baptized by this Anglican minister, because the only way you could inherit property was if you were a part of the Church of England, and so they continued to practice their faith, but they were baptizing their children into the Anglican faith so that they could leave their property to them without fear of it being seized by the British.
• 11:18
  Crista Cowan: Now there is an entire couple of decades of tension that follows that setup.
• 11:28
  Crista Cowan: That's the environment in which these people are raising their families and building their communities and continuing to grow their faith.
• 11:38
  Crista Cowan: Dr Cox decides to sell his portion of that land including what is the village of Hopewell, portion of that land, including what is the village of Hopewell to the West Jersey Society, which is a group of investors out of England, and they fail to register the deed with the British government.
• 12:06
  Crista Cowan: In the meantime, the settlers who are living there are purchasing their own property and registering their own deeds with the West Jersey Society as they continue to grow this village by the early 1700s.
• 12:21
  Crista Cowan: When Dr Cox dies, his property passes to his son, who is also a physician in the court in England, to his son, who is also a physician in the court in England.
• 12:35
  Crista Cowan: He decides to come to New Jersey and become a present landlord and what ensues is a legal battle between Dr Cox Jr and the West Jersey Society over this property.
• 12:51
  Crista Cowan: Okay, and the West Jersey Society loses because they failed to register the original transfer of the deed.
• 12:58
  Crista Cowan: So for decades they've been selling property to the local settlers, but now it's been determined that they did not have the right to do that.
• 13:09
  Crista Cowan: So these people, who have purchased this land and been working it for decades and in some cases are on the second or even the third generation of their family that is inhabiting that land, are being told that that land does not belong to them, and that's the situation where my family finds themselves in this particular story.
• 13:28
  Crista Cowan: So Roger Park had a son named John, and Andrew Smith had a daughter named Sarah, and Andrew Smith had a daughter named Sarah.
• 13:35
  Crista Cowan: And John Park and Sarah Smith, my seven times great grandparents, were living there in Hopewell.
• 13:47
  Crista Cowan: Sarah's brother, thomas, and his wife were also living there in Hopewell, and these two brothers in law, john and Thomas, were very passionately against what was happening with the government and what was happening with their land, and they riled up the community and they created a compact of 50 men of Hopewell who signed a document stating publicly that they thought that this was wrong, what was being done to them, and that they were going to fight it.
• 14:21
  Crista Cowan: Now I think about the precarious situation that that put them in, but that they were willing to sign their names to this particular document.
• 14:31
  Crista Cowan: And so Dr Cox sets up a situation where he now wants to charge all of the settlers.
• 14:38
  Crista Cowan: They either have to pay him for the land they're inhabiting, to purchase it, or they have to pay rents to him.
• 14:46
  Crista Cowan: Here's a little something from the clerk of the Hunterdon County Court in New Jersey that explains a little bit of what was happening.
• 14:56
  Crista Cowan: In 1731, calamity befell these honest and hardworking settlers when Colonel Cox and the other heirs of the late Dr Cox declared that most of Hopewell belonged to them.
• 15:08
  Crista Cowan: A claim without an honest basis, improper surveys are, failure to pay.
• 15:13
  Crista Cowan: That was the claim, but the West Jersey Society lacked a court record proving Dr Cox's transfer to them.
• 15:19
  Crista Cowan: His heir, colonel Cox, had enough political clout to induce Hunterdon's Supreme Court to order High Sheriff Bennett Bard to serve perhaps a hundred or more Hopewell residents with writs ordering them to pay for their land a second time or quit.
• 15:36
  Crista Cowan: Those who failed to repurchase their own farms then received writs of injectment which called them tenants and trespassers on Cox's land.
• 15:47
  Crista Cowan: On April 22nd 1731, in an impressive show of unity, 50 of the earliest settlers of Hopewell entered into a written agreement and solemn compact to stand by each other and test the validity of Colonel Cox's claim.
• 16:03
  Crista Cowan: They hired an attorney, mr Kinsey, and filed a countersuit, naming Colonel Cox as the sole defendant.
• 16:09
  Crista Cowan: The township had more people, but some were not affected, having purchased directly from Cox.
• 16:15
  Crista Cowan: Others considered it useless to fight a man as powerful as Colonel Cox, so did not join in the lawsuit.
• 16:22
  Crista Cowan: The August 1732 term of the New Jersey Supreme Court issued writs of trespass and ejectment against each settler who had not repurchased.
• 16:32
  Crista Cowan: The 50 men who sued them were identified from these records, and on that list of those 50 men are the names of my ancestor, john Park, and his brother-in-law, thomas Smith, several of his brothers, some of his cousins, some additional brothers-in-law.
• 16:56
  Crista Cowan: On both sides of that family I am related to nearly half of the men who signed that particular compact.
• 17:09
  Crista Cowan: Unfortunately, after taking it all the way up to the Supreme Court of the state which, it turns out, colonel Cox was sitting on that Supreme Court they lost and they refused to pay for their land a second time, and so this began, the early stages of what they called at that time the great out migration from that particular area of the Delaware River.
• 17:36
  Crista Cowan: Lands were opening up in Virginia.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: A lot of them moved into the Shenandoah Valley, but these two brothers-in-law, john Park and Thomas Smith they were at the time 58 and 60 years old and because they were so angry about what had happened, they refused to move.
• 17:59
  Crista Cowan: They stayed as long as they could and things just got more and more and more heated.
• 18:05
  Crista Cowan: And I suspect as I thought about this over the last few hours, I didn't sleep a lot last night as I thought about this.
• 18:12
  Crista Cowan: Because the community was trying to maintain peace.
• 18:17
  Crista Cowan: The larger community had people who had purchased land from Cox.
• 18:21
  Crista Cowan: There were families that were leaving, but the way that this community worked, when you start looking through the records, they were all related in some way.
• 18:30
  Crista Cowan: They were interconnected, not just as a community but as families, and I imagine that this probably did a lot of damage in the community as people were picking one side or the other, as some people must have felt that their cause was just and right and others felt that their cause was trying to keep the peace and maintain order.
• 18:56
  Crista Cowan: Like there's so much of a parallel to what I see happening in our world today and as I've imagined that community and what was happening there, it breaks my heart to think about the way some of these families may have been torn apart because of not just what was happening to them because of outside forces, but also the way they were responding to it internally.
• 19:21
  Crista Cowan: I was a little bit nervous as I was reading through some of the accounts of what was happening there last night, because I was afraid that my ancestors did not make a wise choice in how they reacted, and in fact they did not.
• 19:35
  Crista Cowan: So let me read again just a little bit of from some of these histories of New Jersey, what choice they made in that moment.
• 19:46
  Crista Cowan: Many, including most of the Park family, refused to pay for the same lands twice and left the area.
• 19:52
  Crista Cowan: Two of these dispossessed, thomas Smith and John Park, brothers-in-law, community leaders, perhaps able to repurchase their land had they wished, but they were so angry they no longer wished to live where.
• 20:10
  Crista Cowan: Their government was so corrupt that its assembly and Supreme Court had aided and abetted Colonel Cox in what they considered to be a monstrous land swindle against honest citizens whose families were the earliest settlers of the township.
• 20:24
  Crista Cowan: Not only did Smith and Park refuse to pay for their land a second time, they refused to vacate until forcibly evicted by Sheriff Bennett Bard, who then rented their homesteads to two yeomen named O'Gillian and Collier.
• 20:40
  Crista Cowan: This so enraged Smith and Park that in July of 1735, they took their revenge In the traditional manner of the citizens of Old England who over the centuries had developed ways to express contempt whenever there was no legal recourse, a dishonest official was hanged in effigy and a man whose actions the community considered despicable was tarred and feathered.
• 21:09
  Crista Cowan: So one night in July, smith and Park and about 10 of their friends snuck into those homes through the woods.
• 21:20
  Crista Cowan: Behind them they had prepared a vat of melted tar and a barrel of chicken and turkey feathers, and they broke into those homes and they took those two innocent men who had been put into their homes by the government and they tarred and feathered them.
• 21:35
  Crista Cowan: Now, tarring and feathering was considered particularly egregious because the tar would stick to your skin and the feathers would stick to your skin and it was almost impossible to get off without ripping off parts of the skin or just waiting for it to wear off over time, which meant you wore the shame of that throughout the community.
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: And these two men had to do that.
• 21:57
  Crista Cowan: Smith and Park and their associates who had participated in this snuck back out of town.
• 22:07
  Crista Cowan: They went across the Delaware River, but the friends that aided them were members of the community, many of whom stayed.
• 22:15
  Crista Cowan: Them were members of the community, many of whom stayed, and Cox and Sheriff Bard and some of the others not only put up a reward for information about how to capture Smith and Park, but they also put up a reward for any additional information about the others who had abetted them.
• 22:34
  Crista Cowan: The others who had abetted them and the fact that no one came forward, even in what may have been considered financially desperate times, speaks to some of the sentiment within that community, even among those who chose to stay.
• 22:52
  Crista Cowan: There are court papers that I was able to find, there were newspaper articles that I found, and it's just amazing to me that this was the choice that this community made in the face of this particular set of circumstances.
• 23:07
  Crista Cowan: I can understand the frustration that often leads people to make choices that others don't agree with, to make choices that sometimes tear communities apart.
• 23:23
  Crista Cowan: Now the rest of this story is that Smith and Park went to the Shenandoah Valley and they settled there for a period of time, and then, over the course of a few years, several additional families left Hopewell because the political climate there just continued to deteriorate with the dishonesty of the political leaders of more than 25 of the original 50 compact signers and their families made their way to the Yadkin River in North Carolina, led by a guide named Morgan Bryan.
• 24:05
  Crista Cowan: Morgan Bryan, of course, was a friend of Squire Boone and his family.
• 24:11
  Crista Cowan: Morgan Bryan is also an ancestor of mine on my mom's side of the family, so I thought that was kind of an interesting connection.
• 24:19
  Crista Cowan: They led these families to now what is Rowan, north Carolina, and they created what is called the Jersey Settlement.
• 24:32
  Crista Cowan: Be an end of the story where, after decades of hardship, decades of corrupt governments, decades of fighting for property and peace, that they finally found this place where they could settle and have that peace and that prosperity and build their community again and practice their faith again.
• 24:53
  Crista Cowan: But if you know anything about American history, you know that within one generation the regulator wars there in North Carolina started, which some people consider the beginning of the American Revolution.
• 25:08
  Crista Cowan: Not a happy story.
• 25:12
  Crista Cowan: But here's what I've been thinking about a lot over the last few hours since I discovered Cox's land.
• 25:20
  Crista Cowan: Swindle is what it's called.
• 25:23
  Crista Cowan: That right now we live in a country that feels really politically divided and there are people who are saying hateful and horrible things on both sides of the aisle, and one of the things that I hear from both sides as I try to listen to people that I love and care about, is that, no matter how this particular election goes, it could be the end of our country, no matter how this election goes, that this is going to be the worst thing that has ever happened.
• 25:58
  Crista Cowan: But as I look back through history, people have survived horrible things and they have created moments of peace and prosperity in the midst of that.
• 26:10
  Crista Cowan: They have continued to have families, they have continued to practice their faith, they have continued to move forward the best way that they know how Sometimes they don't make great decisions in the midst of that turmoil.
• 26:26
  Crista Cowan: And that's the lesson that I hope I learn.
• 26:30
  Crista Cowan: The resilience that I hope I gain, is that, no matter what happens in the world around me, whether it's here in this country or here in my community or in my own family, that I will make better choices about how to react.
• 26:46
  Crista Cowan: Even in the face of injustice, even in the face of hard things that may happen, that may feel so unfair, that I will make a choice to be a better person, because then I can affect my family and my community and, hopefully, the world around me.