RLP 182: American Nations Part 1 with Heidi Mathis

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 182 American Nations Part 1 with Heidi Mathis. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (40s):
Let’s go, Hey everybody. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (49s):
I am doing fantastically. Well, how are you?

Diana (52s):
I am doing well. And we’re excited to have a guest with us today. We’ve got Heidi Mathis back. Heidi joined us for our German series. And today we’re going to have her tell us about another interesting topic. So how are you Heidi?

Heidi Matthis (1m 7s):
I’m doing really well. I’m excited about this book.

Diana (1m 9s):
Oh, thanks so much for coming on.

Nicole (1m 11s):
Yeah. Thanks Heidi. So Diana, what have you been reading?

Diana (1m 14s):
I have been reading the NGSQ National Genealogical Society edition for September, 2021. So it’s this fall winter quarter. And the first article where I started is by Ruth Randall and she’s a certified genealogist and it’s titled Discovering Kin for Washington Graham of Arkansas and Missouri. And it’s so interesting because this was a formerly enslaved man who served in the civil war and looking at so many interesting records. She was able to discover his mother and probable brother and siblings, you know, just that’s so difficult to do.

Diana (1m 53s):
So I have just been really enjoying it. And I thought there was this one little thing I wanted to read from it because I thought it was really useful for anyone working on African-American ancestry. And this comes up a lot when we’re doing these client projects as well, the surname issue, you know, like where did that surname come from? And so the author quotes a book that I read when I was doing my African-American studies and it’s Dee Parmer Woodtor’s Finding a Place Called Home: A Guide to African-American Genealogy and Historical Identity. So I just thought it would be just fun to read a tiny bit of this because it’s so interesting.

Diana (2m 33s):
Dee Parmer Woodtor says slaves on these large plantations, some exceeding 200 did not leave slavery with the owner surname, unless there had been close ties prior to emancipation. So I won’t read the whole thing, but basically, you know, saying if it was a large plantation that the enslaved people have their own family groups and they oftentimes had multi-generational slave communities formed and they often have their own surnames within. So if you’re looking at somebody that came from a large plantation, don’t just assume that they took the owner’s surname, I thought that was really interesting. And that was part of the premise of this whole article that the slave owner had left records that showed some of the surnames and some of the family groupings.

Diana (3m 18s):
Anyway, I love reading those articles. They’re always so instructive.

Nicole (3m 22s):
That is fascinating. And how wonderful the records that were left behind survived to this day.

Diana (3m 29s):
Yeah. And they’re not anything super unusual. They are pension records and probate records, census records, you know, there are things that we use all the time, but it was the way it was all put together. You know, a bunch of little pieces of indirect evidence that come together to prove this. And of course this, we teach all the time. You have to write that up. You can’t just, you know, tack those onto your family tree and then make a statement. But if you have something written, someone else can read it and come to the same conclusion.

Nicole (4m 1s):
Thank you for sharing that. Of course. Well, we have our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group registration ongoing right now, and that begins February 16th and runs through the middle of May. So if you want to join us for that, make sure you sign up and in the fall, we’ll be doing the research like a pro study group. So make sure you sign up for our newsletter and stay informed of all these happenings. And if you would like to be a peer group leader of one of our study groups in the future, we would love for you to apply on our website.

Diana (4m 31s):
Well, let’s get into our topic with Heidi. We are lucky to have Heidi reading and writing for us on Family Locket. And she wrote two blog posts all about a book titled American Nations. And the author is Colin Woodard. And as Heidi was reading it, she thought it had so much application to genealogy. And so I think it’s wonderful and we can tie history and our genealogy together. And we even have some DNA that comes together and Heidi is a genetic genealogist as well. So it’s really fun when we can tie pieces together. So welcome Heidi. It’s so great to have you, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, an overview of the book and why you wanted to read it and write about it?

Heidi Matthis (5m 19s):
Absolutely. I really love this book as a genealogist or just an amateur historian. You just want to be able to have a lens, to be able to kind of tie all of those myriad of facts that you run into out there. And you, you want to be able to get a big overview of what is really going on here. And I thought this book did an excellent job of doing that. I wanted to, to avoid getting too bogged down in, in histories details, and yet still gain the context that I would need to see the world through an ancestor’s eyes. American nations by Colin Woodard might be a helpful lens. Other people who are out there like you were saying, it also has DNA that, that helps back up that hypothesis, which I thought was so interesting today in this podcast, I was hoping to just introduce the general idea of American nations and in the next podcast I wanted to go through and describe each nation.

Heidi Matthis (6m 17s):
There’s 11 nations that he outlines. And then in that second podcast, go through a couple of examples and just to be able to give people a general framework for how American nations might help them in understanding and having context for American history and where their ancestors may have fit in that.

Diana (6m 37s):
I love that idea of adding context because we often don’t step back and look at a big picture. We get so bogged down in the details of our ancestors’ lives, like finding them on that census or, you know, this little detail, but to step back and look at this bigger picture, I think it’s really valuable, especially if we have a mystery ancestor, it could maybe give you some clues to his origins. Absolutely.

Nicole (6m 60s):
I think it’s interesting too. And I can’t wait to hear more about the DNA that you’re talking about. So Heidi, how did you distill this book into two different blogs?

Heidi Matthis (7m 10s):
It’s not an easy, and I would definitely recommend that everybody out there would read this book. It’s only 300 pages and I think it’s really well written. And I think whether you agree or you disagree, it’ll give you a framework and a hypothesis to start with that I think is really interesting. But if you don’t get a chance to read the book, that’s why we’re doing the blog posts and the podcast here, just to give people the general idea, it’s helpful to look at us history as having a deeper undercurrent of several different nations, struggling to forge one polity. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. I hope that the shortened version of American Nations will help you find your ancestors nation and how they might’ve fit into that.

Heidi Matthis (7m 54s):
The relevance is especially for people with colonial ancestors, but even if you are looking at later, ancestors, it still will help you to understand what kind of a place they were coming into. I’m just hoping that the shortened version will give you some clues and some context, a hypothesis for why your ancestors married, who they married, migrated, where they migrated, and perhaps even might help you understand who they might, may have voted for

Nicole (8m 23s):
Really interesting. And I think you’re right, that even the people that came later, they were coming into these established areas with different worldviews. So it’s kind of helpful too, to understand that.

Heidi Matthis (8m 33s):
Totally, totally.

Diana (8m 35s):
I love that comment to see why they voted for who they voted for. I think that’s so funny and I’ve seen some of those voting lists and political parties named and thought, oh, that’s, that’s interesting to see it. That is their view of life. So that’s fun. What kind of give us a basic premise of the book? How is this book work?

Heidi Matthis (8m 54s):
American nations proposes that the best way to understand American history is seeing that our country does not really behave like 50 states United in one national history, but we operate more like 11 nations each with its own culture and preferred governing style. It’s easier to look at us history as consisting of these 11 nations, kind of arguing with each other, sometimes coming together and sometimes not about what America is and how it’s best to organize our country throughout all of history. These nations have been clashing with each other, but the primary conflict has been between the cultures of new England that Woodard called Yankeedom versus the two that were founded in the south, which he calls Tidewater and the Deep South, his book argues that the original conflict between the more liberal New England states and the more conservative Southern states is the fulcrum on which all of our history turns.

Heidi Matthis (9m 53s):
And that interestingly, this fundamental conflict that is working its way through our history was one that we initially inherited from the English. The early English colonists brought with them an unresolved conflict that they had been recently fighting over in the English civil war of the 1640s. The English civil war can be thought of as a battle between two different views of Liberty held by these warring factions on one side were what they called the round heads or the parliament side versus the Cavaliers who were for the king. The round heads were mostly educated. Middle-class people from east Anglia, which is located to the north of London.

Heidi Matthis (10m 35s):
And as you can tell from the name east Anglia had been a stronghold originally of the Anglo-Saxons and they had a culture of believing that Liberty was for everyone that people could govern themselves. And that perfection for the masses was possible. They supported the parliament in the English civil war, and when they immigrated to America, they formed a very democratically runs, kind of self-righteous bossy new England towns that American nations called Yankee them. And on the other side of the English, civil war were the Cavaliers and they were the aristocratic second sons of people from the south of England, which was historically a stronghold of the Normans that, you know, you’ve heard of the Norman invasion.

Heidi Matthis (11m 22s):
These aristocratic second sons would not be inheriting their family’s wealth. So they wanted to immigrate and when they settled in the tidal areas of the Mid-Atlantic colonies, they founded the tide, what he calls the Tidewater nation. And these second sons of noble birth wanted to recreate the semi feudalism in America of their former home, where a hierarchy was prized. And they had supported the king in the English civil war. They were basically patricians who believe that Liberty was for your betters and those betters would in turn, take care of you. So in other words, the people from Tidewater believed in noblesse oblige, which is the, you know, sort of the belief that wealthy people are superior, but they will take care of those who are sort of beneath them.

Heidi Matthis (12m 9s):
One of the differences that we’ll go into later between the Tidewater and the deep south was that the Tidewater sort of had this sort of aristocratic noblesse oblige, but the deep south tended not to. And that that’s the main difference between them. But back to the Liberty question, unlike Yankee them, they did not believe that giving power to the masses was a good idea. They thought it would result in chaos. They thought that power should be better concentrated in the upper-class and that you would get chaos like the English civil war had led to the beheading of Charles the First or as they saw later in the French revolution that that kind of chaos frightened them. And they wanted to control it

Diana (12m 50s):
So interesting because, you know, we study in school, at least I did because I really loved history. You know, we study all of this, but so often we just don’t put it in context with thinking about our ancestors and where they fit in. And, you know, I don’t have a lot of my paternal side traced all the way back. I’ve got some of them and I do have a Virginia and who would be part of that Tidewater group and then noblesse oblige, you know, they were plantation owners and such, but then I’m just wondering if you just never know where they are when you can’t trace them all the way back, you wonder where they fit in. And it’s really interesting to think of the separation between Yankeedom and the Tidewater groups.

Heidi Matthis (13m 33s):
I thought it was so interesting and it definitely plays in to the revolutionary war and how the constitution was founded and just all these conflicts that our nation has gone through.

Nicole (13m 44s):
Yeah. You can really see that from the very beginning of the settlement of the colonies. It kind of was the sowing of the seeds for the civil war eventually.

Heidi Matthis (13m 55s):
Absolutely. That was, you know, the slavery was basically an unresolved problem that, that the constitution really failed to deal with and then it kind of arose again in the civil war period. You know, that’s the example I used in the blog post to talk about this conflict, because it’s, it’s the clearest example of what he’s talking about. So one way to think about the conflict between Yankeedom and Tidewater in the deep south is like, how were those conflicts resolved? And often it was resolved by one side or the other kind of convincing the other nations to join them. So the two most dominant nations in our country’s history are Yankeedom versus the Tidewater and the deep south and the other eight nations kind of revolved around those nations and kind of fell in between the two poles of those extremes.

Heidi Matthis (14m 45s):
And the two most important nations, especially early on were Appalachia. And the Midlands Appalachia is the nation that was founded mostly by Scots Irish immigrants who had come from the borderlands of the UK. They had settled also on the borderlands of the American colonies in the Appalachian hill country. So Tidewater is basically in the Tidewater, the lowlands, and then the Appalachian settlers were in the uplands. And then the, the other really important nation early on was the Midlands. And they were made up mostly of Quakers in Germans, in Pennsylvania for the most part that, so the Quakers and Germans definitely clashed over who had govern Pennsylvania.

Heidi Matthis (15m 26s):
They were different, but they did have some cultural overlap. They had both had recent histories in Europe that taught them to distrust, concentrated power, and each in their own way, they had come to America for autonomy, and mostly just wanted to be left alone. They found both Yankee dumb in the deep south and entitled water kind of bossy. And they just wanted just to be left alone. So American nations argues that in every conflict in our country, you know, that kind of boils down to the Yankeedom versus the south, whichever of those extreme poles could get its other fellow nations to join particularly Appalachian the Midlands. They would be the winner in the conflict.

Nicole (16m 6s):
That’s a very interesting hypothesis. So it’ll be interesting to hear more about how that plays out, but I can really see that being important for each group to try to win over the other nations.

Heidi Matthis (16m 17s):
Absolutely. They’re sort of the ones that kind of settle, settle the dispute.

Diana (16m 21s):
Yeah. Well, when I was reading the book on the Scots Irish, which I finished, by the way, for those who’ve been listening to me talk about that. That was one of the premises of that book that the Scots Irish basically helped win the American revolution against the British, because of this whole desire for freedom. And we left Ireland because they were in Northern Ireland to get rid of the British influence. Some, we want them out of here too. And so that makes sense that they helped swing the war there because there were loyalists. And a lot of those loyalists were probably part of the Tidewater and deep south who had those ties to England and, you know, didn’t want the Yankees to win the revolution.

Diana (17m 5s):
So that very first conflict, I think we can see that. So interesting. Well, I know the one that really plays out besides that is the civil war. So let’s talk a little bit about that.

Heidi Matthis (17m 19s):
The revolutionary war definitely it’s in play, but the civil war is definitely where we see it kind of all come to a head. Most of us are familiar with the idea that the civil war was between the north and the south, but by thinking of it the way water does, I think we’re going to get a clear picture of what was really going on. And we can kind of go back and look at it as that original battle, but over what is, what does Liberty mean to us? So on one side where Yankeedom, who believed that Liberty was for everyone, that you should not have a hierarchical society. And they were very utopian. And so they were quite zealous about, about that. And some of the other nations like the Midlands and Appalachian, they didn’t feel so strongly about slavery.

Heidi Matthis (18m 1s):
So that bossiness thing kind of bothered them, but they also felt irritated by the Tidewater and the deep south being sort of patrician. And they didn’t like that hierarchy either. So, so on the other side, I was talking about Yankee dumb being Liberty was for everyone. And on the other side, you had a Tidewater in the deep south. And they, like I said, were founded on hierarchy. They had extended the English class system to, into the us. They thought that they knew best and that you should basically keep this hierarchy, which included, unfortunately slavery should definitely stay in place. So even though the other nations were involved in the civil war, the conflict really started between Yankeedom and these Southern nations having a different view over Liberty.

Heidi Matthis (18m 45s):
So like I was saying in the, in the beginning, Appalachian, the Midlands really didn’t like either side. They wanted to stay out of it and tell the south made the first move on from Fort Sumner that appalled them and their pattern throughout history was they would end up joining the side. They hated the least at the time in this case, Yankee them was the side. They hated the least. And so that was the side that they tended to join in the civil war. And Yankeedom would end up as we know, the north would end up winning the civil war, but it’s hard, you know, especially nowadays we can really see that they didn’t necessarily win in the entire argument. For example, reconstruction, the period after the civil war failed in large part, because Yankeedom, when they went down to the south to try to enforce the law, they were viewed as like a foreign country to the people in the south.

Heidi Matthis (19m 38s):
They hadn’t really won them over. And so like the south had not changed its culture basically. And so the Yankees have ended up basically giving up and going home before they had really sort of won the overall victory. So you could think of it as like the civil war was a situation where the Yankees won the military battle to abolish slavery, but they had sort of lost the overall award to end the subjugation of African-Americans. And even to a lesser extent, the hierarchy that also oppressed for white people in the south.

Diana (20m 14s):
Wow, that’s a great explanation. And I think that, you know, those who are civil war buffs and really study that what agree that once those other nations came into a Appalachian Midlands and I love the comment that they tend to, to join the side, they hated least that that’s when the war kind of swung to, to the north side. And I think that’s so interesting. It’s so sad that reconstruction did not play out in a better way that could have really helped to raise the level of the formerly enslaved and those, like you said, the oppressed poor white people. Cause there was very much that class system that just did not go away a good lens to look at, to try to understand what happened there.

Heidi Matthis (21m 2s):
Definitely. So

Nicole (21m 3s):
Heidi, how does this theory show up in our DNA?

Heidi Matthis (21m 6s):
Well, it was so interesting. I came across this blog post by Colin Woodard, where he was writing about a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications called Clustering of 770,000 Genomes Reveals Post-Colonial Population Structure of North America, which apparently he was getting all these emails, telling them about the study because it, it really dovetailed so well with the theory in his book. And he was saying that he neither, he nor the authors of the study knew about each other. But if you look at my blog post, you can see that I, I post a map from American nations.

Heidi Matthis (21m 46s):
And then there are also the map from this DNA study. And you can see that there, there is kind of a, a dovetailing there, the nature communication study involved 770,000 Ancestry users. And they saw how they formed DNA clusters for the, for the whole country, which is kind of a large scale version of what we as genealogists do with our individual DNA results. We look in our match list for matches that matched each other and our forming clusters. And so they did that for the whole, for all of these like 770,000 users. And they showed something that we kind of all know at the ground at our own little ground level is that our ancestors tended to associate with and marry and migrate with other people from the same group.

Heidi Matthis (22m 34s):
And we call that our FAN club and these Ancestry users from the Nature Communication study and the Ancestry DNA communities that we see in our ethnicity results at Ancestry are basically doing the same clustering, but at a much more macro scale, it shows on this 20,000 foot view of how people are tending to stay at within their same group. And it’s even showing up in our DNA results. Anyway, it was fun to hear his blog post about what he saw in this article, that dovetailed so well with his book.

Nicole (23m 10s):
You think that people stayed within their groups because of just convenience because, you know, in the past, I don’t think people were as mobile as they are now. Whereas now we’re so used to like, you know, we go somewhere else for college, we meet new people. We might interact with new groups. Whereas in the past it seems like people mostly just stayed kind of where they were born and grew up, got married to someone around the corner and that kind of thing.

Heidi Matthis (23m 34s):
Yeah, no, I think that’s a really good way to put it. I think that, you know, all those issues of mobility definitely affected how people migrated, but I think it’s just like, you’re on the ground. You, you hear about people moving to Ohio, which is like, so that’s what Yankeedom did, you know, a lot of people from New England, you know, ended up moving to Northern parts of Ohio. So they would have probably heard about that from their neighbors and, you know, so they, they end up being in the same circles. And then also probably having a little bit different culture as we were talking about earlier than the people from the south. And so this study from nature communications really shows how there’s just very little mixing north to south in the United States even to today.

Nicole (24m 20s):
Wow. That is fascinating. You know, and it’s interesting that they went ahead and used profiles from Ancestry DNA.

Heidi Matthis (24m 26s):
I totally thought that was interesting too. And I had to kind of look at it and say, well, were they just using the Ancestry communities? But it looks like they did their own separate analysis, but it it’s the same people as the Ancestry communities I imagine, but it’s just a different way of analyzing it. And I do give a link to that study. So those of you who are interested in how they did it, you can definitely read that.

Diana (24m 49s):
Well, one of the things that I have learned in various classes, or just from experience in looking at records is that people migrated west and they wanted to farm like they had back in their original place. So like if they were in North Carolina and they were used to the soil and the kind of crops they would grow there, they moved out west to similar places in Tennessee and Missouri. And they tried to settle in places where they could grow the same kind of crops. If you knew how to grow cut, and you wanted to find a place where you could grow cotton. And so I had never thought of that before I learned that concept.

Diana (25m 31s):
And that was really fascinating. So I think in these maps that you have on the blog posts, you can really see the westward movement of these groups and kind of see that they’re kind of just moving straight west, give and take a little bit. But then I also think Texas is fun because, you know, I have Texas ancestors and Texas becomes kind of a melting pot. You know, a lot of Southern groups go into Texas, but you get a little bit bigger mix because this was wide open land and people wanted new lands. So it’s just fun to think about where our ancestors came from and why they migrated gives us another view of it.

Heidi Matthis (26m 10s):
Absolutely. I think it, as we’re doing our own little individual research, we, we notice a pattern that keeps sort of happening over and over again. And we wonder why did they keep doing this? And when you get behind the surface a little bit like a book with American nations allows, or your, you know, your idea about the people wanting to farm the same crops, which makes perfect sense. It kind of starts to unpack some of those reasons as to why they might’ve done that.

Diana (26m 38s):
Yeah. And I think when we have mystery ancestors, we need to use all sorts of things to help us understand them and kind of get some more clues about how to research them. So this is great. Well, that’s it for this podcast. Do you want to give us a summation for this part and what we’re going to do in part two?

Heidi Matthis (26m 59s):
I think you can just think of American nations as a 20,000 foot view of us history that has some DNA evidence to back it up. So it’s just a theory or a lens that you can apply to your research. And sometimes, you know, your ancestors are going to fit into that and sometimes they might not, but it’s still going to help you understand the people they were around. Even if your particular ancestors were, we’re an outlier in part two, I want to really lay out what his theory is, and then go over a snapshot of each of his 11 nations. And I hope that it will entice people to read his book because I think he does such a much better job of explaining.

Heidi Matthis (27m 40s):
And there’s so much more context for understanding these 11 nations and giving you clues about the world that your ancestors live in.

Diana (27m 50s):
Absolutely. Well, thanks so much, Heidi. First for writing the blog posts and synthesizing all that information and applying it to the genealogy world and then for coming on the podcast to talk about it. So I’m excited to see where we’re going to go on part two and talk more about this. So we hope everybody listening well, have a great week and make good discoveries in your genealogy and join us for part two of this podcast. So thanks so much, Heidi. Oh, you’re welcome. Talk to everybody later. Bye.

Nicole (28m 20s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.