RLP 183: American Nations Part 2 with Heidi Mathis

Nicole (2s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 183 American Nations part two 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 (41s):
Let’s go, hello everyone. And welcome to Research Like a Pro today.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (51s):
I am doing well. How are you Diana?

Diana (53s):
I am doing well exciting to have a new year 2022. When I was a little girl, I just couldn’t even envision what it was going to be like in 2022. And here we are kind of, kind of an exciting. We’re also happy to have Heidi Mathis back. Hi Heidi.

Heidi Mathis (1m 9s):
Hello.

Diana (1m 10s):
We’re excited to talk about part two of our American Nations series. So, Nicole, what have you been working on?

Nicole (1m 17s):
It’s been fun, we’ve been talking about a new product we want to have on our Family Locket genealogists services arm, and they kind of revolve around helping you with your DNA. So one of them is the DNA research plan, where we review kind of what you have and then make a plan for what to do next. And then also a DNA research consultation, where instead of writing out a plan, we can review what you have and then just talk with you about some next steps. So if you’re interested in that, go ahead and click on the links to those products in our show notes.

Diana (1m 48s):
Yeah, we’re excited to have some new services cause we’ve worked with so many people now in our DNA study group and we realized that there are so many different needs out there for helping you learn how to use your DNA and genealogy. So for announcements, we have our spring DNA study group beginning, February 16th, and registration is open for that. If by chance it is full by the time this podcast airs, just email us for the waiting list and the email for that would be nicole@familylocket.com. And then just to put on your schedule for 2022, our falls study group will begin in September and that is our regular Research Like a Pro study group without DNA.

Diana (2m 32s):
So if you haven’t done one of our study groups before, that’s a great one to start with because we focus just on the documentary work and we love working with everyone in our study groups. So we hope to see all of you at one point or another. Please join our newsletter for coupons. So you get first notice that.

Nicole (2m 50s):
Well, let’s talk to Heidi now. So Heidi, can you review what we talked about in the last podcast?

Heidi Mathis (2m 55s):
Absolutely. We were talking about this book. I read that I loved for how it applies to genealogy. It’s called American Nations by Colin Woodard. It gives us a macro overview of American history that can help us see how the communities and historical forces that were shaping the places where our ancestors lived. The idea that our ancestor had their own small FAN club, but that their small FAN club connected to a larger network of people or FAN clubs that you can see in ancestry communities and in people’s DNA. And in this study that Colin Woodard talked about in his blog post from a magazine nature communications, where they clustered 770,000 genomes and showed how it really dovetailed with his theory in American Nations.

Heidi Mathis (3m 45s):
And last time we just kind of introduced the idea of American Nations. And we talked about the two main nations of Yankeedom and the Southern ones that Tidewater in the deep south. And we talked about how the civil war and how those nations are kind of battling each other and bringing in the other smaller nations. And in this podcast, I’m hoping that we can talk more about the theory that underlies his book and as well as kind of go over each of those 11 nations.

Diana (4m 13s):
Yes. I think it’ll be great to go through each one of those because we probably all have ancestors who were in multiple. I know there are some people that their ancestors come to one spot and they’re just kind of there like new England roots and that’s it. But you know, if you’re like me, you’ve kind of these groups all over the place, so it will be fun to go through each one. So let’s talk about the main hypothesis behind the book American nations.

Heidi Mathis (4m 40s):
Yeah. If you had to be very concise, you’d say the American nations presents a theory that it’s the first people who settle an area, have an outsized effect on the culture that develops in that area and that other people coming in wherever they’re from will more adopted that first settlement culture before they’re even their own. So European colonization in the 17th and 18th century in the 19th century devastated the indigenous people of north America that were here first through disease and forced relocation, dishonest treaties and relentless violent conflict.

Heidi Mathis (5m 19s):
And this unspeakable tragedy resulted in the loss of American Indian culture in the lands that the Europeans colonized and American nations posits that that mostly blank cultural slate that was left behind was filled by the first European cultures to take root in whatever area they were coming to. He builds his theory from several sources, but the most important is his guy Wilbur Zelinsky, who first proposed this theory called the doctrine of first effective settlement in 1973 and I’ll quote Zelinsky. It says “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the latter social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been”.

Heidi Mathis (6m 16s):
So American nations argues that no matter what culture your ancestor came from originally, where they settled in the US would greatly affect where they and their descendants may have migrated and who they married and perhaps even what political party they may have supported. So today, like I was saying, I’d like to go through each of these 11 nations in a real short snapshot. And in his book, obviously he develops these ideas much more extensively.

Diana (6m 45s):
Wow. So interesting. And I think that quote by Wilbur Zelinsky was fascinating that this idea of a viable self perpetuating society and how people bring with them, whatever their cultural and their social mores are to the blank slate. Fascinating. Okay. So let’s start with El Norte, which is a Southern part of California, Arizona, most of New Mexico and Northern Mexico. So basically the Southwest United States now, but called El Norte. Tell us about that.

Heidi Mathis (7m 21s):
Yeah. This one was so interesting to me. If you would have asked me, what was the first of these 11 nations to settle? I would’ve thought you would have said the English colonists, which shows you that I don’t always think things through, but actually the English weren’t the first here, the oldest European communities in the US are in the desert Southwest, and they were the Spanish. The Spanish were the superpowers in the 16th century and so they were the first Europeans to settle in north America. They were in Kansas and Oregon and Florida and Virginia before the English. One of the oldest European communities in north America is, is this El Norte. And it goes back to 1595 in New Mexico.

Heidi Mathis (8m 3s):
The oldest building in the US is the palace of the governors. And it was built in 1610 in Santa Fe. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Witter argues that the people of the Southwest and Northern Mexico, which make up El Norte, they have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of their countries. So the people in New Mexico have more in common with the people of Northern Mexico and those people in Northern Mexico have more in common with the people in New Mexico than they do with the rest of Mexico.

Diana (8m 33s):
That’s so interesting. I know that when I was studying Texas history, you also have that same, you know, it’s a little bit further east and then this area, but you also have that Spanish and Mexican influence there way before you have other people. So great to know.

Nicole (8m 53s):
And Hey, I live in that area, so I should go visit some of these old buildings and things. You know, you are, we have been to some of the old missions. I think those are still around. And some of those old buildings from the early Spanish settlement

Heidi Mathis (9m 9s):
Absolutely. I’m originally from California. And so all the haciendas and stuff that were there were definitely from this El Norte community.

Nicole (9m 18s):
Right. Okay. Well, let’s move to New France. Tell us about Quebec parts of Nova Scotia and Louisiana.

Heidi Mathis (9m 25s):
Yeah. So also before the English in 1604, there were 79 Frenchmen that arrived in what later would be called Acadia, which is today parts of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and parts of Eastern Maine. Woodard sums up this nation by explaining that one of the earlier governors called Samuel de Champlain wanted a feudal society like France had, but they had a slightly different view of Native Americans than the English or the Spanish. And so I’ll quote, Woodard, he says, He, meaning Champlain, believed that new France should co-exist in a friendly, respectful alliance with the native American nations and instead of conquering and enslaving the Indians as the Spanish had, or driving them away as the English would New France would embrace the native Americans and assimilate with them.

Heidi Mathis (10m 17s):
Later, these Acadians would move to Louisiana and become Cajuns. And then more French settlers would arrive in Quebec where they obviously dominate to this day. And Woodard argues that the nation of New France has consistently been the most liberal of the 11 nations. For example, Woodard says that though Louisiana was a slave state its view of slavery differed from the deep south nation. And some of its slave owners were unionists. In other words, the settlers from New France influenced Louisiana to be more liberal than its immediate neighbors, deep south. And likewise in Quebec, it was also more liberal than its neighbors from the nearby provinces that were like, for example, Ontario was settled by midlanders and it’s definitely more conservative than Quebec.

Diana (11m 2s):
Well, I really see that in Louisiana with the treatment of the enslaved people and the native Americans, it was much different there and you see them owning land and being granted their freedom more. And so as time progressed will be seen on it became more like the other members of the deep south, but especially in the early 1700s, probably up to early 1800s, it was quite different. So that French influence was certainly, like you said it was dominant. I wonder,

Nicole (11m 32s):
I wonder, you know, we have seen with some of our DNA study group members that those with ancestry in Quebec and Nova Scotia, and some of those areas do have some intermarriage within their family trees, some pedigree collapse. I think the Acadians, maybe I’m not sure, but I wonder if that’s this similar thing in Louisiana, but maybe it was just up in Canada.

Heidi Mathis (11m 57s):
That’s a great question.

Diana (11m 59s):
Well, one of the, one of the things that I learned in what book I read about this, I can’t remember now. It might’ve been some of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ work cause she does a lot, you know, in that area, but France definitely had its hierarchy. And so when they came over directly from France, they had to try to marry someone of a similar class. And so if there wasn’t somebody available, then they would have an alliance with someone of a lesser class, you know, like an African-American woman or a native American woman, but they were not allowed to really marry them. So those are the situations I’ve seen, but they treated them really well. Sometimes you never know for sure, right? The records look like they do.

Heidi Mathis (12m 40s):
It’s only in comparison to how the native Americans were treated in other nations that they stand out, you know, and that early on, there was a lot more working together, you know? And, and if you look back at the French and Indian war, it’s called that because the French and the native Americans were mostly fighting with each other against the English. The English did have some native Americans, but generally that the French did seem to form more equal alliances with native Americans.

Nicole (13m 9s):
When I think more about Louisiana, I feel like the people who have had DNA from this area, they do have more intermarriage with native Americans or at least like Diana said, they maybe didn’t marry them, but they had children together. So I think they don’t have that same problem of as much pedigree collapsed as is found among some of the other people in New France, up in Canada.

Heidi Mathis (13m 34s):
It’s so interesting to think about how this plays out, you know, kind of on the ground level and we’re kind of doing it right now. It’s just, it’s a lens that we’re using to try to understand the different cultures that are in the United States.

Nicole (13m 48s):
Well, let’s move to a new area. I would love to keep talking about this. And I was going to do some Google searching about undocumented Louisiana, but thank you. So tell us more about the people in new England who migrated to Northern Ohio west across the upper Midwest, and then founded the Pacific coastal cities.

Heidi Mathis (14m 10s):
Yeah. Yankeedom, like we talked about in the last podcast, along with the Tidewater and the deep south has exerted, you know, one of the greatest influences on us history, the settlers of Yankeedom were mostly Puritans who had supported Oliver, Cromwell and parliament in the English civil war of the 1640s. And those from Yankeedom to this day tend to be more utopian and egalitarian zealous, just like the first settlers in the early 17th century in new England, they believed in the importance of education, of debate, and of coming to consensus by reason was how they thought was the best way to solve problems. This contrast with their nemesis regions of the Tidewater and the deep south, the Southern of Yankeedom shunned hierarchy like the deep south and Tidewater wanted.

Heidi Mathis (14m 59s):
They instead created a government system of rotating power. And this culture can still be seen today in small new England towns where they have selectmen instead of a Mayoral system. You know, you can just see a Yankee coming into a place and they’re often have strong ideals and a sense of rightness of their cause. And they thought that they were on the right track to creating a more equal society. And this kind of zeal and righteousness kind of could sometimes irritate their fellow nations, which it came across maybe as being more bossy, you know? So they, they could sometimes alienate others by that view, but that was where they were coming from.

Heidi Mathis (15m 42s):
Wow.

Nicole (15m 42s):
I definitely see that bossiness. I think of like John Adams and his personality, you know, he was a little bit more liberal than some of the founding fathers from the south. And just kind of that personality of like, I’m right. We should do it this way. Yeah,

Heidi Mathis (15m 58s):
Definitely. And in every conflict you can see that kind of coming out that they think they know what’s right. And they’re always, you know, tending to push for a flatter hierarchy, more democracy, but kind of not tolerating other people’s way of thinking about things. Maybe

Diana (16m 14s):
That reminds me of the new book out by David McCullough titled, Pioneers. And it’s talking about these Yankeedom people coming from New England, settling into Ohio, you know, the first settlers in Ohio. And they wanted to build this utopian society where it was going to be so great and everybody that’s going to be equal. And it was very much the idealism. And I was fascinated with this because I hadn’t really studied that before. But the interesting thing was once they got there, then they, you know, they had some other people that were living there. They had some native Americans who were not thrilled with having them there. And so, you know, you see that play out in a very sad way.

Diana (16m 58s):
Yeah. That is fascinating to think about. And so if you have New England ancestors, maybe you’re seeing some of that in your DNA, come forward with the bossiness that kind of cracked me up the ancestors or grandparents or parents maybe, you know, did they have New England roots?

Heidi Mathis (17m 16s):
I, it’s probably not so much in the DNA as much in the cultural thinking, you know, and, and there’s a fine line between really believing in your way of thinking, which we all do and trying to push that too hard on other people and maybe not listening as much. And so I think that’s just been playing out in our history where people who have our own ideas and the United States, these 11 nations struggling to work out a single government. And it’s, it’s tough.

Diana (17m 48s):
Well, let’s move a little south and go to the Tidewater nation, which includes the lowlands or title areas of Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and the Carolinas.

Heidi Mathis (17m 60s):
So unlike the more middle-class ethics of Yankeedom, the Tidewater was led by settlers who were the second sons of the British aristocracy. And they weren’t going to, like I was saying last time they were the second son, so they weren’t going to inherit their land in England. So that’s what brought them to the colonies. And they wanted to recreate their ideal society. To them the ideal society was a feudal society with themselves at the top and indentured servants and enslaved people at the bottom. And they wanted to have this paternalistic mannered class-based society. They weren’t really looking for consensus. They thought consensus was not the way to do things. They thought that the upper classes should be in charge.

Heidi Mathis (18m 42s):
And that, that was the best way to run society. They had this idea of noblesse oblige, which is a feudal notion that basically says that those at the top are superior, but they have the obligation to take care of the basics for those at the, at the bottom. And so pretty much all of our founding fathers with the exception of John Adams were from Tidewater. And you can really see this show up in our constitution. The founding fathers made sure the constitution reflected their distrust of the masses and how they set up the Senate and the electoral college to try to keep power in elite hands rather than in the masses. And along with the deep south Tidewater has been the most conservative of nations and often clashing with Yankeedom.

Heidi Mathis (19m 26s):
But as you can see in the, in the study from nature communications, that map that I put in the blog post, that Tidewater has mostly been subsumed by the deep south. Their ideology is probably still there to some degree, but they were important early on, but as time has gone along, they’ve really been more subsumed by the deep south culturally,

Diana (19m 48s):
If it was because of the civil war that brought the two together, they united against Yankeedom. And so maybe that was the point where they started, or maybe even before that they were entrenched in slavery and they were uniting against anyone that wanted to get rid of that institution. So definitely that probably had some kind of a uniting effect upon them. When you were talking about the conflict between Yankeedom and the Tidewater, I just couldn’t help but think about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who at times were good friends, but at other times, bitter enemies. And, you know, there, we have the two men that really show the difference.

Nicole (20m 30s):
All right, well, let’s go up to new Netherlands, New York city.

Heidi Mathis (20m 34s):
Yeah. This is a really interesting one because it really kind of exemplifies that idea of the first settlers having the biggest effect because the Dutch were the first there, but actually very few people have very much Dutch ancestry. So you can really see that the first settlers had kind of an outsized effect on the culture there. And so the Dutch of the 17th century or a culture that was kind of becoming a super power and, you know, New York was what was called new Amsterdam at the time. And it’s just like Amsterdam proper. It was characterized by diversity and mercantilism. The Dutch weren’t really as feudal as the other European powers.

Heidi Mathis (21m 15s):
So when they came to the new world, they were not as democratically minded as Yankeedom, but they had similar ideas about liberty for the Dutch. They really valued free speech and inquiry. And so basically the bill of rights comes from the Dutch. So those are the things that they prize the most. And even as they were committed to freedoms, they were also really committed to business and they wanted toleration of diversity that was good for business, sort of above all. And so like Amsterdam, New York became a Mecca of free exchange of ideas and cultures and a lot of toleration, but, but with business front of mind, which even today fosters new business ventures and New York is still a place of innovation And, you know, anyone can go there and try to make it there.

Heidi Mathis (22m 3s):
And just like the Tidewater, the New Netherlands doesn’t have a big measurable genetic presence, but the ideas are still really dominant there.

Nicole (22m 12s):
That’s a good point that some of these nations may not be super visible on the DNA nations communities map, but I think you’re right that they ideas, especially for New York city, that’s such an iconic city with these same ideas still floating around there.

Diana (22m 28s):
Yeah. As you’re talking about that, wow. That is such a great definition of New York city. That’s awesome. And I think it’s such a melting pot now. Obviously we had floods of Irish coming in and every ethnicity, you know, Germans, Italians, Hispanic, and so genetically now you wouldn’t see that, but the ideas are still there. Well, let’s move to the Midlands and this is Pennsylvania parts of the Midwest upper Midwest plus Ontario, Canada. So that’s an interesting region.

Heidi Mathis (22m 58s):
Yeah. Well, this one’s near and dear to my heart. So, so after El Norte and New France and Yankeedom and Tidewater were founded, came the earliest and largest non English speaking European group, the Germans, they were more in between the liberal Yankees and the more conservative Tidewater water settlers, 17th and 18th century German colonists were fleeing wars and hierarchical societies that they felt deprived them of land and autonomy. And so they shunned the semi feudalism of Tidewater as equally as the bossiness of Yankeedom and the Quakers, even though they had a different culture than the Germans, they were the other main group of the Midlands.

Heidi Mathis (23m 38s):
And they had settled before the Germans in Pennsylvania, obviously, but the Quakers had also left Europe to escape hierarchy. They, they to do escape the Puritans actually. So they were obviously not naturally allied with Yankeedom, you know, in the beginning. And so these two different groups, the Germans in the Quakers formed a moderate nation that above all wanted to be left alone. And along with Appalachian, as we talked about last time have often been the swing voters of us history, whichever side of the Midlands and the, and Appalachian should have chosen in various battles between the north and the south. That’s the side that’s going to win the war.

Diana (24m 16s):
So when we were talking, maybe it was in the previous episode about why people migrated or why they settled, where they settled. I think we see, and maybe you can comment on this, that Germans came to German communities because they wanted to have something like what they had in Germany. They wanted to build a community similar to what they knew. Would you agree with that?

Heidi Mathis (24m 39s):
Oh, absolutely. But what they wanted was a community like they knew, but without their Lords

Diana (24m 47s):
Better community,

Heidi Mathis (24m 48s):
They wanted to plant. I mean, that’s, that’s one way to really condense what is motivating German colonists throughout time is, is in Germany. They were coming from parts of Germany where the land was becoming more and more scarce. And then the Lords were starting to impinge on their, what they thought was their land rights. And so they really were coming to the new world to, to get land. Cause they had the impression that you could get huge amounts of land for relatively little money. And that was motivating enough for them to get on these ships and come to a country that was settled by England, you know? So they were always going to be outsiders in the beginning.

Diana (25m 27s):
Interesting to think about where they fit into all of this. Yes.

Nicole (25m 31s):
Yeah. What I was thinking about when you’re talking about Pennsylvania and the Germans was going back to my earlier thoughts on in me because we know that Mennonites and the Amish do have some of that endogamy in their communities. And so I had to go check my question and sure enough Acadians and Cajuns are considered to have endogamous population. So I do think there is, endogamy in Louisiana. In fact, there’s an article on JSTOR that I didn’t read yet, but I found called Endogamy Among Louisiana Cajuns, a Social Class Explanation. So that would be really interesting to read, especially if you have some Cajun ancestry.

Heidi Mathis (26m 9s):
So fascinating.

Nicole (26m 9s):
Yeah. It’s just interesting to think about, you know, some of the premise of this book is that people married within their nation, right? And so some of them really did that and it caused that problem of endogamy. So

Heidi Mathis (26m 20s):
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, there could have been a language element there they’re going to, you know, with the Amish, you know, could have been a religious element, you know, so each one is going to be different and is going to fit in this sort of framework a little bit differently.

Nicole (26m 33s):
Yeah. And maybe some of the ones that were more welcoming to outsiders, you know, you don’t see that challenge in DNA research for those, you know, nations who maybe were more open to outsiders. Yeah. Well, let’s move on to Appalachia. This is defined as the Highlands from Pennsylvania down to the South Carolina area, some migrating west to Southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and others through Kentucky and Tennessee and onward to Arkansas, Missouri, and then to Oklahoma, Texas, and into the far west. So this takes up quite a big,

Heidi Mathis (27m 10s):
Yeah, definitely. This is such an interesting group. So the people that in the nation of Appalachia were mostly Scot Irish immigrants who settled on the frontier of the early American colonies. And at that time, the frontier was basically the Appalachian mountains. And this is an interesting group because back in Europe, they had been on the border lands in the UK and they were always fighting the English, you know, the English word kind of coming in and encroaching on their land at times. And so they sort of learned to have these really tough societies where they really depended on their clan networks. So these people started migrating in the 1600s to Ireland, where again, they were kind of a bulwark between England and the native Irish.

Heidi Mathis (27m 58s):
Then they ended up immigrating to the US and sort of had the same function. They were basically on the borderline between the early colonists and the native Americans. And they were trying to keep everybody out and they mostly wanted to be left alone. And they really did not like to be ruled from above. And they wanted to keep their governance inside their community if challenged, they were ready to fight. So it’s not surprising that many of our country’s best generals come from the Appalachian nation, like for instance, Pershing and MacArthur and Patton were all have family roots in that area.

Heidi Mathis (28m 39s):
They’re incredibly independent in their mindset and shun hierarchy, even more than the Midlands did. And they formed a society in Appalachian. That was like, I was saying organized entirely on kinship and not really going for a formal government order.

Nicole (28m 53s):
This is a community or nation that I just didn’t know too much about. So thank you for sharing that.

Heidi Mathis (29m 0s):
Me neither, but it is really interesting. And it does, you know, you can see it playing out in people’s genealogy and in, in our history.

Nicole (29m 8s):
Diana, do you recognize some of these things in what you learned about the Scots Irish?

Diana (29m 13s):
Absolutely. Especially that statement about them being the bulwark. So they were on the borderlands and they were often fighting. They were in the new country and the native Americans were not happy to have white settlers coming into their land. You know, the native just kept getting pushed for them further west. And so the Scots-Irish by the time they arrived in Pennsylvania, the Germans had settled all the land. And so they had to go out to the west and fight out on the frontier to make their settlements. And I think that was kind of the way it went all along the way had to keep pushing west. One of the things in the book said that there were a lot of them that were just love the adventure, you know, obviously not all of them, but there were these great adventures that went ahead and were the frontiersman opening the way.

Diana (29m 59s):
So when you look at the map, you can see greater Appalachia is huge. It’s very large. It’s like all the middle states, all the middle states and they all go down into Texas. And I think we’re going to talk a little bit in a little bit about case studies from my ancestry, but, you know, looking at my pedigree chart, I’m just thinking I’ve got a lot of those people that were in that area and they really did. They all went to Texas very much can see that play out in our family’s migration. Well, before we do that, though, we have to talk about the deep south. We covered this a bit in the last podcast, but let’s do a little bit more on that.

Heidi Mathis (30m 40s):
So the deep south, just like Tidewater and Yankeedom is obviously one of the most important nations in our history. And they’re the primary agonist to Yankeedom. That those are the two that are often duking it out. Even to this day, I would argue so early on the Tidewater, like we were saying earlier, dominated their partnership against Yankeedom, but then eventually the deep south has kind of come to dominate that side of the conflict. The deep south first settlers were second sons of Barbadon slave holders. And the people who went to Barbados would have been people who were probably also second sons, you know, from England, they would have settled there. And then some of their descendants would have been second sons.

Heidi Mathis (31m 22s):
And they were the ones who came to settle the deep south. And they were equally as hierarchical as the, as Tidewater, but without so much of the noblesse oblique, the society that formed in the Caribbean was dependent on the sugar plantations. And those turned out to be very brutal forms of, of slavery. And many of those enslaved people did not live very long. And that was part of, really part of their business model. So unlike enslaved people on the mainland of north America, many fewer enslaved people live to reproduce because the pressure was so great to produce sugar, which was really kind of the oil of its time.

Heidi Mathis (32m 3s):
So as bad as slavery was in Tidewater, it was actually much worse to be sold down river into the deep south. And the settlers of the deep south were often outnumbered by African-Americans, who were in forced labor around them. And this made the founders of the deep south, especially sensitive about any effort to undermine their control.

Diana (32m 25s):
You know, the interesting thing about this discussion of the deep south is there were pockets that were different, you know, a little bit unique. I’m thinking of Arkansas where, you know, a lot of them were turned out to be unionist and did not believe in slavery. You know, that was kind of a state that was divided. But part of it is because they didn’t have slaves because the land didn’t lend itself, they couldn’t grow cotton. They couldn’t grow any of these crops that really worked with big plantations, you know, in other parts of Georgia or Alabama. So, you know, it’s interesting that this is the whole culture though, but then you do have these little different pockets as you study different communities and counties

Heidi Mathis (33m 9s):
Definitely, definitely likes. So I think those border states, it’s, that’s a good point that, you know, Arkansas for sure Missouri would have had a mix of populations and of cultures, you know, so some people would have had more of a, of a deep south mindset and others would have had more of an Appalachian mindset because certainly those places were settled by people from Appalachia. And then you had like these huge numbers of immigrants coming in. So it is, it is really fascinating to take sort of these, oh, this overall framework and try to really apply it to the history of your ancestor’s situation.

Diana (33m 44s):
But you know, when you were talking about politics a little bit, often, even if you were someone that opposed the general culture of the area, the leaders, the politicians, and the cultural leaders were entrenched in that deep south mentality. So, you know, that’s kind of how you look at it from a 20,000 foot level. I think,

Heidi Mathis (34m 5s):
I think that’s how I’m looking at it too.

Nicole (34m 7s):
All right. Well, let’s go to the left coast, Pacific coastal areas, Los Angeles to Vancouver, BC

Heidi Mathis (34m 14s):
The cities of the west coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, BC, and parts of Los Angeles were first settled by immigrants from Yankeedom. The new England shipping industry made Yankeedom the most familiar of the nations with the west coast because they were involved in the shipping industry. So when they settled some of these coastal cities, they brought their egalitarianism utopian ideas. And that’s what was the original culture of these west coast cities. And so these Yankeedom transplants, initially they clashed and then blended with the elements of , who were in some places where there, before them and in, and then the later Appalachian immigrants who came, you know, as a fair number of people from the gold rush, apparently might’ve been from Appalachia, plus just all the immigrants coming in and later times all blended together to make the left coast today, the most similar to Yankeedom in its idealism, but a little bit more individualistic.

Heidi Mathis (35m 13s):
Yeah,

Nicole (35m 13s):
It’s a good description. And now our last nation, the far west, which includes interior Pacific coast states through the great Plains.

Heidi Mathis (35m 20s):
So the far west was the last nation to be settled by Europeans, its landscape made it more difficult to transplant the farming and industrial methods that had worked in settling other nations. And so, but because it’s more sparsely populated than the other nations, but rich in natural resources, this dynamic of a harsher, fewer people and rich resources made the far west into a kind of an internal colony of the other nations that kind of red resentment, I would say. So this, this sort of dependence on the other nations, many ways, but also these other nations were extracting resources from the far west, kind of has resulted in this kind of independent nation that often has elements of Appalachia because there were a lot of people from Appalachia that settled the far west, but it makes it its own nation.

Nicole (36m 12s):
Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, of course the far west would be the last one to be settled by the Europeans. And it’s definitely harsher with, you know, I’m thinking of, is Utah part of this with some of the high mountainous areas of the desert. And when our pioneer ancestors first came into Utah, they struggled with trying to figure out how to do farming. They’re struggling in the winter time trying to figure that out. So I can definitely see that playing out.

Diana (36m 40s):
I think it’s interesting that the west becomes its own thing because obviously it’s people from all the other nations that come, but because of the harshness of the climate and just having to survive, you think of some of the pioneer stories where there’s neighbors miles away and they have to survive on their own, you know, through Montana. Yeah. It kind of gives you a feel for that. Well, let’s get to talking about our ancestors. So I think you’ve got some, a couple of case studies to share with us. Yeah.

Heidi Mathis (37m 11s):
Just some quick case studies, just to talk about applying this to our own families. I was thinking about you Diana, and how you’ve been reading the book about the scotch Irish. And it was kind of ringing true with what I had read in American nations. So I kind of wanted to check it out. So I snuck onto your FamilySearch family tree and was looking through your Harris, Frazier ancestors. And I saw that they were most recently in Texas in Oklahoma. And then before that they were in Missouri and Arkansas and then further back, they were in Tennessee and Kentucky. And this is exactly the migration patterns that he talks about in American nations. And he has a great chapter and different sections of his book on the characteristics of Appalachian people thought it was so interesting.

Heidi Mathis (37m 55s):
I love hearing you talk about your ancestors and thinking about how they would have been, you know, moving from farmland to farmland and setting up new communities and how they would be blending with other nations. So I thought that was a good case study to talk about.

Diana (38m 11s):
It’s fine. I’m looking at my pedigree chart and I’ve got so many surnames that would fit into that. So I have one that’s kind of fun here that I need to research eventually, someday it’s a McChristian or McHuston and the wife is a Mrs. Cherokee Native McHouston that was listed. And, you know, this came from FamilySearch and I obviously have not researched that, but I’m like, okay, well we’ve got a Cherokee, you know, another Cherokee ancestor apparently. And that, you know, you do see that happening because that was where the Cherokees were in that area, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even in the south, we’ve got the five civilized tribes and you do have intermarriage there.

Diana (38m 55s):
So real interesting, fun to think about.

Heidi Mathis (38m 56s):
So the other case study that I did was in podcast 149, I was on talking about my ancestors who were in 19th century, Germans, who had arrived in Missouri right at the time of the civil war and Missouri at the time was divided between north and south. And it kind of made sense for me of like what was going on and really helps me picture what life must’ve been like for them when they were stepping off the steam boat in the 1850s and sixties into this state that was sort of tipping between the north and the south that was kind of evenly divided. And so reading American nations was really fun for me on that mine. And then my dad has one Pennsylvania, German great-grandmother.

Heidi Mathis (39m 39s):
And as I was looking back at her lines and one line in my mom’s family, I was noticing, you know, that they followed the pattern of American nations where they’re starting out often in Southeastern Pennsylvania, they’re moving to Southwestern, Pennsylvania, and then often families are moving into the Ohio Indiana and then sort of into the upper Midwest. And I, it was pretty amazing to see how about, you know, very often that’s exactly what the families I was studying were doing. And I had this one sort of outlier family from my mom’s side that I thought that would not be covered by an American nations. And then as I was reading along, I found out that it was, so that was kind of fun. This one family that starts off in far Western, Maryland.

Heidi Mathis (40m 20s):
So just on the very edge of sort of the Pennsylvania Germans and they were German and they ended up in Ontario. And so I thought that’s crazy. They must have been an outlier, but apparently Ontario was almost entirely settled by people from the Midlands. And so I just thought that was so fun that it even explained that situation.

Diana (40m 42s):
It is. I think it’s fun now. I think we’re probably all wanting to go look at our family trees and then compare it to the nations in this book. Right?

Nicole (40m 53s):
Absolutely. It’s, it’s really cool to have a framework and give some more context to where people lived and help us think about migrations because sometimes migration is challenging to look at through generations, but I think it was very influential for our ancestors, these nations, where they went, where they lived and not all people are going to fall within these patterns. But I think a lot of them are

Heidi Mathis (41m 19s):
Definitely even if your particular family is an outlier, it’s still going to help you understand where they started from and where they ended up, you know, as to what kind of people they were living amongst.

Nicole (41m 31s):
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Heidi. And it was really neat to use this book, American nations to help us see more about our ancestors choices and then the overall pattern and historical forces for migration and us history. So thank you for coming on and talking to us about this. That was so much fun. Hopefully everyone listening will be able to use what they learned here to understand the records their ancestors left behind. So we’ll talk to you guys all again next week.

Diana (41m 59s):
All right. Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (42m 1s):
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