A Little Family History For those that don’t know family history, here is a litt

A Little Family History

For those that don’t know family history, here is a little of it from memory:

1) our direct ancestors can be traced to the 1400’s. We know the lineage and location from that time, and there are period maps that include the homes and names of these individuals. It appears that our ancestors were part of the Norman conquest in 1066 – reasonable documentation exists at least to infer it. There is some ‘constructed’ evidence that Doolittles were part of ‘Rollo And His Vikings’ invading northern France.

2) The national geographic society’s “Genographic Project” will do a genetic test for $100 that will show your maternal or paternal genetic history. Those I’ve seen so far don’t contradict the hypothesis. Nothing can truly prove it however. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html

We should note that current genetic mapping of the UK, shows that nearly all brit’s are of Celtic descent. and very few scandinavian despite the mythology of viking invasion. Most Icelanders are of mixed scandinavian and irish gene pools, apparently because the scandinavians picked up Irish women on the way to settlement. The very northern islands off of scotland are heavily scandinavian. But that is a rarity. Most brits are Celts.

3) There is no good history of the origin of the Doolittle name. Lots of ideas, but mostly the work of bad amateur historians. It’s actually kind of fun to collect all the hypotheses people in the family have.

4) There are multiple historical mentions of our family name. Mostly as members of armies, including letters and memoirs. Our ancestors were often literate. There is a record of at least one monk donating his goods to the church as he joined the monastery. (A monastery was the closest thing to a fortune 500 company in medieval times. It wasn’t that you needed to be religious, they were centers of industrial production, because they were centers of capital.) There is another mention in memoirs from the Napoleonic era of a a quiet and small soldier named Doolittle, ‘who was short and stocky’ listening to some fool rant intolerably and then dispassionately, and calmly killing him for the crime of being too annoying to have in camp.

5) Historically, English society was fully militarized, (leading to the mercantilist English State where the state became a commercial empire) and Doolittles appear to have been sergeants and captains, assumedly all the way back to the Norman conquest: essentially, the military’s ‘middle managers’. There are claims in the family literature to being ‘lesser nobility’ but think of it more that our ancestors were middle class, and responsible for small groups of men in battle, and had that more moderate position in society.

6) There is a good book about the Doolittles of Lescestershire that is available on amazon or from the publisher. Reading it can make history feel very real.

7) living in central England, (the Midlands) our ancestors were part of the losing side of the English civil war. As middle class business people and craftsmen, farmer and small home business owners, and summer soldiers, it was ‘safer’ and more profitable to move to the colonies where land was effectively free. While much has been made of ‘puritans’, the fact is that most ‘puritan’ immigrants were losers of the english civil war.

8) Three branches of the family split during that time as individuals moved to ireland, europe, and america. All american Doolittle’s are descended from Abraham Doolittle. He was the first sheriff of the New Haven Colony. He became a minor legislator in Connecticut. His tombstone is in the small (and somewhat seedy) town north of New Haven. (As an aside, it is somewhat criminal that Connecticut, and in particular the Connecticut River Valley, which in the 1700’s was considered ‘the finest and most beautiful place ever inhabited by man, and possibly the best place and time ever to live as man’ now is home to some of the most horrid, poor, hopeless, nihilistic, drug and crime ridden cities in America: Danbury, Meriden, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford.) He had wives die in childbirth, fought in wars, and was approximately age 20 when he arrived and took on these duties. That is another statement of the difference in our times. He was a man when most of us are still boys.

9) As immigration to the colonies continued, land prices increased, and so many of the early immigrants to New England like the Doolittles, sold their holdings in new england and moved prior to the revolutionary war, to the Ohio river valley with it’s exceptional farm land. They settled, and dispersed to the rest of rural america from there. The family penchant for military service seems to have further distributed our genes around the country over the following two centuries. A google map of the name ‘doolittle’ will show a concentration in new england, and the corresponding westward migration. (Another good book is the “nine nations of north america” which accurately breaks the US into separate cultures, and explains regional differences in social and political preferences.)

9) Class values, along with the IQ to carry those values are (whether people like it or not) inherited, and society is often organized according to IQ, family values and physical fitness. Most Doolittles have, over the centuries, maintained a certain class position. Understanding family history is an interesting way of seeing how families maintain social positions over centuries. We have produced a significant military commander, a poet, a few minor politicians, an awful lot of small business people, and a plethora of soldiers. We are an ongoing testament to our ancient history. “Men with IQ’s over 125 invent machines, Men with IQ’s over 105 repair machines. Men with IQ under 105 use machines.”

10) There is an old book on ‘Ancient Families Of New England’. Doolittles are one of the early political families mentioned in the book. It is in some new england libraries. During this period, because we preserved colonial records, there is a solid understanding of 17th and 18th century in the colonial period. It’s fascinating. As a humorous bit of trivia: there was a genetic study conducted in the early 20th century during the Eugenics movement that purports to show the Doolittles as social malcontents in Vermont as ‘Building Better Vermonters”. This book is sometimes available on the web. It turns out that the authors of the study, in order to obtain the consent of the family it actually interviewed and documented, which was NOT a Doolittle family but another name and family altogether (Dooley I think?), changed the name to ‘Doolittle’ to hide their name. And having done so, quite by accident, stigmatized the family in that area of Vermont, and doomed them to long term ostracization. Bad press matters.

11) Like most people of Norman cum-protestant ancestry, Doolittles do not seem to breed in great numbers – we are still a relatively small family. (Normans were very good administrators. Which is one of the reasons they were good soldiers.) One of the reasons that protestants were middle class, and catholics poor, seems to stem from this control of breeding, and the requirement that a man be able to support his own home before marrying and having children. “He who breeds wins”. We have not been winning the battle of numbers so to speak.

12) Doolittle Family crests are likely fakes. There are at least three common representations of the Doolittle family crest, and all are fictitious. There is no record of any promotion to nobility of any Doolittle family member that we are able to find in pre-colonial history. Very often, late in history, the middle class, as it rose to replace the landed nobility in political power, especially in france, but no less in england, purchased ennoblement by donations to the crown. Others simply fabricated them out of false claims. If you want to represent the Doolittle family in a crest, then the Saint George’s Cross, and the English and American flags are about as close as you can get, because from our family history’s perspective, we are the makers of those flags.

(There is one from ireland I think, that has roosters, and one from England I think, that has three silver spheres on stripes. But I have seen no evidence that these are anything other than fashionable fabrications.)

13) In the early 1900’s, a number of Doolittle women started working on the Doolittle Family History. This book is now in at least eight large volumes. It is available from the family genealogist. It costs real money. But it is very fascinating to read. REaders must remember that in the 1800’s the enlightenment was ending, and northern european civilization was attempting to cast off the last vestiges of catholicism and to develop an new history for itself. This period is called ‘romanticism’ as if it was a fashion, but it was effectively a failed attempt to recreate a european religion from the remnants of our polytheistic germanic past. (this is what the greeks did in the hellenic age, having lost reading and memory of Mycenean greece – they reinvented themselves after their ‘dark age’.) Instead of succeeding in creating this new religion, the commercialism and materialism of the english merchant class prevailed, and England (ie:Athens – the naval merchant state) and Germany (ie: Sparta – the farming Army State) went to war, creating the Great European Civil War that we call the “world wars”, and ending the attempt to recreate a new northern european model and mythology. The James Bond character is an ‘Ode To Lost Empire’. To some degree, these ancestry efforts are an ode to lost ‘identity’. Our time, as a family who rowed the oars of society’s trireme, preserved it’s liberty, and crafted it’s goods, may have passed.

14) The Secretary of the Doolittle Society will give you a printout of your entire family history back to the 1400’s if you ask (and pay for it.) You can contact him and update your family data. He can be reached at http://members.cox.net/edoolittle2/

15) The book “The Doolittle Family In America” can be found on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&index=books&field-keywords=Doolittle%20family%20America.

16) In Index Washington, on the opposite side of the country from the Plymouth Colony, is a small park named “Doolittle Park”, in memory of it’s founder – now forgotten other than for the bronze plaque that states his name. The village has been advertising, hoping to attract people to move there, since it was in danger of losing it’s charter during the 1990’s because so few people live there. The village was used either for mining or logging. It’s little more than a signpost. The park is little more than a patch of dirt next to the river, not even sufficient for grazing a few sheep, cows or horses. The remnants of small summer camping huts line one of the feeder creeks leading to the river.

Some Advice I Found Valuable:

“Knowledge of your ancestors can not only make history seem real and tangible, but it can be used as a guide by which to judge your journey through life. It’s folly to take pride in their achievements, you should instead take pride in the record yours: Leave the world better than you entered it. If possible, do better with your life, and build as good or better a character than did your ancestors. And at the very least, do nothing to besmirch their honor if they had any. By knowing and improving on the record of your lineage, you can make the best of what you started with, and add to your ancestor’s history. See yourself in them, and you will better understand yourself. They are you. You are them. “