Seventy years ago a U.S.president threatened violence against a blameless American citizen. The principles in this historical drama are President Harry Truman; his daughter, singer Margaret Truman; and famous music critic Paul Hume.

Margaret sang in a Washington, D.C. concert. Hume wrote that she was a poor singer. The president wrote what would these days be called a hate message:

"Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beef steak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"

Later on, one of our great institutions, the free market, suggested Hume was correct. Margaret was a poor singer. Later still, Hume and Truman met and got along cordially.

I leave it to the reader to decide if there's a tiny, but useful, lesson for 2019 America in all this.

Yang Dough

The Democrat's debate was a doozie as entertainment, and if my older readers want to think of it as a reprisal of"The Gong Show," I have no objections.

Yang was the only really interesting character. Everyone laughed his gift of $12,000 bucks each for 10 lucky folks, financed with his campaign money. But a couple of candidates got all huffy about "vote buying." That cracked me up. Imagine, a Democrat promising free stuff in return for your support. The very idea!

I will say that Yang streamlines freebie money. At least it's a direct, honest announcement that he believes your vote is for sale and his opening bid is a thousand clams, cash on the barrel head. The other ones muck it up with a lot of obscure bureaucratic word salads.

Beto O'Rourke's Safe Place

"Beto" O'Rourke hates you and your guns. He's pinning his Hail-to-the-Chief fantasies on mandatory gun buybacks, national licensing and registration, and red-flag laws to confiscate your collection of old Winchesters because someone doesn't like you. It's run-of-the-mill stuff from the unicorn left.

BUT, Beto decided to cover his butt  with a little theatre. Saturday, he went to an Arkansas gun show, ostensibly to talk things over with the loophole set -- guys like you and me, red of neck, rusty of pickup, heavy with the steel implements of mass slaughter.

So far it hasn't occurred to anyone to point out that there, amidst hundreds of these armed deplorables, he was probably in the safest place he'll ever be.

The Clark Side of our Farrell Line

Salem Wallace Clark was my great grandfather, the father of Emma Allie Clark Farrell, mother of my dad, Ottis R. Farrell.  He successfully farmed land a few miles north of Madison, Missouri. (I have visited the farm.) Salem appears to have had a good deal of influence  on my dad who called him "Pap" and mentioned him often, especially as dad taught me to make primitive toys  - sling shots, willow whistles and so forth. "Pap said this ... showed me how to...etc."

Salem was the son of Meredith Clark (b. 1809 in Garard County, Ky. and died 1894 in Monroe County, Mo.).  He was the grandson of  William Clark.

William left us with a recorded will, a rare revelation hinting at how some of our people lived. (I find almost nothing similar from the Farrell side.) William's Find-A-Grave entry reads:

William purchased 150 acres of land in Garrard County, KY in 1816. The land was located on the water of the White Lick Fork of Paint Lick Creek. It appears that this land was eventually sold by the heirs of William Clark in 1839. William made a will dated June 2, 1822 in which were mentioned his father John Clark, his mother Milly Clark, his wife Sarah, and his sons John, Meredith, George and William. The will was recorded in July, 1822.

The will left his father John and his mother Milly the plantation where they lived including the farm with 40 acres of land, also half of the horse mill, likewise the sugar camp that they now make use of during their material lives. To his wife Sarah the balance of his plantation during her material life and after her death the property to be sold and equally divided among all his children except his oldest son John who is to only have $10 of his estate. His wife is also to have all his cattle, hogs and sheep, but the colt his son Meredith is to have. His wife is to have the household and kitchen furniture and at her death it is to be sold and divided among all his children except John. His son George is to have all his smith tools, and his son John is to have his whip saw. After the death of John and Milly Clark the 40 acres of land should be sold and William's two youngest sons, Meredith and William, should have $15 each more than the rest as an extra, the balance of the money to be divided equal with them and all the rest of his children. His wife is also to have one log cabin, two axes and one iron (?). The witnesses to the will were Coleman Haley and John D. Stephens. Burial site unknown, but buried in Garrard County, Kentucky.

It is clear that William died young in 1822 even though we have no recorded birth date. This explains the anomaly of his leaving part of his estate to his parents.  His father outlived him by about 14 years. We have nothing to account for the (insulting?)  pittance he left his oldest son, John.

ABOUT WILLIAM'S  FATHER,  JOHN CLARK

John Clark, like our John Farrell, was seven generations back from mine. In Kentucky, he lived only a few miles from our Farrells around Boonsboro. Each served as Revolutionary War fighter in the Virginia Continental Line. They remained neighbors after the large Kentucky-to-Missouri  migration  in the  late 1820s and/or '30s. Details below are from Find-A-Grave.

The family moved to Madison County, KY by 1795 as evidenced by a deed dated Nov. 27, 1795 in which John purchased 502 acres of land from Robert Daniel. The land was located on the east fork of Sugar Creek, and was bounded in part by the land of Abraham Stephens. Apparently, this part of Madison County became part of Garrard County when it was formed in 1796.

John served as a regular soldier in the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. John's application for a military pension in 1818 stated that he enlisted at Goochland County Courthouse in VA, in March, 1775, and that he served as a private in Capt. Samuel Woodson's Company of the Ninth Virginia Regiment on the state line commanded by Col. Thomas Fleming, and after Col. Flemings death that he continued to serve in this regiment until Col. George Matthews commanded it and until July, 1777. In 1776 the regiment was taken on Continental pay and establishment, and he served upwards of 18 months in the Continental line. John was in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and at Germantown was taken prisoner by the British and detained for 8 months and 12 days. He had a discharge afterwards from the hands of Gen. Muhlenberg at the Valley Forge of Pennsylvania, having served 4 months over the period of his enlistment. His discharge was "burnt up" with his house after he moved to KY.

John was 62 years old at the time his pension application was filed in 1818. His pension papers state that John was a house carpenter by trade, but from old age and a complaint called the gravel or an obstruction in the bladder, he was unable to do "little or no manual work labor". His wife was also 62 years old and incapable of labor from a disease called the leprosy. Clark Burial site unknown, but buried in Garrard County, Kentucky.

---

Geography note: Garard County adjoins Madison County in Kentucky. The region is just south  and southeast  (10-40 miles)  of Lexington and is partially "blue grass" country, partially the western fringe of the Appalachians. This makes it easily conceivable that the Farrell and Clark families were friends or acquaintances as far back as the 1790s, well before each migrated to Monroe County, Missouri.

I'm preserving this slightly disorganized post for the sake of the picture and the raw information. For a clearer narrative of these relatives, see the next post up. (jf Aug 4 2019)

Family of Salem Wallace Clark ca. late 1920's in Monroe County, Missouri

Clark is seated. Emma Allie Clark standing, third from left. (more)

Salem 

Wallace Clark is the grandson of on William Clark whose will was recorded as follows from his entry on Find A Grave.Among other things, it suggests that our Clark side people earned a certain amount of prosperity not evident on most of our Farrell side.

William purchased 150 acres of land in Garrard County, KY in 1816. The land was located on the water of the White Lick Fork of Paint Lick Creek. It appears that this land was eventually sold by the heirs of William Clark in 1839. William made a will dated June 2, 1822 in which were mentioned his

Kentucky Secretary of State
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John 1 (repost to restore lost material)

Caution:  With this the TMR becomes quite personal, a series of reports and speculation on ancestry. It's a family thing I wish to do, and for technical reasons this old and dusty blog is the most convenient way.

.

---

John Farrell is our first known ancestor, a Scots-Irish man born in1763 in Kilkinney, Ireland. From there he disappears from written history until midnight of July 15/16, 1779. He appears then at the Battle of Stony Point  on the Hudson River, some 40 miles north of New York City.  We meet him as a 16-year-old soldier of the Virginia Continental Line, serving as a drummer to Captain Robert Gamble's  8th Company of the 7th Regiment of Virginia Volunteers.  As a drummer, essentially a signal man,  he would have ranked as a junior staff non-commissioned officer, perhaps just slightly above a corporal.

How he made his way from his Irish birthplace to the  Battle of Stony Point on the Hudson River  is unclear. Family lore,  plausible but never documented, holds that he arrived in colonial America with seven brothers. All we know firmly, beyond the obvious Atlantic crossing,  is that John landed here after 1763 and before 1779 as part of the very large 18th Century Scots-Irish immigration from Ireland, primarily Ulster.

The most typical of these emigrant families landed at Philadelphia and trekked inland to the east slope of the Appalachians in southern Pennsylvania. Many, perhaps most, sooner or later drifted southward to high lands of Virginia and beyond. Only a relative few settled along the coast,  tidewater country, where the land and culture already belonged to earlier English colonists, an English aristocracy supporting the state-sponsored Anglican church and not welcoming the crude Scots-Irish. 

It is probably safe enough to imagine our John as solid member of these hill people or,  as I once heard it said by a prominent journalist in the region,"...a good old Piedmont boy, not no low-country snob." In any case, he was there somewhere, growing from boy to young warrior to Kentucky land owner and direct progenitor of nine generations (and counting) of American Farrells.

John would have been 12 or 13 when the Revolution broke out, 1775/76.  As said, we don't know exactly where or how he lived  
before he  joined the anti-English Virginia army. One hint, however,  points to the Piedmont country of the northern Shenandoah Valley. His rifle company, the 8th  Co. of the Seventh Continental Regiment, was apparently raised on that Virginia frontier by Captain Gamble.

If we care to reasonably speculate more about John, we need a quick review of general history.

THE SCOTS-IRISH

The Scots-Irish are, loosely, just what the name suggests, a mixture of the two Celtic nationalities.  Importantly, they also include a north-English population, also more or less Celtic, who, over the centuries, refused to kneel before the Crown of England and its feudal-system nobility.

The Scots were generally Celtic lowlanders, clans around  the western reaches the old Hadrian Wall, begun by Roman Legions around 122 A.D to fortify the loose border between themselves and the untamable lowland Celts to the north. Unable to conquer them,  Rome chose a Plan B; wall them out, harassing them occasionally in a way reminescent of rattling the zoo cage of a dangerous carnivore.   

For some 15 centuries more, until the 18th Century, the lowlands were scarred by back-and-forth war. Both shifting alliances and bitter combat flourished among northern English clans and the nearby, often intermixed,  Scottish tribe and clans. They are often known as the "Lowlanders," recognizing they were not quite Scots nationals, beholden to the nobility further north, nor quite English, loyal to royal fops in far-off London.  It was probably this defiance of distant aristocracy that led to them to become a separate and testy  group, a nation without home.

The Scots-Irish also refused organized religion as it existed in feudal times, declining rule by the Popes of Rome or, after Luther and the Reformation,  Rome's Protestant offshoots, primarily the established Church of England  and its counterpart, the Church of Ireland.  As Jim Webb has it, they simply refused to follow secular or religious leaders who were not intimately connected to their local or regional clan groupings. Webb, revealingly, calls his history of the Scots-Irish Born Fighting.

Anyone insisting on an oversimplified explanation of these ancestors of ours can safely use the term "anti-authority."

It is a mistake to understand Irish history as strictly Catholic versus Protestant, but that centuries-long cat fight is useful context. And it gives us a shorthand way to broadly distinguish our Farrell line, Protestant, from the other and much larger group of Catholic Farrells. If you meet a Protestant Farrell the odds suggest a person associated with the Scots-Irish immigration to colonial America in the pre-Revolution1700s. A Catholic Farrell is more likely to be part famine-driven migration of the 19th century.

---

Back to our John 1 of Kilkinney.  "Farrell" has been a native Irish Roman Catholic name for some 11 centuries. It often occurs among the war-like revolutionaries opposing English colonization, English theft of Irish property, and anyone's Protestant faith.  But, since our John 1 was almost surely a Protestant (if he was anything at all), and probably a Calvinist of one stripe or a other, how did the conversion happen?  

The simple and, I think, probably correct answer is "lust." We can pretty safely rely on a common folk observation that when two societies collide, "First they fight, then they (fornicate)." 

The Lowlanders crossed the narrow Irish Sea and settled in the Irish north, among the native, Catholic, Irish with whom they often battled.  

But then on one soft spring evening a svelte immigrant lass espies a handsome young Irish stalwart of the Farrell clan. In the immortal womanly way she schemes to win his notice. A  twitch of tidy hips as she passes him on her way to the village well may do it. Her's does. Jaw agape, he will have her and no other. He leaps from his horse, approaches, and whispers in her ear. She smiles.

"Aye Sir, but ye must abandon Rome if ye would hope to enter here."

He asks himself what the Hell the Pope has done for him lately. A  Protestant Farrell line begins.

We don't know when this -- or something with the same result -- happened. It could have been John's father, grandfather, or earlier, likely during the centuries of  heavy Scots-Irish presence in Ireland. My personal guess would be somewhere in the1600s.

---

A few years after the Revolution our John 1 married Cristina Pursley and sired several children.  One was William who married Mariah Hayes and fathered my great-great grandfather, Richard, who fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. Among Richard's sons were John  Richard Farrell who died young, about 29, never having seen his son, John Ray Farrell, my grandfather. John Ray and his wife, Emma Allie Clark,  were parents of my dad, Ottis Rollin Farrell.

Geography: Our direct-line family lived in Virginia, then near Boonsboro, Kentucky from about 1783 until about 1835. John was awarded land there (Kentucky Land Warrants numbers 885 and 886 totaling 300 acres) for his three years of service in the Virginia Continental Line. Most of his children moved to Monroe County, Missouri in the middle 1830s.  About 1930 our direct line moved to northwest Iowa (Luverne et al. then Fort Dodge)  until the 1960s and 1970s. At present it is scattered around Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. It might be said we arrived and lived as hardscrabble country people for nearly two centuries in this nation and are only recently emerging as somewhat civilized city people. I would not strongly contest that viewpoint.

John 1 died about 1824. His William, migrated to Monroe County, Missouri in the early 1830s along with most others of that region, fleeing hard economic times.

(This all remains a draft and a work in progress.)

Hillbillies and Rednecks: Yes

(Draft)

All my patrilineal kin have long been at least vaguely aware of our rural mid-south mountain past.  I think we can now add something approaching actual information to the suspicion that we are the droppings of mountain folk all the way back to colonial years.

Recent wanderings through the thin family records and general histories of the times and places  persuade me our early Farrells, freshly arrived from Ireland after 1763 and before 1779,  rather quickly built their log cabins somewhere in the Piedmont country.  Plausibly, they took up ground -- probably squatted as was was common -- near the Shenandoah Valley.  By 1783, just after the Revolution, they had trekked further west,  to the environs of Boonsboro, along the Kentucky River. I have spent time around there, and it is a land of hills and dense forests, not overburdened with good roads and trails even in the 21st Century.

The Shenandoah Valley from east to west is a narrow corridor, a few dozen miles wide.  From north to south it stretches a few hundred miles. In its northern reaches it includes Augusta County, Virginia where a source or two say John's military company was raised. It isn't much to go on, but it is the best we have at present.  It is consistent with a social/economic argument Jim Webb makes: Our Scots-Irish people, with their protestantism and small assets,  were unwelcome along the sea coast -- tidewater country. The coast was a bastion of wealthy, or relatively so, English aristocrats, and Anglicism was the state church.

As Webb has it, the Presbyterians from the Scotland-England border lowlands and northern Ireland were encouraged to move inland fast for two main reasons. One was the simple snobbery of the earlier and monied colonists loyal to King George. The other was fear of Indian attacks in resistance to European encroachment.  Maurading natives still raised frequent scares among the coastal elites who reasoned that a line of truculent white settlers with a fighting tradition -- namely us -- along the mountain ridges to westward might absorb the fury of Indian raiders.

---

Direct Line Ancestors

(Incomplete. Stay tuned.)




1. ...  John Farrell born Kilkinney, Ireland 1763, died 1824 near Boonsboro, Kentucky. In 1789 he married Cristina Pursley. who was born about 1770 in Virginia and died about 1830 near Boonsboro, Kentucky.

2. ... William Farrell born near Boonsboro, Kentucky on March 3, 1796 and died died in Monroe County, Missouri on October 1, 1874. About 1820 near Boonsboro, Kentucky he married Mariah Hayes  who was born about 1803 in  Oldham County, Kentucky and died January  14, 1872 in Monroe County, Missouri.

3 ... Richard FARRELL born September 6, 1826 in near Boonsboro, Kentucky and died May 13, 1888 in Monroe County, Missouri. On January 29, 1855 he married Minerva Grove (Graff) in Monroe  County, Missouri. They had several children.

4 ... John Richard Farrell born in Monroe County, Missouri in (about 1867) died Monroe
County, Missouri 1893. (Died of pneumonia after falling through ice while hunting).  He was the father of my Grandfather John Ray Farrell



5 ... John Ray Farrell  born August 11, 1893 in Monroe County, Missouri, died November 20, 1979 in a Webster City, Iowa nursing home.  He married Emma Allie Clark in Monroe Country, Missouri. They were parents of my dad, O.R. (Ott) Farrell.



6 ... Ottis Rollin Farrell -- Born May 8, 1916 in Monroe County, Missouri, died February 13, 2004 in Spirit Lake, Iowa.  In 1939 he married Norman LaVonne Dingman who was born February 25, 1913, near Lehigh, Iowa and died September 11, 2007 in Spirit Lake, Iowa.

7 ... James Ottis Farrell born September 22, 1940 at Lutheran Hospital in Fort Dodge, Iowa. In June 1965 he married Delphine LuRae Huebner who was born October 4, 1943 in Hawarden, Iowa and died in August 1990 in Victor, Iowa of complications of multiple sclerosis.

8. Jon Rollin Farrell born Dec. 4, 1965 in Cresco, Iowa. Married Kimberly van Syoc in Duneland Beach, Indiana.

8. Lisa S. Farrell, born Nov. 13, 1968 married David  Schwarz in 1993 in Wahpeton, Iowa.

9. Justin Rollin Farrell (son of Jon)

9. Ryan Michel Farrell  (Son of Jon)

Another research note

E-mail: lucius@hargray.com     Sat Jan 3 13:22:47 2004
Name: Wilbur Cross
Subject: John Farrell
Surnames: FARRELL, O'FARREL, O-MORE
Query: We are seeking family history about the Farrell's, who fought against Oliver Cromwell before moving to Ireland where several members sat in the Parliament of James II in 1699, and some intermarried with Chieftain Roy O'More of Ireland. There was also a mention of a chief residence in Longford. We'd appreciate knowing sources of informatioin on these subjects. 


Also:

from: https://www.myheritage.com/names/christina_pursley

Christina Farrell (born Pursley) was born in 1770, at birth place, Kentucky, to Benjamin Pursley and Pursley (born *Ann).

Benjamin was born in 1744, in Probably Hampshire County, Virginia now West Virginia.

Christina married John Farrell in 1789, at age 19 at marriage place, Kentucky.

John was born in 1763, in Kilkenny, Ireland.

They had one son: William C Farrell.

Christina lived in 1810, at address, Kentucky.

She lived in 1830, at address, Kentucky.

Christina passed away circa 1830, at age 60 at death place, Kentucky.

Mid-19th century marriages from Missouri genealogy trails


John Farrell Mariam Grouf 18 Feb 1846
Cristina Farrell Richard Farrell 4 Feb 1847
Richard Farrell Cristina Farrell 4 Feb 1847

William Farrell Angeline Holloway 27 Jun 1848

Research note (s) Farrell family

John Farrell 1763

 jimnail83 (View posts)

Posted: 24 Jan 2018 09:46PM

Classification: Query

Surnames: Farrell, Ferrall

Looking for the family of John Farrell, born in 1763, immigrated to Virginia, United States around 1773 and served in the Virginia Militia, then settled in Kentucky. Possibly immigrated from Kilkenny. Possibly a John Ferrall baptized 15 Aug 1763 in Longford county. I know this isn't much to go on but I have hit a complete dead end. Any help would be appreciated.

Baptism barely possibly refers to our John 1, but note variant spelling and in Longford vice Kilkinney.

John 1

Caution:  With this the TMR becomes quite personal, a series of reports and speculation on ancestry. It's a family thing I wish to do, and for technical reasons this old and dusty blog is the most convenient way.
.

---

John Farrell is our first known ancestor, a Scots-Irish man born in  1763 in Kilkinney, Ireland. From there he disappears from written history until midnight of July 15/16, 1779. He appears then on the Hudson River, some 40 miles north of New York City.  We meet him there as a 16-year-old soldier of the Virginia Continental Line, serving as a drummer to Captain Robert Gamble's  8th Company of the 7th Regiment of Virginia Volunteers.  As a drummer, essentially a signal man,  he would have ranked as a junior staff non-commissioned officer, perhaps just slightly above a corporal.

How he made his way from his Irish birthplace to the  Battle of Stoney Point on the Hudson River  is simply a mystery. Family lore,  plausible but never documented, holds that he arrived in colonial America with 7 brothers. All we know firmly, beyond the obvious Atlantic crossing,  is that John landed here after 1763 and before 1779 as part of the very large 18th Century Scots-Irish immigration.

The most typical of these emigrant families landed at Philadelphia and trekked inland to the east slope of the Appalachians in southern Pennsylvania. Many, perhaps most, sooner or later drifted southward to high lands of Virginia and beyond. Only a relative few settled along the coast,  tidewater country,  where the land and culture already belonged to earlier English colonists, an aristocracy supporting the state-sponsored Anglican church and unwelcoming to the crude Scots-Irish.

It's  probably safe enough to imagine our John as solid member of these hill people or,  as I once heard it said by a prominent journalist in the region,"...a good old Piedmont boy, not no low-country snob." In any case, he was there somewhere, growing from boy to young warrior to Kentucky land owner and direct progenitor of nine generations (and counting) of American Farrells.

John would have been 12 or 13 when the Revolution broke out, 1775/76.  As said above, we don't know exactly where or how he lived  before he  joined the anti-English Virginia army. One hint, however,  points to the Piedmont country of the northern Shenandoah Valley. His rifle company, the 8th  Co. of the Seventh Continental Regiment, was apparently raised on that Virginia frontier by Captain Gamble.

If we care to reasonably speculate more about John, we need a quick review of general history.



THE SCOTS-IRISH

The Scots-Irish are,  loosely,  just what the name suggests, a mixture of the two Celtic nationalities.  Importantly they also include a north-English population, also more or less Celtic, who, over the centuries, refused to kneel before the Crown of England and its feudal-system nobility.

The Scots were generally Celtic lowlanders, clans around  the old Hadrian Wall, begun by Roman Legions around 122 A.D to fortify the border between themselves from the untamable  Celts to the north. Unable to conquer them,  Rome chose a Plan B; wall them out, harassing them occasionally in a way reminescent of rattling the zoo cage of a dangerous carnivore.  

 For some 15 centuries more, until the 18th Century, the lowlands were scarred by back-and-forth war. Both alliances and bitter combat flourished among northern English clans and the nearby,  often intermixed,  Scottish tribe and clans. They are often known as the "Lowlanders," recognizing that they  were not quite Scots, beholden to the nobility further north, nor quite English, loyal to the royal fops of far-off London.  It was probably this defiance of distant aristocracy that led to them to become a separate and testy  group, a nation without home.

The Scots-Irish also refused organized religion as it existed in feudal times, declining rule by the Popes of Rome or, after Luther and the Reformation,  Rome's Protestant offshoots, primarily the established Anglican Church and its counterpart, the Irish church.  As Jim Webb has it, they simply refused to follow secular or religious leaders who were not intimately connected to their local or regional clans. Webb, revealingly, calls his history of the Scots-Irish Born Fighting.

Anyone insisting on an oversimplified explanation of these ancestors of ours can safely use the term "anti-authority."

---

Back to our John 1 of Kilkinney.  "Farrell" has been a native Irish Roman Catholic name for some 11 centuries. It often occurs among the war-like revolutionaries opposing English colonization, English theft of Irish property, and anyone's Protestant faith.  But John 1 was almost surely a Protestant (if he was anything at all), and probably a Calvinist of one stripe or a other.  So how did he become a Protestant and a father of Protestants?

The simple answer, and I think probably correct one, is simple: Lust.

Now, if you propose to copulate, the first requirement is proximity to a counterpart. That imperative was satisfied by the migration of ten of thousands of the Scots-Irish across the narrow Irish Sea, settling near the native Catholic Irish of, mostly, Ulster.

On one soft spring evening a svelte immigrant lass espies a handsome young Irish stalwart of the Farrell clan. In the immortal way of the human female she plots to win his notice.  A slightly revealing bodice and a twitch of the hips as she passes him  by on her way to the village well will do it. She succeeds. Jaw agape, he will have her and no other even though she comes with a price. He leaps from his horse, approaches, and whispers in her ear. She smiles.

"Aye Sir, but ye must abandon Rome if ye would hope to enter here."

He asks himself what the Hell the Pope has done for him lately. A  Protestant Farrell line begins.

We don't know when this -- or something with the same result -- happened. It could have been John's father, grandfather, or earlier,  likely during the centuries of  heavy Scots-Irish presence in Ireland. My personal guess would be somewhere around the 1650s.

--



A few years after the Revolution our John 1 married Cristina Pursley and sired several children.  One was William who married Mariah Hayes and fathered my great-great grandfather Richard who fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. Among Richard's heirs were John  R. Farrell who died young, never having seen his son, John Ray, my grandfather. John Ray and his wife, Emma Allie Clark,  were parents of my dad, Ottis R. Farrell.

 Geography: Our direct-line family lived in Virginia, then near Boonsboro, Kentucky (1783 until about 1835), then Monroe County, Missouri until about 1930, then northwest Iowa until the 1960s and 1970. At present it is scattered through Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. One might want to say we arrived and lived in this nation as hillbillies and are only recently emerging as somewhat civilized city folks. I personally would not strongly contest that viewpoint.

John 1 was awarded two small land grants near Boonsboro in the spring of 1783, his reward for three years of military service. He died about 1824. Most of his children, including William, migrated to Monroe County, Missouri in the early 1830s along with most others of that region, fleeing hard economic times.


(The last couple-three paragraphs were dashed off, and I hope to flesh them out before long. This all remains a draft and a work in progress.)


(place holder -- temporary -- showing William as John's son.)

Husband: William FARRELL
Birth date: March 3, 1796
Birthplace: Madison County, KY
Death date: October 1, 1874
Place of death: Monroe County, MO
Burial:
Father: John FARRELL
Mother: Christina Pursley (her surname, long unknown to us, was added by jf about 2014)

Marriage date: Abt. 1820
Marriage place: Kentucky

Wife: Mariah HAYES
Birth date: 1803
Birthplace: Oldham County, KY
Death date: January 14, 1872
Place of death: Monroe County, MO
Burial:
Father: Unknown
Mother: Unknown

(more)
















.

I'm recycling here non-personal parts of a  letter to a life-long friend. He's recently retired as a philosophy professor and has just agreed to reactivate himself to teach a course in Western
civilization.  The first part is a comment on American schooling, sometimes referred to as "education."  The second answers a question he asked me, basically about how guys like Paul Manafort get so damned rich.

 For whatever it may be worth.


-0-

You're going to teach Western Civ?  Wow. Just like (a semi-goofy old college instructor of ours) :)

I agree it should be fun. The bonus will be a fresh and intimate glimpse of how well your k-12 schools are doing in creating culturally literate high school graduates before they decree them ready for college. I really look forward to hearing your take on that subject.

(Good morning, Class. I'd like to begin with a brief discussion of John Locke and his place in the Enlightenment. {You privately judge the number and intensity of dead-blank stares and adjust your pedagogical approach accordingly.}).

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I wish I were more confident in the generality of my fellow citizens' propensity to follow and at least hazily understand the Manafort trial. I'm sure I crossed paths with him in the Reagan years, though I have no specific memory of it.  He would have been one of hundreds of young, smart, attractive, personable hustlers with democracy on his lips and and a lust for personal riches and power in his heart. He found his glory until he broke the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall not get caught.

These guys follow a step-by-step process. Ingratiate yourself with politicians and their staff, beginning with the low (congressmen, e.g.) and proceeding to the high (senior senators, cabinet departments, White House aspirants, e.g.). Prove you can raise money and win elections for your clients, primarily by deft manipulation of public opinion.

At the maturity of your career you will have actual influence in the highest places. Ka-ching.  You may be involved in the movement of trillions (yes, "T") of dollars around the world. It's in trade deals, military aid, economic assistance laws and executive decisions. By diverting only the tiniest fractions of 1 per cent to yourself in fees and purported expenses, you are wallowing in millions of personal wealth.

Note that last week the prosecution alleged that Manafort garnered about $60 million from Ukraine lobbying deals. He's in trouble so far not for the actual work, but for income tax questions. (Personal belief: Sure he cheated. I'd  amazed if he didn't.) Now, a few-year  income of $60 million to most of us is a number beyond belief, but to governments and the "capitalist" firms who depend on them it is pocket change.

Consider a small example. I am making it up, but it is wholly realistic:  A  large Ukrainian ocean-shipping firm is seeking more favorable treatment in its use of ports and harbor facilities in the United States. The concessions hinge on decisions by U.S. federal agencies, perhaps the Department of Commerce. The company forecasts an extra $10 million annual income if it gets the breaks. To pay Manafort $2 million for trying to pressure Commerce and $5 million more as a success bonus could be quite a reasonable business decision. And that's just one comparatively minor deal.

It's a golden cess pool. It grows in parallel with the amount of money and power we -- little guys like you and me -- meekly cede to government.

The Marble Urinal Conspiracies

I don't remember peeing in the actual White House. Besides,  any relief I sought there would have been mundanely in the servants' wing, the press room facilities, during the AP days when I  (rarely)  attended Ron Nessen's briefings.

A different story existed across the alley in the garish old rococo Executive Office Building, built by an architectural Timothy Leary in the 1870s and 80s.  I did a bit of business there as a low-rank political operative in the Reagan years. We swilled coffee during  business hours, and fancy beer and wine flowed freely enough late in the day.

A man's bladder has its requirements, and the American taxpayers of the late 19th Century ensured his need would be met in grand and glorious style. Those flamboyantly grained marble pissoirs were two feet wide and tall enough to make a coffin for a short man. No where else in my life have I actually giggled shaking out the last drops.

I almost always made up little fantasies about my pissing predecessors. Did Teddy Roosevelt dangle his big stick there while conferring quietly with an adjacent William McKinley about which Cuban hill to immortalize? Did his cousin  Franklin sidle up next to Cordell Hull and, sotto voice,  plot ways to goad Tojo into attacking Pearl Harbor?

They certainly could have, validating a life-long suspicion that our masters will  always find ways to to secretly scheme to piss away our fortunes and our lives. And how better than companionably unzipped, shoulder to shoulder, at the upper end of the Washington, D.C. sewer system? No secretary with her shorthand pad. No recorders. No snoopy little aides with pals in the press corps.

All this comes to mind as we open another chapter in our largely aspirational quest for the oxymoronical "open government."

The internet apps wizards say they have found a way to make official government email both private and self-destroying. They mean they have at long last emulated Mr. Orwell's memory hole. It is now the libertarian Winston Smith clandestinely battling the Inner Party. Of course people like you and I root for Winston, but probably to little avail.

For instance, if you see Presidents Trump and Putin heading for the same Helsinki privy, rest assured that they can privately plot to organize your world according to their own  secret designs. There will be no leaks.

Flash! The Official 99 Best Greasy Spoons

I had just about recovered from the hideous Michelle Obama drive to turn my digestive tract over to the federal government. Some of her influence remains, particularly in the school lunch industry, but in general I believed that the clamor  had died down for federal cops to inspect our food-processing innards.

Quite a few serious studies concluded that her drive for whole grain and seasoning-free entrees had resulted primarily in overflowing garbage cans at the end of the lunch line. The American citizenry decided it was unnecessary to evade a Big Mac Attack or decline a slice of Pizza Supreme just because Michelle said so.

Little did I think that my beloved Iowa bureaucrats would take up the cause.

This one is not in the name of nutrition, but of money. The state tourist bureau lady is quoted:

“We looked at places that served a unique dish or had a unique atmosphere, maybe they’d won an award for the best burger or best tenderloin,” she says. “Also, we travel and find restaurants we enjoy. We also looked to Yelp for some positive reviews there.”

So, the sovereign state of Iowa (Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain) has dubbed one restaurant in each of the 99 counties as the best places to stuff our gullets. At least it is done not in the name eternal youth through macrobiotics but in pursuit of greater tax revenue.

Couple of things here: What in the name of holy hell qualifies her and her associates to choose the eateries which will tickle your tongue? Some money was spent on this, including, one infers, 
reimbursed travel to find the juiciest burgers.

(Heard in the tourist bureau office?   Hey, gang, let all go find some really good eats. Might as well. We can collect milage and bill the goodies to the taxpayers. Research, doncha know?) 

Reviewing pertinent constitutions and statutes. I find  no mandate for my Leaders and Regulators to pose as Duncan Hines.

Not to mention the thousands of other restaurants helping pay for the boondoggle which informs the world that they are second best. At best.

Numbers

By now most people should have seen the Washington Post refutation of the widely circulated statistic reporting 18 school shootings so far this year. The number comes from Michael Bloomberg's "Every town for GunSafety," and it is false.

Carrying it a little further, the Post reports that since the 1999 Columbine massacre about 150,000 kids have been present in a K-12 school when a shooting took place. With about 50 million K-12 kids in the country, that means 49,850,000 were not exposed to school gun fire. The percentage is thus about three one-thousandths one per cent over some 19 years.

One more boring statistic, not nearly as flammable as marches on Washington or frantic street demonstrations: There are roughly 98,270 high schools and elementary schools in our country. About 170 of them, according the the solidly liberal and anti-gun Post, have experienced shootings while, therefore, 98,100 of them have not. That percentage is 18 ten-thousandths of one per cent. 

Feel free to fact-check.

Nothing here is meant to minimize the horror of any murder; it is meant to attenuate the mindless drama.

(Just blowing the dust from my blog wth this little item I first posted to Facebook.  How y'all doing out there?)

Idiots of the Corn

Here in the idyllic heartland, one of the common crimes is  burgling and vandalizing isolated old farmsteads. The optimistic thugs are usually looking for antiques and other fencible merchandise (copper is always popular), and they often get away with it, earning, I judge, an hourly income about half of what they could make flipping legal if disheartening burgers.

A couple of years ago drones became the new toy of choice for our local gendarmes. (If you smell some hefty federal grant money here, I forbear arguing with you.)  They would make crook-catching a snap.

Down around Emmetsburg (nee "The Irish Settlement") it didn't work yesterday.

The crime was eyeballed by a citizen who called the cops who descended with enough men and materiel to set up a perimeter around the corn field into which the miscreants had fled. This all happened at mid-morning. Aside from the manpower, the lawn order lads deployed a small manned airplane and two drones.

We can assume a good time was had by all in the air and  on the joysticks.  Hour piled upon hour as they buzzed back and forth over the fading green of high September maize. It isn't too hard to imagine that the suspects watched the aerial crime-buster craft for while, shrugged, then settled down for nice long naps. A little before supper time they snuck out and tried to make their getaway through an adjacent field of soy beans where they were spotted by a citizen innocent of possessing a drone, a thermal imager, or even one of those old-fashioned Cessnas. He phoned the cops and the lead panned out. The county jail population rose by two at sundown.

My personal belief is that the law officers are spending this equinox day preparing new grant proposals to increase their drone force.

The Luddite who lives in one of the sub-basements of my soul finds all this pretty damned funny.

Newspapers from Pig Food

The main trouble with the goddam mass media these days is that cruddy ink they use, made out of soybeans. When you use a page of sooty tofu to polish your windows, it leaves a bunch of goddam smudges.

In my day we knew how to make newspapers with real ink. Useful newspapers. Our readers may have been misinformed, had their intelligence insulted, and been subjected to the you-live-wrong diatribes of the lifestyle writers, but they at least had clean windows.

How to snag ...

an overweight washed-up congressman and simultaneously maintain a national reputation as a seriously advanced  teevee thinker.

Matters of Legacy

It is important to my sense of macho self-image that you understand I was not a total nerd.

Nerd enough to get almost no dates with cheer leaders and to walk softly past the hallway intersections where the duck-assed gorillas struggling to pass shop class hung out. Nether the nobody-home prom queens nor the high-school mouth breathers wanted much to do with guys on the debate team who also devoted hours to the Boy Scouts and the Methodist Youth Fellowship.

To this day I don't know if I made the right trade offs, especially in not staying out for football where I was a little too slow and slightly underweight but blessed with some damn-fool instinct for cross-body blocking. I came into my own in that fleet airborne instant in the broken field when I  just knew I was on target to fold that big suety son of a bitch in half and make him go oooof.  The coach humiliated me in biology class the day after I turned in my shoulder pads. The chief accusation was no school spirit even though  I had explained to him that as a country kid without a car I could not make the practices without adding to my folks' other problems which were not insignificant.

(An aside) In those days schools hired men to coach football and gave them side jobs as biology teachers, hence STDs. These days they have them teach history and "social studies," hence Trump.

So I went out for debate and found that a natural talent for bullshitting had its rewards.  Eventually it saved me from a career as a beer-truck driver while the Boy Scouts and the youth fellowship kept me out of prison.

(Another aside) When in the company of nerds and an obvious example of the breed myself, I could buttress that internal masculine picture of me with only a small datum or two. One of them was a decidedly manly skill, the ability to bark a squirrel at fifty yards, and do it with my very own and paid for Winchester Model 69. (Used, about $15.) And I do mean 69, not the trailer-park upstart  69A which came along as Winchester began its long, slow demise into irrelevance and eventual oblivion. Like this one,  I mean, with the visible hammer and reassuring resistance of cock-on-closing: 

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Nerds those days got to travel at the expense of the local tax payers. A dozen or so weekends  a year we would pile into the debate coach's car and cruise the two-lane pavements to the big cities. Ames. Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and, among others, the metropolis of Des Moines.

We all looked forward to Des Moines. Four or five Gomer Pyles neck-stretching in a corn-field Gotham, so awed at the 10-story skyscrapers that we forgot to act world-wearily nonchalant.

The heart of the city was bounded by two landmarks, the famous Babe's, a downtown Italian joint of wide and sophisticated repute and, nearby,  the Des Moines Register building.

Babe's is really subject for another memory-lane trip. For now I mention only his waitresses, drop-dead beautiful  Drake coeds pleased to be part of the capital city's night life, pregnant with potential for rewarding liaisons with the congregated professional men and politicians. Us they looked through. Some of it was certain knowledge of a nickel tip. The rest was acne. We understood that after-dinner  flirting was futile and that we should quickly leave with whatever 15-year-old grace we could muster while wiping spaghetti sauce from our chins as we strolled over to Seventh and Locust, site of the Des Moines Register news offices and printing plant.

In an inspired marriage of marketing and architural/industrial design, those gargantuan presses were semi-subterranean and, at sidewalk level, enclosed by glass.  P.T Barnum would have appreciated the crowd appeal. Eero Saarinen may have conceded that some older genius had anticipated and  out-done his John Deere building over in Moline. His ghost may have lamented not including a foundry for visiting farmers to gape at.

The editions rolled off at what we would have called warp speed had we known the term.The building itself, all 13 stories, vibrated, the rumble penetrated to the outer world and made conversation difficult, and the sidewalk trembled in synch with the mammoths which told us of Russia's atomic blasts and Pat Nixon's respectable Republican cloth coat.

Five stories up were the dreary offices of The Associated Press where I would one day work. One story lower were the larger and brighter Register and Tribune news rooms. A staff -- men and a few women of a different species from what we now call journalists -- was busy grinding out the routine news of the day while incidentally keeping politicians honest and earning far more than their share of Pulitzer prizes.  It was a newspaper, an institution, a mighty force whose words were must-reading in the Middle West and damned near required all around the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. Some one once called it "a grace and ornament to its profession."

Have you ever noticed that time marches on, things change, and not only Winchester rifles?

Three days ago  the Register digitally posted images of its one-time fortress. If you can't be troubled to follow the link, the message is simple.  The old girl has been sold and remodeled, "loft"apartments and a fern bar. The company will do its digital business from a floor an a-half of a glassy pile a couple of blocks away. There isn't an Underwood in the place.

Sayonara, and  I guess, on balance, that I am glad I dropped football.