Some Questionable Family History for my Cousin

This is info I had put together for a cousin back in 2013, based on my father's remembrances --

Our "Grandma Brown" is, of course, Eunice J. Price ... as to her given name, when my father called her "Eunice 'jay' Price", I don't know whether the 'jay' is an initial "J.", or just the letter "J" itself (in the manner of your father, L B Miller), or whether it's the surname "Jay", or just the word or sound "Jay" because her parent's liked the sound of it.  I've tended to think of her as "Eunice Jay Price", but I'm not aware of any "Jay" family in her ancestry.

Grandma Brown was born on January 27, 1892 (or 1891), near Lutts (on Horse Creek), in Hardin County, Tennessee.  She died on February 5 (or 6), 1981, in South Bend, Indiana (where she is buried).  Her first husband was Westley Scott, who died in 1918 (their children were Earl Scott, who died young, aunt Clura Scott Brown, and uncle Brownloe (or Brownlow) Scott); her second husband was your grandfather, ?? Miller (their son was your father, L B Miller); her third husband was my grandfather, Joseph Haley/Hailey, who died in 1936 (their sons were Jackson William B Haley, who died young, and my father, Samuel Jefferson Richard Joseph Hailey); her fourth husband was (Charles) Benton Brown.

Grandma was 1/4 Jewish by ancestry (by way of her grandmother, Caroline Franks), and according to your father, she was part Indian.  When I was a kid, I asked her if she was part Indian, because to me she looked exactly like an old Indian woman.  She denied it -- but the *way* she denied it, I didn't believe her.  At my mother's funeral, I asked my uncle, L B Miller, her son, whether Grandma was part Indian, and he said that "her people" were ... his manner indicating that *everyone* knew that.  I've read that at one time, if you were "white", it was more socially embarrassing to have Indian ancestors than to have black ancestors (which may explain why my mother didn't know until after her father died that his mother was Indian). 

Grandma's parents were William Price (per the information added below, apparently born in 1870) and Drusilla ("Drew") Frazier (per the information added below, apparently born in 1873, and her name actually being 'Drucella J Frazier').  I don't know which spelling of "Frazier/Frazer/Fraser" they used.  I've read that "Frazier" is an American spelling, with "Frazer" and "Fraser" being the spellings used in Scotland.  The name/spelling "Frazier" *is* associated with Hardin County, so I think that's the one to use.  My father thought that William died in 1910, in Wayne County, Tennessee, and is buried at Lutts, in Hardin County.  My father thought that 'Drew', as he always called her, died in 1911, in Hardin County, Tennessee, at White Hollow.

William Price's father was Edward Price (the family were probably originally Welsh) and his mother was Caroline Franks (who *may* have been born in 1844 ... I found a Caroline Franks in Hardin Co in the 1850 Census, but I don't yet know that she is our Caroline) (her first husband was a Harris).  The Franks family were Jewish, part of a small small clan of inter-related Jewish families who are among "our people" -- so, Grandma was 1/4 Jewish by ancestry.  My father thought they were originally from Germany (though, I've read years ago, that the Jewish surname 'Frank' originated as being what the Ashkenazi, Northern and Eastern European Jews, called the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal ... I suppose because they arrived in German by way of France).  Caroline Franks's family lived along Horse Creek, in Hardin County, Tennessee.  

Drusilla Frazier's father was Edward Frazier (he may have been known as 'Jim'; the family was Scots-Irish, which means they were Scots/English who had migrated to Ireland in the 17th century, before migrating to America in the 18th or 19th century; the family name may have been O'Frayer at one time), my father thought he died about 1950, at the age of 104 (though the information below says he died in 1933); her mother was a Murphy (My father didn't know her Christian name, according to the information below, she was Mary A. Murphy).  

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When I was a kid, my father told me about an old family joke: when you heard that So-and-So Franks was getting married, you were supposed to ask, "Who is the other one?"  The joke being that as there weren't that many Jews in Hardin County, the Franks would tend to marry cousins.  

Both sides of my father's family are related to the Franks family. On the Price side, with Grandma being a granddaughter of Caroline Franks. On the Haley/Hailey side, my father's uncle and aunt (half-siblings of my grandfather Joseph Haley), both married grandchildren, via her first marriage, of Caroline Franks, children of her daughter Mary Harris and Saul Shuburte/Shuburts (both of whom I understand to have been Jewish) -- my great-uncle Byron (or Byrum) Ward ("Uncle Barn") married Mary Jane Shuburte and my great-aunt Zubie Sesile Ward married J Walter Shuburte.  Another two daughters of Mary Harris and Saul Shuburte, married brothers named Brown -- Henry Brown married Lizzy Shuburte, and William Brown married Cass (Catherine?) Shuburte.  Henry Brown and Lizzy Shuburte were the parents of our aunt Clura Scott Brown's husband, Carl Brown.

These Browns, related to both of my father's parents, are also related to the Bensons.  But, I know next to nothing about your mother's people, so I don't know just how the relationships work out.  For instance Edward Brown, a brother of the Henry and William mentioned above, married Nancy Benson, but I don't know how she may be related to your mother -- Nancy Benson's mother was Lizzy Hatley, whom I take to be a 1/2 sister to Arthur Hatley, married to Rosey Esther (Ethel?) Price (Grandma had a sister, whose name I have written as Rosey Ethel Price; I found an obituary for a Will Price, who is definitely Grandma's brother, which lists his surviving sister as Mrs Ethel Hatley), and "Tude" Hatley, who married another Franks woman, and "Queeny" Hatley, who married "Jap" Copeland, 1/2 brother of Henry Brown, William Brown, and the Edward Brown who married Nancy Benson.  Someone my father called "Icey Dora" Benson (I suppose that's Isadora) married James Brown, a brother of Grandma's fourth husband, Charles Benton Brown.  Idella Brown (a sister of James Brown and Charles Benton Brown) married a John Scott (whom I suspect is related to Grandma's first husband).  Their sister, Louella Brown, had a son named Jack Horton, who married a Della Benson.

============

I did find a webpage [back in 2013, but which no longer exists in 2026] about an "Ed Frazier", who was married to a "Mary A. Murphy"  -- they had a daughter named "Drucella J Frazier", born in April 1873 ... making her old enough to be Grandma's mother.  Ah-ha! "Drucella J Frazier" married William Price on April 23, 1891 in Wayne County, Tennessee (which is next to Hardin).  So, she is our great-grandmother, and I've been misspelling her first name all these years; and perhaps the "J" in Grandma's name stands for the same middle name as hers (Grandma would have been their first-born).  

According to these linked pages:

1) William Price was born in Tennessee in 1870. Drucella J Frazier was  in April 1873 in Manteca, San Joaquin, California.  They married in Wayne County, Tennessee, on April 23, 1891. (My father thought that William died in 1910, which would have made him about 40 at death, and "Drew" in 1911, which would have made her about 38 at death.)

2) Edward Frazier was born in April 1848, in Tishomingo County, Mississippi (which I believe is where our aunt Clura lived; it's adjacent to Hardin County, Tennessee, and Lauderdale County, Alabama), and died on October 1, 1933, in Lilbourn, New Madrid County, Missouri. Mary A. Murphy was born in 1846 in Martin Mills, Wayne County, Tennessee, and died in April 1890, in Martin Mills, Wayne County, Tennessee.  They married June 18, 1867, at Martin Mills, Wayne County, Tennessee; they had 14 children, with Drucella being the youngest (and he had another seven with his second wife, Mary Emma Brown ... who appears to be related to some of the other Browns in our family, and to the Franks, and to the Murphys -- pioneer families tended to be interrelated, for example: James Sylvester Frazier, son of Edward Frazier and Mary A. Murphy, and brother of our "Drew" Frazier, married Emma Tilley, daughter of Catherine E Brown, who was the sister of Mary Emma Brown, his father's second wife).

3) Edward Frazier was a son of "J Peter Williams" (born in 1811 in Lauderdale County, Alabama ... my father was also born in that county ... and died in 1859 in Martin Mills, Wayne County, Tennessee) and "Catherine" (born in 1818 in Lauderdale County, Alabama and died in Wayne County, Tennessee); they married in 1835.  Of their seven children, the first (William, though he's also listed as 'William Williams') and fifth (Edward) have the surname 'Frazier', the others have the surname 'Williams' ... I don't know that that's about.

[Note added in 2026: -- A Ward second-cousin once told me that my grandfather, Joseph Haley/Hailey lived most of his life as "Joseph Ward" ('Ward' being the surname of his step-father, his father having died before he was born), and was in fact buried under that name.]

4) Mary A. Murphy was the daughter of "Murphy" (born in 1820, in South Carolina) and "Elizabeth Lizzie" (born in 1826, in Newberry County, South Carolina). 

"Hamilton won in the end."

"Hamilton won in the end."

Much of that is due to Jefferson's own flawed character. Examples:

-- Hamilton and Jefferson almost always offered Washington opposing viewpoints/advice, but Hamilton backed up his recommendations with data and argument; Jefferson did not.

-- Jefferson, pissed that Washington almost always took Hamilton's recommendations over his own, began a "whisper campaign" against Washington, accusing him of being senile.

UNDERSTAND, this was while he was still Washington's Sec. of State -- rather than doing the honorable thing and resigning the office when he found himself in constant opposition to the President's policies, he started the State Department's venerable tradition of undermining the sitting President's policies.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters: 250 Years of America

The Nexus of Language and Politics -- "Native American"

Other than his use of the leftist delegitimizing term, "Native American",  Matt Walsh is spot on in the linked video.

The leftists invented the term "Native American" as a step toward denying that you and I are Americans at all.  This is merely a similar delegitimizing tactic to the leftist assertion that we Americans cannot call ourselves "Americans" because the USA is not the totality of the American continents.

Historically, the American Aborigines (i.e. the Indians (*) ) were not native Americans, because they were not members of the American society in the first place.  Even today, after the Federal government has made them US citizens, whether they wanted to be or not, many Indians don't want to be called "Americans"; they tend to reserve that term for *us*, not for themselves.

I am a "native American", not because I have a bit of Indian ancestry, though I do, but because I am a born member of the American civilization.  Likely, you too are a born member of the American civilization and thus are a "native American", even if you don't have a single American Indian ancestor.

(*) We all need to get over the ignorant myth that we call the American Aborigines "Indians" because Columbus was either ignorant or stupid.  The reason we call them "Indians" is because from ancient times until just a couple of centuries ago, Europeans used the terms 'India' and/or 'the Indias' to refer to all the lands of "the East"; 'India' and "the East" were pretty much synonyms.  When Columbus discovered the islands we now call the West Indies, he thought he had found some outlying islands of Chipango, the easternmost land of 'the Indies' of which the Europeans had knowledge; or, as we now call that land, Japan.  Thus, since from the European frame of reference, these newly-discovered peoples were inhabitants of "India", he (and other Europeans) referred to the inhabitants of those islands, and later of the mainland, as "Indians", as we have continued to do for the past 500 years.  And indeed as the US Constitution refers to them.

The narrowing of the term "India" to refer to a specific geographic region in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and to a specific, and recently created, nation-state in the 20th and 21st centuries, is a modern innovation.  

And, by the way, the current Hinduist government of India is trying to dictate that we English speakers may no longer refer to that country as "India".

Matt Walsh: "These Museum Exhibits Were Just Closed For The Dumbest Reason"

Nikki Haley's "Gotcha" Moment

So, the leftists are having a pretend melt-down because the RINO Nikki Haley -- who, by the way, is not a natural born US citizen (*) -- gave the "wrong" answer to a "gotcha" question about the "cause" of the so-called (**) US Civil War.

Here is the truth about the "cause" of the so-called US Civil War --

Slavery wasn't the cause of the "Civil War". 

The *cause* of the (falsely named) Civil War was the federal government's refusal to allow the Southern States to secede from the Union, as was their right to do, and to take all those sweet, sweet tax monies with them.

The main reason, though not the only reason, the Southern States wanted to secede was over slavery.  But secession is a wholly different matter from the war. 

(*) How odd is that?  Not a peep from anyone, much less the leftists, over the fact the Haley is Constitutionally barred from occupying the office of the presidency.

(**) The US "Civil War" was not actually a civil war.  In a civil war, two or more entities are fighting for control of the government of the same region.  The US “Civil War” was – like the American “Revolution” – a war of attempted separation.

EDIT (2024/01/04):

I suspect that there are two main reasons for Nikki Haley's ignorance of the cause(s) of the "Civil War":
1) Even most people of my generation are ill-educated, and would unthinkingly give the "right" (which is to say, factually wrong) answer. How much worse educated is the typical person of her generation?
2) It's quite possible that she never paid much attention to anything having to do the "Civil War", that she saw it as having nothing to do with her, as she is an Indian (dot, not feather) without roots in America.

Allow me to illustrate that last suspicion:

The last IT job I had before deciding to retire was in a 1.5-2 hour drive from home.  Since I didn't want to spend that much time on the road every day, I rented a hotel room on a monthly basis and came home only on the weekends.  Three or four years later, the hotel was sold to an Indian man (dot, not feather) in his 30s or 40s.  I presume he grew up in the US, as he sounded like any mid-western American. Though, his parents had thick Indian accents.

About a year later, he bought the property next door to the hotel. It had a business on the ground floor and an apartment on the upper.  He asked me to relocate to the apartment, as he thought my hotel room would earn him more money as a normal hotel room than as a long-term rental.

When he was showing me the apartment, he apologized for the swastika his mother -- a Hindu -- had drawn on the kitchen counter with some red substance. By the way, I was never able to fully scrub it off.  Now, as he was apologizing, it was clear that he didn't understand *why* Americans consider swastikas offensive.  He apparently thought it has something to do with the black-white racial divide; he said something to the effect that since I wasn't black, perhaps I wouldn't be as offended by it.

So, why did he not understand what a swastika signifies to Americans?  Why did he think a black American would be more offended by the image of one than a white American? The reason is that he doesn't see that history as having anything to do with him, and so he never paid much attention to it.

Amusingly, black Americans are the group *least* likely to take offence at the image of a swastika.  I, on the other hand, am in the group to take second-most offence -- an Evangelical Christian with Jewish ancestry.  I'm also not ignorant; I well understand that the swastika long pre-dates the mid-century mass-murderer with a funny mustache.

It's Christmas-time; And That Means ...

It's Christmas-time; and that means ... endless repetitions of popular "secularist" (by which I mean anti-Christian) "myths" (by which I mean lies) about Christmas.  Sometimes, these "myths" are even spread by people who claim to be Christians.

By the way, even as a "fundie" Christian, I was taught as a child -- in church -- that Christ clearly wasn't born on December 25, as there wouldn't have been "shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night" that late in the year.  But we still recognized and celebrated December 25 as Christmas.

Sometime this past summer, I had written a post covering much the same points as in the post linked below.  I can't find the post I made, so I suspect it was made as a comment to some foolish YouTube video spreading the "myth" ... and which was deleted when I decided that I'd had enough of the dishonest and dishonestly applied "community standards" of YT.  

So, anyway, I'll emphasize a couple of the points; but mostly, I refer Gentle Reader to the post linked below.

The "myth" goes something like this -- "The celebration of Christmas, and specifically its celebration on December 25, is actually an attempt by [The Catholic Church and/or Constantine following the Council of Nicaea] to co-opt the pagan festival of [Saturnalia/The Birth of Mithras/The Birth of Sol Invictus] in the popular imagination".

Now, anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the period from 29 AD (when Christ was likely murdered .. which ultimately didn't "stick", as it turned out) to to 313 AD (the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire) to 325 AD (the First Council of Nicaea) to 380 AD (the Edict of Thessalonica, which established orthodox Nicene Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire) understands how absurd this "myth" is, in all its variants.

Rather than shooting those individual variants of "The Myth", I shall aim my guns at the root of all of them: the claim that December 25 was chosen by Constantine/"The Pope"/The Catholic Church of popular mythology as the celebration of Christ's birth so as to make it more palatable for the every-day pagan to switch to Christianity.

In 'Adversus Judaeos' (i.e. "Against the Jews" or "Answering the Jews"), believed to have been written before 200 AD, Tertullian says (Adversus Judaeos 8:18): "And the suffering of this "extermination" was perfected within the times of the lxx hebdomads, under Tiberius Caesar, in the consulate of Rubellius Geminus and Fufius Geminus, in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April,¹²⁰ on the first day of unleavened bread, on which they slew the lamb at even, just as had been enjoined by Moses."  That is, Tertullian places Christ's crucifixion on March 25, at the time of Passover, in the year we now designate as 29 AD. Also note that Tertullian places Christ's birth as 28 years after the death of Cleopatra, that is, about 2 BC.

There was a common belief in 1st Century Judaism -- and recall, the early Christians were mostly Jews -- that the lives of religiously significant persons began and ended on the same date; that is, that such persons both were conceived and died on the same date.  This belief is often referred to as "Integral Life" or "Integral Age". This belief is why, as is stated at the start of the linked article, the Feast of the Annunciation is celebrated on March 25.  That is, according to this belief, Christ was both conceived and died on March 25.

And what date follows 9 months after March 25?

The point is, irrespective of what we moderns may think of the "Integral Life" concept, the early Christians decided to celebrate Christ's birth on December 25 for Jewish-and-Christian reasons long before it was legal to practice Christianity, when being a Christian was still officially a capital offence, long before The Catholic Church of popular mythology even existed, long before "The Pope" would have cared to import pagan holidays into Christianity so as to cajole recalcitrant pagans to pretend to be Christians.

The point is, Christmas is the celebration and commemoration of Christ's birth, not of his birthday.

Roger Pearse: "March 25 – the date of the annunciation, the crucifixion, and the origin of December 25 as the date of Christmas?"

https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2021/03/25/march-25-the-date-of-the-annunciation-the-crucifixion-and-the-origin-of-december-25-as-the-date-of-christmas/

About the Dems' 'Trump is Caesar' Murder Porn

An amusing thing about the Democrats' "Trump is Caesar" murder porn is that Caesar was of the party of the 'Populares', rather than of the 'Optimates'. That is, according to the Democratic Party's own self-serving mythology about itself, Caesar was one of them!

Priorities!

William Vallicella, commenting on David Gelernter: Why No Women in the National Football League?

Why No Women in the National Football League?

Because we take football seriously.

David Gelernter:

Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.

We take panem et circenses seriously, but not the defense of the Republic.

On the other hand -- and mind you, I speak as a man with absolutely no interest in sports of any sort, who does his best to avoid all sports "news" -- the NFL clearly doesn't take itself, nor it customers, nor its future, all that seriously.

All you need to know to understand why Western post-Christian societies are dying

J M Smith at The Orthosphere: Nothing Sacred

Who enstupidated whom?

Somehow -- given his commitment to "human bio-diversity" and genetic determinism -- I don't see Vox Day enthusiastically linking to this particular piece by Fred Reed: The Maya: Who Woulda Thunk It?

Deus vult!

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part I: The Preludes

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part Two: On Your Marks

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part III: I have come in order to die

The Book Galileo Was Supposed to Write

Michael Flynn: The Book Galileo Was Supposed to Write

My comment: The more I learn of the actual historical facts of the case (and the era), the more I think it fitting that the 'Science!' worshippers have latched upon Galileo as their patron saint.