digging up your ancestors

Like many retirees, Mikki’s new hobby is digging up her ancestors and she was shocked to find that her family didn’t trace back to Mayflower pilgrims and martyrs but to a convicted felon who evaded execution in the Old Country by transportation and worked as a slave alongside kidnapped Negroes on the tobacco plantations of Virginia.

"Bearing in mind that thousands of Americans can only trace their ancestors back to the 1800s, I'm just happy to have found him and don't feel any shame about it," says Mikki. "Today, he would have been slapped on the wrist for what he did, and the guys who convicted him were undoubtedly bigger thieves than he was and were protected from prosecution by their privileged positions.”

“But, I do feel anger about the lies our government fed to us about our glorious past and the truths they kept from us about convicts and white slaves,” says Mikki. "It sheds light on why so many of us have been kept in complete ignorance of our past for such a long time, and why tobacco has suddenly become such a dirty word, doesn't it?"

“Convicts were sent to the American colonies from 1607 and by 1775 it is estimated that about 54,500 had been transported," says Mikki. "In the same time period, the colonies had imported about 311,600 Negro slaves, 200,200 indentured servants and 217,900 free settlers."

"If you don't grasp the implication of these figures then, setting aside the native population, consider that a mere 217,900 free settlers had at their total mercy -- to starve, beat and work to death -- a total of 566,300 enslaved souls, more than two for each settler. Don't tell me that isolation, a gun and a bible were the only means used to keep this overwhelming majority of slaves under control. The free settlers must have been cruel beyond words."

"The actual number, names and later whereabouts of the convicts became largely unknown after the revolution because records were deliberately destroyed by the colonists," explains Mikki. "And, when the truth about convict transportation did trickle out, it was tempered with lies about the nature of the crimes and gross exaggerations about the number of political versus social criminals."