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."

out of sight, out of mind

The recent Internet publication of old books and articles relating to the settlement of the American colonies has shocked many people, especially retirees, in their new found hobby of ancestry. Looking for ancestral pilgrims and martyrs in accordance with the story of America's glorious past they were taught, they found instead -- as Mikki did -- a convicted felon who evaded execution in the Old Country by transportation – a form of global offshoring of people - and worked as a slave alongside kidnapped Negroes on the tobacco plantations of Virginia.

“He survived, but many didn't, and while our times may be different the social issues are the same,” says Mikki. “Lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers (especially in far away places).”

"Reading the truth about our early colonists, even the so-called pilgrims and martyrs had blood on their hands and greed in their eyes so being related to any of the early Americans is nothing to be proud of," says Mikki. "The whole period of colonization from 1607 to 1775 was far from a glorious beginning -- it was tainted by convict transportation, white and black slavery, indigenous massacres, human misery, biblical greed and massive profiteering that makes our current global CEOs look tame."

"It's the curse of globalization, isn't it," sighs Mikki, "out of sight, out of mind. Evils happening in far away places tend not to bother us, and that's why offshoring is as popular now as it was in 1607 when white slavery to the colonies commenced.”

"By the 1800s, after two hundred years of profiting from slavery, the newly rich American bucks and debutantes descended upon Europe to make advantageous marriages and it was at this time, I think, that ancestry necessarily became a hushed affair."

"Neither the rich Americans nor the impoverished European nobility wanted the dirty facts of the American colonial period to become public knowledge and spoil their marriages of convenience -- tainted American money buying titles of distinction, bucks for baronets and that sort of stuff."

"It was, however, well known among the British gentleman's clubs in the 1800s that a lot of prominent Americans were tainted by convict ancestry and ill-gotten gains," says Mikki, "but these facts, along with others relating to the dissolute nature of some European aristocrats, just didn't become common knowledge."

"It was important in those days to keep up social appearances and maintain an absolute divide between the upper and lower classes," explains Mikki, "and if that meant allowing into gentile society some fabulously rich Americans of dubious birth then so be it."

‘Today, fabulously rich people of all cultures have arrived at that status by the same means – enslaving their own and others in the most heinous global trade of all.”

Read more by Mikki on this issue:

a nation built on white slavery

globalized slavery

whitewashing slavery

Britons never will be slaves?

so you think you’re a slave?

Tobacco and America's Convict Past

digging up your ancestors

is slavery the human condition?

the ghosts of slavery

kidnapped children

black v white slavery

slave migrations

Anglo Slavery

lies, felons, slave-drivers and profiteers