ROOTS & BRANCHES

I recall the late Tim Coyne, a gentleman who served on the board of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania while I was executive director there, opining that “it’s possible for historian not to be a genealogist, but it’s impossible for a genealogist not to be a historian.”

What I think Coyne was getting at was something about which I often opine (some might say preach) myself: Knowing enough history to put your genealogical finds in proper context.

As I have journeyed through learning history again in college and as an adult, I slowly have realized that in the process of learning a lot of names, dates and facts during elementary and high school, I also picked up a lot of bad history, for just a few examples:

• The 1700s immigration of German-speaking people to Pennsylvania was primarily to secure religious freedom (I get a lot of mileage out of this in lectures today – actually, only a minority of what became the Pennsylvania German ethnic group came for religious reasons – most came for land).
• That slavery was a completely Southern thing since the Northern (aka “Free”) states had banned slavery (never learned about how gradual Pennsylvania’s abolition was … or how parts of the Northern economy – such as bankers giving Southern planter loans based on the value of the enslaved “property” – benefited from the institution).
• The glorious history of Manifest Destiny was presented as, well, predestined, with basically no thoughts given to the Native Americans who were dispossessed or “reservation-ed,” let alone Mexico, nearly half of whose territory we took after a war we basically provoked.

But one fact I learned about Berks County and its Native American population apparently was true, at least according to a website that maps out the historical lands of indigenous peoples around the world: I remember being taught in fourth grade that the Lenni Lenape (or Delaware) tribe occupied Berks County.

This website, Native Land.ca, is run by Victor G. Temprano of Mapster, the company that funds the site. It is a crowd-sourced project that is constantly being revised.

In the eastern half of Pennsylvania, the map is fairly simple. It shows the Lenape in the Delaware River valley, giving way with a small amount of overlap to the Susquehannock covering a large swath of land in what is now central Pennsylvania and an adjoining area in present-day New York state.

The map gets more complicated the further west in North America it goes, with many overlaps of tribes. The Native Land site has toggles to look at territories, languages and treaties, but does not address which particular time period that the tribal territory maps depict, which would be helpful to know since there were many migrations as the tribes were pushed westward by white expansion.

The Native Land site (https://native-land.ca/) truly gives its viewers the chance to look at boundaries – especially the ones impacting their own homes or present-day political lines – from a different perspective.