Edward Doty, born in 1599, sailed on the Mayflower and arrived on Plymouth Rock with the first settlers. He has the distinction of starting the first duel of the New World. Apparently he had quite the temper but he outlived fights, famine, and disease to own land and raise a family. His posterity now numbers nearly 100,000. I am among them. Edward Doty is my 9th great-grandfather.

Proving an ancestral link to the Mayflower brings with it certain privileges. I can apply to be a member of the Mayflower Society and there are even associations honoring Edward Doty himself. Also, every 4th grade American heritage project my kids had to do was a piece of cake! (The kids love to talk about their 10th great-grandfather who signed the Mayflower Compact).

I was coming home this evening, to see a woman (white, 40s) looking disapprovingly at the cameras I have mounted on a tree above the sidewalk. So I rolled down my window and enquired as to her concern.

She said, “Nobody should ever do something like THAT to an Living Organism!”

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The swirl of media around the meeting of Kanye West and President Trump spent most of its energy on personality images of the those two men and not the real issues represented concerning minorities and their actual benefit in a growing economy operating more and more on our intended liberty and less and less on the centralized power of the state. That was to be expected from a media committed to the defense of an expanding “progressive” state.

Those issues involving all American citizens, not just those considered minorities, should be the final focus of that meeting. But it was impossible for me not to look more toward the third man in the meeting. To some, he has always been a hard one to assign to any single box. In many ways, his presence there was what added the most credibility to the meeting.

This just in: I am 0.00% Cherokee! According to Ancestry.com DNA I am 96% Irish and Scottish, 4% English, Welsh and NW European.

My Irish last name originates from a Norman guy who fought in the battle of Hastings in 1066 and was awarded lands somewhere in Devonshire, England. Three or four generations later, one of his descendants (probably a second or third son with no shot at inheriting the family estate) joined the Norman invasion of Ireland around 1170 and secured land for himself somewhere in County Tipperary after which my Norman invader ancestor went native.

View original artwork here.