Wrestling George Washington

The Dancestors Genealogy Newsletter provides a multifaceted look at historical research, family narratives, and modern genealogical services. The author highlights personal discoveries, such as using DNA analysis to confirm a family legend involving George Washington and a widow named Stevenson. Additionally, the text details the lineage of the Palmer family in Elizabethan England and recounts a visit to ancestral lands in Virginia. Brief sections explore a range of topics, from the California Gold Rush to personal reflections on the Kennedy assassination and modern military tensions in the Arctic. Ultimately, the newsletter encourages readers to document their own heritage through professional preservation services before stories are lost to time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, usually when we talk about family history, there's um there's a certain expectation of it being well a little dusty, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Oh, definitely very dry.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Yeah. You picture opening this like cardboard box in a hot attic, pulling out a faded, sepia tone photograph of some grumpy looking great uncle. Maybe you look at a stack of indecipherable old tax receipts, and then you just you put it back.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Right. It feels very self-contained, like an isolated bubble of the past that seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with the world we live in today.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Exactly. But then you pull the right loose thread, and suddenly that dusty box acts like a hidden trapdoor. You fall right through it, and you're not just looking at your great uncle anymore.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

You're standing in the dead center of a massive world-altering historical event.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Yes. And that is exactly our mission for you on today's deep dive. We are going to explore how seemingly mundane, deeply personal family roots can actually serve as a backdoor into massive global histories.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

And we're pulling all of this from a really fascinating source. It's the May 16, 2026 edition of the Dancers Genealogy newsletter, which uh, as a quick side note for our listeners, is actually now available in an audio format too, if you prefer to listen to your newsletters on the go.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Oh, that's super convenient.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

So we're going to show you how digging into a single family tree can connect you to literally everything from George Washington's teenage wrestling matches to the literal spark that ignited the California gold rush and um even modern Arctic geopolitics.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

It is a wild ride.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

It really is. So let's jump right into the modern mechanics of solving a centuries-old mystery. Because the author of the newsletter was trying to trace their third great-grandfather, a man named David Stevenson from Alabama, and they hit an absolute brick wall.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, the classic genealogical dead end. So they found a third cousin to take a YDNA test, you know, hoping to establish a clear paternal line. And the result was zero links to early Stevensons.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, the direct male genetic line was completely broken. Genetic genealogists call this an NPE, a non-parental event.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Aaron Powell, which is a very polite way of saying something didn't match up.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Aaron Powell Exactly. It's a polite way of saying that somewhere along the line, the biological reality absolutely did not match the paper trail. Like an adoption, an affair, an unrecorded name change. Right. And if you're relying entirely on YDNA, which is passed strictly from father to son, a broken link like that just leaves you completely stranded.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Aaron Powell So to fix this, they turn to autosomal DNA testing. And this is where I mean the science gets incredibly clever. Because if YDNA is like driving down a single rigid highway, and if a bridge is out, your journey is just over autosomal DNA is basically like a historical safety net.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Aaron Powell That's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Yeah, it's more like cell phone tower triangulation. It doesn't just rely on that straight paternal line, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Trevor Burrus That analogy works perfectly for the mechanics of it because autosomal DNA looks at the massive chaotic mix of genetic inheritance from all of your ancestral lines. So what the genealogist did here was take the author's mother's autosomal DNA and look for shared genetic markers across a wide array of distant cousins. By measuring the like the pings from all those surrounding cousin networks, they could triangulate the exact location of the missing ancestor.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Oh wow. So they just bypassed the broken bridge entirely.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Completely bypassed it. And they traced the true biological lineage back to a man named Jonathan Robert Stevenson, who also went by John Stinson and his wife, Phoebe Clancy, living in Tazewell, Virginia.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

And court records actually confirmed that David Stevenson married his first wife in Tazewell in 1818, right? So the triangulation totally worked.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

It worked perfectly. But finding Jonathan Robert Stevenson in Virginia wasn't just, you know, a neat piece of scientific trivia. It suddenly resurrected this 37-year-old piece of family lore that everyone had just assumed was a tall tale.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

This is the part I love. The story from Jess Stevenson.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Right. Jess was the author's grandmother's first cousin, a World War I veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. And nearly four decades ago, when Jess was 94 years old, he told the author that their Stevenson ancestors back in Virginia used to play with George Washington when they were all children.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Which is wild.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

And he added a very specific detail. He said the Stevenson boy's mother was a widow.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Okay, I have to jump in here. Because I mean, isn't it a universal cliche that literally every American family with colonial roots claims their ancestors hung out with George Washington?

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

It's like claiming your great-grandfather invented the toaster. I mean, how often does the actual rigorous paper trail vindicate this kind of kitchen table folklore?

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Aaron Ross Powell Honestly, in my experience, almost never. It's usually a generational game of historical telephone where, you know, lived in the same colony as slowly morphs into shared a beer with. Right. But the vindication here is stunning. The author dug into the archives and actually found a piece in the May 1904 issue of Century Magazine titled The Youth of Washington by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

And that's based on Washington's own writings.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Exactly. It's constructed right from his diaries. And Washington himself details how in the fall of 1746, he went to board across the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg. He specifically notes he stayed with a widow named Stevenson, who pronounced her name Stinson.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Wait, Stinson, that is the exact phonetic spelling the DNA triangulation uncovered.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Yes. And Washington writes that the widow had six large sons from two marriages, two Crawfords and four Stevensons.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

And Washington actually admits these boys were rough frontier giants who seriously damaged his teenage pride. He wrote that among them, for the very first time, he met his match in running, jumping, wrestling, and something they call the Indian hug.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So those four Stevenson boys wrestling the future first president in the mud, they turn out to be the first cousins of Jonathan Robert Stevenson.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Yep. The family lord just passed down was spot on.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

And the history catches up with them in very dark ways, too. Washington notes that almost all of these boys later served under his command. One of them, William Crawford, rose to the rank of colonel but met a really brutal end.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, he was captured and burned at the stake in Sandusky during the conflicts with Native American tribes on the frontiers, just so heavy. You start with a modern cheek swab in a plastic tube, and you end up uncovering a story about wrestling the future first president of the United States and then this tragic frontier death.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Aaron Ross Powell It really shows how connected it all is.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

It does. But let's follow the deeper theme here, which is this obsession with securing a legacy. We just looked at physical survival and strength on the American frontier.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

But if you rewind the clock and cross the Atlantic, the ancestral methods for survival and control look completely different.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Very different.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

In Tudor England, it was all about the brutal enforcement of paper contracts.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Yeah, we see this really clearly when the newsletter shifts to the Palmer family history. We're looking at a man named William Palmer, born in 1544 at Parham in Sussex.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

And his family had massive political leverage, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Huge leverage. His father, Sir Thomas Palmer, was a member of Parliament and a justice of the peace. William married Elizabeth Burney, who happened to be a goddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah. They resided at Parham Park, this enormous estate originally acquired after King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

So they are swimming in the absolute deepest waters of 16th century English politics. And you see all the terror, the anxiety, and the desperate need for control concentrated into one single document, William Palmer's Last Will, dated December 24th, 1586.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

It's a fascinating document.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

I read this will, and honestly, he sounds like a tyrannical narcissist trying to control his family from beyond the grave. It reads like a 16th-century prenup enforced by a ghost.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

That is a great way to put it. But well, let's look at the actual mechanisms of that control, because it's not just about a father being overbearing, it's about surviving a lethal political climate.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

Okay, fair.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

In his will, Palmer leaves five pounds to the poor, but he attaches a massive, highly specific condition. He explicitly orders that they should not pray for his soul. He actually states he acknowledges no help for his soul after his decease. Wow. Instead, they must pray to God to bless and defend Queen Elizabeth that she might have victory over all her enemies.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

See, to modern ears, paying the poor to pray for a politician instead of yourself sounds completely bizarre. I mean, does this extreme level of micromanagement reflect genuine parental care and religious devotion, or is it just a massive display of tutor-era status anxiety?

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Well, think about the year, 1586. This is the absolute boiling point of the Elizabethan religious settlements. The shift from Catholic to Protestant England wasn't a polite theological debate. It was a matter of execution for treason.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Right, literally life or death.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Exactly. Paying the poor to pray for your soul in purgatory is a deeply Catholic concept. William is using his dying words and his money to publicly and legally document his rejection of Catholicism. He is signaling total loyalty to the Protestant queen to ensure his family's lands aren't seized by the crown after he dies.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Okay, I understand the political survival aspect, but what about how he treats his own daughter? Because I am still seeing a massive display of status anxiety there.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

The inheritance clause.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yes. He leaves his daughter, Catherine, an inheritance of 1,000 pounds, which is a staggering fortune for the time, but it's locked behind a trap. She only gets the money if she marries with the explicit consent of her mother. Yep. If she disobeys, her inheritance plummets to just 400 pounds. I mean, that is a 600-pound financial penalty for following your heart.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

You really have to view wealth in this era not as personal spending money, but as geopolitical scaffolding. William's overriding concern is keeping the family dynasty afloat. He actually had to order the sale of an entire manor, the manor of Barfam, just to pay off what he described as his somewhat great debts.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

So he was cash poor.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

He was incredibly wealthy, but he was massively over-leveraged, trying to maintain the lifestyle required of the Queen's inner circle. He literally couldn't afford for his daughter to marry a political liability.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

That obsession with paper wealth, conditional inheritances, and over-leveraged estates in England, it's the perfect transition. Because eventually, descendants of families like this grew exhausted by the claustrophobia of Tudor and Stewart contracts.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

It drove them to seek tangible, unencumbered land across the ocean, which is exactly what the author of the newsletter does. They go on a physical quest to stand on the actual Virginia dirt owned by their sixth great-grandfather, John Adams.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

And just to be clear, this is an ancestor named John Adams who moved to Fockier, Virginia, around 1730, near where Pantherskin Run meets Goose Creek, not the second U.S. president.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Right, right, not the president. But the author drives out to find this exact plot of land today. And the contrast between the reverence for history and the reality of modern geography is hilarious.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Oh, it really is.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

They end up in a parking lot near a Civil War bridge. They ask a local fisherman how to get down to the creek, and the fisherman basically says, You can try, but you'll have to walk through waist height bushes completely infested with ticks.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

A very quick reality check on the romance of the American frontier.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Exactly. So the author pivots, hikes up a nearby hill to look down on the river bottom land, and confirms they are looking at the right ancestral pasture using the highly scientific method of identifying fresh cow pies on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yes, ticks, cow pies, a parked tractor, and a random solar array. But here is the ultimate sliding doors moment of history. The land that John Adams' son sold and left right before the Revolutionary War. That specific dirt is now the epicenter of elite Virginia horse country.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

The newsletter points out that a neighboring property, Red Bridge Farm, founded in 1749, recently sold for $7.8 million. It boasts 107 acres, dressage facilities, and an 18,000 square foot main house.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

It's just wild to think about if the author's ancestors had just stubbornly refused to move for another 300 years, they would be multimillionaires today.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

It perfectly illustrates how physical geography holds hidden wealth, just waiting for the economy to catch up. Which brings us to an even more literal example of geography holding wealth, the California Gold Rush.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

The newsletter takes us to the Delonega Gold Museum in Georgia, tracing the story of the 29ers, the veterans of the often forgotten 1829 Georgia Gold Rush.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

And we follow a woman named Elizabeth Jane Wimmer, right? Everyone called her Jenny.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Right. Jenny grew up right alongside the Georgia Mines. She learned firsthand how to pan for gold, and more importantly, how to identify it. Eventually, she and her family move out west. By 1847, her husband is hired by James Marshall and John Sutter to help build a sawmill in Coloma, California.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

And Jenny is hired to be the camp cook and laundress.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Right. Then we hit January 24th, 1848. James Marshall is inspecting the mill race and finds a shiny piece of metal in the water. But nobody in the camp knows for certain what it is.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Because they hadn't seen raw gold before.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Exactly. But because Jenny was the only person there who had actually handled raw gold back in Georgia, Marshall hands the mysterious nugget to the camp cook.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

And Jenny applies a brilliant blue-collar chemical test to prove it isn't fool's gold, which is, you know, just shiny mica or iron pyrite. She drops the nugget into her cast iron kettle of boiling lye soap and she leaves it boiling in that kettle all night long.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

The chemistry behind this is fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Lye is sodium hydroxide. It is highly caustic. Jenny knew from her days in Georgia that boiling lye would heavily corrode and tarnish base metals like pyrite.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

But it's not gold.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Right. Genuine gold is practically inert to lie. Morning comes, she fishes the nugget out of the soap, and it is completely unparnished. It's bright and shining. She proved it was gold.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

We always credit the men like Sutter and Marshall in our history books, the Industrial Pioneers. But think about it, without Jenny's lie soap test right there in the camp, does the gold rush happen right then in 1848? Or do a bunch of carpenters just toss a shiny rock back into the river and the course of Western expansion is entirely delayed?

SPEAKER_01 14:15

It's a huge question.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

It is a staggering realization that a massive geopolitical shift hinge entirely on a laundress understanding the chemical properties of soap.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Absolutely. And from geography hiding wealth, the newsletter transitions beautifully to how borders and geography dictate modern geopolitical trauma.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Yeah, this part was really striking.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

The author notes a recent news story about the U.S. Army sending 4,000 soldiers to the Arctic Circle for a training exercise. And they connect this to a personal memory from a trip to Norway, where they met a young waiter who had actually served in the military guarding the Norwegian border with Russia way up in the Arctic.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

The waiter actually showed the author physical frostbite scars on his hands. He explained that during military exercises in subzero temperatures, their standard issue gloves were so thin and full of holes that the soldiers' hands would literally freeze to their weapons, making them impossible to operate.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

But the real question is why that border even exists for a modern NATO soldier to freeze on.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:13

The newsletter traces that specific administrative line all the way back to the 1826 Treaty of St. Petersburg. Before 1826, those Arctic borderlands were jointly administered. But in 1809, Sweden lost Finland to the Russian Empire, suddenly making Russia an immediate creeping neighbor to Norway.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

It's like a geopolitical tectonic plate that's still causing military friction today. That 1826 treaty was literally drawn up by bureaucrats just to resolve land disputes and figure out who had the right to tax the local indigenous Sami reindeer herders.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

And now, exactly 200 years later, you have young soldiers getting permanent frostbite scars defending that exact same tax line. It is the terrifying inertia of bureaucracy outlasting empires.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

As the newsletter points out, Sweden is probably pretty relieved today that they don't share a direct land border with Russia, though they certainly still face off in the Baltic Sea.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

And well, the transition from the physical scars of history on that waiter's hands to the psychological scars of an entire nation is the final and perhaps most intense section of this deep dive.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

It really is. The author recounts being interviewed by their sixth-grade grandson for a school history project.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

They start with the lighthearted generational gaps, right? Like the author tries to explain to a kid raised on tablets that the greatest technological marvel in their classroom was a clunky film projector. They laugh about how kids today have never even seen a manual crank-operated pencil sharpener.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

But the tone shifts drastically when the grandson asks the author for their most significant childhood memory.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Yeah. The author goes straight to a vivid memory from the second grade. A classmate named Mike Xantigus, and the author jokes that remembering obscure names is practically a prerequisite for being a genealogist. Mike walks back into the classroom from the principal's office and announces out loud that President Kennedy has been shot.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

And the teacher, Mrs. Oshiro, is horrified. She initially reprimands him, threatening to send him straight back to the office for inventing such a terrible, disruptive lie. But she calls the office to confirm and realizes he is telling the absolute truth.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

The author points out they lived in the greater Los Angeles area at the time. Back in the early 60s, while rural places maybe had one or two TV channels, LA had seven: KNXT, KMBH, KTLA, Keika, KHJTV, KTTV, and KSI.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

And all seven of those channels played the exact same horrific news continuously for three straight days until the funeral.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

The author vividly remembers those repetitive black and white broadcasts of the funeral procession. The relentless clip-clopping of the horses' hooves on the pavement was completely emblazoned into their brain.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

And that trauma compounded five years later. The author's father worked nights, and their mother woke them up in the middle of the night because Bobby Kennedy had just been shot right there in their own backyard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Later in life, the author actually relocates to Dallas, Texas, and they have this surreal realization they have lived in the two specific cities where the Kennedy brothers were assassinated.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Which is statistically incredibly rare.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah. Using an AI estimate, the author figures that since 1995, about 2.3 million people moved from California to Texas, with maybe a million ending up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They consider themselves perhaps one in a million to experience that specific haunting geographic coincidence.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

This deep dive into memory prompted the newsletter author to actually compile the historical statistics on presidential assassinations and attempts.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

And before we get into these names, we have to be super clear here. We are just reporting the historical events and statistics exactly as they are laid out in the newsletter.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Right, completely neutral. We aren't taking any political sides or endorsing any viewpoints at all. We are strictly looking at this as historical data points.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Exactly. And looking at the timeline, it is incredibly jarring to see how often this happens. Chronologically, the list of presidents who were shot at includes Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Roosevelt. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Truman, Kennedy Ford, who was actually shot at twice. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Reagan, the only one to survive a bullet actually entering his body and remaining in office.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

And Trump, who the newsletter notes has been shot at three times.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Oh, and don't forget the physical toll on some of the earlier ones, like ex-president and candidate Teddy Roosevelt delivering a 90-minute speech with an assassin's bullet freshly lodged in his chest muscle.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Just incredible.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

The newsletter even notes a really odd, often forgotten attempt in 2005 when a live grenade was tossed toward George W. Bush while he was speaking in Tbilisi, Georgia, though it failed to detonate.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

When you look at that list, you realize how frequently our national history is punctured by these moments of sudden, violent disruption. And it brings me to a thought about how we process this.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Well, think about the physical frostbite scars of that Norwegian soldier in the Arctic. That's a localized individual trauma. But when comparing that to an entire nation, watching an assassination play out on seven TV channels simultaneously, I mean, how does that real-time broadcasted repetition of trauma fundamentally change our collective historical memory?

SPEAKER_01 20:26

That is the core of it. It creates a profound generational shift in how we experience history. Before mass media, historical events were stories told after the fact. There were letters or localized rumors like the family lore of wrestling George Washington.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Right, you just heard about it later.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Exactly. You experienced the aftermath. But with television, the public experiences the shock concurrently. The clip-clopping of the horses on the pavement isn't just a fact in a book. It becomes a shared, sensory memory for an entire generation. It moves macro history from the newspaper directly into the living room, making it feel intimately, sometimes painfully, personal.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

And that deeply personal connection to history is the ultimate takeaway from today's deep dive. The genealogy company leaves its readers with a stark, simple warning. Paper gets thrown in the trash, books survive.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

It is a profound call to action to document your legacy. None of us are getting any younger. These tactile sensory memories, the chemical smell of boiling lie soap in a gold camp, the paranoid wording of a tutor will, the specific sound of a second grade classroom going silent, they disappear from living memory every single year if they aren't recorded.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

When you take the time to write down those details, you aren't just hoarding old documents in an attic. You are keeping the past alive. You're actively building those trapdoors for the next generation to fall through, allowing them to connect their small lives to the massive sweep of history.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

So we'll leave you with this final lingering thought to explore on your own. Think about your own family tree. What mundane or seemingly exaggerated people? piece of folklore in your own family tree might actually hold a key to rewriting your understanding of your place in history if you only took the time to dig up the original paperwork.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

The answer might completely change how you see yourself.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see you next time.