Pirates and my Dutch ancestors, along with Cuban defectors

The Dancestors Genealogy Newsletter serves as a multimedia resource for individuals interested in family history, offering both written articles and a podcast format. This edition highlights the lives of the Tilghman family, tracing their lineage from British surgeons and Maryland chancellors to a World War II veteran who survived a harrowing B-29 crash. The author also documents personal research trips to Virginia and the Netherlands, identifying ancestral ties to colonial landholders and a prominent Dutch diplomat named Nicasius de Sille. Further narratives explore the Polhemus family, connecting a 17th-century minister who survived pirate attacks to a New York hospital featured in modern film. Additionally, the text reviews the history of Cuban defections to the United States before concluding with an appeal for readers to professionally document their own legacies. This compilation emphasizes how genealogical research connects historical events to contemporary life and preserves fading memories for future generations.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So in 1991, a Soviet-trained major flew a supersonic MiG-23 fighter jet, like literally inches above the ocean waves, completely slipping past the most advanced military radar in the world to land in Florida. And the craziest part about this, the record of that flight doesn't just live in some, you know, classified military archive.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Right. We actually found it buried in a genealogy newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Exactly. Okay, let's unpack this. Today we are taking a deep dive into a recent edition of the Dancestors Genealogy newsletter. And if you think tracing your ancestry is just this like safe, quiet hobby of collecting birth dates and finding out who begat whom.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, we are throwing that entire concept right out the window today.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

100%. The mission for today's deep dive is to show you, sitting right here at the table with us, how individual lives are shaped and sometimes very nearly extinguished by the massive global conflicts of their times.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

It really completely reframes how we look at the raw source material of the past. Yeah. I mean, genealogy isn't just an administrative record of who lived and died. It's actually a map of human survival.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Wow, yeah. A map of human survival.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

When you look closely at these documents, you uncover these absolute historical thrillers. You know, you see how everyday people navigated terrifying, unpredictable world events, and how they made these impossible gambles just to keep their families alive.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

And sometimes the biggest threat to that survival wasn't even the obvious danger of like a literal war zone, which uh takes us to the 1600s, and a Dutch minister named Johannes Theodorus Polymus.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Right, Johannes.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

He was born in Germany in 1598, and he is sent by the Dutch West India Company to their colony in Recife, Brazil, in 1636. He marries Katharina Van Werven, who was 15 at the time. They have four kids, and life seems, you know, relatively stable.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Until it isn't.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Right. 1653 hits, and the Dutch entirely lose control of Brazil to the Portuguese.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

The geopolitical floor just falls out from under them. I mean, the new Portuguese rulers gave the Dutch colonists a very stark ultimatum. It was basically you have three months to convert to Catholicism and become Portuguese citizens, or you have to leave the colony entirely.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

So panic ensues, obviously. Johannes stays behind temporarily, but Katharina takes the four kids and flees back to Amsterdam. And her entire survival plan relies on collecting Johannes' back pay from the Dutch West India Company.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Which was a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

A ton. She arrives holding this formal power of attorney from him to demand over four to one hundred guilders. Yeah. But the company just they flat out refuse to pay her. Yeah. She is left totally destitute, stranded in the Netherlands, relying on charity just to feed her kids. Wait, I have to stop here. She had a literal power of attorney. How could the Dutch West India Company legally ignore a documented contract like that? Well, you've I mean, weren't there courts in Amsterdam she could appeal to? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

You have to remember what the Dutch West India Company actually was in the 17th century. It wasn't a modern business you could just take to small claims court. Right, right. It was a massive state-sponsored monopoly that wielded sovereign power. They commanded fleets, they waged wars, they managed colonies. What's fascinating here is how clearly this illustrates the ripple effects of those geopolitical shifts.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Because they lost Brazil.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Exactly. The fall of Dutch Brazil likely cost the company massive revenues. And they absorbed that blow by simply turning off the financial tap, shielding themselves behind layers of bureaucratic immunity, and basically passing the devastation right down to a stranded mother of four.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

It is wild. It's like uh trying to cancel a gym membership, but your gym is a ruthless seventeenth century global megacorporation with its own navy.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

That's a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Was the corporate bureaucracy actually a bigger threat to this family's survival than the literal pilots? Because the spite level here is just off the charts. After two years, the company finally agrees to let Katharina and the kids sail to New Amsterdam to reunite with Johannes.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

On the Golden Otter.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Right. On the Golden Otter.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

But they still don't give her the back pay. They treat her ship fare as an advance on his unpaid salary.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Which forces her into debt just to reunite her family. It's incredibly bleak. But as brutal as that corporate machinery was, Johannes' journey proves that the physical world was still, you know, infinitely more lethal.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah, tell me about his journey because while she was fighting accountants in Amsterdam, he was trying to sail to New York on his own.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

His journey was an absolute nightmare. So first, his Dutch ship is captured by a Spanish privateer. He is dragged totally off course, the ship and the cargo are seized, and he's taken as a prisoner to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

He's just caught in the crossfire of this proxy war happening on the high seas.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Entirely. I mean, he finally manages to get released and he secures passage on another ship, sailing with 23 Portuguese and Brazilian Jews who were um also fleeing the fall of the colony.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

Okay, so he's on his way.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

You'd think. But the ship is pirated again.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

No way.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

This time by a French man of war called the St. Charles. It is just relentless. Fleeing across oceans in the 1600s meant putting yourself completely at the mercy of shifting colonial borders that turned you into a target twice over. He finally arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, incredibly impoverished.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Wow. And he ends up becoming the first minister of Flatbush Brooklyn and dies poor in 1676. But there's this amazing footnote to this survival story that caught my eye.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Oh, the hospital.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yes. His descendant, Henry Ditmas Polhemus, eventually had a hospital founded in his memory, the Polhemus Dispensary in Brooklyn. And if you've seen the recent movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

I actually haven't seen it yet.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Oh, you have to. Anne Hathaway's character actually buys an apartment in a building with Polhemus Dispensary inscribed right over the doorway. Right. So we go from a double pirated, penniless immigrant to New York real estate in a Hollywood sequel.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

It perfectly captures how desperate survival eventually cements into a permanent legacy. The physical gamble of that era was immense, but you know, it bought a future for the next generation.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah. But caping across the ocean in the 1600s took weeks or months. When you look at the 20th century in these sources, the timeline of survival shrinks from months down to literal seconds in the sky.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

That's very true. The machinery of conflict became industrialized, and so the avenues of escape had to adapt to that new, terrifying speed.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

I was reading through the section on George Chris Telgman. He's born in 1923, an architect by trade. But during World War II, he is a crew member on a B-29 bomber. On May 29, 1945, during his sixth mission over Yokohama, his plane is shot down. Eight men bail out of the crippled aircraft.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

And the mechanics of that bailout procedure are just chilling when you dig into them. One man is so badly injured they literally have to tie a rope to his ripcord just so his chute will deploy when he drops.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

But his parachute fails to open and he's never seen again.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

The failure of a single piece of silk. It just highlights the absolute extreme of human vulnerability. I mean, you are relying on a fragile mechanism while plummeting through the air. And for the survivors, the ordeal is just beginning. George and a crewmate named Joseph P. Miller end up spending over 30 hours floating in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

30 hours? I mean, the psychological toll of that is unimaginable.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

And the sources mention a Japanese boat actually sinks nearby while they are in the water. They realize later that the other four missing men from their crew had likely been picked up by that boat before it went down. Out of that entire crew, only three men survived the war. George was one of them.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

It's terrifyingly random. You know, you survived the anti-aircraft fire, you survived the bailout, you survived the ocean only to watch a rescue vessel sink. It strips away any illusion of control you might think you have.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Aaron Powell Yeah. And that extreme vulnerability in the sky doesn't end with World War II. I was looking at this list of Cold War flights in the sources, and it's just blowing my mind. We aren't talking about commercial hijackings here, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Trevor Burrus, Jr. No, not at all. The historical record shows a string of highly trained military pilots taking government aircraft to make one-way defections to the United States. And when you look strictly at the historical flight records from the Cold War era, the success rate is astonishing. Zero of these defecting Cuban pilots were shot down over America.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Aaron Ross Powell That is wild. You have records here of Jose Diaz Vazquez landing his Lynn 326 trainer in Key West in 1962, a crew landing a Mil Mai 4 helicopter in 1964, a lieutenant bringing a MiG-17 straight into Homestead Air Force Base in 1969. It even goes up to a Brigadier General, Rafael Delpino Diaz, taking a Cessna in 1987, and an Antonov and two biplane landing right in the Florida Everglades in 2022.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

You're looking at individuals utilizing whatever technology they had access to. I mean, from advanced fighter jets to crop dusters, all to make a singular, decisive break across a heavily militarized border.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Here's where it gets really interesting. We hear endlessly about the tensions of the Cold War, you know, the constant threat of retaliation. How is it physically possible that Major Restees Lorenzo Perez casually slips past U.S. radar in a supersonic MiG-23 in 1991 and lands in Key West without triggering an international incident?

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Aaron Powell To understand how that's possible, you really have to look at the physics of radar systems and the extreme tactics required to exploit them. Radar operates on line of sight. To evade it in a jet like a MiG-23, you have to drop down and fly incredibly close to the ocean surface, basically hiding your radar across section within the clutter of the ocean waves.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

So they're just skimming the water.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Exactly. It is an unimaginably dangerous maneuver. At supersonic speeds, a miscalculation of a few feet, a slight shift in the wind, or a sudden ocean swell means you crash into the sea before you even have time to blink.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Wow. So they are essentially betting their lives against the curvature of the earth and the speed of their own reflexes.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Precisely. And what connects the sheer desperation of these Cold War pilots to George Tilgman floating for 30 hours in the Pacific during WWII is that willingness to make unthinkable life or death gambles in the air.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Just to get away.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Right. In both eras, these individuals were risking immediate death simply to escape the larger grinding machinery of war.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Fleeing physical danger by sea or air is one thing. You can see the enemy, you know the stakes. But what happens when you can't run? What happens when the geopolitical ground shifts right under your feet, and you are forced to pick a side in your own home?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

That requires a much more complex type of survival. You aren't fighting the elements anymore. You are navigating ideologies, and the consequences are just as lethal.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

We see this so clearly during the American Revolution in the sources. Let's look at James Tildeman. He moved to Philadelphia in 1760, becomes a prominent public servant, you know, Secretary of the Land Office, a city councilman. But when the revolution breaks out, he favors compromise.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Which puts him in a very tough spot.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Yeah. He publicly denounces the Boston Tea Party, but he also thinks the intolerable acts are terrible and should be repealed.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

He was trying to play chess on a board where the squares were changing colors beneath his pieces. I mean, what was considered patriotic on a Tuesday became treason by Thursday.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

And the society around him refuses to let him stay neutral. Because he favors compromise, Pennsylvania authorities view him as a loyalist. They actually place him under arrest until 1778.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Meanwhile.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Yeah, get this. Meanwhile, his son, Tench Teltman, is literally serving as an aide-de-camp to George Washington.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

It's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

And his brother Matthew is a delegate to the Continental Congress. Imagine the tension at the Tildman Thanksgiving table. You're a father under house arrest by the local authorities, and your son is George Washington's right-hand man. How did a family survive that level of ideological whiplash?

SPEAKER_01 11:52

If we connect this to the bigger picture, survival in these eras wasn't just about dodging bullets, it was deeply political. Families like the Tildmans show us that historical divides ran straight through living rooms.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Yeah, right through the family.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

They survived by enduring the immediate consequences of their political realities without destroying their familial bonds. James Tilgman temporarily lost his freedom, but he maintained his convictions. And he was eventually allowed to return to his family home in Maryland, where he died in 1793.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

We see that same perilous tightrope walk a couple of centuries earlier with another figure in the sources, Dr. Nicasius de Seal. He's a 16th-century Dutch diplomat. Born in 1543, he becomes the Secretary of the Council of State for Archduke Matthias during the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. Right. How do you even begin to survive in a diplomatic role during a violent colonial revolt?

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Through intense diplomatic agility. In the 16th century, alliances were incredibly fragile. Nicasius was navigating the fall of the southern provinces and constantly shifting agreements between the Dutch, the Spanish, and the English.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

That sounds exhausting.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

It was deadly. A wrong diplomatic move didn't just mean losing an election, it meant the executioner's block.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Which he experienced firsthand. Well, the threat of it anyway. In 1579, during a mission to secure the city of Melin, he is arrested and imprisoned purely out of political revenge.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

But he manages to secure his release.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

He does, and he goes on to draft conditions of homage for Prince William. He even serves as a special ambassador to England in 1587 and meets Queen Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

His survival was entirely dependent on his political intellect. He had to constantly read the room of European power dynamics and position himself as indispensable to whoever held the upper hand.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

He died in 1600 and is buried in the Ou de Kirk in Amsterdam. Though his gravestone is currently covered up by a church pew, which feels a bit, you know, unceremonious for a guy who met the Queen and survived a colonial revolt.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

It really does show how quickly the individual human drama fades into the background architecture of history.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

But there is one thing that doesn't fade. While empires rise and fall, while families are split by revolutions or scattered across the ocean by pirates, the physical land remains. It sits there as this silent witness to all this human chaos.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

The land is the ultimate anchor. I mean, it holds the scars of grand historical events, but it also hosts the very mundane reality of daily survival.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

This duality is captured perfectly in the sources regarding a place called Maiden Springs in Virginia. There is an 1822 court record from Tazewell County. A man named William Thompson Jr. petitions the court because he wants to build a sawmill and a water grist mill on his property along the Maiden Spring Fork of the Clinch River.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

The court issues what's called a writ of ad quad damnum, which basically mandates an evaluation of potential property damage to the neighboring landowners. People like David Stevenson and his brother-in-law Robert Belsha get legal notifications about this mill.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Wait, they were basically doing environmental impact studies in 1822.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

Basically, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Why did a county court care so much about a random sawmill?

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Because in an agricultural economy, water flow is everything. A single dam for a grist mill could flood a neighbor's pasture upstream or, you know, throttle the water supply downstream, instantly destroying their livelihood.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

The courts had to legally manage the mechanics of frontier economics, which relied entirely on uninterrupted access to the environment. It changes how you picture history. We imagined epic battles, but people were still just taking each other to court over water rights. But the land at Maiden Springs has layers of intense historical trauma built right into it alongside those water disputes.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

It really does.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

The very same area, the Maiden Spring Historic District, started as a stockade fort back in 1773. It was built by a man named Reese Bowen as a defensive bastion during Native American conflicts and Dunmore's war. Fast forward to 1862, and the property is hosting Confederate troops who are defending the nearby Saltville Saltworks.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

So you have a single geographic coordinate serving as a frontier defense fort, a staging ground for Civil War logistics, and a place where neighbors suit each other over a gristmill.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

It's all just layered on top of each other.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Exactly. The land anchors the grand, violent sweep of history right alongside the everyday localized human experience.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

We see that same anchoring with the Tildman family. Before the American Revolution tore their political loyalties apart, Richard Tildman was granted a thousand acres in Eastern Maryland back in 1659. He built the manor of Tildman's fortune, which later became Canterbury Manor, complete with all the royalties and privileges of an English manor. The land was the prize. It was the physical foundation they built their survival upon, long before the political ground shifted beneath them.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

The geography always outlasts the politics.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

So what does this all mean? We started this deep dive looking at a genealogy newsletter, expecting a quiet list of ancestors. Instead, we traveled with Johannes Polhinas through pirate-infested waters.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

We definitely did.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

We floated for 30 terrifying hours in the Pacific with George Tillman. We tracked supersonic Cold War defections over the Florida Straits, sat through intensely awkward Revolutionary War family dinners, and sifted through 19th century water right.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

If we take a step back and look at the absolute totality of these sources, there is a lingering thought that I think fundamentally changes how we view ourselves. Think about the razor-thin margins of error here. If Johannes Polemus's ship had been sunk by that French man of war instead of just captured, if George Tilgman's parachute had failed exactly like his crewmates did over Yokohama, if a desperate Cold War pilot made a single wrong calculation in a MiG-23 and hit the ocean wave, if James Tildman had been executed as a traitor instead of just put under house arrest, if any of those razor thin moments went the other way, entire family lines, entire futures would simply vanish. That is heavy. History isn't just a list of inevitable events that happened in the past. Your very life today, right now, is the punchline to thousands of historical near misses.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Wow. That is incredible to think about. It means that quiet, dusty family tree is actually a record of ultimate survival. So to you listening to this right now, we want to leave you with this. What silent high stakes thrillers are hiding in the branches of your own family tree?

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah, what impossible gambles did your ancestors have to win just so you could be here today?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

It's definitely worth a deep dive of your own to find out. We'll see you next time.