Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 4: Earthquakes

Among natural disasters, earthquakes rate right up top as the deadliest. Each year thousands of people are killed or left homeless. Whole families, and by extension family lines have been lost during these events. Current and historical records document the effects and aftermaths of these major intrusions of Mother Nature in the lives of humans.

Since the Earth is in a dynamic state, changes to its surface through such processes as land shifts will continue to happen and any communities or infrastructure, not to mention people it the way will in all likelihood be harmed.

The 1906 earthquake in the San Francisco area, mentioned briefly in my blog post of 18 April 2017, was felt along the entire north coast of California, particularly devastating the urban area of San Francisco where it destroyed 80% of the city. Over 3,000 people died as a result of the quake and its resultant fires.

Major earthquakes are concentrated along the edges of the Earth’s crustal plates where relative movements cause the plates to impinge on each other. California is a region where the North American and Pacific plates slide laterally in opposite directions, grinding against each other and creating major fractures and fault zones. Movement is frequent and never-ending, in a geological sense, resulting in severe tremors and vertical movement.

 

World map showing major crustal tectonic plates – source United States Geological Survey 

Along coastal areas tsunamis may form as a result of the shifting of the seabed, adding a secondary potential for destruction. These large ocean waves can travel thousands of miles across open water, eventually appearing along distant shorelines with highly destructive force.

There is an informative website that lists earthquakes by period, country and region and also compares the devastation in terms of magnitude, cost of damage and numbers of deaths. These are primarily events that occurred during more recent times and documented in the published literature. There is no doubt similar events occurred in the past centuries before mass media. One major difference is in the perceived human toll. The rapid and large increase in population of the past 150 years has led to more people and communities being caught up in the destruction with many more deaths and greater destruction of infrastructure.

Ancient writings, along with archaeological and geological studies demonstrate the occurrence of destructive earthquakes going back thousands of years many of which affected early communities. Turkey and Syria, for example, lie at the junction of three crustal plates – African, Arabian and Eurasian (Anatolian sub-plate). The region has been the site of numerable major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions over millions of years. Records dating back a thousand years describe the destruction from these events. Earthquakes centered near the Greco-Roman city of Antioch, in AD 115 and AD 526 each apparently resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The deadliest earthquake in recorded history occurred in Shaanxi, China in AD 1556 when over 830,000 people were killed.

Besides the well-documented 1906 San Francisco event, there have been many major earthquakes in North America including one in AD 1700 in Cascadia (Washington State & British Columbia). No written records exist from the time period in North America describing the earthquake, however, in Japan there are reports of a tsunami thought to have originated along the North American coast. Tree ring evidence from the Pacific Northwest also show a major disruption in forest growth from flooding of low-lying areas. The earthquake is believed to have been caused by the North American plate slipping over the Juan de Fuca plate with a major shift along the deep subduction zone.

 

Structure of the Cascadia region and history of major earthquakes – source United States Geological Survey

While earthquakes by themselves may not have been the primary reasons for the migration of people, they certainly have been the cause of the deaths of thousands and the early demise of family lines. Family historians may wish to look at natural disasters such as earthquakes when studying the reasons why ancestors died or moved. Such natural phenomena are often part of the stories about families.

Everyone is Related to Everyone

But what does that really mean? James Tanner commented in a recent blog post (Genealogy is not a competitive sport) about family trees that contain thousands of names. He also made the point that having those large numbers is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.

Anyone can add names to their family tree. And many only do just (or only) that, regardless of whether they can justify relationships.

But so what! If you want to go back a few million years we can make a case that we are all related. In reality we can confidently only go back a few hundred years - perhaps 15 generations. Beyond the early part of the 16^th century we are stretching credibility by listing ancestors or stating relationships. Few medieval records list the names of people, certainly true for the “common” people from whom most of us descend.

Many family historians want to latch on to the nobility which I think happens because only those few families published any kind of genealogical summaries. How many times have you seen someone’s tree that goes back to Charlemagne? That’s 30 to 40 generations.

Adam Rutherford poked a little fun about about relationships to the King of the Franks in a 24 May 2015 piece in The Guardian: So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European… He comments: “I am a direct descendent of someone of similar greatness: Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator. Quelle surprise!” He goes on to state, “This is merely a numbers game. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. But this ancestral expansion is not borne back ceaselessly into the past. If it were, your family tree when Charlemagne was Le Grand Fromage would harbour more than a billion ancestors – more people than were alive then.”

The absence of true records of the greater proportion of the population over the centuries before about AD 1300 compels many people to attach themselves to those who have been named in formal documents. Seemingly, if you can trace a connection to any member of a European royal family then you are a descendant of Charlemagne (see Descendants of Charlemagne).

There is also an assumption that many members of ruling or royal families had scores of illegitimate children who somehow became the ancestors of so many of us. I seriously doubt that is true as there has always been a much larger number of people unrelated to those families. Their descendants would logically still make up most of the population today. Connections to any branch of royalty are often very tentative, perhaps even more like wishful thinking.

If you want to go back to Numero Uno in terms of human evolution then we can probably say we are all related. But that analysis is meaningless for family history studies. DNA may help us find or confirm some familial relationships within a few generations and among some close cousins but it won’t tell the whole story about our families and that is what we are really after, aren’t we?

There should be reservations even using DNA, assuming we could get samples from people as far back as the 9^th century. One shares less than 1% of their DNA with their 6^th great-grandparents which would make you wonder whether you can even truly demonstrate a blood relationship. The number is not even statistically relevant going back past 20 generations.

Going back to another post by James Tanner (Sourcecentric Genealogy), to conclusively show relationships or connections to past generations, one must work with bona fide historical records. Even some royal families’ trees or publication of them may be more fiction than fact so researchers must go beyond the summaries to find actual church or other records. And, again, any document dated earlier than the 14^th century should be used with caution.

So, is everyone related to everyone else? Only in the most general, biological sense but not in any meaningful one with regard to family history!

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 3: Drought

Many people researching their families’ history in North America will have ancestors that survived the Dustbowl of the 1930s. Nature’s attack of drought was most concentrated in the states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas but it effects were felt in many other regions. One result of the drying up of the farmlands of the plains region was a forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people, most going west to California.

 

Left – Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas – 18 April 1935 (credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, George E. Marsh); Right – Map of states and counties affected by the Dust Bowl between 1935 and 1938 originally prepared by the Soil Conservation Service. The most severely affected counties are coloured darker red. (Source: Soil Science and Resource Assessment, Resource Assessment Division, United States Department of Agriculture; retrieved 23 May 2017) 

Drought is basically a condition where there is a lack of water resources. According to researchers Gwyneth Cole and Terry Marsh (2006), of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, droughts may be caused be due to a deficiency of rainfall (meteorological drought), accumulated deficiencies in runoff or aquifer charge (hydrological drought) or limited water presentg in the soil during the growing season (agricultural drought). The primary parameters of a drought, though, are a lack of precipitation over an extended period of time and affecting a large area.

The drought that affected parts of the Midwest United States in the 1930s is one example that is engraved on recent human memory. Another is the recent arid years in California. This particular drought was predicted by many august individuals and organizations to last a millenium. It was ended, though, as many are, by record rainfall earlier this year. Not to say it cannot or will not happen again. Of course it will. That is the prime characteristic of the natural world – change!

Droughts have been part of natural events for millions of years in all parts of the world. With regard to human history, both recorded and ancient, droughts have played a significant role in the destruction of communities – even whole societies when they played out over long time periods. Many periods of severe drought have been documented in Europe over the last 500 years (Garnier et al, 2015) which resulted in thousands of people leaving their homes to find more hospitable areas.

North America has many examples:

• ·         The Terminal Classic Drought coincided with the demise of the Mayan civilization between AD 750 and 1050 (Gill, 2000).
• ·         Between AD 990 and 1300 there were three intense and persistent droughts in the central and southwest part of the US, each lasting decades. They all had severe impacts on natives that resulted in migration of the people and even collapse of their cultures (Jones et al, 1999).
• ·         Droughts affected early colonists on Roanoke Island (Virginia) between 1587 and 1589 and again between 1606 and 1612 at Jamestown (I wrote about this event in a blog post in September 2016 titled What if…?) The conditions were the driest in the region in 800 years and resulted in high death rates and the abandonment of both habitations.
• ·         The Civil War Drought (1856-1865) is considered to be the most severe in more modern times, possibly rivalling that of the Medieval period (AD 750-1300).

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorade (photo by Lorax) 

Family historians may come across evidence that such natural phenomena have affected their own families, at different times and in different regions. Sometimes short-lived and sometimes over extended time periods, drought can, and did have devastating impacts on living conditions.

References:

Cole, G. A. & Marsh, T. J. (2006). An historical analysis of drought in England and Wales. In Climate Variability and Change – Hydrological Impacts (Demuth, S., Gustard, A., Planos, E., Scatena, F. & Servat, E., Eds.). International Association of Hydrological Sciences, publication number 308, pp. 483-489.

Garnier, E., Assimacopoulos, D. & van Lanen, H. W. J. (2015). Historic droughts beyond the modern instrumental records: an analysis of cases in United Kingdom, France, Rhine and Syros. DROUGHT R SPI Technical Report No 35.

Gill, R. B. (2000). The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death. University of New Mexico.

Jones, T. L., Brown, G. M., Raab, L. M., McVickar, J. L., Spaulding, W. G., Kennett, D. J., York, A. & Walker, P. L. (1999). Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered: Demographic Crises in Western North America during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Current Anthropology, (40/3), pp. 137-170.