Scots in the West Indies, 1707-1857

by David Dobson

2009 · Genealogical Publishing Com

This book began as Jean Stephenson's effort to validate the family tradition that her great-great-grandparents emigrated from Belfast to South Carolina under the leadership of Covenanter Presbyterian minister William Martin in 1772. The author was not only able to authenticate the crux of the story, but, in the process, to place nearly 500 Scotch-Irish families in South Carolina on the eve of the Revolutionary War.Genealogists will want to pore over the land evidences assembled by the author from entries found in the Council Journal, namely, authorizations, survey abstracts, wills, deeds and other records which demonstrate where each family settled, or was entitled to settle. The families, which are grouped under the vessel they traveled in, are identified by the name of the household head, names of spouse and children, number of acres surveyed, county, location of the nearest body of water and the names of abutting neighbor, and the source of the information.

The Memory of Bones

by Stephen Houston, David Stuart, Karl Taube

2006 · University of Texas Press

All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as archaeological findings, to argue that the Classic Maya developed a coherent approach to the human body that we can recover and understand today. The authors open with a cartography of the Maya body, its parts and their meanings, as depicted in imagery and texts. They go on to explore such issues as how the body was replicated in portraiture; how it experienced the world through ingestion, the senses, and the emotions; how the body experienced war and sacrifice and the pain and sexuality that were intimately bound up in these domains; how words, often heaven-sent, could be embodied; and how bodies could be blurred through spirit possession. From these investigations, the authors convincingly demonstrate that the Maya conceptualized the body in varying roles, as a metaphor of time, as a gendered, sexualized being, in distinct stages of life, as an instrument of honor and dishonor, as a vehicle for communication and consumption, as an exemplification of beauty and ugliness, and as a dancer and song-maker. Their findings open a new avenue for empathetically understanding the ancient Maya as living human beings who experienced the world as we do, through the body.