As you may or may not be aware, I am taking online classes in a desperate attempt to carve out a better life for my wife and myself. I really rather like the History class that’s just wrapping up, and my final project is to do a 3-4 page paper concerning my family tree and any interesting characters several generations back. Prior to this exercise, I might as well have hatched from a giant space-egg for all I knew about my ancestry. Fortunately, several years ago my uncle took it upon himself to research the Jett family, and I had to do minimal investigation since he just emailed me all the information. It seems I have a rather…interesting family history. I suppose it should surprise no one that a man who thinks taking and sharing pictures of himself, naked, perched atop a stool is funny, would have a somewhat bizarre and really rather fucked up genealogy.
That, my dear readers, is the coat-of-arms awarded to the first known “Jett,” a Bavarian by the name of Sir Johan Van Jett, for his service in the first Crusade (1095-1099). So…great. My premier ancestor went to war because people keen on Jesus decided to kill a whole lot of folk in order to “reclaim holy land.” Also, the plundering was good back then. It seems some of the Jett line stayed in that region, evidenced by the same coat of arms above used by Baron Jett zu Munzenberg of Prussian Bavaria in 1701, and another portion went to England. I am totally going to start referring to myself as Baron Jett.
The first Jett to hop the pond, and to whom my uncle has been able to directly link us to, was Peter Jett. He came over to Virginia with his wife, kids and another family, in 1663. Where half of them were promptly killed in an Indian raid. Things are quiet for a few generations, and then it seems in the latter 1800’s our family has a rather embarrassing and loony brush with history.
You may remember a feller by the name of John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln, spouted some gibberish, and leapt from a balcony to disappear off into the night. Booth injured his leg in that jump and, after ferrying across the Potomac, chanced across three former Confederate soldiers. One of them was Private (or perhaps Captain, the history is vague) William “Willie” Jett. He was sympathetic to Booth’s plight, and led him to a friend’s farmhouse by the name of Garrett where the assassin holed up for a few days. Jett was eventually found and questioned and, when threatened with a serious hanging, gave up Booth’s location. Fun!I don’t have the specifics on hand, but I hear tell that the first Jetts to come to Missouri were horse thieves, which was punishable by death in those days. Then again, looking at a man sideways in the 19th century was tantamount to anally raping his mother, so…
Oh! One more fantastic journey down Jett lore: This gentleman is also not directly related to me, but there was a Curt “Bad Curt” Jett who received a life sentence for killing Attorney J. B. Marcum in Jackson, Kentucky, and shooting his cousin, Marshall Jim Cockrill from a courthouse window in 1902. Jett was apparently a “feudist,” which is a fancy way of saying his family didn’t get along with people. He was pardoned for reasons not entirely clear to me some 20 years later. It is, I suppose, kind of neat to have a relative with a nickname in quotes, but I think I could have been more creative than “Bad Curt.”So…what have we learned? Well, I am descended from thieves, murderers and treasonous abettors. Wonderful. On the up side, my mother’s side of the family is so fucked up that she just found out after his death that the man she thought was her half brother was really her real brother, because her mom banged her ex-husband while married to another man. And my maternal grandmother spoke 3 languages, was a fantastic artist, abandoned her family for weeks at a time, and thought she talked to the Devil. Also, kind of a racist.
It’s a blue-eyed miracle I’m not either in prison or the booby hatch…the latter being not nearly as fun as it sounds.
2 comments:
Lmao... great read on our family history, thank you!
Late to the party (as usual). I come from what was an extremely poor and irascible branch of the family (wonder if we're direct descendents of old "Bad Curt"). I know that our Missouri-based branch originated in Jett, Kentucky and ended up in Illinois by the 1930s. Another thing I know is based on the history of language. Old Johan van Jett...I don't think this is a spelling error swapping an a for an o, i.e., mispelling von with van. The "van X" is a convention common among Flemish and Dutch peoples who likely received it from their Salian Frankish predecessors. Jett itself is interesting as it is a place name (van basically being an old German prefix for "from"). There is of course Jett, Kentucky; but that's rather a case of a place taking its name from a people. But there is also Jett, a borough within modern Brussels in Belgium. Since this place was originally deep within the old Frankish Kingdom of Austrasia, this is probably the origin point of the family name (qua we have a surname).
How then, might Sir Johan ended up in Bavaria we can ask. This is also explained by a Frankish origin. Under the Carolingians there was a beef with the Thuringi tribe that used to live in the northern part of Bavaria. The Carolingians conquered them and seized the southern part of their lands for their own. So Sir van Jett is actually a Franconian and not a Bavarian by the 1090s. (Ultimately the rulers of Franconia died out and it got incorporated into Bavaria because of medieval politics which is why not many have heard of Franconia--despite Franconian being a distinct German dialect and the Franconians having distinct cultural habits in comparison to their Bavarian neighbors.)
If one supposes that Sir Johan's family held lands in both Flanders and Franconia during this time period, then it isn't much of a stretch to see how he goes on crusade with the Normans and ends up with lands in England (which would have been a new Norman acquisition at this time).
Just my half-penny's worth on the history of the larger Jett clan.
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