A Brief History of Time

11/26/07

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.