Apparently My Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Badass

It's Monday morning.

The entire weekend was spent doing one of three things: working on LastLook, cuddling with VantaQueen, or working on my hemophilia project. I've never really talked about that last one, so here goes.

I have hemophilia. It came from my mom, who got the gene from her mom, who got it from her mom, Valeria. My grandmother had two brothers with hemophilia. I had, and I stress HAD, two cousins with hemophilia before the Hemocaust of the 1980s wiped out an entire generation of us.

I've always wondered where it started in my family. Was Valeria the beginning? Or was there hemophilia hiding somewhere further back?

I've been doing genealogy research off and on since 2001. It's one of those projects I disappear into when I need to clear my head. No deadlines. No release dates. Just me chasing dead relatives through census records, newspapers and whatever else I can find.

Recently I decided to bring something new into the hunt. I'm writing my own AI. Think Iron Man's JARVIS, except mine is named Aria and she's being built around me, my projects and the ridiculous amount of information I've accumulated over the years. If I'm going to build my own AI, I might as well make her useful. So I've been using Aria to help with the genealogy. She's actually been pretty damn good at it.

There have been dead ends. False leads. Plenty of wasted time chasing somebody who turned out to be the wrong damn person. I still can't prove hemophilia existed in the family before Valeria.

But I did discover that my great-great-grandfather Andrew Glenn was an absolute badass. At 16 years old, Andrew left Pennsylvania and headed west by ox wagon. And here's the part that gets me: his two brothers who went with him were younger than he was. Three brothers. All teenagers. Andrew was the oldest at sixteen.

They crossed the plains in 1853 with what became known as the Longmire-Biles wagon train. This wasn't just another group following the Oregon Trail. Near Umatilla, most of the company took a newly opened route across the Cascades through Naches Pass and became the first emigrant wagon train to successfully make the crossing. Thirty-six wagons went over a route that was so brutal they had to make ropes out of cattle hides to lower wagons down the mountains. One wagon was reportedly destroyed doing it. They weren't following generations of pioneers through an established pass. They were the ones proving a wagon train could get through.

And Andrew was sixteen.

Years later, George H. Himes, who had been an adult in that wagon train and went on to become one of Oregon's prominent historians, still remembered him. Writing about Andrew decades later, Himes specifically noted that Andrew "was in the same train to which I belonged while crossing the plains in 1853." His surviving roster names all three brothers: James, John and Andrew. Something about that gets me. Andrew wasn't some name I found buried in a census. There was a man who actually crossed the continent with him who lived long enough to write down, essentially, "Yeah. I remember that kid."

At sixteen I was worried about completely different shit. Andrew was apparently looking at his two younger brothers and saying, "Well, I guess we're crossing the continent."

And apparently that wasn't enough adventure for one lifetime. Andrew ends up in Southern Oregon, mines coal and gold, serves during the Rogue River conflict, gets into lumber, becomes sheriff of Coos County twice, and later heads north chasing gold in Alaska around the turn of the century. Oh, and in 1854, at seventeen years old, he's associated with the first recorded ascent of Mount Adams while working on the military road through Naches Pass.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here Monday morning drinking coffee and pissed off because I have to stop researching him and go to work.

I still haven't found where the hemophilia started. But I've definitely found some stories.