I love America.

I love America. I love the United States of America. I love it so much that I offered my life for it at one time. I was shot in each leg advancing on the enemy. I would do it again.

America has many faults. I have studied many of our actions against humanity. Many of these actions involved our treatment of Native Americans. I am well aware of them. The actions have been many and terrible. My ancestors were involved.  The knowledge of those actions does not lessen my love for this place where I was born. If you want to love you have to love sinners.

My wife Jackie is one quarter Choctaw. My children are 1/8 Native Americans. I think that they are more American than I am.

I was raised in a large family. All that I knew of the Monson genealogy was that Dad was born in Kentucky. We had years to talk about it. He and my mother moved to California in 1908 with my oldest sister. I thought that we were Swedes who had recently moved to America in a turnip boat. None of this was correct except the birth in Kentucky. I find it strange that none of my siblings knew anything of our genealogy. I did not either. It was not really ever discussed.

When my wife passed away six years ago I needed activities to fill my time. I was a history buff and thought that the study of my family genealogy would be very interesting. It was. I bought a copy of Ancestry.com and started researching. I discovered that my 8^th great grandfather, Captain Thomas Munson, was baptized in Rattlesden, England in 1612. His forefathers had moved to Suffolk after the Normans defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Normans were Danes and Vikings who had earlier conquered Northern France. So I might be a Viking.

Around 1630 to 1650 thousands of Puritans moved from England to New England. Thomas was one of them. His area of England was largely Puritan.

Captain Thomas was a 25-year-old militiaman from Hartford, Connecticut in the Pequot Indian War in 1637. He lived in Hartford for a short time and then moved to New Haven. His signature is on the founding document for the city of New Haven. His descendants donated a sizeable portion of land to the establishment of Yale University in New Haven. There is gravestone for Thomas in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. 

The Grove Street Cemetery is practically on the grounds of Yale. Jackie and I drove through New Haven several times in our RV travels. I had no inkling of the Munson involvement in New Haven history. If I had known we would have stopped and I would have been all over the place. Several years ago I spent several days in New Haven.

In the 1630s the Puritans were having problems with the Pequot Indians.  The Pequot were the foremost tribe in the area. Other tribes paid tribute to them. Over the years there were altercations between the Pequot and the Puritans where people were killed and farms were destroyed. The Puritans decided to settle the Pequot problem. They gathered several hundred militia men and friendly Indians. In the night they attacked and burned the main Pequot settlement. Seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children were killed. The Puritans lost two people. Sounds like a massacre, huh? The survivors were hunted down and either killed or sold into slavery. It did not pay to lose in a New England Indian War. Well, the Pequot problem was taken care of. This is how things went until Custer’s Last Stand.

My great grandfather, Thomas, was a Sargent in the war. It is not known that he was but he could have been involved in the killing of women and children. This could be rationalized to be necessary and all right. I like to think that I would not do such things. But who knows? The love of country drives people to terrible deeds and I love my country.

One of the many things that I love about America is the Constitution that attempts to ensure that every one is treated fairly. Grandfather Thomas was born in Magna Carta country. The nobles of England met at at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds (which is a few miles from Rattlesden) in 1214. (Picture of the ruins below.)

 They swore to require the King to sign the Magna Carta. He did the following year in 1215. This event is considered to be the birth of constitutional law. Our founding fathers wrote sections of the Magna Carta into our constitution. 

I love this place. God Bless America!