Monday, September 2, 2019

Two Mass Shootings in Texas in One Month: Who Owns Guns in the U.S? (Answer: White Republican Evangelical Men Above All)

Latest mass shooter in Texas from Odessa American























I'm glad that the Odessa American today published the photo of Seth Aaron Ator found at the head of this posting. As soon as his name was released, people got busy on social media shopping around a yellowed-out photo of him that seems to have been doctored to make him appear non-Caucasian. As this was being done, people pumped out the message that he was a Jewish native American Democrat. In all of 10 minutes, using publicly available resources at Ancestry and FamilySearch, I was able to track his Ator ancestry back to his immigrant ancestor, Johann Casper Eader, born in 1721 in Alsace, who came with other Germans to Philadelphia on 3 December 1740 — carrying a (Christian) family bible, according to his descendants, one long treasured in his family. 

Casper Eader settled in the German communities of Frederick County, Maryland. From there within a generation or two, his descendants fanned out to east and then west Tennessee, with Seth Ator's family line migrating from west Tennessee to Arkansas, then Oklahoma, and finally, Texas. As with other families of German descent with colonial roots in the Southern states, within one or two generations, they were marrying families of Anglo and Celtic background, so that his family tree is quite clearly, on the Ator side, the family tree of a white, Christian, German-Anglo-Celtic family — like many others you'll find in the regions in which his family has lived (Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas). 

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