By Kirk Johnson
For several years there has been a compelling meme making the rounds on social media titled “Ancestral Mathematics” highlighting the number of ancestors each individual has, going back twelve generations. It adds up fast. A total of 4,096 ancestors over the previous approximately 400 years exists for everyone.
A bit of a genealogy aficionado, I am unconditionally proud of all of my ancestry, so have been increasingly perplexed by the escalating, baseless ire in sundry contemporary media directed toward my predecessors, including up to current generations. In my view this toxic phenomenon is now metastasizing throughout the culture. Somebody has to say something. I have had the DNA tests performed, and know that I am of one hundred percent northern and western European descent. No one can convince me to abandon my high opinion of my ancestors.
Our family’s surname originated in Sweden as Jonasson, but was anglicized to Johnson when my great grandfather Fredrik and his brother Axel came to Jamestown, New York from Vånga, Östergötland around 1890. My paternal haplotype, I1-M253, suggests that I am genetically Scandinavian going back thousands of years — my father, his father, his father, and so on into the mists of time.
People often note my unusual first name, Newkirk, and inquire about its origins. Some assume that my parents were fans of the popular American World War Two television sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, and so named me after Richard Dawson’s character “Newkirk” on that program. That is a good guess, since Hogan’s Heroes ran from 1965 to 1971, and I was born in 1969, but it is not the case.
Newkirk originated as a Dutch surname. My ninth great grandfather on my mother’s side, Gerret Cornelisse Van Nieuwkirk, came to the American colonies during the 1650s from Slichtenhorst, Netherlands, about thirty miles southeast of Amsterdam, eventually settling in Ulster County, in the lower Hudson Valley area of New York.
Many Dutch settled in the lower Hudson River valley. America’s tenth president, Martin Van Buren, was from Columbia County, for example. Van Buren is the only American president whose primary language was not English — he was first a Dutch speaker. (He was also the first president without any British ancestry.) Van Buren was born and raised in the village of Kinderhook, and so was nicknamed “Old Kinderhook,” sometimes abbreviated as “O.K.” Thus, some attribute the use of today’s universally-recognized idiom “okay” to Van Buren and his supporters.
Within two generations of Gerret’s arrival, my predecessors had anglicized the Van Nieuwkirk surname to simply Newkirk. Upon his birth in 1915, my great grandmother Fern Rossall gave her son, my grandfather Chauncey Rossall, her maiden name of Newkirk as his middle name. My understanding is that some called him “Chance,” and others called him “Newie.” He unfortunately passed away long before I was born. He was a gifted chemical engineer.
Rossall, by the way, is an English name, associated with the town of Rossall on the Northwest coast of England in Lancashire, where my mother’s great grandfather (my great great grandfather) Richard Rossall was born in 1852. The surname Rossall was brought to England in the great wave of migration from Normandy following the Norman Conquest of 1066. Rossalls were first found in Shropshire where they were Lords of the manor of Rossall. At the time of the recording of the Domesday Book in 1086, the holdings were known as the Isle of Rossall, held by the Church of Saint Chad.
My father’s name was Jeff Johnson, and, as he explained it, everywhere he went in life there were multiple Jeff Johnsons, so naturally people would confuse him with others. During my childhood in Canandaigua, New York, there was another Jeff Johnson in town who was a commercial house painter. My father frequently got calls from people asking him to paint their house.
Thus, when I was born, my father wanted to give me a distinctive first name, and my mother Jacquelyn wanted to honor her father, so I was given Chauncey Newkirk Rossall’s middle name as my first name. (But people have almost always just called me “Kirk.”) When I was a child I probably would have preferred a “normal” name like Rob, Steve, or Tom, but today I am proud of, and grateful for, the unique ancestral choice. Now you know how the Dutch surname Van Nieuwkirk evolved to become the given name Newkirk with me.
I am not a “progressive.” Or perhaps more accurately, I am not a comrade. Those of that persuasion should not expect me to be their comrade, because I will never be on their side. I have no interest in contemporary subversive sensibilities such as “smashing the state” or “deconstructing the patriarchy.” Open borders policies are to me pure evil. The first and highest responsibility of the government of any nation is to the socioeconomic well-being of its own people — not foreign nationals. I am not interested in promoting “pride month.” Intentionally gaslighting little boys and girls into believing that they are somehow “really” the opposite sex — to the point that they acquiesce to permanently sexually mutilating their own bodies — is nakedly demonic. I much prefer grassroots populist nationalism over an affinity for openly anti-nationstate supranational bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations. And so on. I am tired of far-left indoctrination. I categorically reject it all.
Contrary to the repellent propaganda that Hollywood and others on the left and in media outlets have been browbeating us with for decades, I do not harbor any contempt for the America in which my parents were raised. I do not harbor any contempt for the America in which my grandparents were raised. I do not harbor any contempt for the America in which any of my ancestors were raised. I am not ashamed of the magnificent country we Europeans built here in the New World.
I am one hundred percent proud of every one of my European ancestors and everything every one of them ever did — Scandinavians, Englishmen, Germans, Dutchmen, all of them. Both in Europe, and here in America, they all worked their fingers to the bone so that their descendants — people like me — could have a better life. Thank God for all of them, and thank God for Western Civilization, which produced them all, and which symbiotically they helped to grow.
I hope I had Viking ancestors who raided around Europe and beyond, maybe even taking slaves as far away as the Middle East. I hope I had English ancestors who helped advance the British Empire, either by manufacturing weapons of war at home, or perchance as members of the military helping to tamp down rebellions in African or Asian colonies. “The sun never sets on the British Empire!” My maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Kohler, and our German line came from Württemberg, near the beautiful foothills of the Alps, and the Black Forest. I hope I had relatives who fought for the German military during World War One and World War Two. You name it. I love it all.
To the best of my knowledge all of my American ancestors were northerners, so none of them were likely to have been involved with slavery or the Confederacy, but even if one of them had been, I certainly would not hold it against them. That would be fun and interesting history about which to learn. The bulk of my background is composed of Scandinavians and British Islanders, so a millennium ago I likely had ancestors sailing around the North Atlantic raping, killing, and enslaving one another. That is just a part of history. I do not need or want “reparations.”
In other words, there is literally nothing that anyone can confront me with about the history of the European peoples that will ever successfully trick me into hating, or even looking slightly askance at, or being slightly contrite about, any of my ancestors or anything that any of them ever did.
None of you should be ashamed of or sorry for any of your European ancestry either. Your ancestors were not villains. Do not ever apologize for them to people who hate you. Do not let anyone guilt trip you into being more amenable to population-replacement-scale mass immigration schemes of one variety or another in order to “help make up for the past.” Proponents of such policies are the true purveyors of hatred.
Common sense is dying. Too many have allowed a cucked, politically-correct type of mindset to be projected on them by little more than the power of suggestion. There are too many malleable people. Please know that you do not have to do anything that the liberal elites demand that you have to do, or say. You do not have to bend the knee. You do not have to mouth the words and slogans that they demand you mouth.
They can force me to take sensitivity classes, they can put me in a re-education camp, they can trot out people whose ancestors may have theoretically been negatively affected in some way by something my ancestors may have done at some point in time. It will not work. I will not check my “privilege” (whatever that is). I will not “be less white,” like the woke multinational corporation Coca-Cola and others have advocated.
“Be proud of who you are, no matter where you came from!” ~ Buddy Brown
I will always carry with me a deep, abiding, reverent appreciation of where and who I came from. We all should feel that way. Never let anyone project on you through the power of suggestion the specious idea that Europeans have anything to be ashamed of simply by being European. Whether you are of mixed-European ancestry such as with so many Americans, Australians, Canadians, or New Zealanders; or are a pure-blooded Swiss or French man going back countless generations. We have nothing to be contrite about, and everything to be proud of.
Learn about your family tree. You have to know where you came from in order to know where you are going. Put in some time doing the genealogical research. Get the DNA tests performed, I know from personal experience that it can be deeply edifying, and even emotional. Know your past, know your history. Respect the ancestors — they are all now watching to see how you will respond to the pervasive, groundless, seething contempt leveled against us in today’s openly anti-European milieu.
Proud and strong!