A Nest of Rebel Pirates

I got a quick interest in pirates when I was thinking of a new picture of my OC Mel and my friend's OC Nyomi. We've drawn the two together now and then and it's been a while since we did a fresh picture, so I figured "Okay, this time we'll put them in pirate costumes!". I pulled our copy of "A Nest of Rebel Pirates" off of the shelf for inspiration and opened it...

on the inside front page, there is a sharpie comment written:
"Septembre 11, 1995
Kindest regards to the Davis Family, descendants of Chestnut Neck.
Franklin N. Kemp"

HOLY SHIT!

Mom once mentioned that this book is about our ancestors, but I had never opened it until today and then I saw this autograph directly from the author.

I asked mom "How are we related to the Davis family?" We've gone to the reunions for many years but I never asked this before. She said "My mom's mom was Henrietta Davis". Well, that was a simple answer and it satisfied me for now. I'll have to call Grandma up and talk about it since I want to know a little more about this massacre. She might not know a whole lot because both of her parents drowned in Big Bear Lake when she was 12, although grandpa has been putting together our family tree for a long time now.

Either way, I want to dive into this book. Chestnut Neck was described to be a place of American Privateers, but these privateers attacked other ships and stole their shit. I have pirates in my family.
My understanding of these events is that the British burned Chestnut Neck to the ground, and it never rose up as a trading port again. This event isn't really talked about in the textbooks I read in high school, and it's only part of a small bit of the American Revolution.

I was also pleased to see that the book stated the first white settler to the Little Egg Harbor area was a man named Erkka Mullikka (or Eric Mullica for the American version of his name), a Finn. Of course, that is just the Nightwish fangirl in me suprised to see that my family has the vaguest of connections to Finland, but I will also admit this has raised my interest in genuinely wanting to study Finland and it's culture more outside of a band that I like. I'll start with Erkka Mullikka.

This whole massacre business though is kinda sad. We seem to have a lot of that in my family. On my dad's side, we have the Cheerokee tribe and the Trail of Tears, though I'm not quite touching that just yet. I've accepted that the fullest possible understanding that I can get for all these events doesn't compare to actually being immersed in the tribe, and this acceptance actually comes from the novel Pigs in Heaven, which is a sequel to The Bean Trees. In PiH, Annawake Fourkiller insists that Turtle must be with her tribe because the Cheerokee nation had already lost so many of it's children, and the culture must remain as intact as possible after being fractured so many times. I grew up in a nuclear family so their concept of what is family and the closeness of the tribe is so foreign to me, yet this is also a thread in my family's cloth. It makes me a little sad that I can't fully understand.