Path of the assassins

[L Verge]

Just a clarification that Oswell Swann was actually what is termed a "Wesort." He was a mixture of Caucasian, Native American, and Negro. There are 5-6 family names in Southern Maryland that used to be recognizable as tri-racial: Swann, Proctor, Harley, Neumann, and Butler. They coined the term "Wesort" referring to "We sort of people."

Their history (and pardon me if this has been discussed before) actually dates to Jamestown Settlement. Since women did not come to Jamestown until 1619, some of the men had Native American consorts. Some also began to move out of the confines of the settlement and search for new lands of their own. These five men settled in what would become the Lords Baltimore's colony of Maryland. Since Maryland was settled as a sanctuary for the Catholics, a priest came in the first wave of settlement - Fr. Andrew White.

When Fr. White found the men "living in sin" with their common law wives, he made them marry - thus producing the bi-racial lines. Of course, these families became relative outcasts because of the mixing of blood lines and began to intermarry with each other. Because they knew what it was like to be outcasts, they also welcomed run-away and newly freed slaves into their communities - hence the tri-racial lines.

For many years, they continued to intermarry within those five families until genetics really came into play. In the 1950s, I had a cousin who worked for the Public Health Service, and they conducted significant genetic testing on these families to show the results of close familial in-breeding. I taught children descended from these lines. Common problems were inability to produce full-sized teeth (or any at all), born without fingernails, freckles on Negroid complexions, Native American hair on Caucasians, etc.

I have been raised around Wesorts my entire life, however, and have never seen any with "true" deformities or severe cognitive difficulties. Several of my students were quite smart and tested at the top of their categories. To me, the wonderful thing that has occurred over my lifetime is their assimilation into society. When I was a child, they lived in tight communities comprised only of Wesorts. Now, they move freely, marry into the "outside world," and few people today know their history.