Who is Gracy Parmer?

or, Why genealogy is so much fun.

Genealogy is fraught with puzzlement which may be why some people choose to get entangled in it. I tried it for a time.

I hope I can condense this enigma  to an understandable example of the stuff family researchers come up against.  The one common factor to be found in researching this person is a statement of birth year, 1728, and that she was born in Virginia.  Nothing else has been verifiably established, but that has not stopped the family tree builders from asserting her position as matriarch of a Parmer/Palmer clan, the one to which I belong.

William Branham, a.k.a. William Parmer, born about 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, who died in 1822, is verifiably recognized as progenitor of the Palmer line into which I was born.  It is asserted that his mother was Gracy Parmer and his putative father was William Branham.  In seeking records, though, one will find that it is almost as though, having need of a mother for Mr. Branham/Parmer, one was posited by someone. She came into existence of necessity and disappeared conveniently, leaving no footprints.

Yet if you look at various family trees, there you will find her, including one in which it is stated that she died in childbirth at William's advent, and another in which she supposedly gave birth to two additional children, one when she was fifty years of age, and the other at age 59!

William went by the Branham name for the first fifty plus years of his life, then he filed for legal change of name to William Parmer.  An affidavit by acquaintances asserted that William "was illegitimate" and he was "fair born" to a woman with red hair.  Come now the family researchers yet again.  One I read after went into a long and detailed historical analysis showing why, in his opinion, this tidbit points to the likelihood that mother Gracy Parmer was a Monacan Indian, and that she was in fact married to Richard Branham, and hence William was not illegitimate at all, but now he was seeking to evade a recently passed law in Virginia requiring inhabitants of mixed race to register as such.

And so it goes.

Again I ask, Who is Gracy Parmer?

Incredible

There you go.

I turned six years of age in the summer of 1940.  I was still in short pants.  Even at that tender age I hated short pants.  Long pants in that day represented a rite of passage, and I could hardly wait for the school year to start, for then I would get to wear long pants!  Little did I know then that the tortures awaiting me at school would far outweigh the joys of wearing long pants.  But I have told that part of the story before.  This is about men and their "shorts."

Before I launch into the rant, look at the picture.  Why? I ask.  Nevermind the answer, for I know that there is no good answer.  Look at that!  And my spouse encourages me to go around looking like that?  Incredible.  She said to me just the other day, "You have a ton of Wranglers in your closet that are worn and holey.  Why don't you cut them off and make some shorts?  It is too hot for long pants."  See, one cannot even depend on his nearest and dearest for support sometimes.  But the answer is an emphatic "Not in this lifetime."  She even tells me, argumentively, "You have nice legs."  Nice, yes; they have supported me, lo, these many years.  Something to look at?  I don't think so.  I'm a guy.

A couple of days later, three of my stepsons were standing around here in the house talking about their shorts!  Incredible.  "I hate the way these things (tugging at the bottom of the things) catch on my knees when I try to get up from a chair."  "Yeah."  "Yeah, I hate that, too." 

Comfortable attire.

Ugly attire, too.  Whatever happened to us anyway?  Don't answer that, either.

If you ever see me in swim trunks, I will be on the beach or in the pool.  You will never see me in shorts.

So some clever person will say, "Aren't you hot?"  I say, "It's 102 degrees.  Aren't you?"

Short pants on men: reversion to childhood, sez I.