my maternal genealogy

My sixth great maternal grandfather was born Micum McIntire in 1635 at Glencoe, Antrim, Scotland. On the losing side at Dunbar in a British civil war, he was death marched diagonally across England, from southeastern Scotland to southwestern England. Of the more than 10,000 losing Scottish soldiers who were death marched, about one-third survived and were shipped to America. Micum was sentenced to seven years of indentured servitude in New Hampshire, after which he made his way to York County, Maine and bought a house now called The McIntire Garrison, one of the, if not the, oldest extant wooden buildings in Maine.

After her parents emigrated from Germany, my maternal grandfather's mother was born Margaret Anne Evans in Nova Scotia in 1833. Her third son was my maternal grandfather, Sidney Chester McIntire, (no relation to Sidhartha, that would be my maternal grandmother) born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1871, the first McIntire not born in York in well more than two centuries.

In 1894 Sidney, his father and his brother owned a "ventilating apparatus and hardware specialities" manufacturer in Boston. In 1915 Sidney continued to work full time when he started attending Northeastern Law School. According to Massachusetts Bar records he wrote onto the Bar at a law office in Boston. He was called to the Bar of the City of Boston on 11 March 1919. On that date, 92 years later, Ishinomaki, my Japanese hometown, was destroyed by an artificial tidal wave.

My non-biological maternal grandmother, Doris Currey Martin, born in Buffalo, New York in 1900, married a medical surgeon for her practice marriage. Her spouse died of hepatitis within a year.

In 1928, MacIntyre left Boston in his Cord, met Doris for the first time in the Western tier of New York, and drove with her to Key West. Together they ferried to Cuba, returned to Key West, and drove to the Grand Canyon. In her nineties, she told me about hiking to the bottom of the Canyon, though she could not recall with whom! Doris, sporting fur and bouquet, was photographed with MacIntyre (spellings vary) on the Canyon's rim in 1928.

They kept driving to Los Angeles, then San Francisco where she nursed one of the Wright brothers in hospital. Doris and Sidney honeymooned and settled in Hawaii. In 1930 a maid with Japanese ancestry, whom they called Kimi, resided with them. My mother was born to Kimi, my biological grandmother, while they lived at 2066 Lanihuli Street.

In 1936 in Honolulu, MacIntyre was working as an assistant district attorney until taking up private practice on King Street. Storm clouds looming a decade before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Doris left Hawaii to raise my mother in New York. Doris was childless late in life. At that time there wasn't artificial insemination. Perhaps Kimi was a surrogate mother, or Doris was so ticked off at my grandfather she punished him by taking his child back to the Western tier of New York where her family had helped settle since the early 1800s. Yet another explanation would be that a mixed race child born in 1930 who could pass for white, was going to distance herself from her biology more easily in New York. Perhaps all of these and more are true.

On Doris's 100th birthday we had a shindig to tell. Doris died at the age of 103 in New York, having lived in three centuries. Losing my mother in my teens, she gracefully assumed that roll. Well...at least as gracefully as a daughter of New York can!

On the Emperor's birthday in 1941, a few weeks after the purported Japanese attempt to retake the Kingdom of Hawaii, my grandfather was supposedly felled by a stroke in Honolulu. He never again resided at their home at 1937 Kakela Drive. Documents suggest he died in 1944, and the Honolulu courts closed for a day out of respect. His obituary called him a kamāina, a child of the land.

Indeed, he was evacuated from Hawaii to Japan with my biological grandmother on Pearl Harbor Day. For decades he had been unsuccessfully trying to leave America. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a pretence. The purpose was not to retake the islands for Asians, but to extricate my grandparents from American hegemony.

I was unable to learn more about my biological grandmother other than a photo with her name, Kimi. In 2018, on his ninetieth birthday, my father confessed to me of his knowledge of our East Asian ancestry. My mother faked whiteness her entire life. Until a few years ago, my siblings and I were led to believe we were Caucasian.

paternal genealogy

My grandmother's great-grandfather, James Hattor Bowstead Moore Sr., was born about 1833 in Canada. His father, Thomas Moore, born about 1800 in Knaresdale, Northumberland, emigrated from England. My paternal grandmother, Ethel May Dennis, was born in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada in 1898. Ethel was active in the Kalamazoo Chapter of the United Nations Association, a tradition I continued in high school by participating in the Model United Nations. Ethel was a founding member of the Kalamazoo Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

I can trace my paternal line as far as William A. Allen, who served, starting on 18 September 1863 in the Michigan Calvery in The War of Northern Agression, mustering at Grand Rapids, Kent, Michigan. His son, Ira Allen was born a Methodist in 1822, and died a Baptist pastor in the pulpit in Elsie, Michigan in 1895. His son, William E. Allen, was a grocer who birthed Harold Brainerd Allen. After graduating from Kalamazoo College Harold started his career as a trust officer at First National Bank in Kalamazoo. Within six years, he was "treasurer of the Industrial Finance Company specialising in trust affairs." He then served on the board and as General Counsel of the bank.

Beginning in 1949, he served as Secretary on the Board of Directors at The Upjohn Company, the Pfizer kernel. Photographed in 1958, Harold is seated on the far left, second row. A Utah website calls Upjohn "one of the largest ethical drug manufacturers in the United States."

My non-biological father, Bradley Moore Allen, was, and probably always will be the gentlest man I will ever know. He never cared if people thought him effeminate or weak. He had the strength of his convictions, and taught me my work ethic by showing me his when we were working on carpentry projects and lawn work at his small business. He coached our Little League team, taught me to waterski, and helped pioneer four handed dentistry by starting a trade school, a training industry which has since been subsumed by the state. He passed on 19 December 2022 at 94 years old.

My mother was a member of the National Honor Society in high school and a class president at Middlebury College. Middlebury was the site of the first college education of women in America. She was well loved by people who knew her well, or briefly, and had an introspective, Japanese way about her. She taught me my first Japanese words.

She was destined to be more than a homemaker, and eventually broke the constraints. She deserted my father and left him to raise five children. I was 16. Her death appeared, on Guy Fawkes Night, to be suicide by immolation. I don't think my father ever recovered.

I don't fault her for leaving. On the contrary, I admire her resolve. Her purported death, like her father's, was faked. The world was not yet ready, and our family's privacy has been perpetually invaded. She took the steps necessary to shake me from our fake whiteness, and make me take the steps I ought for her, for me, and, most of all for my daughter, whom she never met. As I stated when addressing the hundreds of people in attendance at her memorial service at a Unitarian fellowship, "I will always love her."

Twelve years after her documented death, I was to meet her again. She had moved to England and, after our reunion in spring 1991 in New Smyrna Beach, returned to England. Marcia = a marsh = The Swamp.

I won't run from who I am, nor will I be silenced. For example, during Mr. Obama's administration, the United States government's torture of me included hacking into a medical facility where I was receiving a medical procedure resulting in something akin to anal rape.

When that didn't work, and I applied for political asylum in Switzerland, Mr. Obama threatened the Swiss with complete devaluation of their currency. When I tried to stay in Switzerland to avoid being politically and economically persecuted by the American government, the American government coerced the Swiss into purposefully housing me at a Swiss refugee camp for undesirables awaiting deportation, i.e. known rapists, petty thugs and vicious criminals. I was almost raped in that refugee camp by two men.

Instead of President, I often refer to United States presidents as mister. I do so because, although they might claim they have no 'personal' quarrel with my family or others America has tortured, silenced or killed, we find the violations to be very personal. If you are an American citizen reading this, I forgive you. I forgive your government, and I forgive your presidents. I will never, ever forget. None of us will.

I will not let you do to my daughter what you did to my mother. I will not. The Buddhist in me warns that striving for something is often the best way not to get it.

If, after reading this, my blog and my memoir, you still don't understand what I am, please ask someone you think is smarter than you. I appreciate your understanding.