King Solomon of ancient Israel, writer of several books in the Bible, wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.” (New Living Translation).
History repeats itself is one of the expressions in my best-selling book, Most Comprehensive Origins of Cliches, Proverbs and Figurative Expressions. Within the next day or two I will have an announcement about that book. But now I want to talk about something different.
A few weeks ago I was on a local radio show on which I am a frequent guest. I was introducing my new book, Exploring Our Exciting World, Book One, which highlights a lot of historical sites in the Southeastern US, including Civil War battlegrounds and monuments, cemeteries, etc.Not ;long after that broadcast I received a call from the local Genealogical Society asking me to speak at an upcoming meeting and be a co-guest on their radio spot before the meeting. I gratefully accepted and started looking for new material to present for them.
A few years back I made a trip to rural West Virginia to find the grave of my third-great-grandfather St. Clair who fought in the Civil War. It was wonderful finding out even more than I had already been told by a cousin about this man and his wife and their ancestry. One thing about which I was curious was why he and his family went to West Virginia from the family home in Virginia where the St. Clair had lived since the late 1600s.
I kept digging until I found that his brother had gone there earlier, and that his nephew, Gen. James William St. Clair, was a very prominent attorney in the area which was a State Senator and served as the National Commissioner for West Virginia at the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair. I even found a picture of him on the cover of the World Colombian Exposition for November 1891, Therein he was greatly praised as one of the most prominent lawyers in the South.
After doing family research for a number of years I had found a lot of connections to well-known individuals, but this one was closer than most. My great-great grandfather’s first cousin. I am still ‘digging up bones’ from my family’s past. This one was a pleasant surprise. There may not be ‘anything new under the sun,’ but there is always a lot to discover about what already has been.
We have a lot of great books at St. Clair Publications with historic significance. Check us out at stclairpublications.com .