Being from St. David?s is something to celebrate was the message from Bermudian genealogist Jean Foggo Simon during a talk at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo recently.

Mrs. Simon was born and raised in St. David?s but currently lives in Oberland, Ohio with her son and grandchildren. In May, she gave a talk at the Aquarium about the heritage of St. David?s Island.

?When I started researching my background no one was interested,? she told the . ?The only person who really supported me at the start was my mother.

?She wanted to know too, and she was thrilled that I would take time out of my job and busy schedule to spend my weekends and nights doing this,? Mrs. Simon said. ?I would share that with her what I found, and she encouraged me to keep going. She passed on suddenly, and it made me want to do that much more.?

Her research has taken her all over the United States, and she has even been historian in residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she found many documents relating to Bermuda history.

Her interest and stubborn pride in her roots proved to be infectious. The meeting at the Aquarium was packed, and at the end of June the St. David?s Island Indian Committee, a subcommittee of the St. David?s Island historical Society ? will be holding the third Native Bermuda Festival.

?It use to be that nobody wanted to say they were from St. David?s,? said Ronnie Chameau, a loyal member of the committee. ?Today everybody wants to be your cousin. All kinds of people come up to me and say their mother or grandmother was from St. David?s.?

Many friendships have developed between Bermuda families and Native American families in New England.

?I stumbled on to some information that led me to New England,? Mrs. Chameau said. ?I became a quasi-historian just by the research that I did. It opened up a lot of doors for my family, and also for some Native Americans who grew up like we did with stories that we were here.?

Before she began, the only information she had were oral stories passed down in her family.

?The stories would be about shipwrecks, or about someone who jumped ship in Castle Harbour,? she said. ?Some of the stories were about the Foggo family. The Foggos were not Native American originally; they were Scottish. In 1612 when the Bermuda company came back to Bermuda, there was a Foggo who was secretary of the Bermuda Company.?

?She also found that oral tradition is not necessarily foolproof, there are some inaccuracies in the old stories. I knew we were Native American,? she said. ?St. David?s Islanders have always been termed ?Mohawk?. I said maybe I need to research a little bit more. I started looking into the Mohawk family, because I was in the United States it was a little bit easier. I found we had no connection to the Mohawks.

?I started reading articles that said they never came here. I looked at the map and saw the Mohawks were from upstate New York and fought against the Pequots and Wampanoag, during their civil wars.

?It didn?t make any sense that they would have been taken as captive and sent to Bermuda because they weren?t even on the coast.?

She thought it was more likely that the Native American connection in St. David?s Island was the result of Pequot, Narragansett and Wampanoag slaves that were sent to Bermuda in the late 1600s.

Pequot and Narragansett Indians are all part of the larger nation, the Wampanoag.

?The Mohawks fought against the Pequots on the side of the British,? she said. ?The Mohawks led the British to where the Pequot fort was in Connecticut. It was burned down with 600 or 700 people inside, many of them women and children.

?It virtually took them off the face of the earth. The survivors were taken as slaves and some were shipped to Bermuda.?

One of those slaves may have been the young son of King Phillip (Metacom) the Wampanoag leader who led King Philip?s War from 1675 to 1676 between the colonists and the Wampanoag in New England.

People from St. David?s were termed Mohawk either because Bermudians didn?t know any better and used it as a generic word for Indian, or possibly because the Wampanoag slaves themselves encouraged the idea since the Mohawks fought on the side of the British, and the Wampanoag now found themselves in a British colony.

?I have a picture of a Narragansett princess and a picture of one of our cousins from St. David?s,? said Mrs. Simon. ?You look at it and can?t tell the difference between the pictures.?

Mrs. Simon is descended from Jacob Minors who was a well known pilot in the 1800s.

?The story is that the Fox and Minors children on St. David?s are very closely related, but I never knew they were blood brothers and sisters with different last names,? she said. ?Some of Jacob?s children were born out of wedlock, and others were born once the couple married.?

Mrs. Simon said when she started her research she never thought she would get so far, and discover so much.

?It wasn?t even something I was interested in,? she said. ?I started to write stories about individual members of my family. As they got older and passed on I wanted to memorialise them in that way.

?Someone said why don?t you put dates of their birth and the dates of their passing? So I started a website, and I wrote fifteen stories of individuals. I invited people to add something to the website if they wanted. The website started getting all these hits and e-mail.?

Today, Mrs. Simon is helping to eradicate the stigma of being from St. David?s which is rooted in racism. ?We were always called halfbreeds or Mohawks,? she said. ?We grew up with the stigma of being inferior to the rest of Bermuda. We fished, and farmed. My ancestors were whalers, boat makers, shipbuilders, mapmakers and fishermen. All that related to what they did centuries ago in New England.

?We married in with Scottish and Irish who were indentured servants for seven years. When the natives married in with these families they became free.

?They could go or stay and they stayed on St. David?s and had land. We have always self-supported ourselves, not knowing who we were. We were told to forget. Well, I?m not going to forget.?

@EDITRULE: