A Note on the Descendants of Thomas Ramsey

A list of the descendants of Thomas Ramsey can be found here.  As with the rest of the series and information about it, it is an evolving work: http://www.poetrybase.info/wat/Thomas%20Ramsey%20Descendants.html

As is mentioned in the “Indian Wars” chapter of the first volume of the series, due to Matthew West’s actions Thomas Ramsey wound up married to twenty-one Muscogee women simultaneously.  As some of his wives passed on, he usually maintained twenty-one wives by replacing those who passed, usually within a year.  His final count was sixty-two (62) wives and 1,019 children.  This gave him the claim to having fathered the highest number of children ever documented, at least until Tom Smith, Jr. surpassed him in the mid-19th century.  That still left Ramsey at the top of the list for non-Angels.

Many of Ramsey’s wives had multiple births, just as the West family had a high incidence of multiple births.  There is the implication in the “Indian Wars” chapter in the first volume that West might be related to Ramsey’s maternal grandmother, and so it might be natural in the line as was the Second Sight (ESP).  However, it is also possible that Matthew West may have altered Ramsey’s genome for some purpose.  This is not explicit in any of the volumes of the series, so it may not have happened.  Perhaps Ramsey has some natural mutations that can cause both identical and fraternal twins and multiple births.

Another factor to be aware of is that many of the children were born of Muscogee women, and the rest were later adopted in as new clans within the Muscogee Confederation.  Therefore, all last names are hyphenated to indicate both the paternal line and the maternal line (clan).  The clan names are not spelled as the Muscogee (este-Maskoke) now spell their language.  The names assigned to the new clans are also not formed exactly as they would be done today, or necessarily as they would have been formed in the late 18th century unaltered by the presence of Matthew West.  Several things are historically different than they would have been and have effected changes in the Muscogee people and their language.  Events in the third and fourth volumes of the series will further complicate their lingual landscape to the point where it becomes easier to use English as the official language of Hyperborea, the kingdom that forms out of the Muscogee Confederacy.

Ramsey gave many of his Muscogee wives English or Christian names.  There are a few with Muscogee names, but most became known by the names he gave them.

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