Pirate genealogy

I've recently - the last several months - gotten back into doing some family tree research. I've always enjoyed looking at old family photos and hearing the old family stories, and I started learning about genealogy in the late 1970's. I found out early on that my grandmother was interested in that too, and had a family tree on her side back several generations into England. My mom told me that grandma was the one in the family with the interest, and that my grandfather, the one we called Poppy, really didn't want to dig into all that. For all he knew, we'd find an ancestor who was a horse thief.

The internet has speeded up much of the research, compared with back when all we had to look at were old papers, published books, and the census and other records on microfilm rolls, which had to be threaded into these big viewers at the genealogy library (those microfilms are still very useful, but I won't go into all the boring detail now). Not that all the information online is necessarily more accurate, but it's quicker to get to.

So about a year ago, I came across information on some Dutch ancestry I didn't know I had, on my dad's side. One of my great-to-the-eighth-grandfathers came from The Netherlands to New Amsterdam (now New York City); another thing I found out about him is that he died and was buried at sea.

And while I still haven't found any horse thieves, it looks like I found a pirate in the family today. I was looking for dates on a couple of families, to get an idea of when they came to the US, to see which individuals would likely show up in census records. I thought hey, the Ringo family has been well researched, and I haven't checked online for any information about them in months. So I typed in Philip Janszen Ringo genealogy on my search engine, and found quite a bit. One thing I hadn't seen before was a posting on genforum, from a Jim Ringo (I haven't figured out what kind of cousin relationship that would be, but we're apparently related). I won't copy the whole entry, but here's part...

"Ringo family members like to say that Philip Janszen Ringo was in the shipping business...During the period 1645-46 he managed to capture the Spanish Ship, St Antonio of Havana at the Bay of Campeachy (sp?) near the Mexican coast...Philip Ringo personally overcame by force one Manuel the Spaniard...was held for ransom at the Ringo family home...The Spanish considered his actions as piracy. The English and Dutch considered it as privateering."

I told the kids (they're all into the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)...there was much rejoicing.