Better Call Saul, and the German in all of us...

We don’t watch much TV around our house nowadays.

As someone born at the very tail end of the “Boomer” generation, my early life was measured-out and in many ways defined by TV.

Some good TV, and an awful lot of trash, truth be told.

I’ve seen Fess Parker playing Daniel Boone. Speed Racer and Fat Albert cartoons. The Munsters. Sesame Street. Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The Jeffersons. Welcome Back, Kotter. The Love Boat. Charlie’s Angels.

I missed a lot of 1980s TV, being stationed with the US Army in Germany.

Further travels eventually saw US TV fall almost completely off my radar.

As a person plagued by “FOMO”, I did try to stay in touch with popular culture.

A brief romance with US TV was briefly rekindled during the 1990s, with the arrival of The X-Files, Millennium, and similar pre-millennial angst-ridden fare, but work, and a love of live music, sailing, and the outdoors eventually saw the communal screen in our house turning into a dust covered black rectangle in the corner.

So I missed The Sopranos. I also missed The Wire.

I know - my bad.

Since the turn of the millennium, younger family members (aka “my son”) began to mention TV shows which were considered essential touchstones for contemporary culture.

“Breaking Bad”.

Its follow-up, “Better Call Saul”.

Determined not to become entirely culturally illiterate, I decided to make the effort to keep up with popular culture.

So I watched Breaking Bad. Brilliant.

And then I finally got around to watching “Better Call Saul”.

Slower paced and lower key, but still loved every minute of it.

*****

When you do what I do, it’s impossible to watch credits without noticing surnames, and going “Ah! I know something about that person’s family history”.

The lead character Jimmy McGill is played by Bob Odenkirk, whose German and Irish background comes mostly from “late wave” German and Irish immigration during the 19th century.

The character Kim Wexler is played by Rhea Seehorn, also with German and Irish roots, with a soupçon of Bohemian Czech thrown in for good measure.

The Seehorn surname itself is German, and most people bearing the Seehorn family name have roots in America going back to an earlier wave of German immigration during the early 1700s.

Although Rhea Seehorn (latterly starring in the post-apocalyptic Pluribus series) sports the quintessential blonde hair and blue eyes popularly associated with Germanic peoples, her own Seehorn ancestry peters-out of any reliable documentary record in early 1800s North Carolina, among a plethora of German families commonly associated with what are known as the “Black Dutch”.

Those who follow this blog and podcast will already know that “Black Dutch” was a term used in early colonial and frontier-era America by many people of German ancestry with complex ethnic backgrounds.

This complicated ethnicity included German Sinti (Romani or “Gypsy”) people, German Jews, or Germans/Czechs who had intermixed with darker ethnic groups of African or Indigenous ancestry (Moravians, for example) found along the settler-colonial frontier.

Contrary to common wisdom, people of complex German background were far more numerous on the Southern Appalachian frontier of Daniel Boone than the much-vaunted “Scots-Irish”.

Ms. Seehorn’s direct ancestors include Grindstaffs, Shouns/Showns, Slemps, Stouts, and Snyders - all of these families can still be found today in Southern Appalachia, which has FAR more German heritage than most people imagine.

Here are just a few of these old Appalachian German families beginning only with the letter “S”, like Ms. Seehorn:

Seahorn (Seehorn, Zeehorn)

Seger/Seeger (Sieger)

Setzer

Shafer/Shaver (Schäfer)

Shawver (Schauber)

Shell (Schell)

Shepherd (Schäfer)

Shown/Shoun (Schaun)

Sides (Seitz)

Siler (Seiler)

Slager (Schläger)

Slemp (Schlemp)

Sliger (Schleiger)

Slusher (Schlösser)

Smelser (Schmelzer)

Smith (Schmidt)

Snider/Snyder (Schneider)

Snodderly (Schnatterle)

Spear{s} (Speer)

Spraker (Sprecher)

Sprinkle (Sprenckel)

Stagner (Steigner?)

Stamper (perhaps from “Stempert”)

Stonecipher (Steinseifer)

Stout (Staudt?)

Stover (Stauffer)

Surface (Zerfass, Zerfuss)

Swadley (possibly “Schwadle” or Swiss German “Schwadli”)

Swearingen (Schweringen, sometimes from Dutch “van Sweeringen”)

Swisher (see “Switzer” and Irish Palatines)

Switzer

[Images: Celia Stout, a direct ancestor of Rhea Seehorn with “witches” in her family tree, and bottom, Marmaduke Seahorn riding an ostrich. Don’t ask. I have no idea.]

#history #rheaseehorn #BetterCallSaul #blackdutch