...By any other name...

On the same night that I went deep into weird logos, I stumbled across something I wasn't expecting. At that point in the night, I was curious about aboriginal-American named places in Mendocino County. I came across a certainly non-native sounding place name on the Pomo Indian Reservation: Sherwood Valley.

As a Sherwood, this was a surprising thing. My family that gave me my last name arrived in Long Island in the 1850s, and I'm pretty sure I would have heard about one of our own ancestors leaving Sag Harbor for the strikingly pretty environs a few hours north of San Francisco.

I started with a search of the Pomo's own website. Nothing about the origins of the name "Sherwood" in Sherwood Valley itself. So...I got busy searching.

I eventually found a PDF of a copy of an 1870s-era "History of Mendocino County." Since I know a thing ot two about searching PDFs, I got busy.

Helllllloooooo Alfred:

So, this passage gave me lots of stuff to check out. But Sherwoods? In Oswego, NY? Where's Oswego, anyway? I have Sherwoods in NY...but probably not back in 1823. Besides Alfred's dad Jonathan, I was going to look up the Meigs and see where Oswego was...

Oswego County is on Lake Erie and in the environs of Syracuse. So...okay. Alfred's mom, Sarah (nee) Meigs, came from an old, classic, pre-Revolution and Continental Army-joining, British-fighting, Connecticut family, the Meigs.

When I tried finding out info on Jonathan Sherwood, my Alfred's dad, I came across the transcription of an article from the Sacramento Bee (seriously, WTF?) about a Jonathan Sherwood, born 1825 in Oswego County, NY, having gone to the Mexico Academy, and, like some of his brothers, was an early settler to Northern California. This Jonathan was an early luminary in the blossoming capitol city of Sacramento.

So...this had to be Alfred's brother, right? After some more digging, and fatiguing my eyes something fierce, I ran across a clipping about the likely father of our dad-Jonathan, that mentioned the grizzled sea-captain Zalman Sherwood...that was a number of hours in, and reading PDFs of faded newsprint can only take you so far.

Things I'm curious to examine deeper: Sherwood Island State Park in CT on the Long Island Sound...is this named for my Sherwood relations, or the Zalman Sherwood relations?

Anywho, I have to say the more I read about Alfred, the more I liked the guy:

He was so early to the area that he retained the knowledge of what the natives called the places, and tried to keep them intact? Pretty cool. Could be WAY worse, right?