Heinous...

The web is a wonderful and awful thing. It brings us closer than ever yet can reveal things we'd rather not see. Today was one of those days for me.

Now, we all know the web took off mostly because of pornography. Much like how the porn industry decided that VHS instead of Betamax would be the choice for video taping. No news here. We all know that no URL is safe because we have either typed in or heard stories of people typing whitehouse.com (thankfully that is no longer the case) and gotten a porn site (even before the Clinton era).

Today I was just snooping around about the Godley name. Nothing new there. Most of us have googled ourselves and family to see what pops up. I've been having fun with images for GODLEY on Facebook and decided to hunt for a new one. Godley brings back a lot of results. It seems that Godley in New Zealand is pretty popular. Likewise in England. There is a Godley, Tx that is a small town outside the Dallas metro area. (Note to self, move there and have a town named after you!) Today I found that in NJ there were Godley's. They also owned slaves. One of them was William Godley, Jr. Not sure of the middle name but we have the same first, last and suffixes!

That kind of rocked me. To see my name attached to a list of slave owners from the early 1800's. Something I consider so heinous, so vile and so repulsive attached to my name. Even worse, there is a photo of a letter signed by this person who documents the birth of a female by his slave! He used the word slave in the letter!

I have no idea if we are related and I'm not sure I want to know.

I know this was a different time and a different place in our history but there are some things I think are universally wrong at any time and slavery is one of them. No amount of justification, attitude, explaining or view of history can ever justify this.

I've always been proud of the name Godley. The coat-of-arms is pretty cool (see photo) and the motto is "without God, nothing" which I really like. I'm not proud at all of this association with the name.