"But all my blood is the heritage
Of one grim great-grandsire."
("Alien")

     In October 1930, Howard wrote to Lovecraft that "the study of genealogy is one of my hobbies, or rather, would be, if I had time and opportunity to pursue it." A few months later, Howard was able to satisfy his cravings on the occasion of a prolonged stay in San Antonio, spending a good many hours in the town's library, immersed in genealogical researches and writing enthusiastic letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, to wit:

What a library they got here alretty! A whole room with genealogy nearly. Like most men who have nothing to be proud of in themselves, I seek a vicarious pride in my ancestry. I have the herewith or rather wherewith to refute the Kentucky Howards, by Zeus, who claim the name comes from hog-ward, or hog-herder. No such things; according to the most authentic accounts and records, there never was such a term as hog-ward; it was hog-herd and the family of Hoggarts got their names thence. One branch of the Howards come from the occupation name of Hayward, meaning a fence-tender – Hayward – Hawyard – Haward – Howard. The other branch got their name from their common ancestor, Hereward the Wake – Hereward – Heward – Haward – Howard. A law suit in my family nearly a hundred years ago proved that the name was never Hayward, so naturally it is of the other branch and I am a direct descendant of Hereward the Wake. That's news to me – I thought my line came into England with the Conqueror and was free of Saxon blood. It's an old South country Saxon family. But that there were Normans by the same name is evident from the records of Fitzhowards, Fitz being of course a typically Norman-French suffix or whatever you call it, meaning son of. I also came upon the first evidence of the Ervin family in America – a will made by a slave-holder in North Carolina and witnessed by one Robert Ervin; date 1724. That he was kin of mine I know, because the Ervins settled in North Carolina and lived there until 1840, and only my branch spells the name that way. Well, I’m glad both Howards and Ervins had sense enough to settle in the South when they came to America.

    Shortly after Howard's return from San Antonio, he and Lovecraft began debating about the notion of "racial memories". The influence of the San Antonio researches is plain in Howard's argument, as testifiy some of his remarks on the name Howard in his circa June 1931 letter:

Fantastic linkings with by-gone ages are certainly curious. I must confess I lean toward the theory that racial memories are transmitted from ancestor to descendent, though I am not prepared to offer any argument upholding it.
[…]
Another instinctive feeling of mine is that of kinship with the Scandinavian peoples of my English line, rather than the Anglo-Saxon stock. I suppose that any man with English blood in him has a good deal of the Saxon in his veins, yet I have never felt any kinship with the Juts, Angles and Saxons who made the first Teutonic invasion of Britain. My sense of personal placement in the Isles centers mainly in Ireland and Scotland; what connection I do feel with England begins with the Danish invasions. Nor is this feeling perhaps unnatural, for my very name is not the modern form of the Saxon Hereward or Hayward, but is the Anglicized form of the Danish Havard. And some recent ancestors of mine, though greatly mixed with Irish blood, still had more of the
look of the Scandinavian than of the Saxon; with their high, rather narrow heads, blue eyes and dark hair and beards, they must have looked much like the Vikings of the Dubh-Gall who swept the Isles in the old days of plunder and conquest.

Nothing of a personal or individual nature is likely to be inherited through many generations - for what happened to any one progenitor simply fades into relative nothingness amidst the vast bulk of experiences inherited through the geometrically multiplying array of other lines…. It makes me laugh to hear of a person boasting of a remote forbear, as if he inherited anything more from that forbear than do the thousands or perhaps millions of others who also descend from the same source even though they do not bear the same name. Heredity counts only when one has behind one a very large proportion of the same kind of blood - blood which represents a certain definite type of experience or natural selection…. Our likes or dislikes for types and periods in ancient history are undoubtedly matters of accidental sentiment wholly unconnected with our blood stream. Early tales and reading - chance impressions from pictures, plays, or conversation - all these things generally lie behind such inclinations concerning ancient races or personalities.

No doubt you're right in deciding that racial memories are a myth. As you point out, a distant ancestor could hardly have much influence on the life and ideas of a present day descendent. Yet it might be possible that atavistic forces might reproduce, to a certain extent, a shadowy ancestral shape in modern form. We know that cases exist in which a person bears a striking resemblance to a grand-parent or even a great-grand-parent, and this might occasionally be extended further into the past. I believe that one certain ancestor may sometimes exert a stronger influence on his descendents than former or later forbears.

    If Howard probably made use of these notions when he wrote "People of the Dark" (October and November 1931), one of his first tales dealing with the idea of remembering past lives, he wouldn't attempt until early 1933 to systematize his ideas on "racial memories" with the creation of James Allison. James Allison is a Texan who has the ability to remember his past lives, and these are always those of Nordic ancestors, such as Hialmar, Niord or Hengibar. Nordic characters' past lives were now playing an important role in the present of a Texan, and it is indeed quite tempting to see this as Howard acknowledging the atavistic influence of his Danish ancestor on his own personality.
    It thus comes as no surprise to see that the year in which all the Allison tales were written, was also the one in which Howard did get to learn a lot about his so-called red-bearded Danish ancestor...

    At the time he was writing the James Allison stories, Howard began an essay titled "The Wandering Years". In the section devoted to his father's ancestry, he offered some previously unmentioned, and probably unknown, bits of information: "In the Black Warrior River country, in what came to be Tuscaloosa County, my great-grandfather James Henry grew up, and married Martha Walzer, a daughter of the Walzers of Georgia, who came pioneering in Alabama in the days of early statehood. Tuscaloosa County is in the west central part of the state. The Walzers and Henrys were neighbors in the river country, and the green forest land."
    To Lovecraft, in September, he wrote: "Returning to Ft. Worth, I didn’t return directly to Cross Plains, but followed the Grand Prairie up to Decatur (an old town remembered by me in connection, especially, with a great-grand-uncle who lost his arm in a blue blizzard hauling supplies from Decatur to the frontier settlements of Montague county back in the early days)…"
    It was in a contemporary letter to August Derleth that he gave the identity of that mysterious great-grand-uncle: "Then I returned to Fort Worth, and wandered north west through Decatur, another old town (which I think of in connection with my great-grand uncle George Walser, who, hauling supplies from that town to the frontier settlements of Montague county back in the early days, lost an arm through a peculiar combination of red licker, a blue blizzard and a fall from his wagon;)…"

    Howard had evidently come upon an important source of detailed information on his Walser ancestors. After O'Walser, Waltser and Walzer, Howard had at last found the correct spelling of the name: Walser. His successive errors on the spelling of the name show that Howard couldn't have relied much on his family to obtain his information. The George Walser episode is also troubling, and one can only wonder as to its source. Perhaps the incident was made up by Howard, or perhaps George Walser did lose his arm near Decatur (none of the Walser specialists I have consulted could confirm or infirm the story.)

    Until his death in 1936, Howard wouldn't learn much more about his Walser ancestor, though he did refine his knowledge on some points. This particular line was mentioned in December 1934 and January 1935 letters to Lovecraft:

The Henrys from South Carolina and the Walsers from Georgia came into the Black Warrior River country before Alabama was even a state, and fought Indians, British, Spaniards, and swamp panthers and helped build the commonwealth, until the early 1840’s when it began to get too densely settled for them, and they moved on into Mississippi, into the Big Black River country, immortalized by the legends of John Henry, the negro Hercules. The next move was in the early 1850’s and took them into Arkansas.

I don’t know just what year my people moved into the state of Alabama, but it was long ago. My great-grandfather, Squire James Henry, was born in South Carolina in 1811, and he was a small boy when they went into Alabama, so you see it was pretty far back, anyway. The Henrys and a family named Walser from Georgia settled in what is now the counties of Bibb and Tuscaloosa, near the Black Warrior river. James Henry married a Walser woman and most of their children were born in Alabama. In 1847 they moved to Choctaw County, Mississippi, and settled near the upper reaches of the Big Black River, immortalized in the legends of John Henry, the mythical black giant. Both the Henrys and the Walsers made the move. The Walsers remained in Mississippi until a year or so after the Civil War, and then moved to Texas and settled on what was then the western frontier. But the Henrys moved to southwestern Arkansas in 1856.

    From 1930 to 1936, Howard sought to learn as much as possible on Samuel Walser, and went to considerable lengths to do so. In spite of his efforts, it as quite evident that he never went beyond the early nineteenth century, and his authentic genealogical data on the Walsers was particularly meager. But to his death, he remained convinced that Samuel Walser was indeed just off from Skaggerack. To Novalyne Price, he thus wrote in February 1936, commenting on the sales of the first few Wild Bill Clanton stories written under the pseudonym of Sam Walser, that: "The tales of Sam Walser (a rugged, upright, forthright, typical American name, even if the original was a Dane from Skaggerack) appear — or will appear when they start publishing them — in a magazine called Spicy Adventure Stories."

    The problem, of course, is that the Walsers didn't come from Denmark, and that Howard never had a Samuel Walser ancestor in the first place.