Every family has a legend or two: the stowaway who escaped certain death, the iron-jawed mamma who led the family through unbearable hardship, the guy with the secret second family.

Heroic family lore can be true, of course it can.

Enter the genealogy nerd. Perhaps a bit of a bore (to be fair, all enthusiasts can be), the person prepared to do the research, to blaze a paper trail, to test DNA for actual proof--that person has the potential to become a clan's most magnificent buzzkill. ​

​But boy-howdy does the hobby work as a way to power through a sub-optimal afternoon.

On a recent snowy Sunday, I was down by migraine and turned, as one will, to self-soothing activities.  My tree on Ancestry.com, to be exact. The site compiles gigabyte after gigabyte of documentation, integrates DNA testing if you choose, and provides an infinity of rabbit-holes to explore. 

Thanks to resources of Ancestry, sadly, the Flathead grandmother to my mom's family, and the Cherokee grandmother in Jeff's family have both turned out to be a bit of tall talismans: Romantic idealism without neither paper trail nor genetic confirmation.

​Believe me I know: way to kill a buzz, Amy. Jeesh.

Which leads me to that other legend in my family: witchcraft.  

My sister remembers hearing from our grandmother—the one who often, spookily, spoke aloud the other half of the thought someone else was thinking, and whose psychic hunches had an unsettling way of coming true—that we had an ancestor burned at the stake in Salem.  

Whether they burned practitioners of some craft or not, that's some pretty steep ancestor power.

Anyway: Sunday, there I was, chipping away at the Riggs line: my dad's mom's dad's people, who were fruitful and did multiply ever since setting foot in the New World in the 1630's.  The family includes kind of a lot of folks keeping the family name of "Carrington" going on as middle names. Proudly.

Call it a lingering 1980's big-shouldered television jones, but the name makes me chuckle every time I read it. 

It's like Thurston Howell III announcing through teeth clenched around a cigarette holder:  "Lovey! Carrington has arrived!"

So I side-quested Carringtons.  One of the Riggses married a Carrington;  pulling on that thread brought me up into the high boughs of the family tree: Peter Carrington, a physician in New Haven in the early 1700s. My fifth great grandfather, this Dr. Peter had a big family with at least three physician sons (John, Lemuel, and Riverius Carrington), but his grampa John? John Carrington (1602-1651), the one who came to the New World in 1630? He has the rare distinction of being hanged for a witch in Wethersfield, Connecticut Colony.

He and his (likely second) wife Joann were hanged for witchcraft.

Oh how I wish there were more details. Like who accused the Carringtons?
What in the world were "works above the course of nature"?
Was "not having the fear of God before their eyes" crime enough to be put to death?

It took two days to convict them. Did they confess? Were they tortured? They left behind an 10-year-old son John and Rebecca, a babe in arms, both of whom lived to carry on the Carrington name. Can you imagine the stigma? The trauma? Though both kids moved away from  Wethersfield, the history of their family followed them. 

The New Haven town clerk, Matthew Grant, kept a diary and thanks to him and the blessed souls at the Connecticut State Archives, we know the Carringtons were not burned or "pressed," but executed by hanging.

The bottom line reads: Mar 10 50 Carrington and his wife were hanged.  

A bald, heartbreaking fact.

Why does it say "50"? Because, oddly enough, the change to the Gregorian calendar. Long story short, the Julian calendar said each year was 365.25 days long, which after 1000 years or so, meant the days were nearly two weeks off alignment with the physical year. Most of the European world switched in 1582, but the British and their Colonies switched over in 1752. At the same time, they changed the first of the year from March 1 to January 1.  Talk about your Y2K bug!  

Hence the number of slashed dates (1605/6) in the early Puritan history in New England.

But a journal from 375 years ago? If, like me, you are intrigued by the idea of accessing this kind of source material: a personal diary! Hand written! Hidden for hundreds of years!     

Well.

First, quill pens and the use of a long s that looks like an f—!

Second,  Matthew used these pages mostly, as far as I can tell, to transcribe sermons and religious poetry. At first look, I thought he was using some sort of code (it was not code. It was Biblical citation. Remember that the King James Bible had just dropped in 1611).

​So, third: it might look like a grimoire, or a collection of gossip and insight, but no, his diary concerns itself with thinking and talking about Christian godliness. A LOT.

I am holding back on the idea of the actual practice of Christian godliness, even thought Buzzkill is my middle name.

Nevertheless, back to the family lore. My grandmother's story had a bitter grain of truth: My 8th great-grandfather, a carpenter in Wethersfield, CT, was hanged as a witch.
 

Connecticut archives:
https://ctdigitalarchive.org/node/3901238

A note from one of Rebecca Carrington's descendants to the Representatives of the State of Connecticut asking for a pardon for John and Joann Carrington
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2023/juddata/TMY/2023HJ-00034-R000301-Vogel-Scibilia,%20Suzanne-Supports-TMY.PDF

An essay about the Connecticut pardons:
https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/senators-absolve-accused-witches-with-one-exception/

A horrifying account of the practice of "pressing" which is how 81-year-old Giles Corey of Salem met his death:
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/10/the-crushing-death-of-giles-corey-of-salem-1692/

John Carrington's Find-a-Grave notation. Ironic really:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/181727621/john-carrington

Okay, it's a very small town. 

​Still, when my sister said, "Wanna?" and pulled over next to a hand-written "Estate Sale," in the home town we left when I was 8,  I was thinking that it would be nifty if they had some of my vintage pink-and-white dishes. 

They didn't.

But my sister spotted a high school Class of 1955 reunion notice. And under the notice was a small flip-book of photographs.  

"Look," she said to me, and struck up a conversation with the two women running the estate sale. This had been their mom Donna's house, for a short while; she'd moved in because her elder daughter lived across the street.  My sister said, ooh, we just had breakfast with a lady whose mom lived over there.  

Ooh indeed: our godmother, Becky, grew up in the house that this woman bought from the family 25 years ago.

At which point, I found it.

My mom was an artist, and at some point in her arty life, she pencilled a grid over the single copy of her senior photo that accompanied her journeys. The grid made it easy to enlarge an image — but rendered the photo frankly ruined. 

I asked if I could buy the photo album, and when Donna's daughter told me to just have this photo, I may have started to cry. 

Mumsie was recruited by the CIA around the time of this photo, but she did not take the offer. Her mom didn't want her to move out of Susquehanna county. Can you imagine what THAT life would have held for her?

That's exactly the power of a senior photo: Behold! It is I, on the very threshold moment of potentiality and possibilities. 

We lost electrical power service for a week or so after Hurricane Milton. As soon as we were able to venture into the Wild West that is Florida driving without working stoplights—old geezer moment, but honestly! People! It's a 4-way stop! Take turns! How hard is the concept?—my favorite skipper and his Mamma Pat and I went to our house and cleaned up a bit. 

I am beyond lucky in my mother-in-law, who willingly swan-dived into the fridge and not just cleaned it out but–Cleaned. It. OUT.  

Grateful, I left her to it, only snatching a couple of luke-warm Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate Kisses from the discard pile.

So it happened that when we cleaned out Mumsie's house that final time, I seeded my own fridge with purple foil-wrapped treats left over from her Frigidaire. And over the past decade and a half, I've periodically renewed my supply.

It's magical thinking to imagine that, lo these many generations later, any of those chocolate nuggets might be one direct from Mumsie. And it's magical thinking to imagine an alchemical charm transfers from the old stock to the new. 

But the reason I snatched a couple from the brink is because those kisses are going back into the cheese drawer.  And I'm buying a new package to empty on top of them. 

Decades of living near the west coast of Florida have granted me a certain sangfroid about, oh, you know, Florida things. (www.etymonline.com/word/sang-froid)

With the daily exception of cars and fire-ants, most of the hazards have proven to be hypothetical, rhetorical dangers for me. The stories circulate, and one thinks, airily, it's the price one pays to live in this humid paradise.

Oh, well, you tell yourself, shuffle as you walk on the beach. If there's red tide, stay inside. Tread carefully in tall grass. Watch for the glint of the gold chain on the guy driving the cigarette boat, because he's not looking for you.

Avoid night swimming. Be cautious strolling with your dog around a retention pond. Never lick a toad. Shake out your shoes before putting them on.

At least we don't have to shovel snow.  

Every so often, however, even the most chilled-blood of us all is taken aback by the casual violence of the place.  Two hurricanes, for instance, each with a wide eye glued on home base—that's enough to unsettle a native. 

Then you begin to think about the stories: throwing a line around oneself and making a human sandwich between a couple of mattresses while a tornado pulls the roof off. Being chased upstairs, then to the attic, and then tearing one's way out of the roof when the flood waters rise, then clinging to the topmost branches of the oak tree as the waters swirl. Riding the top of the dining room table as it bobs and nudges against the sliding glass doors.

Not my stories, but told by pals who survived Katrina and Maria. 

You wonder if maybe it's better to skip town for the season. 

We were away for Helene (another North American title for my favorite skipper! Hurrah!) and missed the flooding, but we spent Milton sheltering with Mamma Pat.

As dark fell, and the electricity went out, and the wind howled, I kept asking myself, "Does THAT sound like a tornado?" "Wait, how about THAT?"

It was not a tornado. It was a foot of rain and winds close to 100 mph.

We were overall so very fortunate:  No lives lost, material losses that can be recouped, and ready options for where to stay and how to get around.

​Many, MANY of our neighbors were not so fortunate.  

​According to one of our sailing friends in the Florida Keys (Hi Jim S!), it will be about six months until people generally forget what the hurricane was like, or really, even that the storms happened.

I hope so, but I also hope not. 

The idea of a fierce Goth mouse that hunts on the wing has a certain appeal.  
To some.
Or to me at least.  

Bats feature in some vivid childhood memories: my sister and me huddled under the dining room table, as the thump of footsteps circles us, punctuated by the whomp of a straw broom swatting the air and making contact with walls and pictures. The sweary battle-cries of our parents, whose bare white legs periodically flash past, and in counterpoint, the tiny high-pitched keening of a bat that has taken a seriously wrong turn in Albuquerque.
​

​
This summer, however, has categorically refuted Jeff's hypothesis.  Mr. Linton stepped into the cabin, and said, with restrained emotion of some sort. (Ire? Shock? Outrage?) "There was a BAT in my PANTS."

Okay. What?!

For a literal thinker, this kind of statement sets all circuits buzzing and causes a momentary freeze response.

Jeff brought me up to speed: As is his wont, he'd removed his very wet and dirty trousers and tossed them over the porch railing to air out the day before. He went outside in the morning and, in preparation to folding them, he held up the trousers, gave them a brisk snap, and Voilá! a chunky brown bat tumbled out of a pantleg. 

And it was still on the porch. 

"Aww," I said, pulling on a pair of work gloves. "The poor thing is stunned."

As I reached to lift the velvety creature, the bat looked up and opened its jaws like a nightmare and hissed. I drew back and it flapped unsteadily off.

"Well we certainly have bats," I said to Jeff. (I didn't add that this should put an end to our perpetual wrangling about them, for pity's sake. But really, it should.)

A consult with the Goog, and then the careful use of telephoto revealed yet more proof: The bat house has an inhabitant! Whoohoo!

If you build it, they WILL come. 

And, let's not lose this particular bit of Google gold: a bat's guano can be differentiated from mousey dung by the degree of sparkle. I kid you not. Bats cannot digest the crunchy outer shell and the iridescent wings of the insects they devour. 

Sparkle poop. It doesn't particularly show in the photos I took, but...Just another cool feature of die fledermaus. ​

Bonus Chiroptera (from the Greek for "hand-wing")-adjacent material: Did you know that as part of the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) program during the Great Depression, we spent around $6.5million across 4 years to support unemployed theater professionals?  
​
I love hearing that part of the FDR plan to help the country recover from the stock market crash and subsequent depression was to rebuild the cultural institutions of our society.  How radical!

Out-of-work actors, writers, directors, costumers, janitors, secretaries, and so forth, as made up the country's live theater found employment through the Federal Theater.  For instance "The Bat," a Broadway hit that the Federal Theater staged in various non-Broadway-ish spots around the nation...

Meanwhile, my grandfather enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, another WPA program, where he lived in company with dozens of other young men in a camp, where they were fed, given the odd lecture, sometimes shown a play by the Federal Theater company, all the while building parks and roads. 

You want more bat content? Or WPA content? Here's a couple of links:
https://www.batcon.org/the-scoop-on-bat-poop/
http://www.amysmithlinton.com/blog/meanwhile-on-the-farm
​https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/wpa-federal-theatre-project/

I keep hoping to find a "conchie" in my family history. That's what conscientious objectors were called, mostly with disdain, by their contemporaries in WWI and WWII.

If your religious beliefs or your individual conscious said, "do not pick up arms and fight," you could end up in jail. Or be executed for cowardice and shirking.

St. Maximilan of Tebessa gets the title as first to suffer this punishment for conscience in modern memory.  Back 200 CE, hell no he won't go was followed by a prompt beheading. Capital punishment for being unwilling to kill –– oh the irony! –– has only recently receded from the world of modern military regulations. 

More proof that we humans aren't actually supportive of outliers from the herd. Or even for folks who exemplify the beliefs we think we hold dearest. Turn the other cheek –– oh no you DON'T.

But so far, I've uncovered garden-variety military ancestors from the start of European settlement in North America:  veterans of the Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812. Survivors and victims of the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both WWI and WWII, et cetera. These are folks who gave time, limbs, life in exchange for their country –– of their idea of the country, right? 

A few during were batting for the other team in the 1770's; and in the 1860's, I trace slave-owners and abolitionists, North and South, Rebs and Yanks in about an even sprinkle across the family tree. Can't choose your ancestors.  

My dad's father, Bompa (for some of the grandchildren it's "Bampa." Weird.) was a genealogy fan. According to my possibly faulty memory, he commissioned a history of the family and then composed his own written narrative about Smiths and Fessendens in that wild northern corner of Pennsylvania.

​ The writing is 100% the way I remember Bompa: it's careful, arch, correct, and as I recall, all of the ancestors were upright good citizens.  For my purposes, it's not much use, as, sadly, the original source material is never cited, and again, as I remember, the professional genealogist's report was lost.

Still, it's a document in and of itself, revealing a certain mid-Century privileged mindset. It's also not terribly accurate (take note, cousins! Bompa's Enoch Smith seems to combine facts from Enoch Jr (1791-1871) and his father Enoch, Sr. (1771-?). Totally understandable, name like Smith.

Anyhow, where are my conchies?  Was their unpopular view a one-way ticket out of our family memory or do we simply have none? My best bucking-the-tide guy so far?  Aaron Augustus Chase, who seems to have had a steely grip on moral north, as least as regards the mining strikes of his day. 
 
But I'll keep looking. 

The triumph of love over barricades and differences: it's such a good story. Especially combined with the romance of the North American Frontier...

But so rare. So rarely true.

I'm not the only one who thought that great-great-something gram was a Native American. I was told so, and the folks who told me believed it. Plus, in that one photo of her at umpteenty-seven, she was tiny, and dark, and those high cheekbones...

But DNA doesn't lie.  And a paper trail (or the electronic ghost of paper), which would reveal the story as it happened at the time, also fails to show an indigenous connection among my forebears. 

That little old lady in the photo? I can trace her parentage three generations back and they all document as garden-variety English settlers who farmed that corner of Appalachia. Some lived in Cherokee, NC, so there's that, but alas, no Indian princess for me. ​

*Yes, this title is a shout-out to the genealogy shows (one in the UK, one here in the US) of the same name. 

My Grampa Navy -–– called for his career –– had two brothers who died young. One was a handsome rogue, killed, as the story goes, in a bar brawl over somebody else's wife.

The other brother was a hero, a fighter-pilot who died during WWII when his plane crashed over the Everglades.

My sister and Mumsie stopped by Copperhill to visit kin on their way south in the 1980's.

​Sarah said the place was dire: the hill of copper laid open by mining, the land as barren and dead as the surface of the moon, effluent pumping through those hollers, cars abandoned in weedy front yards.

Decades later, the whole area was transformed for the Olympic Games, the river channeled and remodeled into a kayaking and canoe course, and the mine terraformed back into something human-scaled. 

All of which explains why Grampa Navy and his family moved to Miami. I only knew it happened when he was fairly young, and sure enough, there they are. 

The little family of five sprawling across two pages of the US Census of 1930 1930: Dad a construction worker, Mom at home, George –– Uncle Buck! –– a truck driver at 20, son Ed (teen Grampa Navy!) a 17-year-old theatre usher, and 13-year-old future no-goodnik Dennis not employed.  

With these birthdates and places of birth for both Grampa Navy's brothers, Ancestry.com. led me to Uncle Buck's 1934 marriage to Ina Pearl. Otherwise known as Aunt Betty, for which we can't blame her.  In Mumsie's version, anyhow, she was Betty by nature, Betty by name.  

And there the trail went cold for me. The mystery of Uncle Buck's death remained unsolved (or at least undocumented) for years. In a 1938 city directory, he's selling insurance, living in what later became Little Havana.

​In the 1940 census, he and Betty are still in Miami. He's a tire service man, and they have Betty's 10-year-old niece Nina, plus a boarder, Orban Strickland, living with them. Looking at the handwriting, I speculate whether Orban is related to neighbor Hokes Stickland, a neighbor.

The censuses (I pause here to look up how to correctly spell more than one census. Censuses it is, but censusses is also acceptable, as is a plural census) from after 1940 have not yet been made public, so I needed to seek elsewhere for intel.

​Opinion among my elders varied, but they thought Uncle Buck's plane went down in 1944.

I kept poking at the question and –– thank you Dawn N for the assist –– Newspapers.com eventually turned up the goods. 

A later article in the Miami News corrected the location of the plane crash to Melbourne Florida rather than Melbourne Australia.  It's an understandable mistake, especially as the crash occurred during the height of the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Solomon Islands on the other side of the world. Plus, it was a Miami paper, so Melbourne might have seemed veritable Antipodes.

I'm satisfied. I'll call Uncle Buck, a Naval airman, a war hero. I don't know his rank yet, but I don't believe he was at the wheel. Melbourne, Florida, by the way, is located north of Miami on the east coast of Florida, not very close to the Everglades, but it's at least the same state as the family legend. It might even count as the Bermuda Triangle.

There's so much left untold from the paper record. It's interesting to note that Hokes Strickland, his former neighbor, is among the pallbearers. I consider Aunt Betty, so cheerful in these sepia toned images with her young husband, widowed at 34. The good news is that after the war, she married again and is carried away by the tides of time. 


Memorial Day Update May 2021

Thanks to alert reader, Ken H., I got hold of the official Navy accident report.

​A training flight out of the Banana River Naval base (we race our sailboat on that section of the river each December!) crashed on landing after the failure of an engine. Five survivors, seven fatalities. The survivors paddled to shore in an inflatable lifeboat.  

As I read it, G.R. Wheeler, Uncle Buck, was not the pilot. He's listed as an "AS," an aviation equipment specialist, acting as "NFO" a naval flight officer on the plane. An NFO, as the inter webs inform, was often a specialist in a weapons or sensor system. A tragic accident, but still, as Guy, the nice guy at accident-report.com said, they gave their all, which makes them heroes. 

Oh glory! Back in 2019, my sweet mother-in-law Pat and I spent a delightful weekend planting jonquil bulbs.  

*Little known fact: Squirrels cherish lofty landscape architecture ambitions. Unsupported by taste or formal learning, but marked by passion and energy. 

And then the waiting begins.  A winter passes. The first spring arrives, and the bulbs do their job, transforming stored potential energy into cheer.

Any chunky little bit of starch can tide a body through a season. No judgement. We've all been there. Anyhow, the real test of the bulb comes after a full year.

Has the little bulb put down roots? Have the squirrels decided to remodel the bed of flowers?  

So this spring? Hurrah.

The bulbs have mostly flourished, putting up multiple stalks and lovely flowers.

​In the nature of gardening nature, however, I find myself perusing those colorful catalogues for just a feeeeew more.

Oldgeezering: the tendency of anyone over the age of 20 to start reminiscing about how the world has changed.

​Identify by use of temporal phrases like "when I was a kid," "back in the day," "nowadays."

Also, Proustian locational references: "the video arcade," "my grandfather's farm," "the five-and-dime."

Oldgeezering in practice:

When I was a kid, my dad used to drag us around behind a boat in pretty much anything that floated. Once it was a wide mahogany door: hard to grip –– and there must have been some additional flotation, right? Huh. It's all blur of water up the nose.
    
The safety rules were few but iron-clad: lifejackets for all kids and somebody was charged to act as spotter. NEVER take eyes off your mark. 

I guess I was spotting for cousin B in this picture.

Check out that flex. Daddo looks mighty buff; always with the Ray-Bans, the cigarette (gasoline canisters be danged!) and the bottle of beer.  

Kids these days –– they don't even.