Category:

Genealogical Eavesdropping

5/14/2019

The internet is one supersized overshare.

Along with the thousands of selfies and blogs about piffle, plus all those YouTube videos about optimal application of eyeliner, surviving the Apocalypse, cleaning scallops using a shop vac, and SO much more, sites beyond number offer deliciously random information to the careless researcher.

And by careless, I mean "easily distracted."

By which naturally, I refer to myself.

I was on the track of my namesake 3x gr-grandmother, Amy Cole Hall. She lived mostly in Pennsylvania, but also in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Amy Cole Hall (with cat) and her daughters and possibly a sister or two.. .

Somehow (and it's always a bit of a click-mystery) I ended up on someone else's compilation of documents pertaining to their ancestors, the Sturdevants of Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Naturally, I started reading. The Sturdevants connect to another branch of my family, but I didn't know that at the time.

Oh the eternal difficulty in resisting the temptation of other people's letters...

An exerpt from a letter 14 Oct 1842 from Dr. George Lane Keeney to Salmon Keeney, quoting from a letter from brother Seth: "My wife has been counting up while I notched a stick, and we find we have (9) nine living children, 4 girls and 5 boys."*

Does this seem –– um –– peculiar that a married couple needed to notch a stick to count their living children?

The internet link to the letters is here.

Also among the paper-trail of the Sturdevants is what might be some of my new favorite letters* of all time. Anyone who commits words to paper is aware that the record will live on; it's kind of the point of putting words on paper, right?

I made a sound recording of one letter –– both for the interest of clarity, as the grammar and spelling was irregular, but also because it was fun to voice those words.

*My previous all-time favorite letters? A series of wonderful schadenfreude-inducing Christmas newsletters from a certain childhood friend's unhappy wife (oh! how I looked forward to those each December! Even after their divorce, I kept getting these little masterpieces of misery bedecked with images of holly and jolly St. Nick! I should be more ashamed to enjoy them, but she had such a way with passive aggression!)

In any case, herewith the letter 7 June 1842 from Asahel Keeney to his brother Dr. George Keeney.

It's a brutal catalogue of local gossip. Burn baby, burn.

There's another letter to their sister, Amy Keeney Hall –– not my Amy, but of interest anyhow –– mentioning that poor pitiful Phebe Wilson, who "quit hur husband to keep from starving." Brother Seth writes "we callculated to have visited you this fall but my health prevented If I live untill another fall I will be sure to visit."

I hope he had the chance.

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So Many Unanswered Questions

2/19/2019

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All happy families are happy in the same way, Tolstoy wrote, but every unhappy one is unique in its misery. Poke around in the high canopy of the family tree, and you see that unique as unhappiness may be –– still, patterns emerge. Familiar patterns even.

Abandonments and early deaths, illness and poverty, and of course, like smoke seeping from under the rafters, scandal.

Like this one:

My gr-gr-grandfather Newton had a bunch of siblings. I don't know much about them. It's a long time ago, and over years of research, I hadn't located half of their graves in our tiny farming hometown. But sometimes you return over and over to a stubborn nut, giving it the odd yank, and it will loosen.

One of those siblings was Cornelia Jane Newton. Born in 1837 in Dimock, Pennsylvania (about 15 miles from where I was myself born a few years later), she was buried in Nebraska in 1912.

First, okay –– Nebraska? That's worth thinking about.

Turns out she married late (at 34) to Joseph Blanding Sturdevant (another long-rooted family from that corner of Pennsylvania) and the two moved West with a group of like-minded Methodists in the early 1870s.. She and Joe had four kids (a son died at 14), and at the end of her 75 years, she was living with her daughter, Sarah Lorena Chittick.

Cornelia Jane's obituary paints a certain kind of picture of the former schoolteacher: "If sometimes in the stress of life's conflicts, the battle pressed sore, faith, courage and Christian fortitude enabled her to bear up."

So, not an easy life for Cornelia Jane, born in Dimock, died in Nebraska.

As I wandered around the inter webs, evidence pointed to Joeseph marrying her twice, once in 1872, and then again in 1897.

Or anyway, there was a second "Newton" bride for him. It might be trendy to renew one's vows now (Or is it? Renewing vows seems an indicator of heavy marital weather.), but it was not a thing I've heard about in the 1890's.

A bit more clicketty clicking, and sure enough, Joe marries a Newton gal from Dimock in 1897, but that would be Rosella Newton –– Cornelia Jane's younger sister.

Joseph and his new bride Rosella exchanged vows in Pennsylvania and then moved to the teeming metropolis of Kansas City.

It's easy to imagine Rosella as the youthful replacement wife, possibly a hussy, and that Joseph was more than a little bit of a creeper, but that's simply too easy a story. No matter how often it happens in real life.

Like they say, when the answer is too obvious, look closer: as I compare birthdates, I see that Cornelia is 12 years Joe's senior. When they first married, he was 22 to her 34. She was a school teacher. Oh lawsie, I wonder if she was his school teacher.

Turning the tables on who's the creeper, maybe.

But more: they divorced, according to one of their descendants, in 1880. That meant 17 years of bachelorhood for Joe before he swooped in for the younger Newton sister. Who was, at that point, 45 years old. Hardly an ingenue.

And Joe (that would be Professor Sturdevant, according to the Mead, Nebraska Independent News of 1881) doesn't seem a likely rake.

He was a railroad station agent. He organized a band in Nebraska and left a couple of pieces of religious music behind.

The imagination boggles. To divorce in 1880, and then –– a period of seeming quiescence, where Cornelia and Joseph both lived in the same small Nebraska town? Then for him to marry Rosella?

What truth could match these data points? Did somebody have a breakdown? Perhaps Rosella was the original object. Perhaps Joseph just liked the family. Perhaps Cornelia organized the hand-off. Perhaps there was a lengthy epistolary courtship with letters coming in the mail. Perhaps one or the other was merely a marriage of convenience.

I can see the new couple moving away from Nebraska. After all, Cornelia lived there, as did another older Newton sister, Catherine (and I wonder what she thought about all this), but why Kansas City?

And, finally, how would a researcher ever know? Rosella and Joseph had no children (Or did they? Joseph's youngest is named Rose Ellen, born in 1879. Though a dozen documents say otherwise, one outlying reference lists her as the daughter of Rosella, and that she was born in Pennsylvania, not Nebraska). But again, if the children were Cornelia's, the surviving generations necessarily favor Cornelia's side of the drama.

It's possible that there was no drama.

Except seriously, what happened?

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Thanksgiving: Orphan Dishes

11/20/2018

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Yes, of course there is so very much to celebrate on a daily basis.

Waking up, for instance. Highly underrated.

Also the ability to walk about. Coffee (Or Mountain Dew, for those so inclined). The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth like the –– Wha?

Shakespeare, really?

Truth be told, I am grateful for this rich cornucopia of memory sending me so often off topic. Then I can loop it back again...

Not that any of us should wait for a special day to recognize the good fortune and lucky stars that has got us this far so far.

But tis actually the season for this sort of thing. Plus feasting.

Ah, feasting. We have missed a few years of Thanksgiving in the States. So the groaning board seems novel this year, despite its familiar elements.

And those less familiar ones. What I think of as the orphan dishes, left from another time, fossils of past iterations of the family.

You know to what I refer...the things made only for one Thursday in November (or maybe for a midwinter feast).

Perhaps enjoyed only by one of the people around the table, but it's the item that ensures that THIS is the feast of family tradition.

Oh, the outcry when an orphan dish is forgot!

Recipe box. Before there was a Google.

Orphan foods I have known:

Creamed corn. Corn souffle. Corn pudding.

Aspic and Jell-o based salads, especially the ones with shredded carrots or mayo.

Green-bean casserole with canned fried onions on top.

Dilly carrots.

Candied yams with mini-marshmallows.

Parker rolls.

Creamed pearl onions.

Giblet-mushroom gravy.

Ambrosia salad (aka white people soul food).

Baked quince custard –– or was it persimmon?

Let alone the vast category of foods Mr. Linton refers to, bracingly, as "wet breads."

What we might call in normal parlance, stuffing*.

Traditional sage stuffing, chestnut or pecan stuffing, cornbread-sausage stuffing. Be it ever so savory, we know it as "wet bread."

In England, I discovered that treacle cake was in point of fact, a too-sweet syrup-drenched wet bread mess. Such a disappointment after all those jolly British boarding-school novels!

Wet breads. Gah.

*In strict honesty, I know some people make stuffing more often than once a year. I dated a boy who made StoveTop at least once a week. For himself. Still, there are stuffings and StoveTops, and the latter does not make or break Thanksgiving.

My childhood Thanksgivings –– set out on a white tablecloth, with my mom's Friendly Village dishes and the polished silver cutlery (I can still almost taste that odd polish-and-silver flavor. Yuck-yum) –– started for me with a series of sneak attacks on the pickle and olive plate.

She'd dash out from the kitchen and replenish the crystal dish with a sort of mock-annoyance. I might be adding the mock part.

Anyhow, Mumsie also served mincemeat pie. Hey, don't judge. It's like a spicy apple and raisin pie. She skipped the suet and beef component. As do I.

Anyhow, the single element that proved it was Thanksgiving in Mumsie's house? Oyster stuffing. Technically a wet bread, the recipe includes saltines, "dots of butter," oysters, milk, salt and pepper, all baked in a casserole.

Mumsie's cousin Shirley (Hi Shirley!) continues to make this family dish for Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania.

I haven't had the heart to make it –– or mincemeat for that matter –– absent my mom.

Well, that and my casein intolerance thingie. Making oyster stuffing my orphaned orphan dish.

One day, I imagine, the idea of a roasted turkey itself might seem quaint and Betty-Jo Crocker-ish.

If not, you know, for the oddity of roasting the flesh of a formerly living creature, than because the means of cooking seems so rustic and old-fashioned.

A couple of years ago, we switched over to deep-frying the birds. Nope, not greasy. And three minutes per pound!

Nowadays, we all show up at the family feast bearing our various contribution (pies from my kitchen) plus a whole uncooked turkey to take home.

The element of danger –– open flame! boiling oil! –– plays well with the boys, and there's zero squabbling over the leftovers.

Plus, we get our money's worth out of that bubbling vat of peanut oil.

Perhaps as time marches along, I'll see the evolution of the meal go farther yet afield. Tofurky maybe, or into the funky Cajun science of the turducken. Both of which appall my Yankee sensibility even as the latter –– wet bread filling notwithstanding ––does pique my curiosity.

Well, I promise to be thankful if I have the chance to see that.

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Trigger Warning

5/10/2018

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My Daddo was petrified of snakes. A traumatic childhood canoe mishap rendered him and his sister and his mother all terribly snake-averse.

In later years, he referred to them as "serpents" in a mostly ineffectual effort to keep from getting the willies* when talking about them.

Not wanting to suffer the same fate, I once took hold of a squirmy mass of frigid reptiles as they emerged from their winter dormancy. I figured if I could grasp multiple snakes and carry them around for a bit, I would never have that fear.

So I conveyed my legless cargo –– at full arm's stretch over my head like the trophy I imagined it was –– to Mumsie as she knelt gardening and said, "Look! Snakes!"

Mumsie was seriously afraid of spiders but pretty much loved any other living creature in the world. She said, "Oh, for pity's sake. Put them down before they warm up and start biting you."

Lo these decades later, the vaccination still works. A little corn-snake lurking among some line doesn't bother me one bit.

I wonder if he imagined he was invisible. He didn't have much of a grip on how complementary colors work on the color wheel. It's a like scene from a Michael Bay film.

*Ooh, yeah, that Flickr site: so there's someone who re-creates Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons using Legos.
I may have reached the end of the interwebs.

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The New Year's Couch Issue

1/1/2018

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The year comes to its tipping point: this week there are resolutions to make and thank-you letters to write and a fresh new expanse of days to anticipate with hope.

Even though Mark Twain said that resolutions were "humbug," and that "Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.*"

Even though thank-you letters are quaint.

And even though the coming random number of days are just as full of potential as the previous ones were.

Happy New Year.

*The Works of Mark Twain; Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 1 1851-1864, (Univ. of California Press, 1979)

But at the top of mind, there's the question of the couch. At least for me, anyhow, New Year's is a couch issue.

It's like the pull of an annual migration, or whatever impulse that makes bears and porcupines wake up in the spring. Midwinter and its myriad festivals of light and sugar-cookies pass and I look around with a sense of urgency like a vulgar itch. It's time to rearrange the furniture.

My mom also did this, which is probably why I do. She was not a terribly physical creature, but she could pop a folded washcloth under the corner of a full china cabinet and hip-check that bad boy across the room in a jiffy.

Like her, I find myself standing in the midst of disorder, asking the furniture itself where it wants to be for the next twelve months. "Whaddya think, rug?"

Mr. Linton was caught up into the maelstrom of cleaning and hip-checking this year. Held indoors by the damp chill of a Florida cold-front, he did not offer to answer in the voice of the rug about where to go. He did sidle off to the porch with the cell-phone a time or two, but he cheerfully lent a hand at my continual requests: "Will you shake this rug over the porch rail? Will you help me move this washing-machine? Will you carry this back to the car?"

Ideally, my primal impulse to redecorate results in a refreshed space. It's a blitzklieg of cleaning. And while changing things up will result in the odd stubbed toe, it also makes home seem strangely roomy and interesting.

At the literal end of the day this year, the living room is still in a bit of disarray. Turns out the little red chair and foot-stool were ready to retire. Ten years of service in a home-made slipcover? Okay, then, go on, thrift-store find, thanks for your service!

Plus, the inexpensive IKEA rug I picked up to cover more square footage of the plywood floor is –– to the inch –– the exact same inexpensive IKEA rug I have had for four years. Whoops. (A foolish consistency would be the hobgoblin of little minds, just ask Ralph Waldo Emerson, but this? This consistency shows unflappable design taste, baby.)

But the drive is wearing off. I think the impulse that kept me hustling around the house today is almost the opposite of a resolution: I make no promises for the coming year. The work is done, aside from returning that rug and a bit more cleaning. In the coming weeks, I'll be utterly guilt-free as I think less and less about the process. And by May, I too will have forgotten humbug promises and the shiny sense of a whole new year full of potential and improvement.

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A Thimbleful of This and a Jigger of That.

4/21/2017

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We've all watched too many television cop shows in which a tiny speck of bodily fluid results in a (dunt dunt DUNN!) dramatic DNA revelation.

On tv, it takes about 5 minutes.

For amateur genealogists, it's more like 5 weeks.

And regrettably, there are very few attractive lab techs shooting one another significant looks under flattering lights when the results arrive in real life.

via GIPHY

Most of us were supposed to have learned this in high-school biology, but here's a quick review:

via GIPHY

Humans have 46 genes (which comprise something like three billion DNA base pairs linked together in elegant sets of spiral ladders). The double helix.

When a mommy and a daddy love one another, they each contribute half of their DNA for the baby blueprints.

Each parent's genetic spirals unzip in half and go forth into the world as an egg or a sperm. Egg engulfs sperm; the halves mix and mingle and –– poof!

An offspring!

Have a cigar!

As a big fan of metaphor, I keep wrestling with a good way to describe the complicated mixing of genetics. Half an apple (father) plus half an orange (mamma) and each child is an apple-orange? Erm –– that does not clarify anything.

Maybe a soccer playoff? Two leagues, 46 teams, they have to fall out into half-teams and play the final while paired with an unfamiliar other half-team? Hmm. But what about the goalies? NO! Just nope! Sports metaphors, ratsa fratsa....

Or wait: what if you think of the mom as a margarita –– the good kind, with the top-shelf tequila, Grand Marnier, lime zest, fresh-squeezed Key lime juice, and sea-salt over ice. Which naturally makes the daddy an Old Fashioned, all muddled bitters and sugar, dark rye, a fat twist of orange peel with a maraschino cherry on top.

Unzip the spirals, mix, mingle and –– poof!

One kid turns out a mix of tequila, bitters and a maraschino cherry. Another is Grand Marnier and rye with orange and lime zest. A third child is a sour mix of lime and bitters and sea-salt. Another... you get the picture.

That's why you aren't exactly like your sibling (unless you're an identical twin), but instead seem like variants on a theme: Mumsie's near-sighted eyes and Daddo's thick, wavy hair paired with different jawlines and frames.

Go to a family reunion and the mixology can be actively unsettling: the shared blond curls, the cousin's toddler child who is a ringer for long-dead great-Gramp Earl, and the vision of your parent's feet at the end of someone else's legs.

Aunt Margaret and Papa Joe in the early 1940's.

Papa Joe and Aunt Margaret around 1990.

Or maybe it's comforting, that ongoing flow of family genes. A river, maybe, even more than a mélange of mixed drinks.

Science Links:

genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask128
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/whats_a_genome/Chp1_4_2.shtml
http:genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask445
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/howmanychromosomes

Naturally, there's more to say about the genetic side of genealogy, but this is enough for now, I think.

Which brings me, sideways, to the word "anon." Anon can be short for "anonymous," but it's also an archaic adverb meaning "shortly." As in, I will write more about this anon. The etymology of the word (it strikes me that genealogy is the etymology of a person. Hmm.) gives it an Old English heritage. It meant "into one," which eventually referred to time, as in "at once."

I am distracted, it's inevitable, by thinking about how the Old English (700-1100 A.D.) visualized time differently that we do.

Until later. Anon.

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Would-Be Farm: Wilderness Encounters

2/16/2017

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We joked about the cave as we sat in the 4WD mule and looked up the rock face. "Nice spot for a bear, ha ha ha!"

The game-camera had already caught an image of a bear (a black bear! alive!) nosing around the beaver pond, so there was some basis for the comment. And my sister and I have a small history with bears.

In an earlier era, my sister was a Maine river-raft guide. While visiting her one Christmas, we startled a bear from its nap, the creature exploding out from under some brush in a mad flurry of snow and branches crackling as we three –– her big golden-retriever was walking with us –– stood frozen in shock.

As I remember it, the bear bee-lined it over a nearby hill and out of sight like a cartoon road-runner. And the dog, bless his golden heart, commenced barking then as if he –– and only he –– had saved us from the danger. Perhaps he had.

I don't know if I was witness or audience, but another time, at the municipal dump in rural Maine, one of my sister's Mainer pals refused to drop his box of Triscuits. It was a thing to do of an evening: drive down to the dump and watch the black bears sort through the leftovers. That night, one bear (it was the size of a sofa) was in the mood for Triscuit crackers. My sister's friend was likewise craving those woven wheaty snacks. There followed a longish moment of hectic excitement as everyone demanded that the Triscuits be sacrificed ("No way, man, I am STARVING! These are mine!") and the bear lumbered ever closer and closer...

Back at the Would-Be farm, the rock face cave turned out to be empty. It was a shallow little ledge, but with stone formations interesting enough to us that we cut along the base of the cliff to explore on foot.

"There's a path here," Sarah announced from a dozen feet ahead of me.

It was: a narrow strip of clear ground, the hard dirt not holding prints. "Game-trail," I agreed, savoring the tough, Land-Rover flavor of the word.

Twenty feet farther, I stopped to admire the tenacity of a tree growing out of the rock. Sarah was peering around. A gamey, musky scent hung in the air.

"It smells funky," she said.

"It smells like carnivore," I said, inhaling a big sniff. I turned downhill. "Maybe it's a bear."

My sister laughed, and then took a few more steps along the game-trail. "Ooh, do you see this?" she said, and then, noticing that she'd gotten into burrs, she began plucking at her fleece jacket.

"See what?" I called over my shoulder as I navigated down the rocky slope.

"A hole in the rocks," she said, tsking and plucking at her sleeve. "And it really stinks!"

"Sis, why don't you come down here? Like, now."

Catching something in my tone, she looked up from the sticker-burrs.

I found myself speaking carefully, "Maybe. It's. A. Bobcat."

Our sainted Mumsie used to say that it wasn't so much "Fight or Flight" as a response after she'd reached a certain age, but "Pee and Flee." This was one of the thoughts that flitted through my mind as I watched my sister back away from whatever she'd nearly stumbled into and then scramble downhill to me.

"You could've told me you were getting out of there," she said.

"I didn't think I needed to," I answered.

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Oh ShEnandoah, I Long to Hear You.

1/10/2017

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Thank goodness for teachers like Mr. Forman. My grade-school music teacher was nerdy and boney and tireless in his love for and encouragement of music. He mimeographed the lyrics of songs and once a week from 4th to 6th grade, we went to his classroom and sang while he played electric piano.*

I have no recollection of how we sounded. Not all of us were invited to join the school chorus. But I can still sing every word of Elton John's "Rocket Man, John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High," "Shenandoah," John Prine's "Paradise," and more.

These are tunes that pop up on the internal jukebox and startle me in their clarity.

*He also played in a jazz band on the weekends, but I only learned that later.

Sidebar Tangent: John Prine wrote "Paradise" for his dad in 1971 about coal-mining in his Kentucky hometown. The chorus goes something like "Oh Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County/Down the Green River, where Paradise lay./Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away."

In 2015, the Peabody Energy Corporation filed a lawsuit, that, among other things, claimed that the lyrics were inflammatory and offensive. Forty some years later, and Mr. Peabody's coal train still riding those rails.

This ties into my New Year's genealogy binge.

My binge was marked by long stints in front of the trusty laptop punctuated by exclamations of, "Huh. Well of course it's his great-uncle Gorton," and "What were the chances that these two families would intermarry this many times? Jeesh. Guess they swiped right on KINder. Nyuk nyuk nyuk."

So here's a brief, obvious overview: when looking up into the family tree, everyone gets four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 g-g-grands, 32 g-g-g-grands and on and on.

Family multiplication happens pretty quickly: about 100 years gets you sixteen great-great-grandparents. Sixteen family branches. Sixteen.

If you are lucky, there might be a photo of yourself in diapers perched on one of those great-great-pappy's grumpy lap.

But in a hurry, these many forebears become mysterious strangers. Even with a storytelling family, diarists, and hoarders of ephemera, finding out about these people can prove fiendishly difficult.

The time flashes past. Nobody asks enough questions. And a flood or a fire or a hungry mouse can wipe out the paper records of a whole county.

Baby Mumsie on her great-grandfather's lap.

But back to my binge: I was poking into the history of my Wheeler kin. They lived way up in the hills of Franklin County, Georgia, fifty or so miles southwest of Asheville, NC. My Grampa Navy would have pronounced that word as "he-ills."

Franklin County held quite a number of likely Richard Wheelers who might be my great-great-grandfather, but he's been a sticky wicket.

In that steep corner of the world, Wheelers bifurcated like tadpoles in a pond. And they each named their kids after the same uncles and dads: William, Richard, John, James.

Which is why I was idly staring at the 1880 US Census entry for a Wheeler family. In 1880, our Richard had been dead already for seven years, leaving the kids and wife to work the farm. This nearby family farm was headed up by John Franklin Wheeler, a possible brother to my Richard, with kids named Mary E., Catherin C., Richard W., Masurah, Martha, and Lu Ellar.

Lu Ellar, really? It's an all-to-easy assumption to think that hill folks are all Clampetts –– clichéd stewed squirrel and moonshine.

Taking a closer look at the census-taker’s handwriting, I saw that Lu Ellar is more likely “Sue Ellen.” Regional –– but not so over-the-top as "Lu-Ellar."

As I pondered names and names, my internal jukebox piped up with “Shenandoah.”

It’s a magnificent song, really, a sea-shanty with long sonorous notes that are fun to splash out on. It's about the exploration of the States when the "west" was the Missouri River.

I'll spare you my rendition, but Harry Belafont's version is pretty good.

Mr. Foreman used to insist that we pronounce the lyrics as befitted the song and its historical setting (just as a later professor taught me to read Spenser so that it rhymed). So when the chorus came up in my mind (and –– full disclosure –– throughout the living room) I sang it this way: “A-WAY! I’m bound away, across the wide Missor-ah.”

If Lu Ellar can be Sue Ellen, what about Massurah? Massurah, Missourah...Missouri.

Missouri? Click-click-click and it turns out that Massurah was the delightfully easier-to-track Missouri Caroline Wheeler. Her grandfather was my great-great-great grandfather. I don’t yet know why she was given this unusual name, but I do have a better handle on Richard, son of Mary Freeman and William Wheeler.

I probably should have mentioned it sooner, but thank you, Mr. Forman, for putting up with my shenanigans, teaching me to read music (I’ve mostly forgotten, but still), and sharing your unembarassed love of song.

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The Colonies (Part 2 of 2)

11/25/2016

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Some genealogy people shake their tree for an Indian princess or a French baron, or whatnot.

Some are looking for any family at all.

Me, I'd just like to know the stories. The begats are all well and good, but what else happened to these people?

On a wide-ranging tangent recently, I zoomed into early New England as its history exists on the internet.

Transcribed letters (my favorite is this long one here), journals, official documents, state histories, recollections, maps, and all.

It started with my great-grandfather Charles's grandma, who sports the lovely New-Englandy name of Pamelia Carrington Riggs (1791-1884).

Her grandfather was Levinius Carrington born in the New Haven Colony in 1712, died 1770.

His great-grandfather was Benjamin Wilmot (1589-1669), who probably came over to the New World with the Winthrop fleet.

Under the leadership of John Winthrop, these eleven boats brought one thousand Puritans away from England in 1630. For some, it's a point of pride to have been among this first wave of English settlers.

As if a person gets the choice.

But anyway, Benjamin Wilmot, born in 1589 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire and his wife Ann Ladd (b 1593) are my 8th great-grandparents.

Once they crossed the ocean blue, they settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then moved to the newly formed New Haven Colony, probably to be closer to their son and his family. Benjamin is recorded as taking an oath of fidelity there 2 May 1646.

It's not necessarily the upright citizens whose stories appeal to me. Instead, an unhappy marriage in this distant and alien time is the thing that caught my imagination.

One of Benjamin and Ann's kids, my great-something Aunt Ann, married a man named William Bunnell in Watertown, Massachusetts Colony.

Although he stood for jury duty in September of 1630, William doesn't look like a successful addition to the Colony. He didn't build on the land given him, and he couldn't seem to make ends meet.

These early Colonies included a stout social safety net: an allowance was paid out in support of William Bunnell's three children when William fell on hard times. And then, in 1646, he asked the authorities for a shot in the arm so that he could have a new set of threads when he returned alone to England. They agreed to give him 30 shillings or some such as he left.

The safety net also ended up being a bit of a cage: The Massachusetts Colony needed for Aunt Ann and the children –– left without means –– to be claimed by a responsible man. Someone like her father Benjamin Wilmot over in New Haven Colony.

So, as has happened since immemorial, the daughter moved back in with her folks.

Signs of that time: two of the kids (Ben, aged 10, and six-year-old Lydia) were sent into indentured servitude.

Fast forward three years, and William Bunnell returned to North America, following his wife to New Haven.

He petitioned the town of New Haven (the Town) for tax relief as he was "old and infirm."

...But not so infirm that he couldn't reconcile with Aunt Ann and have a new baby (Mary), whose birth he neglected to properly register with the authorities. And was fined 4 shillings for the transgression.

Within a few months, William was back in court with a dispute about rent not being paid. He tried unsuccessfully to get his children out of their indentures, but he still needed a handout from the Town to keep food on the table.

New Haven included about fifty households (1,000 or so people) by 1640-ish, and I imagine each one of those households knew all about old William and poor Ann. The government was small, personal, and specifically religious. Morality was not a private affair.

Imagine how claustrophobic that cozy little town might have been for a family on the down side of luck.

The second Bunnell son, Nathaniel, who had not been sent in to servitude, "who now for want of due nurture growes rude and offensive,"* caught the attention of the authorities.

One of the neighbors offered William a cow in exchange for indenture of the boy. William refused the deal, and so the Town stopped his allowance.

William and Aunt Ann had another child, Ebenezer, who, along with poor Ann, died in 1653. Poor things.

William shortly thereafter decided to return once more to England.

According to the town records, this decision "which, if it could be attained, might free the Towne from some charge, though they made some present disbursement for his passage and other necessaries for him, and understanding a vessel at Milford is bound for Newfoundland ordered that the Townsmen and Treasurer should treate with them for his passage thither, and Agreed of some course how he may be sent from thence to old England where he saith he hath some friends to take care of him." *

Here's your hat and what's your hurry...and William Bunnell fades from the pages of history. His children (cousins of my ancestors) went on to multiply and (mostly) prosper.

*Lazy scholarship, I quote this passage from the Ancient Records Series of the New Haven Historical Society 1649- 1662, edited by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Volume 1 and the Vital Records of New Haven as cited by William R. Austin in his profile of William Bunnell/Bonnell from The Bunnell/Bonnel Newsletter, Vol 1, No 1, January 1 1987, p 3-5. Here's the weblink.

More resources:

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/way-more-than-the-scarlet-letter-puritan-punishments/
teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2003/2/03.02.04.x.html

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The Colonies (Part 1 of 2)

11/22/2016

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I remember making construction-paper feather headdresses and tall capotain hats to commemorate Thanksgiving, but I have always been a little fuzzy on the hows and whens of the English colonization of the US.

The Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock, but then what? And that was not 1492, but pretty soon afterwards, right?

And what do I know from Pilgrims?

Which is the kind of direction research will take a person, whether she meant to or not. Especially when researching the first of her European-American ancestors.

So, England....

So first: the WABAC machine.

Or binge-watch The Tudors.

In the early 1600s, Shakespeare was still alive. Queen Elizabeth's long reign was ending. When I say religious diversity was not welcome, it's helpful to know that King Edward had ejected Jews from England in 1290. Also, Elizabeth's dad, Henry the 8th, had made Roman Catholicism more or less illegal in 1534.

Your option was Church of England or nothing, and being an agnostic or atheist was heretical. Heretics were all too regularly burned at the stake.

So when a group of folks wanted to "purify" the Church of England by focusing on reading the Bible and doing good rather than supporting a centralized church, they had limited choices. They could try to reform from inside the church (and keep their heads down!) or they could leave England.

About 100 or so of these "Separatists" went first to Holland in 1608. Like many another, the Separatists were shocked –– shocked! –– by the cosmopolitan and hedonistic lifestyle of the Netherlanders.

Having lost a few of their faithful to the fleshpots of Holland, they decided it was time to high-tail it out of there. They went back to England and then set sail for the New World in 1620 aboard the Mayflower.

I was taught that the Pilgrims moved to the New World in search of religious tolerance.

But no, they came so that they could practice their religion without persecution. Big difference.

Fun fact: Nobody called themselves Pilgrims in Colonial America.
Separatists called themselves "Saints" (everyone else was "Strangers" to them). The reform-from-the-inside people were known as "Puritans."

Puritans established a society built on their own religion. The Bible didn't have trial by jury? Well then, neither would New Haven Colony. A sea-captain came home from sea after a few months and greeted his wife with a kiss –– and the Colony government (known as "The Town") stuck them both into stocks for their shameful display of fleshy affection.

The Puritans forbade religious diversity. The Massachusetts Bay Colony put Quakers to death. Quakers! Tortured and hanged, including the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer. Puritans even banned the celebration of Christmas.

To be fair, I should note that some Colonies were formed with the spirit of tolerance built right in, like the Rhode Island Colony. Founder Roger Williams not only believed in religious freedom (with no tax dollars!) and he felt that taking land from the Natives without paying for it was not quite morally right. Heartening news, that.

So meanwhile, back in Merry Olde England, the religious conflict deepened and developed into the English Civil War, 1642-1652. Oliver "Bad Haircut" Cromwell lead the Roundheads against the Royalists of King Charles I.

Cromwell won; Charles was beheaded. There was a short-lived British Republic.

Republican rule in England meant that fewer Puritans felt the need to move West. Some early Colonial settlers even shipped back to England in the 1640's and 1650's.

Then Cromwell died (kidney trouble) and Charles' son, Charles the Second* was restored to the throne in 1660. This is why the following time is known as the Restoration Era –– a small piece of information that surprised me. Did I simply nap through that part of history class?

All this data is place-setting for a tiny slice of family pie that I learned about.

Which I shall serve another day. Thankfully.

•(He of King Charles Cavalier Spaniel fame)