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.
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.
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
3 Comments
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.
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.
Here are a few of the resources I used in researching this blog:
www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/anne-hutchinson/ www.history.com/news/when-massachusetts-banned-christmas esoterx.com/2015/03/05/the-great-ship-of-new-haven-phantoms-puritan-hippies-and-the-reformation/ dunhamwilcox.net/ct/new_haven1.htm winthropsociety.com/doc_higgin.php winthropsociety.com www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/oliver-cromwell/ www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/charles_ii_king.shtml bcw-project.org/timelines/ www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=2&smtID=4 avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mayflower.asp www.catholic.com/tracts/the-inquisition thehistoricpresent.com/2008/07/02/why-the-puritans-persecuted-quakers/ www.history.com/topics/mayflower www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/history/350.shtml http://www.history.com/topics/mayflower www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pilgrims www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/geoffrey-robertson/remembering-regicides-350-years  My sister assures me that genealogy is absolutely, supremely, and irredeemably dull. Unless you are doing the research, it's BORING.
She doesn't sugar-coat it. Yet even she was willing to admit that great-great uncle Aaron Augustus Chase* was actually kind of inspiring. Bit of background: In 1871, coal miners in Scranton, Pennsylvania were protesting. The local coal companies had cut wages from $1.31 to $0.86 per car-load of coal in late 1870. The miners joined the Miners' and Laborers' Benevolent Association, which called for a strike. That strike subsequently began January 1871. On May 17, 1871, there was a large crowd of strikers (and their family members) protesting the scab laborers who were working the Brigg's shaft in the Scranton neighborhood of Hyde Park. As reported in History of Scranton and its People by Col. Frederick L. Hitchcock, published in 1914. the protesting included "jeers, hootings, vile names and threatening gestures as the men went to and from the mine." (ooh! hurtful hootings!) "Opprobrious epithets" were flung. And then perhaps a stone took to the air, which lead like night follows day, to an escallation of violence. Two strikers, Benjamin Davis and Daniel Jones, were killed by a single shot from the squad of militia hired by Mr. W. W. Scranton, superintendent of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company to guard the workers. Enter Aaron Augustus Chase. The editor of the Scranton Times, he called out W. W. Scranton and wrote that the killings of Davis and Jones amounted to murder. He ended up in prison twice, but refused to retract the statement. Yes, he was a Civil War veteran, which probably means he was a hero already, and his later life included a stint as judge and civil servant for the City of Scranton –– the town named for the family of the industrialist whom he called responsible for murder. But moral conviction and action in the interest of downtrodden workers? It warms the cockles of my heart. *Aaaron Augustus was my great-great-great-great-grandfather's cousin, but seriously –– in the interest of a story, I am thinking he's an uncle. PS. The Long Strike of 1871 was not, of course, the end of the labor troubles. The Great Strike of 1877 nearly shut down the country, and in 1891, 19 unarmed immigrant miners were killed in Lattimer, PA. And on and on. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "So it goes."  Elderberry-ish. While trying to identify a berry-bush on the Would-Be Farm this past summer, I turned to Newcomb's Wildflower Guide. I flip through this reference probably half a dozen times each year, trying to get a handle on the plants. Names are important. Even if the name is only Latin for "hairy-stemmed yellow flower thingamabob," knowing it gives a person power. (Magical thinking about true names aside...) For instance, pickle weed. It's a leafy little plant with sour, tender leaves that most outdoorsy folks have nibbled from time to time. It grows in the shade, has a little yellow flower. It tastes like dill pickle. Pickle weed's actual name is Oxalis stricta. From the Greek, it translates to "sour sorrel," again showing that the scientific name is sometimes just a regular name dressed for special occasions. Anyhow, look up Oxalis stricta and you can discover that (no surprise!) it's full of vitamin C, but it turns out to bind calcium when taken raw in large doses. Also, it might have been the plant St. Patrick used in his gentle conversions, rather than what we call "clover" these days. Or not –– pagan Celts held Oxalis sacred; there's probably a shipload of interpretive wiggle-room when it comes to what happened in 5th Century Ireland. But when I opened the wildflower book this time, looking that something looked a lot like elderberry, but not exactly like elderberry and wondering what the heck it was, a tattered four-leaf clover slid from between the pages.  A regular Trefolium repens ("three-leafed creeper"), the sort that mutates and grows a fourth leaf from time to time*.
It must have been in there for a decade or more. A flat, papery bit of luck put aside by Mumsie, who didn't necessarily know the Latin names of things, but who gave the lucky gift of curiosity. *While proofreading, I discovered I'd typed that phrase as "from time to tome." I crack myself up. These sweet, personable young pigs swim right up to any passing tourist. We encountered them in the Abacos, in the Bahamas, a few years ago.  What an unsettling surprise to see them in the trailer for the Angry Birds II movie.
 In a blithe hunter-provider mood, my favorite skipper once yanked a yard-foot-long shark right onto the 24-foot-long sailboat we were cruising. Three muscular feet of dove-gray anger thrashing about, in what turns out to be a –– maybe –– six-foot long cockpit. At every thrash, those blank yellow cat-eyes not blinking and that grabby mouth with the stadium-seating rows of triangular serrated teeth snap snap snapping... We weren't wearing shoes, and we had neglected to arm ourselves with a winch handle or any other species of bludgeon. Forced to retreat to the cabin top, we were obliged to wait for the fish to, as the captain put it, "simmer down."  Oh, we ate shark nuggets that evening, of course we did. As my hunter-provider often remarks about the swimmer vs. Jaws issue: he's eaten a lot more of them than they have of him. (*"Alert! Sharks have no bones!" is the most awesome Archie McPhee catalog headline of all time.)
 Back soon. Just gathering more material while on family vacation.
There are many things I don't know, but economic history is close to the farthest edge of my solar system. (In strict honesty, let me admit that I also didn't know that Louis Sherry sold more than chocolate and ice-cream, and those things circle my sun pretty closely.) Luckily, Mary not only has a PhD in the topic, she is an impassioned and delightful storyteller. To paraphrase (and probably confabulate some details), it goes something like this:
The good news for the country's eventual financial stability is that this panic led pretty smartly to the foundation of the Federal Reserve System. And even I know that the Fed is the central bank that sets interest rates and money reserves and government securities. A quick poke around the interwebs shows me that Louis Sherry's was one of the most exclusive restaurants in those halcyon New York years before the first World War. In the same stratum as Waldorf's and Delmonico's. There was even a very deluxe 5th Avenue building for the restaurant, designed by the Sanford White (he of Girl in a Red Velvet Swing and Ragtime fame). After Prohibition and the rise of Bolshie waiters who just wouldn't do the work, these fabulous New York eateries faded or geared down. Louis Sherry himself turned back to his confectionary shop, which makes chocolates even now. 
I got out of the habit when I left farming country –– though it's a virtuous and pleasant tradition to spend part of this first summer weekend cleaning gravestones and trimming overgrown grass on an antique stranger's plot.
Still, over the course of this year's Memorial Day weekend, I'll take a moment or two to contemplate and be grateful for the service of those who have gone ahead. When my sister and I were green and youthful singletons*, sharing a happening beach apartment on Pass-a-Grille Beach, we witnessed a Christmas miracle. Of sorts. (*That time was roughly ten minutes or so ago on the geological time scale.)
Not just any old city bird, this was a pure white dove that stomped in its pigeon-toed way across the thin, sandy carpet of the living room, past the mod, mirrored wall of the dining room, straight into the bathroom where my sister was showering. "Caa-hooo! Caa-hooo!" the bird insisted. The bird was nonplussed by the Bottacelli vision of my sister emerging from the shower. The reciprocal –– less so. My sister found the pearly-white creature creepy and unsettling in her personal space, but it was unmistakably a bird of peace, so we put out a dish of water, scattered some crumbs on the patio, and shooed it back outdoors. The next morning, the dove barged through the door cooing. It waddled straight to her bedroom and hopped onto the pile of blankets covering my sister. "Well, F-ing-A Tweetie," my sister said. We had a propensity to speak the intensifying phrase "F-ing-A" in a John Wayne accent that year. The sobriquet "Pilgrim" was also heard rather more frequently than one might have wished. The bird fluffed its feathers and settled more comfortably onto the hump of blankets. "F-ing-A Tweetie," my sister said. "A Christmas miracle."  The dove said, "Humpf," in bird-language and left a small deposit on the blanket.
F-ing-A-Tweetie lived with us for a week, during the cold snap of that Christmas season. Quite tame, the bird suffered itself to be handled and was happy to settle on the back of the couch when we watched television. It was not banded, though it must have been someone's pet. Unless it truly was a Christmas miracle. At the turning of the year –– by the Festival of the Epiphany, say –– the visitation ended. Day dawned, and no cooing and no stomping around the house. Then another day and no bird, and another. We hoped that F-ing A Tweetie hadn't been eaten or blown into the Gulf, but that might have been too miraculous to hope for a bird of peace flying around in the world. |
About the Blog
A lot of ground gets covered on this blog -- from sailboat racing to book suggestions to plain old piffle. FollowTrying to keep track? Follow me on Facebook or Twitter or if you use an aggregator, click the RSS option below.
Old school? Sign up for the newsletter and I'll shoot you a short e-mail when there's something new.
Archives
March 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
