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. ​

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. 

First, it's got zillions of acres of dramatic desert scenery and otherworldly rock formations.

​One ranger-led evening program included an entertaining slide show where the audience was invited to guess: Mars? Or Utah? It was harder than you might expect.

Second big thing about Utah? Mormonism.    

What we don't know about the religion would fill a library. (Just for the record: our ignorance extends to nearly all branches of belief. We are non-denominational like that.)

But thanks to the Big Parks Trip, we do know why there are orchards at Capitol Reef National Park, and why the fort at Pipe Springs was built.

Here's my abbreviated version of the history: Back in the day (mid 1800's), when Mormons were facing persecution in the eastern US, Brigham Young led his followers into the Utah Territory, where they could practice their religion without oversight or interference from the government.  Since, naturally, the territory was not yet a state.

Long story short, the conflict between faith and state came to actual war between Young's followers (the Nauvoo Legion) and the US Army. 

As in, one can wander around in the orchard and eat apricots to one's heart's content.

3000 or so fruit trees are maintained by the National Parks Service (the last settlers moved out in the 1960's after selling their land to the Park). An earthly paradise.

And likewise, the Mormon ranch at Pipe Springs is a National Monument. Halfway between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, Pipe Springs served as a stop-over for early tourists out west.

My historical summary: For time immemorial, local Kaibab Paiute people came here on their annual circuit. At the end of winter, this little oasis was full of rice grass and small game. And for time immemorial, the Paiutes moved along for better hunting and gathering as the seasons changed.

Drought and ongoing federal prosecution of polygamy (check out the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 for some stimulating thought on church vs. state) put an end to Mormon ownership of the ranch. 

It became a National Monument partly because Pipe Springs offered a way-station between the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, Today, the water rights are split between the Kaibab Paiute Tribe, the National Parks Service, and a group of descendants of the cattle farmers.

​The Kaibab Paiute (now numbering 200 souls) would still like to have the spring back, by the way.

​Ironically, of course, when the states came into being, Pipe Springs ended up in Arizona rather than Utah. Which is another thing we learned about Utah. 

Like Devil's Tower, Bear Butte is an incongruously tall mountain in the midst of the high plains. It's mysterious and magnificent. However, Bear Butte is still in use as a spiritual center of Native American culture.

​Unlike nearly everywhere else we went, Bear Butte State Park was staffed by Native Americans, managed by Native Americans, and visited largely by Native Americans. 

I grant you, one day of hiking does not an expert make. But there's plenty of data for me to form some theories.

Nearly everyone we saw –– the shirtless dark-haired boys pelting down the trail at top speed, the elderly ladies in skirts assisting one another uphill, the dressed-up middle-aged couple wheezing asthmatically, the young family way way up the trail carrying their littlest up the ladder-stairs –– looks to us as if they don't need to be reminded of the mountain's significance. ​

Before reaching the summit, there's a saddle where you can look for miles in every direction. You can see four states, though the big colorful Rand-McNally lines are not quite visible.

If you were watching, you'd probably be able to see enemies approaching for a long time before they arrived.

​The wind blows right up the Butte from all directions. It's eerie. And beautiful.

And it reminded us, for the next six thousand or so miles, that these astonishing natural wonders we treasure were also sacred ground for cultures that came before us. Even if people stopped leaving fabric gifts tied onto the branches like Tibeten flags, fluttering to the heavens.​

The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  

Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 

Each trip worth a Tale.

I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.  

​Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.

Fine fine fine.  I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.


Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?

Once upon a time, the Would-Be Farm was buried under the Laurentide ice sheet. Then it drowned under great Lake Algonquin, and then it was wild open country.

For millennia, these meadows and rocky outcroppings were the stomping grounds for wood bison, wolves, and of course, the Iroquois Confederacy. (Jeff continues to keep eyes peeled for an arrowhead).

Then along came the Europeans with their pesky notions of land-ownership.

I'll gloss past the colonization. We know the basics: the French trappers and traders, the priests, the English settlers, the Revolution. Now, to zoom in to the details of that little corner of the world that catches my attention. In 1791, New York State was strapped for cash and land speculation was all the rage.

Leading to the Great Macomb Purchase of 1791.

This back-room deal sold off nearly 4 million acres of Northern New York for a whopping 8 pence an acre. Of course the sale was meant to encourage economic growth and settlement; the land was meant to be earmarked for Revolutionary War veterans.

Heavy sigh.

Nothing new under the sun: scheming and greed resulted in a solid scandal and several fortunes lost and made and not a lot of veterans hammering swords into plowshares. 

There is so much future to dream into reality with the Would-Be Farm: what else is it to plant a bunch of twigs but to wish an orchard to life?

But it's comforting to find out a little about its past.

To know, for instance, that the flowers (the iris and violets, hosta and columbine, lungwort and daffodils) probably came from this 100+ year span of women before me who cared for this farm: Julia and Harry farmed the land from their wedding in 1937 until 1980. Julia's mom, Georgiana was probably born on the farm in 1868, and spent her 80 years on this bit of earth. So nice to meet you! I hope you like what we are doing with the place.

References and reading material

https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/64000558.pdf
 
​https://www.britannica.com/topic/Iroquois-Confederacy
 
http://www.omdhs.syracusemasons.com/sites/default/files/history/McCormick,%20Daniel.pdf
 
http://www.mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/mansion.htm
 
https://archive.org/stream/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog_djvu.txtwas w
 
old abandoned buildings of northern new york http://oabonny.com

http://mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/amsr/wt.htm

​https://localwiki.org/hsl/Macomb%27s_Purchase

​http://www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp

One of my favorite nephews was helping me shuffle boxes of stuff from one place to the other recently. With that mix of patience and impatience native to the under-20 crowd, he did not express the slightest flicker of curiosity.

Still, his doubtful expression as he slid the carton (Marked "A-16") into the back of the Honda made me want to explain a little.

"I haven't unpacked that box since before your Uncle Jeff and I got married," I ventured. Which would make it the equivalent to the Jazz Age to him. 
"Toss it!" he said, then, reluctantly, "Why?"
"Because there was space?" I said. "Because I never got around to it?"
"Huh," he said. "Welp, that's the last of the pile. Anything else?"

There wasn't, except my continuing impulse to explain.  And of course my own curiosity.

​I hadn't unpacked the box -- or possibly even peeked into it –– for a very long time.

​Under a layer of yellowed St. Petersburg Times packing paper, an old acquaintance gazed back at me.

So it's not a book that is going to have a revival, like Beryl Markham's West with the Night*. It's not a book I'm going to read again, ever. But I don't want to forget it. And so it has waited in a cardboard box lo these many years.

Wide Wide World essentially fired up the country's book publishing industry. The novel was huge. It outsold David Copperfield in England.

But Susan Warner did NOT make a fortune from it.  She and her sister started writing after their father lost all the family money in the panic of 1837. The girls were poor and writing was their best option to keep body and soul together. They managed, but they did not enjoy the life of bestselling authors. Susan went on to publish a book a year until her death at age 66. The Warner sisters have been mostly forgotten.

Mostly: they did manage to pass along their family property, Constitution Island, to the US Military Academy at West Point.  The island is part of the campus, although their house (Warner House, natch) is presently in a state of disrepair.  

​Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Resources:

*A quick essay about West with the Night.

What Katy Read: Feminst re-readings of "classic" stories for girls, by Shirley Foster and Judy Simons, University of Iowa Press, 1995.

Child brides in present-day US

Goodreads page for Wide Wide World

https://www.enotes.com/topics/wide-wide-world-susan-warner

"Loving The Wide Wide World: a novel, its fans, and their fictions" essay by Jennifer L. Brady, Harvard.

Margaret Atwood on "Women's Novels."

http://www.inspirationalarchive.com/1730/the-history-of-jesus-loves-me-this-i-know-song/

Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, Susanne Lebsock. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies by Susan K. Harris, Cambridge University Press, 1990

"Panics, Gifts, and Faith in Susan Warner's Wide Wide World" in From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-century American Fiction, by Hildegard Hoeller, University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.

Susan Warner and "The Wide Wide World" by Mabel F. Sltstetter, The Elementary English Review, Vol 14, No 5 (MAY 1937), pp115-167.

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

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. 

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.

A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle. 

This week has thwarted me.  

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

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. ​

 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.