Category: History

Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage*

4/15/2018

*I love that phrase, which goes something like, "In April...then folk do long to go on pilgrimage," from the opening sentence of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

In the interest of brutal honesty and over-sharing, inside that ellipsis? Those three dots contain an entire universe of wordy wordy words that may have in played a pivotal role in my decision NOT to pursue graduate work in English.

As a young student, I heard the Middle English version of the prelude to The Canterbury Tales once and was interested –– my word, how German it sounds! And it's almost comprehensible! Wow, 600 years later and the language is so different!

The second time it was quoted at me, I began to find the thing tiresome.

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.

In case you think I am being over-dramatic, I give you a YouTube video (Go on, I double-dawg dare you!) of the poem.

You can imagine the performance when combined with a certain brand of collegiate earnestness and ardor.

PS: Yeah, by the way, "Old English," which is what you might think this guy is speaking? That's what people spoke before 1066 AD.

Geoffrey Chaucer was writing around 1400 AD. If you were to make this rookie mistake when someone is fervently quoting Chaucer at you at an English department event, you might never escape the lecturing.

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.

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I Don't Always Waste Time On the Internet...

1/16/2018

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But when I do –– oh heckydoodle, who am I trying to fool? Whole chunks of time are left bleeding and helpless in my wake.

I'm not sure even if "waste" is a strong enough verb. "Ravage"? "Murderize"? "Squander"?

But there is so much see –– and do –– out there in the vasty dark of the internet.

Such as, for instance, Google's Arts & Culture selfie app. Thanks a whole heck of a lot, NPR for featuring this on the Two-Way.

Way to lead me down a primrose path!

The idea is that you snap a selfie and then Google –– bless its mighty brain –– searches for matches among its many images of art.

It's nearly instantaneous, and you get a couple of matches, which are...

Huh. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt? O-kaaay.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, my sweet skipper was innocently trying to watch the World Championships of Darts on BBC America.

Is anyone surprised to know that not only is he glued to the television, but he knows the rules of the competition?

And so his 65% facial match is to Robert Louis Stevenson, not an unattractive fellow who certainly shares a certain mustachey something with Mr. Linton.

And with no one else handy in the living room to help me slaughter time, I turned to the way-back files.

I knew I've been scanning photos for a good cause...

My sister the artist as a chilly young offshore sailor of course matches a lovely painterly portrait.

And a photo from the Sunfish Worlds awards ceremony from sometime in the 1990s gives Jeff this match-up with a Union general who has a fantastic moniker: General Manning Ferguson Force.

I wonder if his buddies said things like "Oh, he's a Force to be reckoned with."?

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?

And what does Eleanor have to say?

I hoped she was the one who said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit here next to me."

(Nope, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.)

Instead she offers a non-piffling message from the wide reaches of Google herself.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering the strength to stare it down.
From You Learn By Living, by Anna Eleanor Roosevelt p 41

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The Would-Be Farm: Antecedents

6/6/2017

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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.

Namesake Alexander Macomb* was a fur-trader/wheeler-dealer, who, in the way of many a land speculator, found himself in the weeds: even at pennies an acre, 4 is many millions of acres.

He spent time in debtor's prison after the Panic of 1792. He was forced to do a bit of a fire-sale of his purchase, which is how Jefferson County ended up with a contingent of French aristocracy for a while**.

*Why, yes, his son was General Alexander Macomb, who lead the United States to victory at the Battle of Plattsburgh, which helped turned the tide of the War of 1812.

**Indeed, these French fled their Revolution; many settled in the young US, but alas, as political tension with France developed, President Adams signed the "Alien and Seditions Act," in 1798, which basically repealed freedom of speech (no public speaking out against the government!), made citizenship harder to attain, and expelled foreigners. Oh the irony of the French Festival!

Heavy sigh.

Some decades later, the Would-Be Farm took shape. Roads arrived, and someone drove a few hemlock posts to mark the corners of the property.

The earliest European owner might have put up a house. Some barns. Sheds. So might the next couple of owners (I have the title search in hand. Who knew that the Farm was part of Macomb's Purchase? I'm surprised by how interesting I find it. I never liked history class in high school.)

But these days, the only remaining structure is an abandoned farm house.

I assumed it was a kit house, the kind that came unassembled via train car from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. (And you thought Ikea shelving is hard to put together––!)

After all, it’s a familiar, plain, elegant pattern of so many farmhouses in the North Country.

But as it turned out, assuming is wrong again: Sears’ kits really hit their stride after 1905, and this house is circa 1880.

I don't know what the design is called, officially –– vernacular architecture, maybe? with a splash of Neoclassical? Maybe one of my clever architect friends can give me some more insight on how to best describe it.

Of course we toyed with the idea of restoring the old fella.

But it’s about 20 feet from the road. It's not especially charming. There’s a truly gruesome detached outhouse.

And most decisively, the underpinnings of the structure have come undone: while the topline looks good, the interior is all sliding into the foundation.

Gravity is not just a good idea: it's the law.

One day, when I am tip-toeing around in these sad little rooms, I might find myself hip-deep in debris alongside the porcupine that lurks in the cellar.

I always check to be sure the phone is in my pocket when I venture inside.

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

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A Ghost of Bestsellers Past

5/28/2017

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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.

Wide Wide World was the first real bestseller in the U.S. Published in 1850, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then, for a couple of solid reasons, it disappeared from most people's memories.

Why was it forgotten? Here's the short list:
1) It's a "woman's" book, which critics and scholars later tended to dismiss. What's a "woman's book"? Well, the short form is that, like Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford novels, The Wide Wide World is focused on a heroine within the limited sphere of house and hold.

2) Like Little Dorritt or The Shack, the book offers a lot of weeping. Sentimentality is all well and good, but like unhappy families, I think every generation needs its own sentimental novel. Bridges of Madison County, anyone? Jonathan Livingston Seagull?

It's almost as if the reading public wrings the emotion out of a popular book, leaving a dry husk for the next wave of readers. Or not. It's just a theory.

3) The novel is long and it's deeply and relentlessly religious –– 592 didactic pages about Christians and their duties.

Our pre-teen heroine's duty boils down to how her sufferings are the will of God and how she needs to submit to the will of the men in her circle in order to find a happy ending...Think just a touch of Shades of Grey mixed with all the light-hearted fun of Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress.

Goodreads reviews are sprinkled with phrases like "patriarchy by proxy" and "accepting male dominance" and the book is described (fairly) as "preachy," "stifling," and "horrid."

Sidebar data:
The author Susan Warner collaborated with her sister Anna on several novels.

Thanks to one of those collaborations, Say and Seal, we have the hymn "Jesus Loves Me," so popular with the Sunday School crowd.

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.

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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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This Space Intentionally Left Blank

4/7/2017

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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.

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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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Whur th Deeeeer and th Antelope Play

1/3/2017

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Okay, belay the antelope. There are no antelope at Paynes Prairie.

But there IS an actual prairie near Gainesville, Florida. Go figure. Where the buffalo roam even.

We made it home for a couple of days before New Year's.

Paynes Prairie was the state's first state park. It's also the subject of one of the great early narratives about nature in the New World.

In 1773, William Bartram traveled south from Philadelphia, sketching and making extensive notes that became Bartram's Travels, first published in 1791 by James and Johnson in Philadelphia.

The author, who was exploring when the Revolutionary War started and who ended up restoring his dad's botanical garden to pass the latter years of the conflict, was reportedly disappointed by the first edition of his 500-plus page opus. As one so often is.

He didn't live to see a second American edition (with the typos fixed), but the book was a hit in Europe.

Bartram's Travels is a delight. I recommend it even without a camping trip to illustrate the wildlife.

Exerpt from page 187

THE extensive Alachua savanna is a level, green plain, above fifteen miles over, fifty miles in circumference, and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. It is encircled with high, sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant Orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil.

The towering Magnolia grandiflora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst them. At the same time are seen innumerable droves of cattle; the lordly bull, lowing cow and sleek capricious heifer. The hills and groves re-echo their cheerful, social voices.

Herds of sprightly deer, squadrons of the beautiful, fleet Siminole horse, flocks of turkeys, civilized communities of the sonorous, watchful crane, mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace, 'till disturbed and affrighted by the warrior man.

Exerpt from page 189

THIS isthmus being the common avenue or road of Indian travellers, we pitched our camp at a small distance from it, on a rising knoll near the verge of the savanna, under some spreading Live Oaks: this situation was open and airy, and gave us an unbounded prospect over the adjacent plains.

Exerpt from page 128

THE alligator when full grown is a very large and terrible creature, and of prodigous strength, activity and swiftness in the water.
I have seen them twenty feet in length, and some are supposed to be twenty-two or twenty-three feet; their body is as large as that of a horse; their shape exactly resembles that of a lizard, except their tail, which is flat or cuniform, being compressed on each side, and gradually diminishing from the abdomen to the extremity, which, with the whole body is covered with horny plates or squammae, impenetrable when on the body of the live animal, even to a rifle ball, except about their head and just behind their fore-legs or arms, where it is said they are only vulnerable.

Want more Bartram's Travels? The University of North Carolina provides a nice electronic version here.

And the park itself? I can't recommend it enough: miles of trail for biking, hiking, picturesque wildlife. It's well worth a couple of extra days on a trip to or through Florida.

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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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