Our Ancestors Heard the Fife and Drum

Discovering that at least one of my direct ancestors served rather extensively in the Revolutionary War has, of course, made me more interested in that amazing start to our country. First, there's the continual astonishment at the brilliant individuals who created the basic framework that we take so much for granted -- John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the gift that was George Washington. Each one was a leader to be proud of; together they were world-shatterers. 

For some reason, the Revolution has been the subject of far fewer films and TV programs; perhaps it's just too complex. But a  few recent works are freely available and very informative: first, John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as the remarkable Abigail Adams. with other terrific performances by Tom Wilkinson as Franklin and Stephen Dillane as Jefferson. My favorite scene in this occurs when Jefferson is in the process of writing the Declaration of Independence,  and Adams and Franklin go to see him to see how it's going. But Jefferson, the inventor, has also just created the swivel chair, and he and Franklin start getting into practical mechanics, much to Adams' annoyance!

I have also been reading a fascinating book about the military history of the war, which I know nothing about. This novelization of the story, by Jeff Shaara, which is in two parts -- Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause -- tell you all about the people involved, from General Washington to General Cornwallis, the tactics, the weapon, the blunders, the successes. It's hugely informative. And pretty darn long. I just had to force myself to put it down long enough to write this!

Serviceable: Capable of Being Put to Good Use

Looking back, it seems that everyone on my mom's side of the family set great store by practical skills and competence of all kinds. One very cool fact I've discovered is that my Waters ancestors were also descended from the Manning family back in the Old Country (England, that is). James Waters (1572-1617) was married to Phebe Manning, whose uncle was an armorer for Henry VIII. Henry VIII! I'm thinking you had to be a pretty darn good armorer to successfully produce arms for Henry VIII. The consequences of customer dissatisfaction could probably be severe.

The client

James, the nephew-in-law, was an ironsmith, and he died in England; his widow remarried and emigrated with her new husband, William Plasse, a gunsmith, and all their children to Massachusetts. One can infer that men and women became acquainted and eventually paired off with others in the same artisanal social set; Phebe, from a metalsmithing family, married first an ironsmith and then a gunsmith. If your family were  wheelwrights, you would probably know other wheelwrights. Richard, James' son, also became a gunsmith -- and, as such, was an incredibly valuable craftsman to the colony. The town of Salem, in fact, gave Plasse (or Place, as it was often written) and his blended family a house as a perk for establishing his business there.

Wasn't that a good deal! And it was a pretty clear object lessons for the family's descendants -- knowing how to do something useful is a very good thing. There are all sorts of interesting and, when you think about it, necessary skills and trades on this side of the family, besides, of course, the always important farming.  Blacksmithing, cider pressing, shingle-making -- all things people really need.

My great grandfather had a farm in Minnesota, and he and his four sons also had a broom factory. (Their product was a real necessity -- think of women trying to keep a homestead out on the prairie tidy without a proper broom.) In about 1909, this burned down, but a few years later the older sons opened another broom factory, which was still going in the 1960's. We visited my grandfather there, and still have some of his handmade pieces. They're fifty years old,  and they're beautiful, practical, and completely untouched by plastic.

The Carpenter Bros broom factory

My grandfather -- and my mom, too -- had the greatest respect for practical knowledge. He could do practically anything himself; in fact, he impressed the heck out of me once when I was seven years old, and with his own hands he sewed the loose eye back onto my stuffed bear!

*NOTE: I had to change the title of this post because it kept being linked to a popular movie. Sorry about that!

A New Eden

Okay, so it's true that there are probably millions of descendants of the Mayflower passengers. In the first year of the settlement about half of them died, but the ones who survive were tough. And they tended to have big families. John Howland and Elizabeth Tillley had ten children, and they all had big, healthy families.

One of the amazing things about getting to know these early settlers is how extremely healthy and long-lived they were (if they survived at all), especially compared to the folks back home. From dirty, smoky, crowded cities and small tenant farms they moved to an area rich in farmland, fish, and timber, completely free of pollution. Certainly there was hunger, cold, and disease; but when they did get food it was pure and fresh. No plastic refuse clogged the streams; no nitrogen dioxide or sulfer dioxide poisoned the air. Imagine how clear the sky must have been, day and night!

The Waters Farm in Sutton, MA

These first two survivors both lived to be very old for those days. And a lot of their descendants did, too, at least the ones in my background. Amongst my grandfathers' forebears, the Waters family settled in Sutton, MA; the first Waters to arrive in Sutton, Richard, was born in 1700, and was a third-generation North American. He lived to be 87 -- which is pretty old now. His great grandfather, who lived all his life in London, died at the age of 39. The family became major apple growers, providing high-quality fruit for food -- and cider.. My grandfather said that his mother kept up the family tradition of making sure that each child always had an apple a day, for health.

These long-lived people also had very large families, eight or ten children not being unusual. So it's not really surprising that the first settlers are usually credited with literally millions of descendants. But it's still meaningful to discover that some great people are your actual blood relatives. I don't really know if it's a natural human instinct to seek a clan, or simply something our culture values. But I must say it is a great satisfaction to me to share certain forefathers with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maude Adams, and Franklin Roosevelt! Not to mention Dr. Spock, Christopher Lloyd, and, my favorite of all -- Humphrey Bogart.

Cousin Humphrey and friend

Information about the historic Waters Farm is here:
http://www.watersfarm.com/

It Must Be the Dutch Blood....

...because I've always liked tulips, blue and white porcelain, and cocoa!

The Old Country, as my grandmother used to say

The Influence of Ethnicity: But Why?

A few years ago I also provided samples for DNA testing by 23andme.com, and among the analyses they offer is a breakdown of your ethnic background. For example, you could find you had 50% Irish, 23% German, and 27% Norwegian.

In some ways mine was remarkably boring; we certainly didn't find forgotten Polynesians or even Lapps in our past. But on the other hand, it was actually more diverse than I knew until very recently. Because it turned out that my Mayflower ancestor was merely the first surprise.

I had always assumed -- through sheer ignorance, really -- that our Early American forebears were basically British immigrants to Massachusetts. And many of them were. But many were Dutch families avoiding the Eighty-Years war with Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. Now, I imagined myself to have a pretty good grasp of European history, but quite frankly I knew practically nothing about this.

Other European immigrants fleeing religious persecution were the Protestant French Huguenots, many of whom settled in New York. This at least I had heard of! Especially since it has been a frequent subject for fiction. But I did not know that sizable numbers of Huguenots were early American settlers, nor that they were my ancestors.

The Dutch settle on Staten Island (with their stuff)

Now I not only feel like a dope for never learning these facets of American history, but I am very eager indeed to find out more about it. The Dutch family patriarch, Thomas Janse Van Dyke (spellings vary) apparently packed up his whole family, including grown children, and moved to what is now Long Island City in 1661. Then it was New Netherlands. But the area wasn't restricted to Hollanders; it was a pretty cosmopolitan mix of immigrants from various European countries, traders as well as farmers, who did have one thing in common -- they were largely Nonconformists, or Dissenters, or other rebels against the establishment.

So two of the major themes of American life were present right from the start; true, these settlers wanted to make a lot of money, but they were also ready to stand and fight over a matter of conscience. They refused to be pushed around.

I was just discovering these unknown forbears through research when I received my DNA report of my Ancestry Composition, as they call it:

36.1%  British & Irish, 31.1%  Scandinavian, 3.9% French & German, 1.0%  Finnish,  26.9% Broadly Northern European.

There it is.

My mom's side of the family was always taken with Scottish history, and the romance of the Highlands, because they identified with it; those were our people. Now I'm suddenly interested in Huguenots and the history of New Amsterdam -- why is this? Maybe it's because life is so complicated that we need some artificial categories to help us sort it out. I'm sort of shocked at myself for looking at history through such a personal lens!

Mayflower - the Voyage from Hell

There's an excellent ebook about the Mayflower:

 Mayflower: the Voyage From Hell

I feel proud of them for just surviving!

Genealogy and Me: To Begin At the Beginning

For a few years now, since materials have become so widely available on the internet, I've been doing genealogical research. For decades, whenever my mother and her sisters would get together, eventually they would sit down at the dining room table with cups of coffee and discuss their family history. Their mother, my grandmother, was one of 17 children, 13 of whom grew up and had children of their own -- so there was a lot of family to keep track of on that side alone.

But, frankly, listening to these discussions for all those years, they seemed like a pretty normal midwestern family. Maggie McGillivray, my grandmother, was the daughter of a Scottish immigrant, Hugh McGillivray,  and his wife, Jane Irvine, who was born in Canada of a Scottish mother and and Irish father. They moved from Canada to North Dakota, and then Minnesota, when good farmland became available for homesteading and supplies and other perks were provided to qualifying homesteaders. Many families in the area had basically the same story, whether they came from Scotland, Germany, or Finland.

My grandfather's family had roots in old New England; his parents moved from Massachusetts to Minnesota for pretty much the same reasons. Or so everyone thought. My grandfather's background  wasn't usually the subject of these discussions, and I think this is because of the sad fact that his mother died when he was 13, and never really talked about her family with him. And that's too bad, because there were certainly a lot of surprises for me when I began my research, and I'm sure he would have liked to know what I found out.

The first big surprise was discovering our Mayflower ancestor. Yes! I know my mom would have loved to know that -- not out of snootiness (which would be pretty silly, since our ancestor was an indentured servant), but out of love of history. (As a family, we all enjoyed trips to historical sites and reconstructions; I think I was 12 years old when we went to Williamsburg.)

Our family's first arrival in America was John Howland, who was born in England, and sailed for the New World on the Mayflower in 1620, at the age of 19. He was a servant to one of the other passengers, John Carver. But my favorite fact about him is this: he was the one who fell overboard! Apparently he sank quite deep underwater but was able to grasp a line thrown to him and so was rescued. He later married Elizabeth Tilley, another passenger whose entire family died of various illnesses in the colony, and they had 10 children -- and probably tens of thousands of descendants.

But how precarious our lives are! What if he hadn't been able to reach the lifeline? What if he, too, had succumbed to cholera, or whatever it was that swept the colony? A lot of us wouldn't be here today.