This is my first post for the GFHC, which I just came across recently. I was prompted to join because of all the fascinating tales other members of the community have posted, and because this year I delved into my own family history in a big way for the first time, with some surprising results.
If you had asked me a year ago today, I would have told you my ancestry was 75% Irish and 25% some sort of Russian. My mother’s family is from Brooklyn, New York and my father’s family has its roots in Massachusetts, where I live, though I’ve also lived in Brooklyn at various times.
For the first 36 years of my life, I understood my ancestry like this:
Father’s father: 100% Irish
Father’s mother: 100% Irish
Mother’s father 100% Irish
Mother’s mother: 100% Russian, but with plenty of confusion (a story for another day)
Much to my non-Irish grandmother’s occasional consternation, basically everyone in my family identifies as Irish-American. There were plenty of Irish in their Brooklyn neighborhood, so many of the family’s closest friends and neighbors were Irish. I grew up around plenty of shamrocks and claddaghs and worry stones and folk music and step-dance classes. And, as it turned out, both of her daughters married 100% Irish men. Or so we thought.
For me, 2012 will always be the year we re-elected Barack Obama and sent Elizabeth Warren to the Senate, the year wheels came completely off the Red Sox , and the year I learned a lot of unexpected things about my family history.
All of this started in a very random way. Last Christmas I went to New York for a few days to visit the family there. I went to visit the grave where my (maternal) grandfather is buried. It’s a large plot, with a large stone, in the oldest Catholic cemetery run by the Diocese of Brooklyn. There are no individual names on the stone, just six very Irish last names. My grandfather’s last name and his mother’s maiden name. Easy. A third was the married name of my grandfather’s aunt. The other three names were of cousins of some kind, names I’d heard bandied about but never fully understood how they fit in to the picture.
I asked everyone who’s still there to ask but nobody knew much in the way of details. On New Year’s Eve, back in Massachusetts, I absentmindedly conducted a number of Google searches for my older relatives. To my astonishment, I found a family tree site by a man in Belfast I’d never heard of that included my maternal grandfather, his siblings and parents, aunts and uncles, and other members of the family I’d never heard of before. From there I was off to the races. I figured out who the man in Belfast was and got in touch with him (yet another story for another day). Then, at my wife’s insistence, we joined ancestry.com and a couple of other sites and I had a new obsession.
The first mild surprise came a week or so into January when I shifted from my mother’s family to my father’s. My great-grandfather Lee, the father of my father’s mother, turned up in the WWI draft registrations. The card had his date of birth and his place of birth: Hartland, Vermont. This was news to me and my father.
With the new information, I next discovered Lee’s 1900 Census record. He lived in Vermont with his parents and sisters, listed under a middle name which it turns out was his given name. He reversed the order of his names because he didn’t like it. In that 1900 census document came another surprise: Lee’s father (whom I’d never heard of) was born in Vermont in the 1840s and his parents, in turn, were listed as born in New Hampshire. Lee’s mother (whom I’d also never heard of) was likewise born in Vermont, as were her parents.
Here’s what made this strange. My great-grandfather Lee married my great-grandmother in a Catholic church in 1913. At that time, he told his bride’s Irish Catholic family that he was Irish Catholic. His last name is found in Ireland as well as England, making this plausible. But now it appeared that all four of his grandparents were born in Vermont or New Hampshire, around the 1820s at the latest. There were few people, and virtually no Irish Catholics, in either state in the 1820s. Was Lee not Irish, or Catholic, at all?
Little by little the research pieces fell into place. A record revealed the exact birth town of Lee’s father, clear on the other side of Vermont (confirming my hunch it was the same person). Following the line back, I learned that the first ancestor in that family to come to America, following the paternal line all the way back had landed in Plymouth in 1643. Not an Irishman or Catholic in the bunch, just a bunch of New England Puritans who’d fought in King Phillip’s War, the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Along the way they’d helped found a number of towns in New England, and even over the border in the traditionally English Protestant Eastern Townships area of Québec, where some of my direct ancestors and their relatives are buried.
This was astonishing information, but there was more to come. I next traced the women in Lee’s father’s ancestry. More of the same, and then some. Revolutionary War British prisoners, cousins of John and John Quincy Adams, and one ancestor who sailed on the Mayflower.
Maybe Lee’s mother, she of the Vermont-born parents, was Irish Catholic? That theory was dispelled when the town clerk in Hartland, Vermont sent me Lee’s birth certificate. Now I had his mother’s birth name and town of birth. Her ancestry was as Yankee as Lee’s father’s. More Revolutionary War soldiers, people of high rank in the Plymouth Colony from its earliest days, and first settlers of literally dozens of towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
It turns out I’m directly descended from George Morton, confidant of William Brewster and William Bradford, who stayed behind in London to handle the colony’s affairs there and publish Mourt’s Relation, the first printed account of the Plymouth Colony (I now call him “the man too important to sail on the Mayflower”). I’m also descended from his son Nathaniel Morton, for many years secretary of the Plymouth Colony and the author of New England’s Memorial, the first such account published in America.
And many more: Roger Conant, the founder of Salem and sometimes called the “first governor” of the Massachusetts Bay Colony since he was in charge in that part of the state before the colony was officially founded (Until the late 1600s the Plymouth Colony in today’s southeastern Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Bay Colony to its north were separate entities). Thomas Faunce, a Plymouth Church Elder responsible for the Plymouth Rock legend. Plus a whole host of other fascinating, tough people who built a new life in the wilderness and were most definitely neither Irish nor Catholic. I’ve already seen, looking through some of the GFHC posts, that some of you are descended from some of the same people.
All this came as a severe shock to me. If you live in Massachusetts, it’s hard to escape the history in this area. Plymouth, of course, has a Mayflower replica and a number of Pilgrim museums. Salem has sites commemorating the 1692 witch hysteria and other important historical events. Boston has the famous Freedom Trail of Revolutionary era sites, as do Lexington and Concord. Every town around here has many houses dating from the 1700s, if not the 1600s, and old, old churches. At each town line you have a white sign telling you you’re entering such-and-such town, established sixteen-something. And the names of so many of the towns and the streets are very English names. All of this is my history as an American and a New Englander. But I always it wasn’t necessarily my personal history. Now I learn that, actually, it is.
How did this make me feel? Great. And full of existential angst, as I’ll explain next time.