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Your Turn |
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It is both a frustration and a blessing that every question my research answers raises three more, equally enticing. I visit a place where some ancestor’s memory lingers and find there kindred memories and the makings of stories I hadn’t expected. I gather images and documents and take them back to Chankly with every intention of integrating them into this account of my burgeoning debt to Hepzibah, only to store them away while I attend to other amazing corners of the fabric.
So, the best I can do is to point you to as many as possible of the loose ends I’m not going to get around to, in the hope that some of them will attract your attention and that you can have as much fun with them as I would have had. Maybe you’ll have a Hepzibah of your own. Indeed, maybe it will be given to me to have been your Hepzibah, so that you can blame me hereafter for disrupting your lives by turning your hearts to your fathers and distracting you from much else that might have occupied these precious corners of your time. That’s an opprobrium I could brag about. I’ll now assign a new color in these pages to draw your attention to diverse interesting research opportunities that I’ve encountered, followed up to a temporary pausing-point, and shall now leave to my survivors, so that you can share in my sense of satisfaction at having brought new shared glories to our family’s attention. Until I change my mind, how about this nice green, denoting a “green light” for continuing progress? Throughout my “I Blame Hepzibah” collection, a “Do You Know” link appears in the lower right-hand corner of each page. When clicked, it takes you to a growing list of surprising connections between our family members and world history, over the past thousand years or so. Makes a good trivia quiz for young kinfolk. Or us oldsters, for that matter. At the bottom of the “Do You Know” list, a prominent green Your Turn link transports you to this page and offers this evolving list of variably-exciting bits of our family story which I won’t live to pursue any further and that may suggest lines of investigation that will reward your efforts. I invite you to consider looking into them, when the time is right for you and the Spirit moves. Easier yet, I just decided to put a “Your Turn” link at the bottom of the very first screen you’ll see, when your browser goes looking for “commensa.net”: Welcome! I Blame Hepzibah! Your Turn! |
“Treasure Cities”— places where our family has left memories. You may be able to visit them, but if not, clever Internet research, guided by the corresponding Sections of this collection, can help you expand our family’s awareness of them and how they fit into our story:
“Buried Treasures”— major resting-places of our kin:
“Pedigrees and Descendancies”— For Temple work, or just to connect us up to our impressive pioneer ancestries and cousinages:
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Y O U R T U R N : Between 1958 and 2002, we resided mostly within the boundaries of the old New Towne, and I take it as an honor and a distinction to have been referred to as a “Cambridge Character.” We were privileged to live most of our lives where a very large portion of our family’s New England pioneer history took place, and I’ve captured only a few fragments of its richness in my “I Blame Hepzibah” accounts, particularly in the Section named NewTowne.
Anyone who wishes to contribute further will also find valuable material in
In particular, a diligent descendant may be moved, some day, to check into our kinship to Abijah and Sarah Child(s), whose family tragedy I’ve documented. Not pioneers in the immigrant sense: they lived and suffered at the time of the Revolution and rest in the Old Lexington Burial Ground. I suspect they’re cousins of ours, fellow descendants of Watertown founder Ephraim Child, in which case Ephraim belongs in the chart of our descent from the founders with 9GGF John Child. |
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Y O U R T U R N : A great deal of our colorful medieval heritage comes up in the context of the town of Carlisle, even though its territory bore other names when it was originally settled by several of our New England pioneers, and so I’ve presented it in my Carlisle Section. That’s probably what I’ll work on first, if I’m vouchsafed time and strength to undertake any of these residual projects on this side of the Veil.
As it turns out, we had direct ancestors on both sides of the table at Runnymede, when our reluctant and regrettable ancestor King John affixed his seal to the historic Magna Carta. One of the troublesome barons (widely considered heroes of world political history) who brought him to that pass was Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, and I’ve seen reasonably believable assertions that Saher was also an ancestor of Olive Welby Farwell, the Middlesex County pioneer who brought our Plantagenet heritage to these shores in the 1630s. His biography has to be a page-turner, and the stories of his descendants through whom we come, down to Grandma Olive, surely would make as good reading as those of our Plantagenet connections whom I’ve included toward the end of my Carlisle section. My library at Chankly includes
Granted time and strength to enjoy it properly, I’d probably also apply for membership in the National Society Magna Charta Dames and Barons and perhaps other lineage societies, to go along with my affiliations with the Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Sons of the American Revolution, although I’ve thus far resisted numerous similar temptations. The Mayflower group is the only one I’ve been active in, and it’s been a rewarding association. In case you hadn’t noticed, we do have a remarkable collection of ancestors. Incidentally, the founding officers of the Second District of Carlisle included our 6GGF Nathan Munroe, (Hepzibah’s dad) then aged 64, in two roles: as a member of the Committee of Safety and also as a Tythingman. Whatever that entailed. It’s on my research agenda, unless you beat me to it. |
Y O U R T U R N : The obelisk there that remembers the names of the founders who accompanied Grandpa Reverend Hooker to Hartford bears, among others, these surnames—each a researchable line of ours—that I can already trace back to direct ancestors in Hartford’s early years:
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My research into these lines hasn’t extended much beyond their initial segments in the New Towne. In particular, what I’ve seen of the Stillman and Hurd histories in southern Connecticut and the Hartford area titillate my loving curiosity; maybe you’ll be moved to look into them further.
I still have the photos we took in July of 2001 at the Ancient Center Church Burying Ground: they await your pleasure in a folder named
Jay Mack Holbrook, an old Worcester yokefellow and a fellow sealer in the early days of the Boston Temple, also authored (entre autres) a volume of Connecticut history and genealogy:
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Y O U R T U R N : In the course of our 2004 east-coast homecoming hegira, on June 16 (the tender anniversary of our Mammy’s accident) we paid our only visit to Groton, Middlesex County, the birthplace of our Plantagenet ancestor Abigail Woods Wheeler, and to neighboring Lancaster, a truly deep-rooted Treasure City for our family; they surely deserve at least one Section in this record. All we carried away, alas, was a collection of 77 photos, almost all of gravestones; certainly a starting-point for a proper record, but only that. They reside in a folder labeled
I’d resolved to pay a visit to these centers of our Middlesex County colonial family history, back in the summer of 2002, when my camera and I spent another fascinating afternoon in the “HistGen” library in Boston, capturing many pages of Lancaster history, including vital records, epitaphs, and, fascinatingly, the autographs of a number of our ancestors and of their fellow 17th-century pioneers. I really ache to add a Lancaster section to “I Blame Hepzibah”: its absence, as C S Lewis wrote in the last year of his life to Walter Hooper, makes a cavity like a drawn tooth! The folder at
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Y O U R T U R N : The Nauvoo2001 Section reports on our visits in October and November of 2001, on our way to and from the West coast. It was among my earliest ventures into hypertext and has required several revisions and reorganizations since, with the most recent happening only this past January, 2020. The current version is on the Web.
As long as we are blessed with family members in Keokuk and therefore in the Nauvoo Stake, and as others pass through as tourists or missionaries, we’ll be in a position to accumulate updates and expansions: our Nauvoo experience, do let’s rejoice, is not over yet. My library also includes a couple of volumes I picked up in the bookstore that the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) operates in Nauvoo:
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Y O U R T U R N : When I visited Sandisfield for the third and last time in 2009, Norton Fletcher and Willard Platt, my esteemed hosts, were my guests for lunch in the Gentlemen’s Parlor, where they permitted me to snap these portraits, after a day of photographing priceless records of their community, with emphasis on my family, particularly in the early years. I’ve made a start at organizing the information in these images as the “Sandisfield-Colebrook” Section of this record. I pray fervently that some diligent descendant will be moved to dig into them and expand the Section into a coherent record of our family’s life in the Berkshires. They reside among my computer files, in a folder named
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Y O U R T U R N : As in Sandisfield the day before, I spent my final visit to
Colebrook chasing around with the excellent Bob Grigg and snapping photos of various records. These images, together with a folder full of Colebrook property maps that I don’t expect to live to study adequately, are also at your disposal in the folder labeled
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Y O U R T U R N : Valerie and I visited Freedom several times in the course of our family visits and research travels. Most of what we gathered went into the OliverAndHannah Section, but much remains to be uncovered and incorporated into our record. Much of the earliest Latter-day Saint missionary work in the 1830s, both to Indians and “Gentiles,” took place in Cattaraugus County, and our Wheeler and Decker lines first met the Restoration there, at the hands of Joseph Smith and other early missionaries. The Freedom Branch (with whose resurrected congregation we worshipped on one trip) is the only unit of the Restored Church whose presiding officer was designated by name in the Doctrine and Covenants. If other family members were moved to visit, they would surely find additional treasures.
Grandpa Oliver Wheeler III, the father of Grandma Harriet Page Wheeler Decker Young, is buried here, and we were guests in the home he built around 1827 in the village of Elton. It’s an affecting story. An extensive history of the region is in my files at
Furthermore, after correcting many errors and resolving some distressing puzzles in our family’s Wheeler and Decker stories, we were left around 2010 with a pair of dense pages I’ve entitled “Next Questions” in my “Oliver and Hannah” Section. It’s now Your Turn, and I do hope some descendant will find them as intriguing as I have:
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Y O U R T U R N : On 19 February 2002, four days after my revelatory birthday visit to Salem, at the great library on Newbury Street, I took thirteen pictures of documents relating to the distressing story of young Grandma Harriet Page Wheeler’s family’s
sojourn in Salem from 1805-1815. They occupy the folder named
I’ve never since made it back to this Treasure City and now don’t expect to, but it will surely reward any descendant’s further investigations. Via Grandma Hannah Ashby Wheeler, our nearest ancestor in this cluster, we have heritage through distinguished Salem pioneer lines bearing surnames including
Much earlier, of course, it was at Salem in September, 1628, that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded. |
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Y O U R T U R N : Of all the unfinished tasks I’m leaving to my survivors, this may be the most embarrassing. Decades before Hepzibah obtruded, Mammy called my attention to the Founders’ Monument in the next town over from our various Middlesex County residences. Captain Robert Seely, the Pioneer, turned out to be kin, but not an ancestor. But seven others honored on the Monument are indeed our direct progenitors and candidates for descendancy research on the model of my efforts for the Munroes, Fishers, McLeans, and Russells, none of which qualifies as complete.
So, dear descendants, please understand that our hearts do still remain to be turned effectively to the Barrons, the Balls, the Benjamins, the Warrens, the Bigelows, the Stearnses, and the Prescotts. Just for starters. The first book ever published by the first significant genealogical society in America was Henry Bond’s Genealogies of the families and descendants of the early settlers of Watertown, Mass., (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1850). It’s a rather massive book. Every library with serious genealogical pretensions owns a copy. I used to have (but can’t now seem to locate) a searchable compact disc of its contents, but data availability won’t be a problem, if you decide to dig into its content: there’s a whole lot there. Happy digging! |
Y O U R T U R N : The This Is The Place Section documents our family’s central participation in Brigham Young’s arrival via Emigration Canyon into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. My library holds at your disposal some primary accounts of that event in
These records enclose some wonderful family stories, such as Dow’s own account of his miraculous healing in Kirtland and the lesson he learned by declining with excessive modesty a calling from the Prophet. Maybe I’ll get to incorporate those into our record; if not, I’ll count on you. |
| Y O U R T U R N : A clever descendant may some day see fit to expand the little slideshow named “Brigham City Cemetery” that leads off this collection (alphabetically, at least) into what the FindAGrave people call a “virtual cemetery,” chasing down the sepultures of the other descendants of Artie and Alfie Seely and incorporating snapshots of our cousins and of their gravestones. |
| Y O U R T U R N : Ten stops may suffice for a single visit to this large cemetery, especially on foot. But this section, as it stands, comes nowhere near covering our connections hereabouts. Contributors may also choose to venture to other nearby burying-places, in particular the Young Family Cemetery at the other end of Salt Lake’s Avenues, within sight of the Temple. After all, that’s where we must go when we wish to pay our respects to Grandma Lucy Ann Decker Seely Young, as well as to our distinguished Uncle/Step-Grandpa/President/Prophet Brigham Young. |
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Y O U R T U R N : The bones of Thomas Rogers, our Pilgrim Sire who did not survive the first winter, probably rest in the sarcophagus on the top of Cole’s Hill in Plymouth that bears his name and those of his fellow non-survivors. I haven’t investigated the sepultures of Stephen Hopkins and his family, although it’s my impression that their first three generations lie mostly in southeastern Massachusetts. Our Mayflower ancestors of the fourth generation emigrated, of course, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires, and I address their story in the Sandisfield-Colebrook Section .
There’s obviously room for a lot of research to expand and improve my Section entitled “MayflowerDescendants.” As it stands, it offers ample facts and references and the opportunity, should you so choose, to sign up with your friendly neighborhood Society of Mayflower Descendants. After a decade as Secretary of the Utah Society, I do warmly recommend their fellowship. And if you’re in my line of descent, you qualify to piggy-back on it. You may also wish to deepen and widen the Mayflower research I’ve done: the Twining, Snow, Elkins, Stillman, Hurd, and Seymour lines, in particular, intersect with ours in ways I’d like to understand better. My library at Chankly includes two of the Society’s “Silver Books”: • Volume Two, including five generations of the descendants of Thomas Rogers, and • Volume Six, covering those of Stephen Hopkins. Rumors persist, by the way, that we have Alden heritage also, but I haven’t encountered any convincing particulars. And I’m not going to devote waning energy to the project, at this late stage of my researches. |
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Y O U R T U R N :
I’ve invested considerable time in the Old Burial Grounds in Harvard Square and Lexington; if they fascinate you as they have me, you can probably refine my writeups. Watertown, on the other hand, I’ve clearly neglected, and you’d do our record a real favor to inventory our family graves there. Our Bigelows in particular are still fairly numerous among current residents.
Many of the Middlesex pioneers who started out in Watertown, moreover, went somewhere else to settle down, die, and be buried. You could trace those emigrations and put together a coherent account of the Watertown diaspora. I’ve seen comments on its extent, but I don’t think the literature includes anything comprehensive. |
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Y O U R T U R N : In a sense, my family history odyssey began here, well off the proverbial beaten track, where Granny Hepzibah didn’t really quite reprove my sloth as I deserved. I visited her on Memorial Day, brought her roses, reported to her at length in the drizzle, and then wandered around this classic New England cemetery, snapping pictures of the Munroe stones I saw, along with a few others I was able to recognize. They appear in Granny’s Section. If I’d prepared better, I’d have known whom else to look for. Bottom line: there’s still plenty of room for a descendant to do a better job in New Hampshire.
While you’re at it, it shouldn’t be difficult to locate, photograph, and document the sepulture of our New Hampshire pioneeering cousin Jason Hartwell Theodore Newell. I don’t think he’s buried in his home town, but that’s a researchable question. His life story illustrates the enterprising spirit of nineteenth-century New England, and his physiognomy puts me in mind of Ebenezer Scrooge. An enterprising student of our roots could doubtless gather the necessary facts in an hour or so of chasing them on the Web. Then it would be easy to fill in that gap in my GrannyHepzibah Section. |
On our second visit to the Little Neck cemetery, in the late summer of 2007, we snapped some fifty photos, available to you in a folder named
My intention was and remains to chase down those kinships and either to extend the LittleNeck section or to make a new section for them. But as my 80th birthday approaches, next February, and as so much else clamors for my attention in this record and elsewhere, it’s looking more and more as if I’ll have to leave that task for some faithful descendant who will have found my “It’s All Hepzibah’s Fault” collection worthy of interest and extension. |
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Y O U R T U R N :
In contrast to other family Treasure Cities such as Cambridge and Watertown, in Massachusetts, which served our colonial forebears largely as jumping-off points, our Fishers and allied families tended to stay in Hunterdon County long after the pioneering generations went to their rest. So, Hunterdon’s institutions, places, and cemeteries are replete with our family names.
A lot of our relatives were born, lived, died, and/or were buried in this vicinity, which bears the charming label of “Ringoes.” Named, we’re told, after a tavern operated there a long time ago by one John Ringo. One of the roads is still labeled with his name. On the 7th of July, 2015, we were visiting our beloved Ralstons in Springfield, New Jersey, about an hour away from Flemington. For a family activity, we drove there and deployed ourselves and our iPhones in the cemetery at Ringoes where we knew many of our kin are buried. The resulting photos are in a folder named
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Y O U R T U R N : In preparation for the construction of the Boston Temple at the end of Appleton Street, Granny Hepzibah (bless and “blame” her) awoke me to the purposes that have structured the residue of my mortal life. Assigned to identify 35 deceased kinfolk for the Temple’s cornerstone, I extracted the names and relationships of 3,888 fellow descendants of William and Mary Munroe from Richard S. Munroe’s 1966 book, History and Genealogy of the Lexington, Massachusetts Munroes. Subsequently, I obtained a copy of
The central product of my Munroe researches is a Reunion1 family file and equivalent GEDCOM named
1Reunion is the premier genealogical program for Macintosh. If you don’t have it and don’t want to get it, I’ll gladly translate any of my .familyfile records into a GEDCOM, so that you can load it into another program of your choice. |
Y O U R T U R N : On the general model of my Munroe research, to provide eligible deceased relatives for my own Temple work, I undertook research for a few years into the descendants of my sixth great-grandparents Johann Peter Fischer (1698–1775) and Anna Maria Jung (1701–1775), the immigrant patrilineal ancestors of Grandpa Seely’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Fisher Seely {1839-1885). I drew my sources and documentation from ancestry.com, contributing to familysearch.org those who needed Temple ordinances. The resulting Reunion familyfile record, with its equivalent GEDCOM translation, filed as
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Y O U R T U R N : The McLean Descendancy project investigated the descendants of William McLean (1707–1785) and Elizabeth Rule (1707–1784), of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Grandma Elizabeth Jane’s matrilineal immigrant ancestors. When I moved on to the Russell descendency in 2020, I’d connected up 14,920 persons, of whom 4,603 are direct blood descendants of William and Elizabeth. Another 2,054 are spouses of those descendants, and 3,310 are parents of those spouses. The other 4,953 are there for other reasons. The resulting Reunion family file and GEDCOM are entitled
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| Y O U R T U R N : When the Temples open up again for proxy work, if I’m still here, I plan to resume daily work on the descendants of William and Martha Russell, our 10th great grandparents and our Munroes’ across-the-street neighbors in Lexington. You’re welcome to join me in this project, though I’d suggest and prefer that you pick another from this homework list. If you really want to investigate the Russells in parallel, please give me a ring (801-447-4774 -- a beautiful number, don’t you concur?), so that we can avoid stumbling over each other’s researching toes. |
Y O U R T U R N : Even though “I Blame Hepzibah,” it was my nearest and most influential Seely relative, my Mammy, Leola Seely Anderson, who laid the motivational foundations of all the joy I’ve had in this work, even if she didn’t stay in this world long enough to take much pleasure in her success. These pages preserve rather a lot of Seely memories, scattered among their Sections:
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Y O U R T U R N : If anybody in our family has looked in any depth into the ancestry of our great-great-great-grandpa Isaac Decker, I haven’t seen the results. He did not immigrate from Holland, as Frank Esshom would have us believe: in fact, he was a sixth-generation American with roots among the earliest settlers of New Netherlands. Some family member who isn’t scared off by Dutch, German, and other European names could do us all a big service by summarizing and documenting Grandpa Isaac’s heritage. Just among his first six ancestral generations, the Family Search Family Tree attributes birth-places in the United States, Germany, British Colonial America, Netherlands, Prussia, Sweden, New Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Grandpa grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church in upstate New York.
Lord, if it be Thy will to grant me another twenty years, I’ll make sense of all that, for the edification of posterity: as an inveterate onomast, I rejoice in exotic nomenclature. Failing that, Lord, please move some faithful descendant to tackle the job. In due time. |
| Y O U R T U R N : A decade ago, I personalized The Book of Uncles for each of my then-living grandchildren, and some of them have since confessed to enjoying it. It makes no claim to complete or even adequate coverage, and I’d rejoice if any descendant were moved to expand it to include one or more favorite uncles. I might even pretend to be surprised that none of the sweet feminists in the family has yet perceived an opportunity to celebrate our “Aunties” in a symmetrical fashion. Hmmm? |
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