2002—Memoirs: Shakespeare, Seely, and Samaritans

A memoir-fragment by Richard B. “Andy” Anderson, prepared as ticket-of-admission to Clark Abt’s Memoir Group, meeting at 19 Follen Street in Cambridge, 18 September 2002

Returning to the States in April, 1964, from thirty months as a “Mormon” missionary in France, I seized the opportunity to stop over in England. It was the Bard’s 400th birthday, and my English-teacher parents had made sure that I’d be eager to make the Stratford connection. Education was always a central theme at our house, despite the inroads dispersion was making by then on what Pappy liked to call “our team.” Signed up for a one-day bus circuit and enjoyed my first exposure to England, with several of the usual Stations of the Tour: Brasenose College at Oxford, peacocks at Warwick Castle, hot cross buns for tea at Charing Cross, and, of course, Stratford. Where, in the elbow-to-elbow company of the entire English-speaking world (or so it seemed), I also waved at Prince Philip’s helicopter as he arrived in bright afternoon sunshine for the commemorative ceremonies. A memoirable visit, to be sure. But the part that I remember most poignantly was a bit less conventional. My Mammy had “awared” me (to borrow a perennially-useful expression from Stevie Bornstein) of ninth great-grandparents Robert and Mary Seely. The story, as she had it, was that they were married in St. Stephen’s Church, Coleman Street, London, in 1629, and that they emigrated the next year to Salem, Massachusetts, and thence to join the founders of Watertown. Might I perhaps find the original marriage record and confirm that part of the story for her? You didn’t know my mother, Leola Seely Anderson; that’s your loss. Suffice it to say that her gentlest request was, however tritely, my command. So, the last day of my London stay, I went walking in the old City. The map showed Coleman Street clearly, only a couple of quirky blocks ending just across the way from the blocky, monumental Bank of England. Two complete ambulations of Coleman Street in each direction revealed no St. Stephen’s Church. More disquietingly, most of the buildings appeared relatively new, surely none dating back more than a century or so.

Falling back five yards to punt, I noted on the map that Jewry Street might be construed as a rough continuation of Coleman at its southern end, and so I wandered down into a tangle of old City streets, shortly winding up on Walbrook Street in front of St. Stephen’s Walbrook. Aha! Maybe in 1629 Coleman Street extended farther than it does now. And maybe when they renamed the street, they followed suit with the church. I entered. Before my eyes could adjust to the reverential gloom, a clerically-collared gentleman in his thirties asked how he might help. He delivered the bad news first: St. Stephen’s Walbrook had been St. Stephen’s Walbrook for ever. Never St. Stephen’s Coleman Street. Worse yet, the latter church had perished in the Blitz. But he did have good news: the records from Coleman Street had been rescued and were preserved in the very building where we stood. So the kindly vicar (for it was he; I’m mortified to have forgotten his name) led me down the old stone stairs into the crypt of St. Stephen’s Walbrook, past the phone banks of the Samaritans’ suicide hot-line, to a room full of marvelous old volumes, where he found and showed me the signatures of Robert and Mary Seely (both literate, by the way, which didn’t go without saying, in those days), affixed on their wedding day in 1629. Robert’s name, by the way, appears in stone with 114 others on the Founders’ Monument near Watertown Square. We’re told that he laid out Watertown and drew the first map, still extant, of allocations of farms and homestalls in that pioneering community. He subsequently performed similar duties as a founder of Wethersfield, Connecticut, and later yet of New Haven. When “the world” finally began to encroach even on the rock-ribbed Puritan enclave of New Haven (they were negotiating to merge with—horrors!—the flesh-pots of Hartford), he pulled up stakes, signed a special-purpose covenant, and cast his elderly and widowed lot with the founders of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he’s probably buried. All this according to a little volume at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, entitled, The Life and Times of Captain Robert Seely, the Pioneer.

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