Stories about my Mother 12
Almost none of my family, on either side, that I can see, stayed in Europe. The McElhinnys, on my mom’s side. were still in Northern Ireland in the 1800s but everyone else seems to have left Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands in the 1600s.
As the Age of Discovery revealed land previously unknown to the Europeans, thousands of my antecedents seem to have, with one single common thought, jumped onboard creaky unreliable boats and sped off into the barely known. They rushed in to settle and exploit whatever resources they could get their hands on.
Within a hundred years, they were spread out across the globe. Few of them ever really went back. My father’s people made landfall in the New World near the original British settlement in Jamestown and eventually migrated inland and to the south. Many of my mother’s people made their way to India, but a huge number of them came over to America and fanned out across the north. It turns out that my mom’s ancestors are planted in colonial graveyards all up and down the New England coast.
James Morgan was born in Wales in 1607. His family moved east into England to Bristol. That was sometime before 1636 when he, and two of his brothers, then made the journey across the Atlantic to Boston.
It’s impossible for me to read that sentence and not picture them getting off the Amtrak train in Back Bay Station and catching the T to wherever they were going. In truth the Mayflower settlement had only been established sixteen years before. Boston, itself, was only founded in 1630. They arrived six years later. James and his brothers did not catch the T to anywhere.
In March of 1630 a fleet of eleven ships carrying about seven hundred Puritans made their way to what we now consider to be Boston. They established the Massachusetts Bay Colony named after the tribe of people who were already living there. Over the next ten years nearly 20,000 people followed them over to the area in what is now called the Great Migration. James and his brothers were very much a part of this wave.
The people who came often had some education and some means. They were leaving Britain in order not to be members of the Church of England. They believed that the English church was too much like the Catholic Church in Rome and that all ceremonies and ways of worshiping not explicitly outlined in the Bible should be dropped. The description of these people as Puritans was initially a term of contempt used by their enemies. Like the LGBTQ community’s embrace of the word Queer, the Puritans embraced the word and made it their own.
The Puritans were just as rigid in their beliefs as the people in the institutions they left behind were, which led to many schisms. People broke away from the main body and formed groups like the Quakers and the Shakers and many others.
James came over as an indentured servant. In May of 1645, he had fulfilled his work obligation and was made a free man. In 1650 he received in own land grant in what is now New London, Connecticut. A few years later, he sold the land. Along with a few other settlers, he and his family made their way across the Thames River to a larger tract. He became very active in the colony’s political life and was nine times chosen to represent the New London Plantation in Hartford.
He lived to be 78 years old. His granddaughter Elizabeth married the son of Mayflower passengers William and Mary Brewster’s granddaughter Hannah. He and other members of his family are all buried in the Avery-Morgan Burial Ground in Groton, Connecticut.
The Reverend Peter Prudden was born in 1601 in Hertfordshire, England. As a kid, he lived in London. He went to Cambridge University. When he graduated, he entered the ministry. He soon started questioning the Church of England’s doctrines and pulling away from the establishment. After his first wife died, he emigrated to Boston in the spring of 1637. He married my 8th great-grandmother Joanna, and they moved south into Connecticut. They first settled in what is now New Haven but didn’t stay long. Eager to start his own church, he negotiated with the Paugassett tribe for parcels of land along the Housatonic River and moved there.
Fifteen months after the Pruddens settled they, along with fifteen other families founded the First Church of Christ in their new town which they called Milford. His grave is unmarked, but there is a stone monument on the main bridge across the town’s little river memorializing him as one of its founders.
Francis Stiles came over from London on the ship Christian which was owned by a guy named Sir Richard Saltonstall. Francis was a carpenter by trade. He, along with two of his brothers, two of their wives, two children and nineteen other people arrived in Boston Harbor on June 16, 1635. The trip had taken them three months. Despite all the people making their way across, the journey was still unbelievably dangerous – the weather being the main hazard.
Francis had been hired to build houses for Sir Richard who planned to emigrate himself if religious conditions in England got any worse under Charles I. Sir Richard’s son Robert was part of the expedition and he and Francis did not get along. Eventually, the tension between them was so great, that Francis led a group of twenty-seven people to what was called the Windsor colony along the Connecticut River.
Francis and his wife Sarah Birdseye had nine children. The next to youngest was my seventh great-grandfather Ephraim. The Birdseye family crops up on several twigs of this branch. John Birdseye and Elizabeth Andrews who are two of my ninth great-grandparents were in the same group of Milford settlers as the Revered Peter Prudden. They are immortalized on a plaque just across the street from the Reverend’s marker on the bridge as being among the founders of the town.
With such a small population in these early settlements, it’s not surprising that the same families appear in neighboring branches of my tree. In the United States, second cousins are still allowed to marry in every state. In colonial America, if that were taboo there simply wouldn’t have been enough eligible people to go around. First cousins share grandparents. Second cousins share great-grandparents.
Ephraim Stiles died in 1714 but his will survives. There are several pages in which he outlines who should receive what portion of his seemingly considerable landholdings. Then, almost as a postscript he adds, “… and I desire that my wife should dispose of the negroes at or before her death to any of her Children or otherwise as she shall think fit…”
The Puritans separated from the Roman church because they had issues with the practices that were being followed which they felt strayed from the Bible. The concept of their own inherent supremacy that had been sanctified by the Pope in 1452, however, is not an idea that they questioned. That idea Henry took with him when he formed the Church of England and that same idea, the Puritans took with them when they left Europe for the New World.
The hypocrisy is remarkable.
I was in the graveyard in Stratford, Connecticut where I knew Ephraim Stiles was buried. In it, I had already found another sixth great-grandfather’s marker, Robert Walker, but I couldn’t find Ephraim’s. The cemetery had a map that had each stone numbered and on a list. Unfortunately, the list of names was alphabetical, not numerical. The layout of the plots was not orderly at all. The numbers weren’t always consecutive on the ground and the main landmarks indicated were often trees that weren’t there anymore.
I knew the general area from the map, but the stones were uneven, and some were missing. They were all hard to read. Try as I might, I couldn’t find Ephraim. I gave up and sat down on the grass in the middle to take stock. There were several homeless people in the yard, too. When I got there, one man had accused me of taking his picture and demanded that I hand my phone over to him. Thankfully, when a van from the gas company pulled up at a neighboring house, he walked over to yell at them.
The two remaining people were just, like me, sitting. It isn’t remotely outside the realm of possibility that the three of us might have shared some family. As I was wondering what Ephraim would think of the paved busy street running along the cemetery’s outer wall and the cars driving along it, a robin landed on one of the stones in front of me.
There were three stones in a row and the center one, where the robin was sitting, had worn away to the point that the writing on it was illegible. I could make out the names on the outer two, though. Hardly believing what I was doing, I walked back over to the map and tried to find where those two people were. It turned out they were, in fact, on either side of Ephraim’s plot. The illegible marker that the robin was on was exactly the one I was looking for.
It's hard to tell from the photograph I took, but when I really started looking, I was able to make out a couple of letters, among them a capital E.
All these early colonists, and many more, make up just one tiny branch of my entire tree. They mostly all spring back from my great-great-grandmother Harriet Van Buren’s mother’s side of the family. Her name was Betsy Ayres and I’ve written about her before. She was one of the pioneer wives of Gouverneur, New York.
My family has never truly stopped moving. Maybe that’s why I find it so hard to stay in one place for any long period of time. I value my home and my family deeply, but man do I like to get out into the world and see what’s there.
In between the graveyard visits in Connecticut, I worked on a concert for Patti LuPone in Poughkeepsie. We were having dinner and I was telling her about what I had found. She wondered what it would be like to be able to have a conversation with our ancestors. My immediate reaction was, that I wouldn’t want to. What common ground would we have? In addition to everything else, why would I want to spend time with people who thought nothing of buying and selling other human beings?
Thinking about it later, I started to think that maybe she was right. It would be amazing to meet them one on one and be able to get a sense of who they were as people, not as seventeenth century ancestors that I find myself judging through a twenty-first century lens. They would likely be even more judgmental of me and the fact that I have a husband. In Colonial America, that would have condemned Michael and me to death.
The rational part of me immediately dismisses the robin showing me where Ephraim’s stone was as mere coincidence. Deep down though, I am not entirely sure. I am grateful to it. That moment is probably as close as I will ever get to meeting Ephraim face to face.