In Search of the Old Ones

It began with a casual remark.

Some time back in February, as I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Mom, I off-handedly suggested that she and I spend the summer traipsing around New England cemeteries. Cemeteries? Yes, cemeteries and museums and archives and old houses. "Let's go all in for the creepy, the crawly, the old and the mysterious" I might have muttered. To my surprise, good ole Mom said yes.

To the casual observer cemetery creeping -- which is decidedly not the same as pub crawling -- might seem odd. However, upon closer inspection it does make sense. You see, for the past ten years or so I have been doing geneaological research on my ancestors. They include the Winslows, the Sears, the Otises, the Paddocks, the Greenleafs and the Coffins. There we are: back to the creepy again. But the Coffins were real people who represent, with many others, the founding of Massachusetts and Maine in the early decades of the 17th century.

Along with serving as founding members of Plimouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony, these relatives did amazing and wonderous things. Some of them came on the Mayflower. Yes, that Mayflower. Some of them went to Harvard, when it was the only college in North America. Others of them were merchants, sea men, writers and weavers. They made their own butter, braided their own rope and preached their own Gospel.  They often married their cousins, and then would promptly set about having ten or twelve children. Occasionally they fought, frequently they traded with and sometimes they even married Native Americans of the region.

Therefore, what started as a hobby for me over a decade ago has turned into Travel Plans for Summer 2012. Accompanying Mom and I will be my 10 year old daughter, Hope, who has not yet been to the East Coast. Together we will be three generations  -- past, present and future -- in search of the Old Ones.

And there will be, to harken Shakespeare, a method to my madness. In preparation for this adventure I have been reading up on 17th century New England society. One of the texts I recently came across is a fun little manuel entitled After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle. In it, the authors demonstrate aspects of historical research and elements of historical writing. Of particular inspiration to me was a section in the Introduction which asserted that "history is rooted in the narrative tradition" and that "good history begins with a good story" (xiv). I whole-heartedly accept the notion that story telling is at the root of good writing, and so Davidson and Lytle's words seeded my imagination. There is rich possibility in telling history as stories through words and pictures on this blog.

 

This, then, is my task: to capture for you our journey into the past, by chronicling the present and shaping the future. This is what Davidson and Lytle refer to as "doing history as well as of reading it" (xv). In short, they suggest establishing a "sense of vicarious participation" whereby the audience "savors" the "digging" into the past as much as does the writer of the stories.

Thus, our pursuit of the creepy, the crawly, the old and the mysterious will mindfully contain three parts: 1) an exploration of the past in primary source documents and locations; 2) an experience of the present in interactions with the locals; and 3) an offering to the audience (that would be you, Dear Reader! who represents the future) as armchair explorers into colonial New England. It's a cycle of collaboration; each of us puts something into the stories in order to get something meaninful out of the history.

I hope you savor this journey of purpose, which began so casually with a cup of coffee.