Pictures of my People!

A really fun part of genealogy research is finding photos and portraits of ancestors that you've learned something about. After my post the other day, I realized that I had pictures of several of the individuals I mentioned. I thought it might be fun to share some of them, plus one or two more that are just interesting or fun. If you haven't read the previous post, you might want to do that now, as I will refer to some of the stories I told there.

Remember the illegitimate son of an English nobleman who indentured himself to a Quaker family to come to America? Well here he is, Philip Packer Jr.:
Presumably, this portrait was painted before he came to the wilderness of Pennsylvania, probably when he was still living off his father's money. His father had holdings and business interests in Ireland, and he seems to have kept his little family there quite comfortable. When his first wife died, he married his mistress, Sara Isgar and brought her to his English home. However, since all of his children by her were born prior to their marriage, the children had to make their own way after Daddy's death. His children by his first wife got the estate. Here are Philip Packer, Esq., and the lovely Sarah Isgar, my 10th great grandparents:



Those of you with exceptional memories may have noticed that Eli and Ann Packer were the names of my last Quaker ancestors who died in Gratiot County Michigan in the 1800's. Eli was a direct descendant of these peolple. Philip Jr. became Quaker in Pennsylvania while serving his Quaker master. Perhaps the master had something to do with it, but I suspect the young woman he wanted to marry there had even more influence on his conversion!

Below is Groombridge place, the family home that Philip Packer Sr. re-built outside London in the 1660's. Packer was apparently an architect, a contemporary and friend of Sir Christopher Wren. The grounds are open to the public today, and the 2005 movie, Pride and Prejudice, was filmed there.




The picture below is an illustration of the adventurer with the Persian family meeting with the Indian Mogul in Agra, India circa 1604. His name was John Mildenhall (the family name later became Mendenhall), and his story is so fantastic that I have trouble believing it. It includes passing himself off to the Indian court as the ambassador of Queen Elizabeth I (he was not) and securing trading rights which he later sold to the recently formed British East India Company. Crazy! But apparently true! He is even buried in the oldest English grave in India. You can visit his tombstone there.



On to more normal (and recent) people:

Here is my Great-Grandfather, my maternal grandmother's father, a cute little boy who grew up to have a rather sad and hard life:

Alexander Franklin Fraser

Below are his parents, Bertha Harpham and Clarence Joseph Fraser (of Scottish descent). Clarence was a good deal older than Bertha, and she was widowed young, with no money and several young children. She also had physical and perhaps mental health problems. Her life story -- what I've been able to piece together of it -- is quite painful. Unfortunately, her children suffered right along with her -- a pain that was passed down for a couple of generations until my grandma and her siblings eventually seemed to pull things back together in their own adult lives.


Bertha's mother died when she was only 4 years old, and her father seems to have disappeared from her life at that point. Her mother's mother had died years before in childbirth. So Bertha was was raised by her mother's father, Franklin Squire and his 3rd wife. This 3rd wife had charge of several of Franklin's children and grandchildren by his previous marriages in addition to her own babies as they came along. Plus, for a time, her aging father *and* Franklin's aging father, both in their 80's, were living with the family. Even if her step-grandmother was a saint (and how many of us would be, under those conditions?), I don't imagine poor little Bertha got as much love and attention as every child needs. Her vivid unhappiness in later life, which living family members still recall as their strongest memory of her, is sadly suggestive.

Franklin Squire himself was a busy man outside the home. Not only did he have a rather large farm to tend, he was the early leader of the Michigan Seventh Day Adventist Church that I mentioned the other day. This is a portrait of him:

And last, but not least, I just had to include this picture of my maternal Grandfather's Grandmother. (My g-g grandmother.)
Don't you LOVE the hat? This is Mamie Gooderham Salisbury Harvey Cutler. (Well not Cutler yet in this picture -- he came later.) Based on clues, I believe this may have been her wedding photo when she married her 2nd husband, Samuel Harvey, in 1910 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was divorced from my g-g grandfather at that time. I believe my he may have been a scoundrel! If I am right on the date of the picture, she is about 39 -- very close to my age right now. :o) My mother remembers visiting Mamie a few times as a child. In her later years, Mamie and her 3rd husband lived very near Tiger Stadium in Detroit. That whole side of my grandpa's family were big Tiger fans! They would meet at Mamie's house and walk down to the games.

Patterns of My People

So I haven't blogged all summer! In large part, it's because I've been spending most of my discretionary computer time (as well as some time I should have been doing other things) researching my family history. A couple of readers have expressed interest in reading about what I found. I've found a lot, and believe me, you don't want to hear it all! Even to my own family the details can be overwhelming, so I won't go there much, in spite of the fascination some of those details hold for me.

Instead, I want pull the focus back and show you the entire tapestry, because, rather wondrously, I've discovered that there are clear patterns and trends, even across disparate family branches and several centuries. Detailed information about individuals has been amazing to discover, but these patterns feel more significant to my sense of self. I don't feel like a different person or anything, but I do have a stronger sense of belonging to a larger story. I could go on about that, but I won't for now -- maybe another day. Perhaps also another day, I'll share how I got started on this journey, if people are interested. I've only been doing it for a few months now and I'm still a little in awe of how much I've learned about my heritage in that short span of time.

For now however, here's a bird's eye view of the landscape and the people who gave me birth:

1) America's story is my story. Before I began this project, I thought that my family in America would trace back no further than the early - mid 1800's. Most of the immigration stories I knew about came from this period. Indeed, most of the branches of my family did immigrate during the 19th century. However, one of the earliest discoveries I made was that I had many ancestors who came to Pennsylvania on ships commissioned by William Penn to bring Quaker settlers to his new charter colony in the 1680's.* One even came as an indentured servant, which no doubt seems more romantic and adventurous to me than it did to him! He was the bastard son of an English nobleman who couldn't inherit a dime, poor guy. That was on my father's side. Later, I discovered that some of my mother's ancestors were in colonial New England as early as the1630's! Can't get much more "founding father" than that unless your people came on the Mayflower. So I'm all in, right from the start -- the good, the bad and the ugly of our country's history is my history as well. That's something I didn't know until just a few months ago.

* I did not have even the faintest inkling of my Quaker ancestors when I became a Quaker a few years ago. The last practicing Quakers in the family, Eli and Ann Packer, died in Gratiot County, Michigan 1867 and 1871. The faith did not survive in the second generation in central Michigan, probably because there were no Friends Meetings there at that time. Although Eli and Ann both had Quaker ancestry reaching all the way back to the time of George Fox, the memory of our Quaker roots was lost in my father's family until I uncovered it this spring. I got to share this information at the family reunion this summer, so now it is remembered again. :o)

2) I come from rural and village people. My ancestors were farmers (many, many farmers), blacksmiths, millers, small-town day laborers, wool packers, weavers, etc. These were the professions of the men, of course, but my female ancestors were of the same stock -- they were the daughters, and then wives of the men who plied these trades. The women's lives are, if anything, even easier to imagine, as they likely varied less according to the trade of their men. They were gardeners, food preparers, livestock tenders, dress-makers, healers, neighbors, friends, pioneers, and perhaps most predominantly, mothers. They were the mothers of 5, 8, 10, 14 children. Most of them, until more recent generations, buried at least one child and sometimes several. A number of them gave their own lives for posterity, dying in childbirth or from complications thereof. These women married later than I'd been led to believe by popular history. Certainly, there were a few 17 and 18 year old brides, but not all that many. 19 was a more common age, with many entering their first marriage in their early 20's, and marrying men who were, on average, just a few years older. (There were some exceptions of course, especially where a man who was a widower wed a never-before-married young woman.)

My nearly complete lack of urban roots did surprise me a bit, given the broad scope of time and places and people involved. Yet even those who disembarked on American shores in New York City seemed to have set out for the country nearly immediately. My few wealthy and well-connected ancestors (remember the bastard son?) were landed gentry -- rich country folk, but still country. With nearly 500 individuals in my family tree so far (not all of those are direct descendants -- some are siblings, etc.) I can think of only one branch of the family that seemed to stay in a city for several generations, and that was colonial Springfield, Massachusetts. I'm not sure if Springfield counted as a "big city" back then or not! It was certainly not rural much beyond the founding years, however.

3) I don't have a single ancestor who came through Ellis Island. So many people ask about this! It's one of the first questions I got at family reunions this summer: "Do we have any family who came through Ellis Island?" Nope. Many people don't realize that Ellis Island didn't open as an immigration point until 1892. (I didn't know this either, until I looked it up.) All the branches of my family were in the New World by that time, save one: my Norwegian great-great grandfather was a stow away on a cargo ship in 1898. I believe he simply slipped off the boat and into the crowds on the dock. An undocumented immigrant...

4) I am a Northerner. So far, I've found not a single direct connection to the American South or West. Michigan, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ontario account for probably 90% of my North-American born family members. The remaining 10% would be from a few other New England states, Quebec, and Indiana. I think that about covers it. Certainly some of my ancestors' descendants or siblings migrated south and west, but no one that led to me, as far as I know. I may have a Native American g-g-g grandmother, but I have only the say-so of my great-grandmother and her sister regarding this, and they are no longer around to interrogate. I know how often this kind of family lore is untrue, so I'd very much like to prove it or disprove it somehow. But even if it's true, she was said to be Ojibway, so still a Northerner!

5) My European ancestors were northerners as well, from England, Scotland, the pre-German states, Ireland, Eastern France, Norway, Finland. No Spaniards, no Italians, no Austrians, no eastern Europeans. One long-ago ancestor, who was quite the adventurer, had a Persian wife and children to whom he left his entire estate when he died. Nice for them, but I'm sure it didn't go down well with his English wife and family, from whom I am descended! So no Persians either, darn it! ;o)

6) No Catholics. I have not been able to confirm a single Catholic ancestor thus far. I do have some Irish potato-famine immigrants (on my father's side) whose religion I don't know, but my earlier Irish immigrant ancestors were protestants. I do know that by the second generation in American, my potato-famine Irish folks were not practicing Catholics, so I don't feel I can assume that Irish = Catholic in their case. Of course going back before the Reformation (which I have not done) most of my European ancestors would have been Catholic, but clearly we've been Protestant (or non-religious in some cases) for a very long time.

7) And the Protestants were often outliers! With Quakers and Restorationists on my father's side, and Puritans and Seventh Day Adventists on my mothers side, I seem to come by my contrary religious tendencies naturally!* One Puritan ancestor converted to Baptist very early on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was involved in Baptist "church planting" north of Boston. Baptists might seem pretty mainstream today, but his erstwhile fellow Puritans didn't think so in the 16oo's! One of this Baptist's descendants became a prominent leader in the early Seventh Day Adventist Church in Michigan. Another (the sister of the Adventist) became a follower of Joseph Smith and married an early Mormon elder. (It's thanks to her descendants that this branch of the family is so well researched!)

8) I don't know as much as I would like to know. A sad, but predictable truth: Most of my ancestors remain anonymous to me. I might know when and where they were born or died, how many children they had and perhaps what they did for a living, but that is all. Some left tantalizing clues, such as the obituary of a 4th great grandmother which contains this phrase: "Though surrounded my many depressing conditions, she won and held the respect of all..." I long to know what the "depressing conditions" were, but I probably never will.

9) I know more about some ancestors than I ever dreamed possible. I literally put my face in my hands and gave a little sob when I read this about my 10th great grandmother: "Marjorie was moderately active in the Women's Meeting at Middletown (PA). She served on five marriage clearness committees and one committee to labor with a friend who had failed to uphold Friends' principles." Reading about her serving on clearness committees for marriage over 300 years ago -- something I might do today in the very same tradition -- made her suddenly seem very real and dear to me. Here are some other things I know about Marjorie: Her first husband (my 10th great grandfather) died very shortly after their arrival in Pennsylvania, leaving 30-something Marjorie with 6 children, ages 16, 15, 14, 9, 6, and 3. She remarried (quickly!) in 1684 to a man whose wife had died on the voyage to Pennsylvania. Theirs was the first marriage under the care of Middletown Friends Meeting, which still exists today. Later in life she and her husband became involved in a painful schism among Friends, but Marjorie was later reconciled and was buried in Middletown Friends Cemetery. Her husband never came back into unity with Friends, but his step-son -- the one who had been 6 when his biological father died -- requested that he be buried next to Marjorie. The request was granted. Perhaps only other Friends will appreciate how easy and satisfying it is for me to imagine this request being brought before the Men's Meeting by a loving son, the ensuing Spirit-led deliberation among those in attendance, and the gracious outcome. I think about Marjorie sometimes as I'm going about my daily life and wonder what she would think of me and my world.

10) The tapestry grows exponentially. I'm struck by this: My mother's ancestry -- all of it -- is only half of mine. Same for my father, of course. My grandparents each share only a quarter. My two sisters and I are the only people on Earth who share this specific history as our full heritage, yet we share many of our more recent ancestors with hundreds of others, and each of our distant ancestors with thousands or even millions of people alive today. Our children share our lineage as well, but they have double the number of ancestors we do! My own children's ancestry stitches on the Caribbean Islands and the continent of Africa, making their lineage stretch across nearly half the globe. My youngest sister's new baby will someday trace his father's roots through Mexico and on to wherever else that leads him -- probably Spain, other places in southern Europe, and Indigenous Mezo-America.

The richness of all of this astounds me. I may have traced only a couple of family branches back to the 16th century, but of course they all go back that far, and farther: to the beginning of civilization, to the beginning of humanity itself. We are also growing forward. Someday, about 300 years from now, my 10th great granddaughters will walk this earth, perhaps here in Michigan, perhaps in a far-off land. Probably both, as I'm likely to have quite a few 10th great grandchildren! I will be a tiny part of their tapestries, woven in with all those who came before me, and all those yet to come, gathered and joined to another whole cloth with every generation in an ever-growing family.

They Were Good... and Flawed

This is the book I'm reading now. I'm enjoying it on an intellectual level -- it's written in a scholarly, yet accessible way. On a personal level, it's by turns inspiring and disheartening. The author, John Moretta, is writing as a historian, rather than a Quaker. (He is not a Quaker, as far as I know.) Thus, in addition to relating the bravery, sacrifices and accomplishments of Penn and early Friends, he has no qualms about pointing out the ways in which they failed to live up to their ideals in the New World. The "Holy Experiment" was not exactly a smashing success. Moretta is not censorious about this; he reminds readers of the conditions -- social, geographic, demographic, historical -- that make their difficulties easier to understand.

Nevertheless, I can't help but feel bad for Penn and the early settlers. They were so sincere in their desire to do things right -- to be an example of what Love and Light can do and to model tolerance and harmony among diverse groups of Christians. Guess what they did instead? They behaved like human beings. Penn played the class card much too heavily and got huffy when the farmers and artisans who mostly populated his colony resented him for it. For their part, the colonists almost immediately challenged Penn's authority over the colony and flaunted laws in such a way that the king threatened to rescind Penn's charter. This could have meant the end of the religious toleration they so cherished, among other things. (In their almost allergic reaction to authority and their refusal to be "managed", I reflected that modern Quakers must come by this trait naturally!) Once the colonial Assembly in Pennsylvania managed to wrest control almost completely from Penn, the leaders in the Assembly set about consolidating their power: changing voting requirements so as to disenfranchise many non-Quakers in Philadelphia and lower the bar for rural residents, who were largely Quaker.

Sigh.

Plus some of them owned African slaves at this time, and few were speaking out against it. but that's old news to me. I was prepared for *that*. What I wasn't prepared for was all the mundane ways in which they were..., well, kinda like Quakers today. They were righteous in all the good and bad senses of that word. They loved God. They disagreed about what "God" was, but they loved It/Him. They took their values seriously and tried to live up to them. They failed at that sometimes. They got jealous and nursed grudges, then realized how painful and wrong that was and made up. (Or not.) They got involved in religious schisms. They griped about Penn behind his back, then happily threw him a big party and parade when he finally showed up after too many years in England. Penn griped about the colonists to his friends, but he clearly loved them and was distressed and genuinely surprised when they exhibited un-Friendly behaviors. They judged and forgave. Families could be harmonious or troubled or both, depending on the day/month/year.

Someone in my Meeting gave spoken ministry this week about how "the universe doesn't keep score", and how that was liberating for him. I immediately thought of this book and about how we humans LOVE to keep score. We can't seem to help it. Even by being inspired by and disappointed in my Quaker forebears, I'm engaging in a kind of score-keeping: Went to prison for beliefs -- 10 pts.; treated Native Americans like fellow humans -- 10 pts.; lobbied for religious toleration (even for Catholics!) -- 5 pts.; didn't decry slavery soon enough -- minus 15 pts.; bickered too much -- minus 3 pts.; Penn a bit of an elitist/colonists bitchy about it -- minus 5 pts.; etc.

The fact is, people (and groups of people) with high ideals get held to a higher standard -- maybe not by the universe, but by other people, and usually themselves as well. That's how it should be. Yet what should be our response when they/we fall or fail? Should we proclaim "hypocracy" and make snide comments? Should we forgive all? Perhaps we should simply Love, and tell the truth. Great -- that's one more ideal to live up to!

I'm looking forward to any comments on this one. There is more to be said about what good can be accomplished simply by trying, not dependent on succeeding, among other things. I may add my own comments as I think more about it, but it's past midnight as I write this and I can feel my brain shutting down... Good night!

Sumo Wrestling

This week, we read about the Edo period of Japan in our History curriculum. One of the activities following the reading was Sumo wrestling! In addition to trying it out ourselves, we watched some truly informative and interesting YouTube videos on Sumo. (This one and this one. They're short -- check 'em out.)

The kids had great fun with it. For a while. Turns out the old saw is true: "It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt." But even so, I think Alexander (the one who got hurt) would say it was worth it. It should be noted that the injury happened when they deviated from acceptable Sumo maneuvers and decided to run their pillow bellies together at top speed. Xander being the lighter of the two, went flying backwards into the wall.

So they got a little Physics lesson too. Ah, homeschooling!

Everyday Sacred

For the longest time, I needed an apron. I spend a substantial amount of time in the kitchen, and going apron-less was proving hard on my clothes. The aprons I already owned were of the stiff, canvass, men's grill-out style. They bunched around my waist and were too big around the neck. They're simply not comfortable to leave on for any task besides cooking, so I tended to take them off during a break in the kitchen action, then forgot to put them back on when I went in to finish up. I needed a nice woman's apron -- one with full coverage, soft fabric, and a narrower waist. One that I could leave on all day if need be. But there were two problems. First, I couldn't find anything for sale that seemed to fit my needs. Second, I had a mental block: it seemed so 1950's house-wifey to wear something like that! To make matters worse, I often wear long skirts, so I needed one with a full skirt to properly protect my clothes. Forget 1950's housewife, think Amish farm wife! Eek!

The I attended Friends General Conference Summer Gathering. I participated in a week-long workshop (run by Robin M.) that addressed, among other things, ways in which contemporary Friends can find new meaning in the practices of early Quakers. One of the peculiarities of early Friends was that they did not celebrate holidays. Partly this was because of the pagan origin of many holidays, but also it reflected their belief that every day was sacred, that every act and every moment should bring us closer to The Light, to God.

Now, in practice, I'm not very good at remembering the sacredness of mundane moments. Not many people are. This is why we create rituals and yes, even holidays -- to remind us of the sacredness of life and this moment. Yet there is danger in ritual as well. Early Friends were harsh critics of "empty forms": rituals that were performed mindlessly out of duty or habit. Rather than sacred, such rote rituals were a denial of the Living Spirit within. Thus, to the extent that Quakers had rituals at all, they tended to serve some practical purpose as well. For example, plain clothing, without extraneous trim or complicated styling, reminded them of their faith, but also served to simplify their morning routine, ostensibly leaving more mental space for God and more money for good causes.

Thinking about early Quakers and the sacredness of daily life provided me with a shift in my frame of reference. Ruining my clothing was wasteful and inconsistent with the testimonies of simplicity and stewardship, but that wasn't quite enough to get me past my cultural hang-ups about aprons. The concept of every day being sacred was the clincher. I would make the apron myself, and both the making of it and the wearing of it would be a sacred act.

When I put on my apron, I'm reminded of why I do so -- to be a good steward of my clothing, sure, but also to provide sustenance for my family, to cook (as often as possible) in a way that is consistent with my ecological and community values, and to remember to make mental room for the Sacred, the Divine, even in the most mundane of tasks. Who'd have thought an apron could do all that?

I still feel a tad house-wifey when I wear it. (I'm thankful I'm not called to wear it outside the house!) Yet, in truth, the slight discomfort is probably a good thing. Without it, I wouldn't remember all that the apron signifies.

Photo credit: Brianna Charlot

Making Ice Cream

My new Kitchen Aid mixer came with a free ice cream maker attachment, which arrived in the mail last week. I've been promising the kids ice cream, and today was the day. I adapted a recipe from this book:
The recipe was nice and simple -- milk, cream, sugar, eggs, flavoring. (They suggested a historically typical lemon, we went with mint chocolate chip.)

I was able to make it using local ingredients, except for the chocolate and perhaps the mint oil. The cream and milk came from the cow herd we own a share in. The eggs from a family in our Quaker meeting who raise a few chickens in their back yard, the sugar was Michigan beet sugar. Even the mint flavoring *could* be local -- there are big mint farms in this area.

The recipe begins with a milk/sugar/egg yolk custard. The book states, "Don't expect your custard to be yellow like Eliza Jane [Wilder]'s unless your cream comes from grass-fed Guernseys and your eggs from scratch-fed chickens."

Check. Check. The cows are Jerseys rather than Guernesys, but that's a minor detail. ;o) I don't know why the fact that my custard was bright yellow made me so happy, but it did. (What I said in this post may have something to do with it.) Can all that beta-carotine and omega-3's make up for the huge hit of saturated fat? No? Oh well...

As much as I enjoyed getting in touch with the past, there is a time and place for modern conveniences. Like whipping egg whites to a stiff peak and turning an ice cream dasher for 30 minutes.

I don't have any pictures of the finished product. We were too busy eating!