Essay from Essex - "Ancestry"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Ancestry”

January 23, 2022

 

“Everything, from when and where we are born to when and how we die,

is out of our hands. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

                                                                                                                                J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

                                                                                                                                The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

 

The pandemic prompted an interest in genealogy, made easier because of the internet and with companies like Ancestry.com, 23andMe.com and MyHeritage.com. This interest was not so much about deifying one’s ancestors, as was common in preliterate societies, it was more about learning of inherited diseases. Nevertheless, those companies saw their businesses double over the past two years, and Ancestry.com, a billion-dollar revenue company, was sold to Blackstone for $4.7 billion in December 2020.

 

Curiosity about one’s ancestors also played a role. We inherit traits from those who came before us, and gene and DNA technology have made tracing one’s ancestors easier. As well, I have long been fascinated by the math of evolution. Everyone descends from two people. Assuming three generations per hundred years, looking back a thousand years to the Norman invasion of England, a child born today would descend from 536,870,912 twenty-seven great grandparents. With the population of the world in 1066 estimated to be about 340,000,000 how would that be possible? The only answer is that we have common ancestors. My parents, for example, were fifth cousins, both descended from William Greenleaf (1725-1803) and Mary Brown Greenleaf (1728-1807). For most of human history populations lived in low-density rural areas. In 1790, 90% of Americans lived and worked on farms. Spouses were generally neighbors and likely to be 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th cousins. It was 1920, three hundred years after the first Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, before more Americans lived in cities than in the country, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and a surge in immigrants during the last half of the 19^th Century and the first couple of decades in the 20^th.

 

Nevertheless, with so many preceding us, we each carry the genes of some fascinating forebearers, who should be judged by the moral standards of their time, or else we would disown many of them. At the time of the Civil War, roughly 10% of the U.S. population was comprised of slaves – about 3.1 million. Slavery was not novel to the U.S. While inhuman, it had been ubiquitous throughout most of human history. It appears in the Bible and in the Code of Hammurabi. It was pervasive in classical Greece and in republican and imperial Rome. It persisted in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia and still exists in parts of the world. Helen Keller, in The Story of My Life, perhaps quoting Plato or Socrates, wrote: “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

 

At the time of the Civil War, almost all slaves in the United States lived in the south. Seventy-five percent of southerners owned no slaves, while 1,733 families owned more than a hundred each. Among those families were one set of my eight two-greats grandparents in rural Tennessee, about 30 miles north of Nashville. In 1860, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia, the farm contained about 13,000 acres, had 274 slaves. It was the largest grower of dark fire-cured tobacco in the U. S.

 

While some of the letters and papers stayed with the family, most of the original documents from Wessyngton, as the farm was called, were donated to the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. The best history of the place was written by a descendant of some of those slaves, John F. Baker, Jr. of Springfield, Tennessee in 2009: The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation. In this book, which Kirkus Reviews calls “an enriching, deeply personal history,” he traces his ancestry. One set of Mr. Baker’s two-greats grandparents, Emanuel and Hennie Washington, had been born into slavery at Wessyngton. An 1891 photograph of them, with their two sons, adorns the cover of his book. A copy of the same photograph hangs in our apartment in Essex, Connecticut. Wessyngton was founded by a three-greats grandfather, Joseph Washington in 1796, the year Tennessee became a state. With John Baker and Stanley Rose (a third cousin) as the impetus, a Wessyngton Memorial Monument was dedicated in October 2015 listing the names of over 200 slaves known to have been buried there. As a youngster, I visited Wessyngton when two of my maternal grandmother’s siblings lived on the farm. In the early 1980s, our oldest son spent two summers working in the tobacco fields.

 

Another story that I used to hear told was of Richard the “Indian Killer.” Richard Hunnewell, born about 1645 in Devonshire, England and migrated to Scarborough, Maine (then part of Massachusetts colony). His wife and one child were killed in an Indian raid, and he was killed by Indians at Massacre Pond in 1703. However, there were several Richard Hunnewells and records are confusing. The Richard from whom I believe I descend lived a more prosaic life, as a mason and bricklayer in Charlestown, Massachusetts. 

 

There are other nuggets tucked into the recesses of my ancestry, as there are with everyone. Asa Messer (1769-1836) was a three-greats grandfather on my father’s side. In 1804 he became president of Brown University, the same year the college took its present name. He served until 1826, when his belief in Unitarianism created concern from some of the Congregational trustees. My middle name comes from him. A four-greats grandfather on my mother’s side was Noah Webster (1758-1843) of dictionary fame. A great-grandfather, Joseph Edwin Washington (1851-1915), spent ten years as a Democrat Congressman from Tennessee. Edward Augustus Silsbee (1826-1900) was a great uncle of my paternal grandmother. He was a bachelor sea captain who became fascinated with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and was the inspiration for Henry James’ novelette, The Aspern Papers. Our second son was named for him. Gideon Welles (1802-1878), nicknamed “Father Neptune” and Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy during the Civil War, was one of my great great-grandmother’s (Isabelle Welles Hunnewell – 1812-1888) second or third cousins. A framed photograph depicts my maternal grandmother with her godfather, Fitzhugh Lee (1835-1905), no relation but a nephew of Robert E. Lee. Through the Webster side of my family, we trace our ancestry to William Bradford of the Mayflower. However, if you think that is bragging, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants estimates there are 35 million living descendants of those 100 or so people who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts on November 11, 1620.  

 

Stories of ancestors provide entertainment, and they make history more interesting, as we associate historic events with those from whom we descend. They help us realize how far we have come. Have you wondered what kind of a life your great grandmother lived, or what made your ancestors leave their home country to come to an unknown new world? We all have interesting forebearers among the hundreds of thousands from whom we descend. Among them are likely kings and slaves, as well as ruffians and preachers. We cannot change them or the times in which we lived. But we should know something of them.

 

It is Gandalf’s advice, quoted in the rubric that heads this essay, that I find inspirational. There are aspects of our selves we cannot change – the color of our eyes, our height or gender. But we were all given life, which is a miracle when one considers the odds against being born. It is how we conduct ourselves and what we do with the life given us that should be our focus. Two hundred years from now some descendant might query about his or her ancestors. No descendant of mine will remember me for my accomplishments. I will have no Wikipedia page. But I hope to be remembered for having lived honorably.