Because the webwork of familial relationships is immense, it was necessary to create a clear scope for the project: a compilation of all known direct ancestors through the 14th generation. Information for each ancestor includes dates and places of birth, marriage, and death, burial place, names of brothers and sisters with their birth information, and a few other facts and anecdotes as available. For earlier generations, information about baptisms and wills is included, especially when birth and death dates are missing.
There is no attempt made to present biographies, but some interesting facts have been noted. They are necessarily uneven from one ancestor to the other. Migration, occupation, disaster, and honors appear as noted in available sources, but may have been copied for one ancestor and not another.
With rare exceptions, other biographical information about siblings is not included. The decision was necessary, but was made with regret, especially for three reasons. First, Franklin Blackmer carefully collected many death dates; if that information is not passed on, it may be lost. Second, childless family members are not adequately represented. Some died as children, others in wars; some chose not to marry, were not able, or chose not to have children. Their achievements may be forgotten, creating an undesirable bias in family history. Third, family members who may be interested in this document may not appear in it. In-laws, cousins, nephews, and nieces will have been slighted. Our apologies to them.
The information presented here is dense, idiosyncratically arranged, uneven in authenticity, and compiled by genealogical amateurs. But, it is far more accessible than the myriad scraps of paper and obscure references on which it is based, and it is the best we could do. Had there been more time, we would have had more to say about our conclusions. I would have liked to be more scholarly. There would have been maps of places in England where the ancestors came from. And so forth…. We did draw some conclusions, and some of those appear in the headings for different branches of the family. Often the general statements apply to the whole, not just the specific branch.
The Context:
New Englanders respect privacy and practicality;
they cultivate their social conscience in their own ways and are suspicious of experts;
tend to distrust public displays of emotion but savor the private indulgences of the senses;
honor wit over rhetoric;
prefer understatement to pleasantries;
encourage character over opportunism;
are suspicious of dogma;
discuss their consciences and vote their prejudices;
prefer the yarn to the sermon and the abrasive to the sonorous;
often mistake education for morality;
tend to confuse art with decoration;
pretend to understand the difference between luxury and comfort;
feign to fathom the eloquence of silence;
find significance in boundaries;
negotiate neighbors with reason and relatives with tolerance;
are eager to plunder a practical idea but remain standoffish near an emotion.Donald Junkins "New England as Region and Idea: Looking over the Tafferel of our Craft" Massachusetts Review 26:2 and 3 pp. 202-203
Soon after I started the 1997 iteration of genealogical searching I wrote this summary of my thoughts:
Two months of genealogical exploration has led me to see New England in ways I hadn't really articulated before. I'd certainly been conscious of something unique and glorious, though not generally appreciated as either by outsiders, and I probably really became aware of its salience when I went to California in 1956. Bill Holland's American Literature class (junior year of high school) was the first time I realized that it was recognized (Van Wyck Brooks' book New England: Indian Summer), and more than just a local conceit. So I happily adopted the mantle of New Englander, and over the years gathered bits of it into my own version of the persona. I suppose I did take it seriously, though I didn't do anything serious with it. I concentrated on the unspoken parts of the identity, the ineffable knowing that rock-ribbed Yankees seem to share.There's a pride in New England identity that I've realized that I share, and now [with this compendium] it attaches quite clearly to a network of linked people and the landscape they animated. A dozen generations of people who mostly stayed put, didn't emigrate westward, and didn't mix much with later arrivals —tending rather to marry each other and tend to local affairs. Very few seem to have been people of consequence —no fortunes, some modest prosperity. I can't really tell much about their inclinations to rectitude, or their foibles, for lack of evidence.
What do we know about these people? The genealogical perspective is uneven, providing details of birth and death dates for people dead hundreds of years ago, remembering some lines while forgetting others, but suffering amnesia in the 18th and 19th centuries, and generally preferring to retain knowledge of male ancestors. We have anecdotes and ‘facts' for only the most recent generations, and for those distant or illustrious enough to have details recorded in the genealogical literature, but even the details of the lives of the grandparental generation are hazy. When did they move where, and why? Have the versions of their histories that we have inherited from our parents been sanitized and otherwise moulded into selective remembrance? Do we routinely engage in the same processes ourselves? Can we in fact even claim objective knowledge of our parents' lives? Evidence of the past —letters and photographs and siblings' memories— raise far more questions than they can answer, and all we really know is that these ancestors surely had the personalities, motivations, quirks, foibles, and proclivities that we recognize versions of in ourselves. They were creatures of their times and places, as we are; events in the world outside their snug New England towns changed their lives and (at least in the 20th century) sometimes drew them away to distant places.
The wealth of detail available for many of the New England lines seems to underline our primary identity as New Englanders, but we both have substantial German inheritance as well. The Joerndt, Mueller, Pagenkopf and Felker lines are all but unknown, beyond a few names and dates and inferences about reasons for emigration, and almost nothing is known of their lives in the German regions from which they came —certainly nothing to match what we think we know of the material and spiritual climate of 17th and 18th century New England. Similarly, there is the tantalizing puzzle of the arrival of the Felker line in the Maine Woods, presumably sometime in the early 19th century —but from where, and why there?
Physical resemblances are easily read as genetic inheritance; personalities are more difficult to parse and explain. It is tempting to impute psychological qualities to individuals or even to lines, and to see outcroppings in selves and others, but these activities are mostly projective. Even siblings are vastly different from one another, though the similarities in their nuclear family environment suggest that they ought to share many intangibles. — What is a genealogy? Is it a family myth? A historical record? A tribute to ancestors? A way of connecting with other people? A genealogy can be a personal obsession. It can be a gift from one generation to the next. If it is not created, valuable information may be lost. But how true is it? Does it lean more toward myth or historical record? It has to be some of both. However accurate the author tries to be, there are many unknowns. Call it historical fiction. A working hypothesis. A working velocipede.
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Genealogical Maps
Genealogical data cry out to be mapped: the events and processes they summarize are obviously spatial as well as temporal. Conventions for such mapping are much less well established than those for pedigrees and descendencies, but GIS software permits and rewards experimentation. There are difficulties and compromises, and the resulting maps are only as good as the data they summarize. In many cases (and in some lines more than others) we have no locations for the basic demographic events of birth, marriage, and death; the base maps used here show present-day geographical boundaries, which don't reflect historical changes (more than 10 towns are now included in the area that was Duxbury in 1635); and computer maps are exact but soulless.Some patterns in the data do stand out: persons included in this genealogical summary are clearly identified with some areas (Marlborough and adjacent towns, the Connecticut River valley, the North Shore of Massachusetts, the Bridgewater and Rehoboth and Swansea areas, Antrim NH), and entirely absent from others (the Berkshires and western Connecticut, most of Rhode Island, much of central Massachusetts, the whaling areas of southeastern Massachusetts).
The maps of birth and death places for the 12th, 11th and 10th generations sketch the story of inland spread of 17th century English settlers, most of whom moved from initial landfalls at Plymouth, Salisbury and Watertown. By the 11th generation they were well established in Sudbury and Marlborough, in the Rehoboth area, in northeastern Connecticut, and in the middle Connecticut River valley.
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Consider some maps from the genealogical work my wife and I did on our families, using birth and death places for our 17th and 18th century ancestors:
The 12th generation (counting backwards from ourselves) didn't spread out much: some (the Eastmans) decorated the North Shore (Ipswich, etc), some (the Parmenters) were to the west of Boston (but none were in Boston), some (the Blackmers/Blackmores and Reeds) were south of Boston (Scituate, Plymouth), and some (the Roots) were in the Connecticut River Valley. Over the next two generations the families spread out quite a bit. By the mid-18th century the Blackmers were in Bennington VT (having wandered thence from central Connecticut), and the Roots were in the Springfield MA area. The Parmenters had made their way to Antrim NH. And then in the 1820s, Holland Blackmer walked from Bennington VT to Boston and seeded my branch of the Blackmer family in the near suburbs of Boston (Chelsea, Malden, Melrose).
