Walking with the ghosts of my ancestors…
Last week I went to Massachusetts on a business trip. It was my first time there. While I was there, attending meetings, listening to the CEO talk, working to plan the future of my company, there was a part of my brain that was wandering around outside, looking for old houses and gravestones. See, my great-grandmother’s side of the family comes from that part of the country. She was born in New Hampshire, near the Massachusetts border, and she and her family left for California in 1902.
Several years ago, I dug into the world of genealogy, which is more obsessed and time consuming than blogging was 4 years ago even. I knew my family was from that area, knew they had been there for quite a few years, but I didn’t know names, or dates, or how many generations were there. What I found out was that both sides of my great-grandmother’s family came over from England in Massachusetts in the early-mid 1600s, and they stayed there, and in neighboring New Hampshire, for about 275 years. So when I hopped in the rental car and went in search of a drug store to buy hand cream (not provided in the hotel…weird, huh?), and I saw signs for the neighboring towns, I thought, “Oh, great-grandma-however-many-times-back, she was born here, before she moved to New Hampshire. I wonder if the house she was born in is still standing?” It was weird. Maybe because my family has been in California for so long, because my mom moved so much as a child, to Colorado and Texas and Puerto Rico and New Mexico, and because I moved around a lot as a child, several cities in the Bay Area, then Alaska and four houses there, then back to California and moving around here for several years before moving to San Francisco, three houses, then Pennsylvania, and now here. I’ve lived in our current house for 12 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else before in my life. So visiting this area where my family lived for so long, for so many years, it was a wild feeling.
One night, we had some free time. Some folks went into Boston to go to a Red Sox game, and some of us went to Salem to go on a ghost tour. A ghost tour is a lame idea, but it was the only tour available when we could get down there. So tour we did. The tour guide was long winded and the ghosts fairly innocuous, they couldn’t even compete with the ghosts of my ancestors that were running around in my brain, walking beside me on the brick sidewalks of historic Salem. Some of my family, before moving to Northern Massachusetts, lived in Salem for several generations. One of my ancestors was among the first to be accused of witchcraft in 1692, and she died in prison in Boston before they could hang her. Another of my ancestors was the father of one of the girls who accused her. Another ancestor condemned one of the judges for his part in the hysteria. How can fake ghosts trooping through hotels and basements compete with that?
So I found myself walking amongst the ghosts of so many ancestors, wondering what their Puritan hearts would think of my atheist one, what my great-great-grandmother who didn’t want a wedding ring as much as she wanted a family bible would think. What would they think of our modern world? Of automobiles and airplanes and hyper-consumption and TARP and Tea-Partiers and a black President? I confess, it took a large part of my brain over while I was there. I would love to go back at some point, on my own time instead of company time, and look around this area a bit more. I hope we can make it happen. Also, I had some pretty amazing lobster in Salem, the best I’ve ever had, for $9 at an Irish pub. I’d do that again in a heartbeat.
5 Comments
L.
Wow, about the time when your ancestors were leaving the Northeast, mine were sailing over from Eastern Europe.
Dad Who Writes
And mine (on my mothers side) were still stomping around in the bogs of Northern Ireland stealing sheep. Though I have a picture of my grandfather standing in Central Park in the 1930s before family tragedy forced him to shutter his nascent air-conditioning business and sail back.
Nance
I’m so conflicted about ever going to Salem; they’ve so demeaned the memory of the accused witches and their families by hyper-commercializing that area and exploiting the history. I’m always so affected by the story of The Trials and the suffering of the people there, and to see that area, to know that they actually have their high school team mascot as a witch (among other things) just makes me sick. You’ve really hit on the sense of Irony, though, haven’t you, in your last paragraph, when you muse about the values of the Puritans and contrast their ideals with what their “shining city on a hill” has become? Nice. (And serves them right, some might say.)
J
Nance, It was kind if interesting. Salem was a pretty big port in MA, until the industrial revolution made it obsolete (shallow channels couldn’t support the huge ships), and then they went seeking for some other industry. That they made it tourism based on such a horrible time is indeed shameful. I’m guessing that the people who lived through it probably lived with a sense of shame and wanted to just forget it all, like Germans would like to forget Hitler, and Americans would like to forget the genocide of Native Americans.
The tour guide seemed to suggest that people didn’t even really know the history until fairly recently, and someone found the documentation and made it into a tourist thing, and everyone jumped on board. Of course, he could have been talking out of his ass, as one who is showing you ghosts in a city is more interested in story than in truth.
Yeah, the people who suffered through that suffered mightily. I felt their ghosts around me. Not sure if I would have been so interested in going if it weren’t for my family coming from that area and being directly involved in all aspects of the hysteria. And really good cheap lobster is not to be missed. 😉 I would have liked to visit Danvers and Beverly, which are other towns where the family lived that are very close to Salem, but alas, work.
Ted
Looks like a trip to Boston is on the long term agenda, huh. I did like Boston as a city, and thought they had the best/easiest to use subway system — especially if you’re drunk. If you have to take the red line, the trains are red. The same for the orange, blue, green and so forth… It really makes it easy to get around the city.