April 25, 2010

In late 1700, John Lawson, an adventurous chap from London, set out from Charleston, S.C., pushing through swampy lowlands and trekking through the mountains of both Carolinas. One of the places he visited was Roanoke Island where he found the ruins of an old fort, some old English coins, a powder horn and small cannon.

Even more fascinating, a group of Indians from near an Outer Banks village known as Croatoan – where the lost English colonists signaled they had gone – told Lawson that several of their ancestors “were white People, and could talk in a Book, as we do.” The truth of this, he added, “is confirmed by gray Eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians, and no other.”

The story is related by James Horn, vice president of research and historical interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in a new book, “A Kingdom Strange, the Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke."

It’s only a piece of the puzzle. But Horn, who taught Virginia history in Brighton, England, for 20 years before himself migrating to America, has neatly put the others in place, a feat that has defied explorers and historians almost from the day those folks went missing.

There were 116 would-be colonists – 90 men, 17 women and nine children – who arrived at Roanoke Island in July 1587. They had planned to stay only a short while, then head north to the Chesapeake Bay region where they would establish a permanent settlement. But a series of setbacks, including hostilities with the local Indians, kept them there.

John White, the leader of the expedition, returned to England for supplies and additional settlers. He’d be back the following spring, he assured the others. It didn’t happen. War with Spain and other distractions delayed his return until 1890, and by then the colony was lost.

Where did they go? The question has tantalized researchers – and tourists – seemingly forever. But Horn thinks he knows the answer.

His advantage was that he had written a book about the Jamestown settlers, the most prominent of whom, John Smith, searched for the lost colonists and found, if not exactly evidence, Indians who had heard of their fate. Some spoke of English-style, two story houses that once stood in Indian villages.

They probably dispersed into four main groups, Horn believes, those who went to Croatoan and others who went far inland to places on the Chowan, Roanoke and Pamlico rivers.

The settlers lived peacefully with the Tuscarora and Chowanoc peoples for about two decades. By then, many had spent most of their adult lives with the Indians, Horn writes.

“They had not forgotten their English background,” Horn writes, ”but those who survived and lived in Indian communities would have by now thoroughly adapted to Indian ways. They spoke the Indians’ language and dressed like local peoples. The men would have hunted and fought, perhaps using their steel swords and axes, and the women looked after the fields and homes.”

Then, Horn adds, a catastrophe overwhelmed them. At the same time that the Jamestown settlers were arriving in 1607, the Powhatan, Tuscarora and Chowanoc tribes were fighting bloody wars for dominance. Nearly all of the English people, as well as the children they may have had through intermarriage with the Indians, were slaughtered.

Except, perhaps, those gray-eyed descendants who could talk in a book.

Illustration: The cover of James Horn’s book, A Kingdom Strange. He theorizes that the lost colonists dispersed inland and lived with in Indian villages. Courtesy Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

April 18, 2010

The Lynnhaven House, ca 1725, an example of a middling farm/small plantation house, by Casey Holtzinger. Courtesy of Lynnhaven House. Click to enlarge.

AS YOU WALK ALONG THE SHELL PATH to the house, as you open the door and step into the parlor, as you run your hand over the massive, ax-scarred lintel above the fireplace or caress the smooth banister while descending the stairs, you are following in the footsteps of a colonial era farm family.

It was 1725 when Francis Thelaball, a third-generation French Huguenot from Norfolk, moved his family into a sturdy house on the edge of Princess Anne County’s wilderness. He and his wife, Abigail, and five surviving sons coaxed a living from 250 acres and lived purposeful although, by today’s standards, cramped lives in that house.

It is now called the Lynnhaven House, and it rests beside two churches and a couple of acres of woods on Wishart Road in Virginia Beach.

Today is a good day for checking out this historic gem because, from noon to 4 p.m., the city and Preservation Virginia are holding an open house and dedicating a sprawling new Colonial Education Center that now stands closest to the road. This 4,000-square-foot facility has modern classrooms, meeting rooms, a kitchen and gift shop, but its purpose is to teach about the past.

I don’t know if today’s “everything Virginia” refreshments will set the colonial stage but “George Washington” and other bewigged and petticoated figures may help.
So may the Thelaball family Bible, printed in 1743 at Oxford, England. It’s on display in the center, with dates of births and deaths of its members.

Here you’ll find that Francis “departed this life” two years after the house was finished. But the family hung onto the place until after the Revolutionary War. One of the granddaughters married William Boush, descendant of Samuel Boush, the first mayor of Norfolk, and the home passed into that family. Later, it went to a family named Oliver who in 1971 donated it to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities – now Preservation Virginia. The city has now acquired the five-acre property, including the historic house.

There was apparently joy and sorrow associated with that house. Consider that the houses of that day were centers of life. Weddings and other social events took place there. There must have been lots of dancing and feasting.

But something else was going on. A small family cemetery out back includes the grave of Mary Boush, the wife of William, who “was of a broken...”

The letters are too faded to read, and you have to finish the sentence yourself. I was told that boys invariably choose “neck,” while girls unanimously say “heart.” Apparently, one of her sons had recently died, so the girls probably have it right. Either way, “when the last summons came,” as the tombstone puts it, she took leave of family and servants with “serenity.”

So what was life like out there in the wilderness in 1725? Only 2,000 people lived in all of Princess Anne at the beginning of the century. Almost all lived on self-sufficient farms, raising and cultivating their own food. Roads were almost nonexistent, the family likely traveling by water, negotiating the then-existing Cattaile Creek to the Lynnhaven River.

The outside, with its massive chimneys and decorative brick work, identifies the house as a substantial place, but its size, with just two rooms up and two down, shows it to be solid-middle-class modest.

Inside are huge, almost-walk-in, fireplaces, where herbs are tied up to dry. A humble pallet beside the fireplace testifies to how tight the quarters were. But the coolest thing about the house is probably the small chalk - yes, chalk! - marks on the ceiling, about 11 feet high. The wide planks, cut in ship-lap fashion, were carefully numbered when hand-sawn, so they would meet perfectly when joined. The downstairs flooring is new, but the upstairs planks, with rectangular-headed nails embedded, are original. You touch the boards and realize that children played here almost 300 years ago.

And then going down the stairs, aided by a banister smoothed by centuries of Thellabals, Boushes and Olivers, you realize with a rush and a gulp that others have passed this way.

April 11, 2010

The Old Horton House, built by Barnabas Horton – a distant relative of mine – in Southold, N.Y. The illustration appears to be an 1878 postcard. Courtesy of Long Island Genealogy. (Click to enlarge.)

Don’t talk to me. Can’t you see I’m busy?

So what if I’m displaying classic symptoms of addiction, that I appear trapped in a bottomless pit that is called family tree-building and I’m ignoring other perfectly good subjects for columns? I’m dealing with it. I promise I’ll quit if you just give me space.

Last week it was the “violinist” on a 1913 passenger list when my grandfather Richard Clancy – whom I’d never met – got off the boat in New York. The other thing that hooked me was the declaration that he’d been born in India. What a wonderfully interesting fellow he must have been.

Now I’m ensnared by Mortimer.

Here was this perfectly nice fellow, my mother’s charming Uncle Mortimer S. Horton Jr. He had come back from World War I and was staying with her family in Brooklyn while looking for work. He married the girl next door. But on a trip down south, this apparently happy fellow vanished without a trace. His mother, sisters and other family were devastated. They searched and searched, but never learned what happened.

“Where’s Mortimer?” became a familiar family expression.

Ninety years later, I rise to the challenge.

Surely he’s listed somewhere. On a census form, in a newspaper story, on a death certificate. But I seemed to have hit a blank wall. The billions of public records that Web-based genealogy services are able to access lead nowhere beyond 1920.

But wait! A general search of newspaper stories shows…among the names at a Dec. 1926 engagement party in Reno, Nev., where “red carnations graced the table,” was, Oh drat! Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mortimer Horton of San Francisco. Never mind.

I haven’t found him yet. But one of the rewards of doing this is intersecting with distant relatives who happen to be on the same wavelength. The genealogy service quickly senses that someone else has been doing Horton family – and here’s a message!
“Since our grandmothers were sisters…” it begins.

Oh, my gosh. Here’s Carolyn Norklun, neé McDermott, the daughter of my mother’s favorite cousin, Marge, sending me a message. And it’s about the family mystery man.
“He was a newlywed who traveled south for work,” she writes. “He apparently sent his bride a telegram telling her to sell the house and put the furniture in storage. He was never heard from again!” Family speculation, she adds, is that he was selling insurance in some pretty seedy places and was murdered. But where in the South and when?

“Also,” she writes, “I don’t know if you’ve found the thread, but Mortimer Stillwell Horton [his father] was directly descended from Caleb Horton (son of Barnabas) who was the first white child born in Southold Town, Long Island.”

I look up old Barnabas, who arrived from England in 1640, and find his will online. He begins, “Finding my distemper daily growing upon me…” (charming way with words) and bequeaths, among other things, 10 sheep to each of his sons and daughters, five to one of their children and a horse to another.

Well, I haven’t found you, Mortimer, but I’ve found other stuff that’s just as good.

What I take away from this is that, unless you have an unlimited amount of time and patience, this sort of thing can, and will, become a passion.

And what’s wrong with that?

April 4, 2010

I think it was the violinist.

You see, when I was very young, my grandmother Dot showed me the violin her husband used to play. I remember it was gleaming, and the strings sang oh so sourly. And although I had never met him – his life was far too short – I could almost picture him because of that instrument.

And now I see the name Richard Clancy on the passenger list of a boat cruising from Quebec to New York City in December 1913, and among its entries, in scratchy but legible writing under Occupation, is the entry, “violinist.”

Then there’s something else that absolutely nails it. Family lore has it that he was
born in India because of some position his father might have held with the British government, when England ruled that country. And there it is again, in that same hurried handwriting under country of origin, “India"!

Later, a 1901 England Census identified Richard’s Father, James, as being with the Cheshire Regiment of the army. So that’s probably what sent them there.

I had heard that family genealogical research can be fascinating, but I didn’t realize that addictive is a much more apt description. Because we’re planning a trip to Ireland this summer, I wanted to find out where in that Auld Sod some of my ancestors had hailed from. I hooked up with one of those Web outfits that take you back through family history, and within hours I was staring not just at electronic versions of census reports, passenger lists, marriage and birth records, and so forth, but at the actual documents. You can even zoom in at 200 percent to see it all the better.

The only drawback is you have to be careful, as you walk back through time, to step in the right places. Or you could be quickly barking up the wrong family tree. At one point I thought I had a relative named O’Halloran who had died in Tasmania in 1859!

A friend who knows the genealogical ropes showed me how to zero in on the correct documents by picking up a few facts, such as the relative’s age, before clicking on the “historical records” tab. And then I was off to the races.

I thought this would be a good time for this subject because it’s census time. And you realize it’s not just a civic duty to record our presence on this planet, but the answer to an as-yet unspoken plea of some future great-great grandchild to find his or her way back through the maze…to you.

Along the way are incomparable riches. In my case, here was Richard again in ship manifests. He wasn’t a violinist for long, but an importer-exporter who’d traveled everywhere. And taken his wife and my father, Russ, to places like Shanghai, Bermuda and England. My dad, at age 7, sailed to England on the Mauretania, one of the great ships of its day, on her maiden voyage in 1907.

Here’s Richard again on a 1925 passport application: 5-8, gray eyes, fair. Born in Bombay.

I did make the Irish connection, although it was more distant than I thought, going back to my grandfather’s grandfather, a “furniture broker,” who was again named James and his wife, Margaret, a “dealer in old clothes,” somewhere in that country. I don’t know where. Yet.

There’s something else I’m going after. On my mother Elizabeth’s side, I found “Betty,” 4, in the 1920 U.S. Census. She was living in Brooklyn with her parents and sister, Kathryn. But there, also, was the family mystery man. Mortimer Horton Jr., her 24-year-old uncle, was living with them temporarily. It seems that shortly after Mortimer got married he upped and disappeared. And try as I might, he doesn’t show up in any further records, not Census records, marriage records, death records.

Well, let me tell you, Mort – may I call you Mort? – give me a few more nights of whiffing on this addictive drug called family tree building, I’m going to find you.

The Mauretania made her maiedn voyage in 1907 and, later, took my father to England. Courtesy of Cruising the Past.