Weaving with straw

kw: family history, genealogy, writing

If locating a new ancestor is like finding a needle in a haystack, genealogy as practiced by my mother and two other women to whom I am related is like weaving the haystack into a tapestry, and using it to display one's needle collection. First and foremost, I am thinking of a book I received very recently, Buckland Filleigh: A Continuous Thread by Madeline Jane Taylor.

There are thousands of books that recount the family history of one specific family, but a much smaller number that weave together the history of a region or place out of all the family stories to be found in it. When a place is small enough, it is possible in one volume to encompass all the family histories, and that appears to be what Mrs. Taylor has done for Buckland Filleigh, a parish in Devon, England that is one of twenty-six in the Shebbear Hundred.

A Hundred is an administrative unit, as set up by the Saxons, consisting of one hundred "hides", a hide being a land area that can support one family. It is not hard to determine that Buckland Filleigh, then, contains but a handful of hides. But in modern times, by which I mean since the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s, only a few families might live by farming, while the rest have "day jobs", so the chronicle of even this small place is rich with stories and is quite a challenge to compile.

I cannot yet review the book, as I am still reading it, and that right slowly. For the moment, it is quite amazing the amount of raw information from parish records, land office records, tax records and other sources that the author has compiled to produce the book. Was it Rumpelstiltskin who wove straw into gold? The nugget for which I obtained the book is the last appendix, an 8-generation descendancy chart for Stephen Vanstone, an ancestor of Mrs. Taylor's, and also one of mine. From noting where the line to her and the line to me branch, I reckon that we are eighth cousins.

Genealogy of the Lindsey Family, compiled by Emily Lindsey, is an unpublished manuscript that jump-started me and my mother in the genealogy obsession. We received in 1962 a typescript produced by my mother's cousin from the manuscript. This cousin had typed up the 1901 manuscript and added a few pages to bring it up to date to 1962. The total volume is but 30 pages of double-spaced typescript, containing the vital data for about 100 people, beginning with Thomas Macy, one of the original purchasers of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Miss Lindsey, my great-grandfather's sister, must have been about my age when she compiled the material, starting with the Lindsey family Bible.

The descendancy record from Thomas Macy to her generation occupies just five pages. The following twenty-one pages record other descendant families, Freelands, Pecks, Turners and others. My mother's cousin added Lusters, Wilcoxes, Vanstones and more, and one or two more recent generations of the other families, for a record of about 100 cousins through the fourth degree, most of whom I've never known.

Then there is my mother. She, my brothers and I figured out Miss Lindsey's system (by no means clear at first), and drew charts of the ten generations of our own family tree. Within a few years, my parents' nest emptied and my mother joined a genealogy club, among other pursuits. Then I found in a library The history of Nantucket: county, island, and town, including genealogies of first settlers by Alexander Starbuck. Mom told me, "At the genealogy club, we all have cake when someone finds one new ancestor. This book has about thirty, so we had quite a party!" That was in 1970, now forty years ago.

Just a few years ago, my brother sent all her genealogical records to me; she'd sent them to him when she could no longer continue to research and compile. He did quite a bit of research himself, in the years just before we all got computers. The core is a large, half-folio-size binder of pedigree pages, more than 100 of them. A box of photocopies from books, newspapers, and other sources rounds out the material. My brother did not add to the pedigree pages, but had gathered census records in both the US and England. Again, this was before computers: he photocopied microfilm records.

I think if she'd had time and energy, my mother would have written a book from all this. She is gone now six years. Since my brother sent me all the stuff, I've put it into Ancestry.com and the number of ancestors in the tree has grown to just over one thousand. The descendancy information on cousins I've chosen to track adds another hundred or so. That is quite a needle collection!