I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again. ~ Georgia O’Keeffe (Letter to Russell Vernon Hunter, October 21, 1933)
It’s been a curious summer. Very little went as planned. As many of my readers know, I’ve long been trying to go through all the family history items we inherited after our grandparents’ houses on Cape Cod were sold. Before we moved to North Carolina I went through and discarded many of the things from their attics and closets, but still wound up transporting 14 boxes of stuff down here. My goal for this summer was to take advantage of being stuck inside to go through the boxes and organize all of it by family lines into my special acid-free notebooks.
Well, I only got through 4 boxes and am in the middle of the 5th! Each box is 12″x14″x18″ and is crammed full of pictures and paperwork! I’m still throwing a lot of things away, but I’m going through every piece of paper with a fine-tooth comb and in doing so have found many treasures. Reading every letter, every deed, every will, every newspaper clipping, every vital record and naturalization certificate. My notebooks are filling up fast. I’ve added a few more of them to the shelves. The pictures are being set aside to be sorted out after the paperwork is done.
I feel like a curator, managing this huge collection. I feel like I’m ‘being myself again’ after all. These summer days have been so enjoyable and a labor of love. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the stories about our ancestors that I’ve discovered, but am determined for now not to stop until finished. So this will be a year-round project going forward. There’s no way I’m willing to wait until next summer to start in again!
some of the 14 boxes waiting in the corner
The pictures are going to be more difficult to deal with because, sadly, so many of them are unidentified. But the paperwork is fun to read. The above letter was written by a lawyer (?) to Tim’s 2nd-great-grandfather, advising him about a search for a will in England. It was written in 1869.
The oldest piece of paper found so far was a hand-written ‘article of agreement’ between Tim’s 4th-great-grandfather and two of his sons, signed by him in 1837! It’s quite something to be holding a document that was in his ancestor’s hands 187 years ago.
I’m also in the process of taking my ancestor blog posts and turning them into stationary web pages. The growing list of pages can be found near the left bottom of my blog’s sidebar.
A book on the new arrivals shelf at our local library caught my eye. I snatched it quickly, as if I feared someone else might have been around to grab it before I did. The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story, is a deeply moving memoir by Victoria Belim, who was born in Ukraine and then emigrated to America with her mother and stepfather when she was 15 years old. Many years later, after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, she felt pulled to return to Ukraine for a lengthy visit with her aging grandmother Valentina, who was still living in the village of Krutyy Bereh.
The book started with two of my favorite things, a family tree diagram and a map of the villages in Ukraine where the stories of the lives of the author’s ancestors and relatives unfolded. Central to the story was the Rooster House, an attractive mansion in the city of Poltava, with two red roosters flanking the door. But to her late great-grandmother Asya it had been a sinister place to be avoided, the home of the secret police.
Back in February 2022 I wrote a short post about Russia invading Ukraine and the vague memories that event stirred up for my sister and me. See post here. Ever since I have been wondering about those possible genetic memories.
My father once told me that when he was 4 years old, in 1926, his father was finally able to send for his 18 year-old sister, who grew up in Ukraine with their grandparents. When she came to live with her family in America she brought with her some notions that were puzzling to the rest of her siblings. Once, my father went up into the attic to play with a couple of his friends. When his sister heard them having fun up there she came up the stairs and scolded him severely. Didn’t he know that attics are where families keep their secrets?
While visiting her grandmother Valentina, Victoria Belim found and started reading her great-grandfather’s journal about their family. In it was a short underlined sentence mentioning one of his brothers: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” And so began a very long and frustrating search for Belim’s great-granduncle Nikodim’s story, which very sadly, finally led her to the guarded archives at the Rooster House.
Reading about Nikodim reminded me that I also have a mystery in my Ukrainian family. In 1999, when my aunt was 91 years old, I had a chance to interview her about the grandparents, aunts and uncles she left behind, but kept in touch with, in Ukraine. She was very reluctant to share anything and only met with me after being somewhat persuaded to by another aunt. One thing she did reveal was that her uncle had served in the Austrian army and later studied to be a teacher in the Soviet Union. At some point he went to Czechia. He is thought to have been killed by Stalin when he returned to Ukraine. I wondered what ‘being killed by Stalin’ involved. This book gave me some ideas about what life was probably like for my father’s aunts and uncles during those years.
My portrait of Ukraine is personal, tracing my own story against the tidal wave of Ukrainian history. At the same time the book reveals the complicated nature of Ukrainian identity and the country’s difficult relationship with its Soviet past. As such, The Rooster House explains the context in which the current war takes place. ~ Victoria Belim (The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story)
What I appreciated so much in this book was those personal details, how her family made the best of things in the midst of so much turmoil, over many years and several generations. I loved reading about how much their gardens meant to them, how they cared for their cherry orchard. I was surprised to learn about how culturally important Ukrainian embroidery is, not just used for clothing, but also for ritual cloths used in weddings and funerals. Some patterns had hidden meanings, handed down in families. They hung on to their scant possessions, they were students and teachers, all while suffering through famine and random arrests and interrogations, and adapting to never-ending changes in circumstances, including the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
They had no jewels passed down from illustrious forebears and no books of family trees. They knew of their distant ancestors only by virtue of their own existence. They left few traces. It was hard to accumulate belongings and uninterrupted history when one lived in a place referred to as ‘the bloodlands’, ‘the borderland’, or ‘the frontier’. Asya and Sergiy lived through many upheavals in the twentieth century and their way of life was swept away by one tsunami of events after another. In the end, anything that survived was valued simply because it had emerged out of the chaos. My mother and aunt disputed ownership of Asya’s chipped cups from the 1930s with the passion of Greeks talking about the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles. ~ Victoria Belim (The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story)
How the author finally encouraged her reluctant grandmother and cousin to talk about the past was heartwarming. It took multiple extended visits to Ukraine for her to connect all the dots, but thanks to her persistence and research skills Victoria Belim’s family now has this beautifully written book to treasure, a record of the lives of their ancestors and relatives, and what she went through to find some of their stories.
5.24.23 ~ Tim on the Charles W. Morgan Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut
A year ago we were busy packing up to move to North Carolina and visiting as many of our favorite places in Connecticut as we could get to before we had to leave. This post was meant to be about the last one of those visits, but I ran out of time to get it written and posted. Mystic Seaport is an amazing living history maritime museum and it was also the venue for many special exhibits, performances and festivals that we enjoyed over the years.
stern of the Charles W. Morgan
The Charles W. Morgan is the main attraction, the last wooden whaleship in the world, and a National Historic Landmark. (more information here) It was a 15-minute drive from our home and we were long-time members of the Seaport. In fact, my parents were members and brought me here often when I was growing up, when we lived an hour away.
deck prism lying flush in the deck, it refracts and disperses natural light into the space below deck
harpoons tucked under a ceiling
ship’s wheel
luxury for the captain
captain’s quarters
first and second mates’ shared quarters
Life onboard consisted of long periods of boredom; for weeks, even months, no whales would be seen. The crew would repair gear, write letters, play games and music, and carve scrimshaw — pieces of whale bone or tooth — to pass the time. ~ New Bedford Whaling website
Whaling voyages lasted about three years. I was watching Space: The Longest Goodbye on PBS’s Independent Lens the other night. NASA is concerned about the mental health of astronauts being separated from their families for a three-year mission to Mars. The space explorers are not going to able to communicate with loved ones in real time! As if families have never had to do this before… Many of my ancestors did.
crew’s quarters
deck prism bringing in light below deck
whale blubber was cooked in big iron pots above deck, the extracted oil was stored in casks below deck
port side of the Charles W. Morgan
Every year on July 31-August 1 there is an overnight event on the Morgan, a marathon reading aloud of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I regret we never managed to participate! In the Seaport Village, Schaefer’s Spouter Tavern was named for the one found in the classic American novel.
many pleasant summer evenings we spent outside dining and listening to live acoustic musicians performing outside at Spouter Tavern
Our final visit to the Seaport would not be complete without a visit to the Small Boats building.
spritsail boat built by my 2nd-great-granduncle, Edward Ellsworth Swift (1861-1964)
I was 7 years old when Uncle Ed died at the age of 102. My grandparents, the late Mr. & Mrs. John E. White mentioned above, took care of Uncle Ed & Aunt Flora in their old age. My grandparents were also caring for my great-grandparents at the same time and I well remember our countless visits to the six of them at the house on School Street in Woods Hole on Cape Cod.
I will miss my visits to the little boat my grandparents donated to the Seaport, which connects me across time to my ancestors.
So many memories: live music performances we attended, the visits of the Íslendingur (2000) and the Draken Harald Hårfagre (2016) Viking ships and how excited we were when the Draken decided to stay, the yearly By Land & By Sea Antique Vehicle Show, the exciting Viking Days encampment, the restorations of the Mayflower II and the Amistad, making and printing our own Christmas cards at the village Print Shop, watching costumed historians cooking on open hearths, blacksmiths at work in the forge, and so many more. The Sargent, Whistler, & Venetian Glass: American Artists & The Magic of Murano special exhibit we saw in February 2023 was unforgettable!
image credit: Ukrainian Dancers USA ~ 8.20.22
An extra special memory is an Arts on the Quad evening, when we took Katherine to see Ukrainian dancers at Mystic Seaport, seen above performing on the porch of the Thompson Exhibition Building. We were so very lucky to live so close to this treasure trove of history and culture. It is deeply missed.
We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home. ~ Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
Addie, shedding her winter coat while eating some brush
One last visit with Julie’s goats… Another lovely, sunny, spring day.
an iris coming soon…
the goats have some gnomes in their yard
The goats were busy grazing and browsing, as goats do, and they were fun to watch. Brie even put on a little show. Julie though she might be pretending to be a dog…
Brie
being silly
“Whatcha doing, Brie?”
Some of my readers may remember Betsy, the little goat who had a rough start in her life. (see here for the story) I’m happy to report she has thrived with her new family and weighs as much, if not more, than she should now.
Betsy
I want to go about like the light-footed goats. ~ Johanna Spyri (Heidi)
Crackers (hoping for a cracker!)
My apologies to Chai because I don’t seem to have gotten a picture of her! 🐐
Such a pleasant midday visit with the charming goat gals and then a great family history chat with Julie afterwards. I was delighted to see that Julie has a loose leaf ring binder system for storing her genealogy records that is similar to mine. I think she is the only person I know who loves collecting ancestors as much as I do.
How very strange to go through December, January and February without a single nor’easter! And to finally get one in March. Who knows? This may be the last one I had a chance to anticipate before the move. I’ve always enjoyed the drama and excitement these storms bring with them.
A Nor’easter is a storm along the East Coast of North America, so called because the winds over the coastal area are typically from the northeast. These storms may occur at any time of year but are most frequent and most violent between September and April. … Nor’easters usually develop in the latitudes between Georgia and New Jersey, within 100 miles east or west of the East Coast. These storms progress generally northeastward and typically attain maximum intensity near New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. They nearly always bring precipitation in the form of heavy rain or snow, as well as winds of gale force, rough seas, and, occasionally, coastal flooding to the affected regions. ~ National Weather Service website
the Canada goose couple, back to claim their nesting island in the pond
We took a nice long walk at the nature center the day before this nor’easter arrived. So delighted to see mama and papa goose swimming around the pond together. We first saw mama sitting on her island nest on the last day of March last spring. We kept checking back and got to see her little goslings exploring the world near the end of April. Maybe we’ll get to do it again this year.
reindeer lichen clinging to branches reaching out over the pond
catkins and reindeer lichen
Our ancestors spoke to storms with magical words, prayed to them, cursed them, and danced for them, dancing to the very edge of what is alien and powerful — the cold power of ocean currents, chaotic winds beyond control and understanding. We may have lost the dances, but we carry with us a need to approach the power of the universe, if only to touch it and race away. ~ Kathleen Dean Moore (Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World)
daffodils across the street
back in the woods
But, as it turned out, there wasn’t much to get excited about this time — for us. It started raining Monday afternoon and rained and rained. The wind blew and blew. Tuesday evening there were a few snowflakes in the mix but nothing to stick. We didn’t even get the coating to 3 inches of snow predicted for the coastline here. But I see things are much different inland…
Long time readers of this blog may remember me complaining about the ancestral “stuff” we have accumulated over the years. For instance, here is part of my 15 July 2018 post:
You might guess from my recent choice of reading material that I’m still struggling with the objects and possessions I inherited from our ancestors. Things started piling up around 2008. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years! I have managed to dispose of a lot of stuff but cannot rest on my laurels. What’s left is stacked halfway to the ceiling in a corner of what is supposed to be the genealogy/guest room. The corner takes up almost half the room. … Trouble is, life (births, illnesses, travels, weddings, visitors, deaths) keeps happening and I need a good chunk of uninterrupted time to roll up my sleeves and dig in.
Four years after writing that, nothing had changed. More illness and then a pandemic… Well, I finally measured the pile of boxes. 6′ x 5′ x 4′. I’m terrible with numbers but I believe that was 120 cubic feet of stuff! And I finally realized that a good chunk of uninterrupted time was never going to come my way. I was going to have to seize it for myself. Walks, yoga, blogging, housework, puzzles, reading and family history research were all abandoned for the project.
I rolled up my sleeves and dug in. Much of it was disposed of. There were countless trips to the dumpster, the Book Barn, Goodwill and the Give & Take Shed at the transfer station. It took me a little over a month to make that pile disappear.
There were many treasures in there and these were roughly sorted and then stored where I can get my hands on them and organize them. (Soon, I hope!) At first I was trying to file important papers, like birth, marriage and death records, into the loose-leaf notebooks I created back in the 1990s. But it quickly became apparent that these would have to be reorganized to accommodate the volume of paperwork and photographs I was finding. These are the old notebooks:
There is room for expansion on the shelf below now. All the paperwork is put into acid-free sleeve protectors and kept in these notebooks. I need more! The first one was for us and our parents and the rest were for our eight grandparents and their ancestors. But I’ve had to start new notebooks for our parents and change the size for some of the grandparents. I can’t believe how many citizenship papers and wills and property deeds I found. Not to mention photographs.
One thing taking up a lot of space was my grandmother’s and my mother’s slides. My sister has made a start on digitizing them. Sadly, some are badly deteriorated.
There was about a decade in the 1990s I think of now as my genealogy heydays. My children were in their teens so I had more time on my hands. My mother had died of cancer in 1991 and my father decided to spend some of his time helping me with research. We took a day-long local family history class together with the Connecticut Society of Genealogists in East Hartford. He also came with me to a national genealogy conference in Hartford one summer where we bought a map of the Austrian Empire in 1875, as it was laid out when his parents were born there, in what is now Ukraine. I found the map and got it hung up again.
In 1993 I started a correspondence course with the National Genealogical Society.
My father and I also made many trips to Cape Cod during that decade. My late mother’s beloved parents were still alive and we visited them about once a month, sometimes making a side trip to a cemetery to locate an ancestor’s resting place. Grandfather finally had to put Grandmother in a nursing home when she kept falling and her dementia was too difficult for him to cope with. I am so grateful for my father’s companionship during those years. It was on these visits that Grandfather told me stories about his parents and grandparents, and I wrote them down. I did find many of my notes and corralled them into one place.
Grandmother died in 1996. After her funeral Grandfather took me and my sister and my cousin and my children to two of the cemeteries where Grandmother’s parents and grandparents were buried.
After a few pauses and restarts, I finally completed my course in 1998.
I wish that my mother had lived long enough to enjoy that decade with us. She became interested in family history toward the end of her life and my father used to help her visit town halls and genealogical libraries. She was just getting started with genealogy chat rooms online. She would have loved using the resources, like Ancestry.com, that I take for granted now. Once in the 1980s, before she got too sick, Tim had a work conference in Boston so he took Mom and me up there with him and dropped us off at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. We spent a memorable day in their library doing research. Went out for lunch in the city. It was a fun day, a rare mother-daughter outing. I can’t even remember who was watching the kids — was it my father?
Time marches on. Papa fell in 2000, breaking his femur, and began his slow decline. Beverly & John moved back from New Mexico to stay with him. Grandfather died in 2001. Auntie Lil needed ever more help and finally moved from elderly housing into my father’s house. Children went to college, got married and moved away. The 2000s are a blur of eldercare to me now. Tim had a major heart attack and almost died in 2007. Tim’s grandparents’ home in Provincetown was sold in 2009 and the Dennis Port home of my grandparents was sold in 2010, if I remember correctly. We wound up with lots of stuff we couldn’t handle or absorb. Papa, and Tim’s brother Toby, who lived out his last eight months with us, both died in 2013. Auntie died in 2016, at the great old age of 101. In 2017 Tim had major surgery, a sigmoid colon resection, and later that same year I was diagnosed with cancer and had a hysterectomy. So this is all why there was such a huge, untouched pile of stuff!
It’s such a relief to have it finally done. There are some loose ends to work on but these can be handled a little at a time. I’m looking forward to making new covers for my notebooks and reorganizing the insides. That’s fun work. It was so nice being able to set up air mattresses for our grandchildren to sleep on in the space formerly occupied by that awful pile of stuff!
Way before dawn this morning my sister and I found ourselves sitting together in the living room, shedding tears for Ukraine. Our father was the son of Ukrainian immigrants. We both have memories of him telling us about how Ukraine has been invaded over and over again throughout its history. Being little children most of what he was talking about didn’t mean much to us, but we often heard about Vikings, Mongols, Cossacks and Tatars, the Austro-Hungarian Army and Russia, Hitler and Stalin. His sense of ill-fated tragedy made a deep impression on us.
My grandfather left his pregnant wife and young daughter (Mary) in Luzhek Verkhniy, Ukraine to come to America in 1909. My grandmother left their daughter in Ukraine to be raised by Mary’s grandparents and came to America with her five-month-old son in 1910. They had six more children born in this country. Our aunt Mary finally came to America to live with her parents in 1926, at the age of 18. Most of her aunts and uncles who she grew up with came over at various times, too. Except for one who was “killed by Stalin,” presumably because he stayed.
Our hearts feel very heavy. I wonder if some sort of genetic memory is at work here. Took a peek at CNN and saw some people in Ukraine kneeling in a city square, praying. I had to turn it off. If you have any comments, please don’t make them political. My thoughts and prayers are for the Ukrainian people.
The ground was pretty soggy from melting snow and days of rain so we decided to take a walk in the village of Stonington Borough, rather than traipse through the muddy woods. I visited this lighthouse many years ago with my sister-in-law and climbed the very narrow circular stairs up the tower to the lantern room on the top. The view was wonderful. There wasn’t much space to move around or stretch out, though!
The Stonington Harbor Light is a historic lighthouse built in 1840 and located on the east side of Stonington Harbor in the Borough of Stonington, Connecticut. It is a well-preserved example of a mid-19th century stone lighthouse. The light was taken out of service in 1889 and now serves as a local history museum. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. ~ Wikipedia
The Stonington Harbor Light is located at the southern end of Stonington Point, marking the eastern side of Stonington Harbor. The light station consists of the tower and keeper’s house; both are built out of large granite blocks, and the keeper’s house has a wood-framed ell attached. The tower is an octagonal stone structure 35 feet (11 m) in height and 10 feet (3.0 m) in diameter, with a circular glass lantern house on top. The house is 1½ stories and about 30 feet (9.1 m) square. ~ Wikipedia
leftover Christmas wreath above the door
The promise of a water view behind the lighthouse lured us around the back and across the spongy lawn. How nice to see a bench there. Looks like a nice spot to enjoy a warm spring day. But no sitting for us on this wet day!
the back of the lighthouse
There were lots of sparrows chirping and flitting about, making it feel like a spring day. We found a sundial in a corner of the yard but it was too cloudy out for the sun to tell us the time. It might have been accurate, too, because we are not in daylight savings time. I wish they would do away with the time change. We’re only under “real” time for about four months out of the twelve…
small sundial
gray skies to the east
Looking west on our way down to Stonington Point we saw a moment of blue sky! From the end of the Stonington Borough peninsula one can see two lighthouses in two different states.
Latimer Reef Light Fishers Island, New York
Latimer Reef Lighthouse, which was placed on the western end of the half-mile-long rocky reef, consists of a prefabricated, cylindrical, forty-nine foot-tall, cast-iron tower with a cast-iron, concrete-filled foundation. … There were a number of other lights built around this time using the same design and employing the same construction methods. They were initially referred to as “Coffee Pot” lights because of their shape, but a few decades later, after the internal combustion engine was in common use, these towers became more commonly known as “Spark Plug” lighthouses. ~ Lighthousefriends.com website
A good portion of the parking lot at the point was still covered with the snow deposited there from the blizzard. It blocked a lot of the views! But in the distance between these mounds (above) I spotted Watch Hill Light, which we visited in October. So I walked across the waterlogged lawn area and used my zoom lens to get a picture of it from Stonington Point. (below)
Watch Hill Light Watch Hill, Westerly, Rhode Island
Our plan to keep our shoes dry failed completely! But at least they were less mucky than they would have been had we gone for a walk in the woods.
winter at Stonington Point
Years ago I used to be a member of the Stonington Historical Society but discontinued my membership when paying the dues didn’t fit in our budget. But it was there that I found a letter written to the Society by my great-grandmother in a file. Emma Flora Atwood was asking them if they had any information about her husband’s parents, William Martin White and Ellen C. Hill, who lived in Old Mystic, another village in Stonington. I don’t know what their reply might have been, but the folder had little else in it. It was exciting to handle a piece of paper that she had touched, too. I like to think my great-grandmother was as interested in family history as I am. She was my mother’s Grammy and that’s why I wanted to be Grammy to my grandchildren. ♡
The other thing I learned while I was getting the Society’s newsletter, was about my 2nd-great-granduncle, Pvt. Rufus C. White, brother of my 2nd-great-grandfather, William M. White, mentioned above.
Rufus C. White, born 6 June 1839, died 16 May 1864, age 24, at Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia. Rufus served as a private in the Union Army, Company E, 21st Infantry Regiment, Connecticut and was killed at the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff. In the 1860 census, Rufus was recorded as a farmer with a personal estate of $100.
The following is from Stonington’s Forgotten Heroes of 1861-65 by James Boylan:
The second large Stonington unit was Company E of the 21st Infantry Regiment, which was recruited in the summer of 1862 from eastern Connecticut. About seventy Stonington men served in Company E, under Captain Charles T. Stanton, Jr., of Stonington. Like Company G of the Eighth, this company became involved in the fogbound battle of Drewry’s Bluff, in which Stanton was severely wounded, and the siege of Petersburg, where Captain Henry R. Jennings of Stonington was wounded. Partly because its term of service was shorter, it suffered fewer casualties.
And there was another pleasant memory, which Tim & I recalled as we passed the Society’s Captain Palmer House Museum on our way home. It must have been in the early 2000s, when I read with great interest, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. I am distantly related to some of the sailors he wrote about on that ill-fated voyage. Imagine how excited I was to attend a lecture he gave about his book at the museum. Tim and Larisa came with me and we had a brief conversation with him afterwards.
