A Funny Thing Happened

Eleven generations separate my sisters and me from the Mayflower passengers. Only eleven, and they didn't seem so long dead to me anymore. Reading their birth, marriage and death dates forced me to visualize actual people as they lived their lives. Reading of their community, its hardships, its triumphs, of the children and following them through their histories and generations to the present.

An ancient lichen covered slab of slate engraved with the name of a man who died in 1791, the bones of a British warship sunk in 1770s being exposed by the onshore winds and tides..these things are old. Looking at the letters and numbers inscribed thereon, I feel a connection with the anonymous craftsmen just doing their jobs. Imagine. Imagine. My fingers tingle with recognition. My feet and eyes marvel at the sights and touches of the past. To walk in footsteps of builders of Chartres or an isolated hill fort in the Magillicudy Reeks in Ireland - these people wakl with me. I watch DaVinci as he places a stroke of pigment on the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. And there were ghosts at Gettysburg winding their souls about us, reminding us never to forget.

They come alive if given the chance. They speak, smell, laugh, love and cry. Some become dour and stolid as they age - they were children when younger. I never forget that. Quadequinna's daughter married an English immigrant in Cape Cod. How did the two cultures react? Anne Hutchinson followed her own beliefs and refused to let the Covenanters in Boston break her spirit. Banished, she moved to Rhode Island, then to the Hudson valley north of New Amsterdam. There, one would hope, she found a period of peace before she and most of her family were slaughtered by an Indian war party. She appears to me as a tall, grey woman surrounded by light and grace.

Ordinary folk, most of them. Real people speaking of their lives through their stories.

Eleven generations seem such a very short period of time, now, for the passage of time means nothing. The ancestors are what they seem now. Real, tragic, powerful, nasty, saintly. So much can be found out about them, even back into the very deep periods of history.