Well, it is the premise of this blog. For the record, a lot of our junk was stored under this floor, though this barn in York, Maine, was never ours.
Tag: New England
No index and no footnotes
November is the month many amateur writers set out to draft a full novel within 30 days.
My book Quaking Dover is nonfiction, but with eight published novels, I can still sympathize.
I should have been suspicious when this book seemed to write itself, producing what one beta reader then sensed as not just stream-of-consciousness but a mind-dump.
Ouch!
Revising it, aiming at a more consistent, creative non-fiction tone, was much more torturous and required much more time and attention than I can calculate. Still, I have to admit the result feels satisfying. Just don’t make me do it again.
As a history book, it wound up with no index and no footnotes but instead focused on a community of people over time.
Well, the ebook edition can be easily searched for items. Not so with the paperback.
As for footnotes? Much of my research in the Covid outbreak was conducted online, not exactly a permanent source of information.
The effort did push me far beyond my journalism discipline, pushing me into the story as an active observer, not that I was comfortable with that.
But it seems to work, all the same.
Looking for God in the details
The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited as the origin of the quip, “God is in the details,” but the phrase actually goes back much earlier.
Still, however tedious but essential, details do extend to the minutia of building and sustaining a marriage, a family, and a wider community. You can also apply it to any number of other things, including business, sports, the fine arts, politics.
In researching Quaking Dover, I am left with many gaps in the records of Friends’ godly endeavors. When, for example, did Dover Friends cease to run their own schools?
In addition, in writing a history, the details can drive one mad.
May I suggest the devil’s at work there, too?
My genealogical research experience was a plus
In my mid-30s, a decade after I started worshiping in the Society of Friends, I heard that my great-grandfather had been a Quaker who moved from North Carolina to Ohio after the Civil War.
I’d no clue and was shell-shocked, in a good way.
That soon got me into genealogical research with another, older, cousin, which in turn led me to others through correspondence. Many of the results can be found on my Orphan George blog.
Central to that research were Quaker Meeting minutes and learning to interpret those records. For family data, they can provide some of the best information before the census of 1850, the first to name everyone in a family, along with ages and some other facts.
Serving as clerk of Meeting and in other roles also deepened my understanding of the faith and practice.
While I gained some skill navigating this field, other researchers specialized in public records, such as wills, tax filings, and property maps.
Admittedly, working as a census taker in 2020, I did develop a sympathy for lapses and errors in the federal population documents.
When it came to researching Quaking Dover, I found myself returning to others’ genealogical summaries, where one version differed from another, as well as other records. I knew to treat what I saw there as tenuous but still helpful.
Somehow, though, it felt familiar.
Ornamental wild apples
The trees are found everywhere around here. As are the deer that eat all the fruit they can reach.
Doodling around with the origins of ‘Yankee’
The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.
Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.
The word’s origins, though, are contested.
- The earliest recorded use is credited to British General James Wolfe in 1758 when he complained about the Americans under his command. The British continued to use it in a derogatory fashion. The pompous fools.
- A largely dismissed theory had it arising in a French word for English-speaker that the Wyandot rendered into Y’an-gee.
- Another had it being adopted when New Englanders defeated a Native tribe who had identified themselves as Yankoos – meaning invincible. Problem there is the tribe must have been invisible all along.
- More likely is a derogatory Dutch-language origin in the early 1600s through New Amsterdam, beginning with the name Jan, for John, pronounced Yan. One theory has Jan being applied to any Dutch-speaking English colonist, a kind of winking acknowledgement that they could converse. How about having it originate among those Dutch-speaking Englishmen? I haven’t seen that suggestion before.
- Or it may have been imported from the Old World as Jan Kaas, “John Cheese,” a generic nickname the Flemish had for Dutch in the north.
- Or Jan might have been combined with another popular Dutch name, Kees, into Yankee, as English-speakers turned it against the New Netherlanders.
- And then those New Netherlanders soon slapped the word on English colonists in nearby Connecticut.
- By 1681 there may have even been a Dutch pirate, Captain Yanky or Yanke. The Dutch settlers, now subsumed into the English colony of New York, may have seen the Brits as pirates. Sounds awfully late in the timeline for me. I think it was definitely widespread slang before that.
- By the time of the Revolutionary War, the song “Yankee Doodle” was well established. Whatever its original intentions of mocking the Americans as simpletons, New Englanders took it as a badge of honor, macaroni and all.
- Somehow, after the Revolution, it became a synonym for Protestants descended from New England Puritans and their values. Take “Yankee ingenuity” as a prime example.
None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.
Halloween’s in New England’s bones
Looking for witches among the Quakers
One of the first things the Puritan authorities examined for after arresting women preaching the Quaker message in America was physical proof of their being witches.
I have no idea about the specifics – and am not sure I want to know. Still, their obsession with the naked bodies strikes me as creepy, even pornographic.
After publishing my book Quaking Dover, the thought struck me that the Puritans must have seen Quaker worship as some kind of séance. Not that we were trying to communicate with the dead, but rather be open to the presence of the Holy Spirit, or Christ.
Of course, that Holy Spirit was translated at the time as Holy Ghost. Yipes! Sounds like Halloween, no?
From my perspective, Ghost is way too limiting for that Spirit, especially when Christ is seen along the lines of Logos in Greek philosophy.
It’s far more revolutionary and liberating than you’d think. One way builds religion as a kind of legal system with punishments and rewards. The other builds it as a set of relationships.
Now, to stock up for those little trick-or-treaters who will be knocking on our door. I promise not to put religious tracts in their bags, tempting as the opportunity might be.
Tamarack glory
A boreal larch tree, also known as hackmatack, is a member of the pine family, it is one conifer that changes color every fall and loses its needles. The species grows in wet soil and withstands extremely low temperatures, reasons it’s found widely around here.
Its bright yellow autumn color is shared with birches, also found widely hereabouts.
And let’s not overlook the red punch of sumac.
All too soon, it’s over.
There’s much more to Salem than witch hysteria
Through much of the colonial era, Salem was one of America’s ten biggest cities. In addition, it was closer than Boston to Dover, and like Dover it was settled by West Country English fishermen before the Puritan migration flooded into New England.
Salem’s first Quakers suffered some of the most intense persecution for their faith found anywhere, and they were instrumental in bringing that faith to Dover.
What I didn’t realize was that Salem was long the only Quaker Meeting in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The other early Meetings in today’s Massachusetts were actually in the Plymouth colony.
Details on Salem Meeting’s existence were scarce until I was pointed to Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.
Her study breaks off before the Salem Meeting shifts to Lynn, where it was once the largest or second largest Friends congregation in New England. And then that, too, faded from sight early in the 20th century.
Pestana’s sensitive telling of Friends through the period includes her sense of Quakers as family oriented, communal, even what she calls tribal. I would still like to see the story of what happened to Salem Friends in the industrial era, but she provided consolation for my own conclusions in Quaking Dover.
As for Salem, its unique Peabody-Essex Museum ranks in many categories in the top ten art institutions in America. It’s definitely one of our favorite destinations. Its grounds even include a reproduction of Salem’s first Quaker meetinghouse, built about the same time as Dover’s.
