All Souls Day -- The Scotch-Irish Immigrants appeared today, when I wasn't even looking for them.

So, it's All Souls' Day, and the ancestors have been crowding around, wanting to have their stories told. I went looking for one small piece of information in the 1920 Census, and got sidetracked and distracted (isn't that always what happens?) and turned up all kinds of cool things today...but the most interesting thing I found is, finally, a pair of our immigrant Scots-Irish ancestors. I was looking at something in someone else's tree, out of curiosity, and looked at a record, and there they were.

Here is a shout-out to my 6th great-grandfather, Thomas Rutherford, born in 1707 in Derryloran Parish, Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. His father and uncles had left Scotland while in the service of King William III for Ireland, and were present and engaged at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.  Two were officers, and the third was a Presbyterian minister. They decided to stay on the island, and there they raised their families: one in County Down, the minister in County Monaghan, and Thomas' father, in County Tyrone. In 1728, Thomas was in love with 16-year-old Jean Murdach, of nearby Gorty-Lowry Parish. His feelings were returned, BUT! When he asked her father if he could marry her, not only did her father say "no," but he moved his whole family to Pennsylvania.  I should note that nowhere does it say that he moved them to America to get his daughter away from Thomas, although that would add an extra dramatic spice to the story.

On October 26**, 1728---- either before or after the Murdachs left for America--- Thomas went into Cookstown and bought a memorandum book. On the flyleaf he wrote his name, and the date, and "written at the house of Aggness Murdoch,"---Jean's mother. On the cover, he wrote only "Enquire for Dennygall." Whether from Jean or another source, he was in possession of an important piece of information: Jean's family planned to settle in Donegal, or "Dennygall," on the banks of the Susquehanna River. Either that year or the next, Thomas left for America, the first of his family to do so.

In 1729, he finally got to Dennygall and showed up on the Murdach doorstep to claim his bride. He was again disappointed. Jean's father, John, sent him away, but told him that if he returned with a certain amount of money to prove that he could provide for her, he would allow them to marry. He departed for Philadelphia, and some time later reappeared-- on a horse this time, instead of on foot--- and with documents that satisfied his future father-in-law. No, Jean's father didn't send him away a second and a third time, although that would make this a more stereotypical fairytale adventure.  Thomas later wrote in his memorandum book, "Me and my wife was married the 7th day of September, A. D. 1730, by the Rev. James Anderson, in Donney Gall, America."

In the years to come, Thomas added the births and sometimes the deaths of their 12 children, the later marriages of the surviving children, and other details of their lives. The girls for the most part married at least once, some losing husbands who had left on explorations into unsettled territory, or who became casualties in the Revolutionary War; these families moved south and west, to the Appalachian foothills of South and North Carolina. The boys, for the most part, stayed close to home in Donegal and Paxtang, or Cumberland and Adams counties, in Pennsylvania. 

A kind person who is also a descendant of these people transcribed the records written in Thomas' memorandum book, which still exists. She then posted all of this, along with some bits from William Henry Egles' 'Pennsylvania Genealogies: Scots-Irish and German' on the Find-A-Grave website entry for Jean Murdah/Mordah/Murdach.

Thanks to Thomas and his stubborn determination to chase Jean (part of the way) across the globe, thousands of us now appear solid and clear in our own family portraits (Back to the Future-style), solidly written into our family trees, existing in flesh and blood, here-and-now form at our kitchen tables and walking on the sidewalks of our towns.

To steal the status post of a friend this evening:
"Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. 'Be still,' they say. 'Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.'"

**- my birthday, no big deal...

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Two Sides to the Coin of Creepy

.......

There's the warm side, of friends and firelight, holidays and companionship...romantic language and story-forms.  Tradition.  Tales told over and over but never written down...the same stories told in different ways in different places, the children of travelers, adept at blending in and looking at everything familiar through a different lens in each new location....and all the stories that have been written down.  Literature and folklore, transmission of cultures...Festive and social,  awash in spiced harvest foods, candy, and alcohol.  Creepiness as entertainment: a costume that can be put on and taken off with little or no risk in the comfort of society.  Quaint idioms to universalize and tie a clever bow around the primal reality symbolized and played out by the natural world at this time of year.

But the other side of the coin is not so much cold, as devoid of warmth.  There is no companionable feeling here.  No stories to distract and thrill.  Stories can be put aside, but what is here can never be put aside, because it is part of the whole fabric of which we are made. Nothing is familiar, there is no blending in.  No literature or art to make beautiful that which is inevitable and terrifying.
It is not human, not in our image or the image of any other creature we know.  It does not care or feel.  It is cold.  It is bleak, most of all.  It is what is left when there is nothing else.  Despair and emptiness.  Gray daylight ordinariness.  The most disorienting dream you have ever dreamed.
Sometimes you will catch a glimpse.  This is a warning.  Nothing lies beyond but more and more of the same.  This is what you have been looking for, and it's like nothing you could have imagined.  It is truth.

Doctor's Report from 1880 Census....St. George Dist,. Accomack County, VA - transcription.

'The only contagious diseases that have prevailed in my district during the past year are the mumps and whooping cough; the latter of which has proved fatal in a few instances.  My district is situated in an exceedingly level section of country, extremely well adapted for railroads, which may here be constructed at less expense than perhaps in any other part of the United States.  It has long sustained the reputation abroad, of being very unhealthy, so much so that strangers regard it as a sort of death spot.  But its exceeding healthiness for the last six years has contributed greatly to retrieve its character in that respect.  Indeed, I believe it to be as healthy as any part of Virginia which is not mountainous.  It is true, that the mortality on this shore in bygone days was very great, but that, I think, was owing more to the luxurious and epicurean style of living which then prevailed than to the climate.  For now, when terrapin and oyster suppers and bacchanalian carousals have become less frequent, a very decided improvement in the health of the Peninsula has taken effect which is likely to increase as the Sons of Temperance are making very strenuous and successful efforts to do away with the use of intoxicating liquors, that well known source of disease and premature death.  The district is free from rocks, and contains but little timber adapted to ship building………..however there is enough that is useful for building small schooners; and also the erection of dwelling houses.  The most common tree is common pine, which grows very rapidly, the leaves of which are much…….making beds for hogs and cattle.  This when decomposed and compounded……substance makes a very excellent manure, and is very  generally used.  There is a compound, de…..nated among us “……..”, which has also been found to be highly useful as for fertilizing the soil; owing to the salt with which it is very strongly impregnated, our lands requiring manure of character.  This grass is ….. in great abundance to our bay and ocean…it is also much used in our ice houses for ….. ice, which it has the main …..of preserving.  ………. Are unknown on the Eastern Shore.  ….., known…….(next page missing.)'

(this is a snapshot of the place my grandfather's family came from, thirty years before he was born.  they had lived in this place for about 250 years, at the time. I think this was written during the time that there was a campaign to persuade the railroad to come to the eastern shores of Md. and Va.)

Sleep Story

At my grandparents' house, I usually slept in the guest room on the first floor.  Down a tiny hallway off of the 'entrance' hall (which wasn't really an entrance hall since only strangers used the 'front' door), the guest room had three windows, two of which faced the spacious side-yard, which was bordered by the Chincoteague Bay and PawPaw creek on the east and south sides, and was empty except for a weathered picnic table and a large cedar tree.  The third window looked out on what I thought of as the 'front' yard, since it was the side of the house that we saw first when we arrived, since it faced the road.  Later I learned that the real front of the house was the side that faced the water, and was fronted by the wide, screened porch.  The 'front' yard contained the willow tree that I liked to climb and sit in. The willow branches made swish, swish noises when it was windy, which was always.  Inhabited by rhythmically-singing cicadas in the summer months, it was easy to climb.  I loved to collect the crispy brown shells that the cicadas left behind.  My grandmother would give me a paper lunch bag to keep them in, and I would take them home to my house in Elkridge, for my mother to throw away months later, no doubt, when these summer days were more distant and my thoughts were absorbed in the worries and business of school days.  Behind the willow tree ran the white-painted, two-planked fence which separated the yard from the end of the tar and gravel lane that dead-ended at the creek, and the low, narrow, ramshackle pier that reached out into the shallow, muddy water.  Across the lane stood the neighbors' house across a damp grassy lawn, and an expanse of salt marsh, and finally, from this same window you could see the bridge that crossed the creek.  Bayside Road ran, and still runs, along the Chincoteague Bay coast from Public Landing, swooping inland at Boxiron Creek and Brockatonorton Bay.  In the 1970s, the bridge still wasn't paved, and each car or pickup truck rumbled over the wooden bridge, the sound echoing off of the surface of muddy PawPaw Creek and drifting back toward the house.

I. The Beech Tree

While the house I grew up in was being built, my mother would sometimes come and watch, making a cozy spot for me at the feet of a huge beech tree that stood in the backyard, at the edge of the woods in our new neighborhood, Marshallee. We moved into the house in August of 1968, when I was 10 months old. The tree still stands behind the house, but after more than 40 years of residency, my parents sold the house a few years ago. I haven’t been back to see it since, although I’m often in the area visiting friends, or my sister, or my daughter who now lives with her aunt during the school year.

There are many things about beech trees that set them apart from their fellows in the tree world. First would be their smooth, silvery bark, which scars easily and is therefore a beloved target of graffiti aficionados who were obviously never Girl Scouts who were taught that tree bark is the equivalent of our skin. Second would be their interesting, rounded-pyramid-shaped seeds, housed in prickly little nut shells. Squirrels sometimes nested in this tree, but always loved scrambling around in its branches, feasting on these tasty (I imagine) little nuts. The shells would fall gently onto the back porch, and sometimes our heads, in the autumn months. I wonder if the squirrels made bets with each other about whether they could make their scraps hit us when they fell. The third, and most interesting, unique feature about this breed of tree is the way that its trunk seems to grow human faces. Knobs and whorls, which appear on the smooth trunk as it grows, resemble eyes and eyebrows, sometimes even a lumpy nose or a scowling frown. A single tree can glower down upon the forest from 6 or 10 different vantage points on its trunk. Because of these faces, beech trees have always seemed to me more likely to be inhabited by a spirit or soul than the average tree.

This exact tree, both in fact and in fancy, watched me grow from a baby into an adult…watched my sisters grow, and my family evolve. I miss it almost in the way I would miss a relative.

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Some links / H.C. Tragedy

Belmont - Description and Floor Plans from Md. Inventory of Historical Properties

Hanson Family Burial Ground


*Morningstar Lodge Cemetery and Gustav Lurman Cemeteries were built over, headstones removed but graves left intact.  MLC:  Pizza Hut on Rt. 40.  GLC: parking lot of Catonsville High School.

Belmont Photos

Investigation

Lawyers Hill Historic District

Lawyers Hill Historic District

Tutbury

Patapsco Bridge

Spring Grove

HD Cottage and Elibank

Elkridge Heritage Society

Jail-keeping and Wolves' Heads **

November 7, 2007

While taking a break from working very hard on this quarter's statistics at work today, I found a really cool and amazing thing on a genealogy site....transcriptions of Westmoreland County, Virginia court records concerning John Minor (a 10th great-grandfather from Garway, Herefordshire...the immigrant!) and his wife, Ellinor. This document has his date of birth as 1625, which could be more accurate than my date of 1600. But look! He was in court practically ALL the time, which I guess is not shocking since this also reveals that he was the undersherriff of Sheriff Youell for many years. It looks like he was responsible for prisoners, and for building a jail, providing accommodations for transported indentureds, etc etc which his wife seems to have continued after his death. This is totally fascinating, and I recognize some of the other names in these records as names appearing in my tree, too (Bull, Allerton, Sturman, and even a Thomas Vaughn who maybe he knew from back home?)

John Minor's Court Records

***October 23, 2015.  This REALLY needs to be about the wolfs heads!