Abraham Parker was the first ancestor who ever told me to go to hell.
Well, not in so many words — when he died 160-odd years ago, he left me almost nothing to argue with. That was the problem. He left me pretty much no trace at all.
Getting to him was easy. He’s my great-great-great-grandfather, and every link from me to him is a Parker: my father, his father, his father, his father, then Abraham (1789–1864). Married Mary Haynes in Natick in 1813. And then the trail just stopped.
It stung in a way I didn’t expect, because Abraham was a Parker. My Parker. By blood he’s no more mine than a Titus or a Pike or a McCrillis — same fraction of me, same distance back. But Parker’s the name I ended up with.
It’s the name on my driver’s license, it’s the name on the email signature, and yet here Abram was cruelly slamming his genealogical door in my face.
It wrecked me a little. It also kept me up for weeks. So I did what every beginner does when a wall won’t move.
I forced it.
Here’s how you force it. You pattern-match on names — and the colonial records are lousy with the same dozen first names. You line the candidates up, and you “eliminate” all of them but one, and then you announce that the one left standing has to be right.
When I did this, Abraham’s father was Elijah Parker of Freetown, his grandfather was Capt. Elisha Parker of Scituate. And a couple levels (and marriages) behind Elisha, a pot of gold: a Mayflower passenger, a couple of names straight out of The Crucible, a Longfellow cousin if you squinted.
I’d proved it. Proof by elimination. I was so sure.
I also knew, in the part of my brain I’d stopped listening to, that I was stretching. Proof by elimination has a shelf life. It lasts right up until the moment you find something else that could be right.
And then I found something else.
The real answer was quieter than the lie. After another two weeks of banging my forehead on the desk, it turns out Abraham’s father was Francis Parker of Newton — son of Enoch Parker, a Harvard schoolmaster.
Behind Francis? No Mayflower, no witches, no poets. Just a documented line of boring-but-safe Parkers whose only excitement seemed to be moving from Newton to Dedham and back every two or three generations.
The proof is unglamorous. The 7 Sep 1845 Roxbury marriage record names Abraham a “widr., a. 56 y., mason, s. Francis and Mary.” (A gripping read, I promise you.) The Newton records hold exactly one Francis of the right generation born to an Enoch, and he married a Mary. No rival candidate anywhere.
It isn’t flashy when it doesn’t come with a single dramatic document that closes the case in one stroke — but I’m learning that type of Indiana Jones #$@# doesn’t happen.
The truth came the way most honest pre-1850 answers come, finding one path through the trees where all the records line up, and none of the subsequent records crushes your dreams of leaving this branch and moving on to the next person.
But the lie did cost me. I had fallen in love with my false Parker family tree. I loved my first Mayflower hit (Henry Samson). I loved that I was related to a Hilton (Hannah, not Paris). I even loved the creepy girl who lied about witches in Salem and helped send a half-dozen people to the gallows (Mercy Lewis, via her sister Priscilla).
So Abraham. The first ancestor I wanted so badly to be someone that I nearly made him someone else — and the one who taught me the difference between a fact and a hope.
Abraham told me to go to hell, and it took me years to realize that was the lesson.
And it’s awkwardly fitting that the ancestor who taught me to wait for the truth instead of inventing it was the one whose name I’d been carrying the whole time. I learned it first on my own name, before I’d earned the right to screw up anybody else’s.
