theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Massachusetts

  • The Wrong Scot

    The Wrong Scot

    For about a week, Ancestry.com was confident I was from New Jersey.

    It had me descending from a woman born in Marlton – which I assumed was in Scotland, but a quick consult of the altas turned out to be a city in New Jersey, fifteen miles from Philadelphia, named after marl, a green clay full of crushed shell that local farmers spread on their fields as fertilizer. 

    There is no Marlton in Scotland. There never was. The whole thing arrived in my tree the way these things always arrive: a bum merge, somebody else’s bad data welded onto mine by a hint I should not have accepted, quietly relocating a genuine Scottish ancestor to a Philadelphia suburb named after dirt enhancer.

    It’s even funnier once you know I’d spent my whole life certain that it was being a MacDonald that made me Scottish.

    My grandmother was Marion Louise MacDonald — Nana — and honestly her name did most of the work. You hear MacDonald and you picture heather and a tartan and somebody being treacherous to somebody else at a dinner party in 1692. I never questioned it. Of course I was Scottish. Look at the name.

    But the MacDonalds had not been in Scotland for a long time. Donald MacDonald came across on the Hector — the ship that dumped a couple hundred Highlanders at Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1773, three years before there was a United States. 

    By the time anyone in my family was alive to tell me I was Scottish, the MacDonalds had been Canadian for well over a century. John @#$@#ing George MacDonald — my great-great-grandfather, the brick wall, the man Nana spent twenty years of her life trying desperately to trace past — was born in Nova Scotia and died in Nova Scotia.

    So when Helen “Ellen” Boyle (1823-1866) was actually on a boat, leaving actual Scotland, John George was technically a seven-year-old Canadian. My Scottish grandmother’s people had left Scotland three generations before my supposedly-not-Scottish grandfather’s people got off the boat.

    Ellen Boyle is on the Parker side. The side with the flat, unbothered English name that nobody ever accused of being from anywhere. 

    Nonetheless, she was baptized in 1823 in Troqueer, Scotland — a parish on the west bank of the River Nith, just south of Dumfries, in the old stewartry of Kirkcudbright. That’s Galloway, the bottom-left corner of Scotland, the part that never makes it onto the shortbread tin. 

    Through her childhood, Ellen’s family moved between three Galloway parishes — Creetown out on the granite coast, Troqueer, and Kirkpatrick Irongray inland — the itinerary of people chasing work that keeps not lasting. Her father James did a stretch in the Kirkcudbright tolbooth, the town jail, which in that time and place held one main category of guest: men who owed money. (I looked for something more dramatic. There isn’t any.) He died in Scotland. So did her mother, Mary.

    Galloway in the 1830s and ’40s was a place you left. The handloom weavers who’d anchored the local economy were being ground out by the power looms in the cities. Wages collapsed. When Parliament studied the misery, one of the remedies its experts formally recommended was that the weavers simply emigrate. 

    The government’s official advice was leave. 

    Two of the Boyle children didn’t look back. Ellen sailed to Massachusetts and married Charles Francis Parker in Newton in 1843 — a Yankee, born there in 1822, no Scotland anywhere in him. Ellen’s brother went to a mill town up in Strafford County, New Hampshire, married a local woman, and dissolved into rural manufacturing without a ripple. The parents stayed, and died, and that was the end of the Boyles being from anywhere.

    It worked because Ellen was built to vanish. Lowland Scots came with the full assimilation kit — Presbyterian, English-speaking, literate — and dropped into Protestant Yankee New England like they’d been ordered from a catalog. 

    She married her Yankee Parker in Newton, and then the couple drifted north to Rochester, New Hampshire — the same Strafford County mill country her brother had landed in.  Both Boyles who got out ended up in the same corner of the same state. And, within one generation Galloway was simply gone: the tolbooth gone, the three parishes gone, the granite coast gone.

    So here’s the full stack, and I’d like a moment to appreciate it. The branch where diversity meant being born 10 minutes, 20 minutes, or 60 minutes outside of Boston brought me the ancestor with the most recent claim on global citizenship.  

    She grew up there, left there, crossed an ocean to get out — was sitting quietly on the branch with the boring English name. And when I finally went looking for her, the machine briefly and confidently informed me she’d been born in New Jersey.

    In a town named after fertilizer.

    I think she’d take it as a compliment. Vanishing was the whole idea, and turns out she was very good at it.

    Sources. Scottish parish registers — Troqueer and the Galloway parishes (Kirkmabreck/Creetown, Kirkpatrick-Irongray), Kirkcudbrightshire. Newton, Massachusetts vital records — the Boyle–Parker marriage, 1843. Find A Grave — Ellen’s death at Rochester, New Hampshire, 1866, the record that fixes Thomas M. Parker as her son rather than Charles’s second wife’s. Kirkcudbright burgh court records — James Boyle’s imprisonment.

  • The Difference Between Fact and Hope

    The Difference Between Fact and Hope

    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.

    Sources. The 7 September 1845 Roxbury, Massachusetts marriage record — Abraham entered as “widr., a. 56 y., mason, s. Francis and Mary,” the document that names his parents. Newton, Massachusetts vital records — the single Francis Parker of that generation, son of Enoch, married to a Mary. Natick, Massachusetts vital records — Abraham’s 1813 marriage to Mary Haynes.