As an old year gives way to a new, we think of those who are gone or far away or with whom we have lost touch. After a certain age we are all orphans, in a strangely depleted land. Those who knew us first and best are no longer available to provide warmth and comfort in a cold, hard world.
Every New Year’s Eve we sing the Burns poem about Old Long Since, that is, the days gone by. It captures a bit of this winter solstice mood of melancholy and nostalgia, and it is no accident a Scot wrote it. Scotland’s population in 1800 was 1.6 million, but in the previous century hundreds of thousands had left home, many for America. In the first US Census of 1790, 480,000 people were of either Scottish or Scotch-Irish descent.
No wonder its second verse is peculiarly appropriate to a country of immigrants. “We two have paddled in the brook/ From morning sun to dine,/ But seas between us broad have roared/ Since Auld Lang Syne.”
Newly arrived immigrants feel keenly the pang of distance and separation. Those of us whose ancestors came generations ago are, ironically, even more isolated. In a sense we don’t know what we are missing if we are ignorant of our forebears’ stories.
My putzing around with genealogy rather late in life has provided me with an unexpected feeling of belonging to something. I have now walked in places where many of my ancestors and those of my wife came from and where they settled in a new land. And fragments of their stories have come to light.
A French lad from Rouen came to Quebec in 1640, was captured by Mohawks, tortured and held for three years, but he learned their language and was eventually freed after serving as translator and peace emissary. Guillaume Couture is my maternal grandfather’s ancestor, and a statue to him stands a patch of the 180 acres he was given on the banks of the St. Lawrence across from Quebec City.
I have paused there, and I have visited the original land of my father’s first Monroe ancestors on the broad banks of the Potomac. I have seen the rusting ruins of the mills where my 19th century Welsh and German ancestors toiled making tools and steel in Yeagertown. Pennsylvania and Warren, Ohio.
And I have seen where my grandmother’s earliest American ancestors founded towns in New England, and the little churchyards where they came to rest after fleeing Puritan intolerance to seek freedom of religion in Quaker southern New Jersey. I have also visited the small town of Zanesfield, Ohio where Browns and other like-minded Quakers ran a stop of the Underground Railroad.
On my wife’s side of the family are a few German and English immigrants but a preponderance of the Scotch-Irish who dominated the back country of the south. Her father’s Deans came from Ulster to Maryland and down the Great Wagon Road to settle on the border of the Carolinas.
A few miles to the west, a remarkable group of families – Craigs, Neels, Boyds, McKnights and Johnstons — settled in the years before the Revolution. One, Thomas Spratt, is said to have been the first man to build a cabin in what is now Charlotte. His bones were discovered just a few years ago under the parking lot of the Charlotte Medical Center.
These people founded a collection of Presbyterian churches that preached resistance to the British and they fought at Fishing Creek, Camden, Stono, and Rocky Mount. Many lie in the churchyard of Bethel Presbyterian in Clover, S.C. We are now awaiting DNA results that may help confirm a rumored droplet of Cherokee blood from my wife’s Grooms or Gordon ancestors.
When I think of those who are gone, I no longer think only of my Mom and Dad and my wife’s parents, but of all those previous farmers and factory hands, soldiers in the Revolution and the Civil War on both sides, the Presbyterian firebrands and the pacifist Quakers, German River Brethren and Seventh Day Baptists, the abolitionists and the slaveholders, religious pilgrims and indentured servants.
It is easy to sentimentalize the past, but any family tree also has its share of bad apples — wastrels, bounders, brutes and weasels. And the good old days believed things that now make most of us cringe — about race, gender and ethnicity. It was also willing to turn minor doctrinal differences of opinion into a reason to condemn, torture or declare war. Part of coming face to face with our ancestors and their history is deciding what to admire and emulate and who and what to lament and avoid in the future.
Still, most of these people came here seeking a new start, economic opportunity or religious freedom, greater equality and self-determination, cheap land and upward mobility. And they met and married and mingled their histories and created something new. That’s something we count on every new generation to do, to renew the Republic yet again, adapting to changing times.
We may think we are living through hard times and divisive times, but knowing what our ancestors came from, and what they lived through, and what they built ought to give us a bit of hope. They were a tough bunch to have left everything they knew behind, to brave broad, roaring seas, to populate a new land with unknown dangers, odd flora and fauna, harsh weather, war and insurrection, diseases and sudden death, economic boom and bust.
Is our generation or the next going to be the one to tear it all down, to fail to rise to the challenge, to acquiesce to decay and entropy? I don’t think so. Decline and fall has happened before as history endlessly reminds us, but, so far, not here. And learning a bit of our own family’s history can help. With a few exceptions they weren’t heroes, but they were workers and neighbors, builders and survivors. They endured, and even prevailed. Most often not as lone wolves, but as members of a community — a village, city, state, country.
Coach Bill Belichick preaches one paramount rule to members of his team. He tells each man to: “Do Your Job.” If we all do — as fathers and mothers, employees and, especially at this moment, as American citizens — the surprising result can end up being “E Pluribus Unum.” Happy New Year, I hope. As the old song says, the darkest hour is just before dawn.