Celebrating America’s 250th: Between Blue & Brown There is Hazel – A Family Heritage Story & What I am Reading

I have been rereading a young adult book about the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony ~ A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower 1620, which our librarian and myself, her aide, culled from our school library a couple of years ago (and I was happy to give a new home!)…

This is an older series of books called Dear America, and this particular book was written by Kathryn Lasky, Scholastic Books, 1996. In the epilogue, it says that this story is based upon the real diary found by Remember’s great-great-great-great granddaughter in 1850 in a very old trunk in her family’s attic!

Synopsis: Remember’s mother wanted to name her Patience, which is what she is called in the actual Mayflower Compact, but when she was born she squalled a lot and did not seem to have much patience, so Remember was added to her name. I love this as “Mem,” as she calls herself in the book, talks about how she and a friend, Humility, “Hummy,” made up names for members of the crew and people aboard the Mayflower based upon those people’s personalities.

One of those was the nickname “Lark” for Priscilla Mullins, my twelfth-great grandmother, as her eyes were as blue as larkspur. What a lovely thought!

My grandmother’s eyes were a lovely light grey-blue and as a child I always wished I had blue eyes.

One diary entry talks about Mem missing her mother, who died during that first hard winter/spring when everyone became ill from malnourishment and general illness. She asks, “Does one ever get over it?” (missing them)

Well, the short answer is, of course, yes — and no. Yes, you get over the intense pain of missing a dearly loved person, but no, you always miss the times together. 🙂

In that, I thought of ancestors, mine in particular. I thought of my grandmother Helen and her family, which descended from Mayflower colonists, John and Priscilla Alden. I remember how her eyes were a pretty blue. Grampa Frank’s eyes were brown, my mother’s father.

Mine are brown, and my mother’s were a green-hazel.

Here are my grandparents above. 🙂 I really don’t remember my grandfather much as he died when I was seven. I know we saw them a bunch when we moved to Massachusetts in the late 1960’s but I guess he must have been very quiet or we just didn’t talk much, I don’t know. However, I talked to my grandmother a lot on the phone as I was growing up. She came once to Hawaii to visit us, and then once to California when I was 15 years old.

Then this thought popped into my head:

Between blue and brown, there is hazel.”

Barbara S. Chapman

Not quite a poem, but poetry to me, and Shakespeare has been on my mind lately, for some reason. On another note, I just sent a modern poetry book to my son which was signed by the author and I purchased at a local grocery store this winter.

A funny story involving my grandmother Helen: Twinky, a large but very gentle soft-grey tortoise cat with a white underbelly and paws , one of 13 cats we had over the course of time we lived in our last family home there in Northern California, would follow Grammy around trying to drink milk out of her cereal bowl!

Poor Grammy! She was horrified and would hide in my bedroom in order to be able to eat at my desk in peace. Funny memory…

During that same summer, Grammy helped me write out all of the ancestors names she could remember, their dates, and stories about them into an album my mom had picked up for me. (I wrote, she spoke.) I am ever grateful to her and Mom for their funny stories and knowing our family roots back several generations.

Helen passed away at age 75, but I can still hear her voice saying, “Hi Barbie (Babbie), how ye doin?” in her Irish Bostonian accent.

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Mom & Grammy would be pleased

My mother and grandmother knew we had been in America since the early 1700’s, but they would have been really excited to learn how far back our family went! Mom had heard that so many family records had burned in the terrible fires over the centuries but information had been saved. It was much harder to find family records back then than it is now.

I’m ever grateful to all the people out there who combed cemeteries and wrote down who was buried where, and to the countless librarians who copied and typed information into microfiche files! All the family Bibles with births and deaths recorded within their pages. All that is being stored in massive databases now just waiting for us to find them!

As a descendant of The Mayflower and John & Priscilla (Mullins) Alden, if you are also a Mayflower descendant, you may wish to join The Pilgrim Society/Pilgrim Hall Museum.

The museum is “accredited by the American Alliance of Museums” and “is committed to diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusiveness…”

I love that The Pilgrim Society’s mission statement states:

“We are committted to telling this story with historical accuracy, inclusion and recognition for histories that traditionally have been submerged, silenced or erased.”

The Pilgrims settled into the area of Plimith/Patuxet where the Wompanoag Native American tribes lived and they lived quite well together. After all, if it weren’t for the Native Americans leaving food for them that first winter and bringing the Pilgrims seed corn and showing them how to plant it and cultivate it during that spring of 1621, (among other vegetables like squashes) they would have starved to death.

It was only later on that the English took advantage of this friendship between the Pilgrims and Wompanoag peoples, author Kathryn Lasky wrote in the Epilogue in Remember Patience Whipple’s diary.

Of course, while just looking around the internet for photographs, now I am thinking that a trip to visit all of my cousins and family back east is in order. 🙂

My brain is busy putting together an itinerary so our grandson could get to see some of these places, too.

This could be a whole family adventure!

Poems and Poetry

“The Courtship of Miles Standish,” Parts I – X, is a very long fictional piece written by another distant relation, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, about John Alden winning Priscilla Mullins hand. I’d quote a little of it here, but seriously, it’s a BOOK reading the whole thing! It may have been written from stories handed down from his ancestors so who knows? 😉

Our whole family enjoys poetry. How about you??

I know that studying about the Pilgrims may not have been popular these past few years, but I feel this sweet young adult book is still good reading for today. Here is another book on our shelves which I found at Half-Price Books a few years ago: Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, by William Bradford. It is a book with all of his writings including “The Mayflower Compact.”

Enjoy this year and do celebrate our melting-pot heritages, friends! Please let us know where your families come from and how they arrived here. We can have our own Ellis Island here on the blog. 😉

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Happy 250th anniversary, Dear America,