From a small heath field to America!
Edited to add: It is now my goal to talk Tiny Pasture into smoking a corn cob pipe in honor of his ancestor.
From a small heath field to America!
Edited to add: It is now my goal to talk Tiny Pasture into smoking a corn cob pipe in honor of his ancestor.
Tiny Cat Pants 
163 years in America…hell, my family’s got hoe handles older than that.
But do they have corn cob pipes older than that?
I’m guessing that branches of my family may have been here longer, too, but I don’t have time to track down all those bills of sale.
You sass, Mr. Holloway, but I have an expensive subscription to geneology.com I like to get as much use out of as I can. If you want to see what the Mormons have on your people, just email me.
My first ancestor, Athey Wall, arrived in Charleston, S.C. way back in 1763. My last name on both sides is Anglo Saxon, Cobb and Wall. But the Wall went to bed with Cherokees poluting the real Amerikun in me.
And we’ve owned a farm in N.C. since 1801. Do we Kleinasshole beat?
Ha, n00b, 1763 is practically last week compared to some of my folks.
(Of course, the mid-1600s is practically last week compared to your ancestors who go back 14,000 years so I should probably not talk smack, especially since I’m not even sure if I used “n00b” right. But I can’t resist smack-talking on the internet! It’s my hobby.)
Aunt B, I hope you have a great Turkey Day.
You know, this is making me think about how long my own family has been here. And I still feel very much the newcomer. But I realized that the first of my ancestors to get here arrived a bit more than a century ago. We’re actually part of US history by now. Cool.
We’re all (or vastly mostly all) newcomers in the Braudelian scheme of things.
Bridgett, did you ever see Jack Hexter’s “review” of the Annalistes in Journal of Modern History? One of the funniest piece of criticism I’ve ever read.
/derail
nm in our family we recite the names of each generation here in the states and still verbally pass their stories and other information from one to the other ( the original boat story, I bet your family has one too). I am the 5th generation here. We Irish tend to be clannish and the South reinforces that culture.
I have an immigrant student who has been an American for three weeks. Seeing how excited she was after her
Sorry, that posted without me hitting the submit button. It was inspiring seeing how excited she was.
Saraclark, I actually have very few such stories, about the old country, the voyage, or the early years here. My family was resolute about not looking back — the general impression I got as a child was that circumstances had been so dreadful that it was better to forget them. Two of my grandparents went to school here, though, so I have some stories about that. And details fill in gradually after that. I love your family’s approach, though.
Nm, I think it’s similar in my family. I’m sure if I were to dig deeply and get lucky, some of the stories I’d find would be fascinating, but the reality for me (and for many African-Americans, I reckon) is that there hasn’t been anything substantial or durable that was intentionally handed down through the generations (e.g. names, oral histories, or property), so any attempt to establish a connection to my ancestry wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Sam, I don’t want to push it if you don’t want to do it, but I’m more than happy to give it a shot. There may not be anything to find, but there may be.
I don’t mind at all. How much info do you need?
I’ll e-mail you a summary of an interview with my dad from October of ’08; it contains as much as I know from his side of the family.
Sam, I have a cousin who’s a genealogist, so I have all sorts of information about where my grandparents lived, and people’s names, and all that. I even have photos. I just don’t have stories. And it’s … odd-feeling and backwards.
The first American Lamb of our Lamb family was Thomas Lamb(e), who came to the Mass. Bay Colony in 1630. He was probably one of the first 5,000 European settlers in the English colonies. I noticed in the materials about Thomas that shortly after he arrived, he was asking the authorities to forgive the fact that he was breaking a law about where he was not supposed to live, and asking that he be allowed to stay there.
Figures.
Yes, Lambe was a member of Winthrop’s fleet and one of the original English settlers who started the town of Roxbury. The episode you mention was because he had moved too far away from the central meeting house — everyone was supposed to live within a half-mile of the church and he’d moved out of eyeshot of his neighbors (which made him both at risk and an odd duck — the Puritans were all about being in each other’s daily bidness). You can also be proud of him because he supported the first “free” school in New England (and probably the first in the space claimed by the British in North America). He had two small sons and wanted them to have a proper English education. Unfortunately, it was “free” only inasmuch as it did not teach Latin or Greek; parents still had to subscribe to pay the teacher and this school was fine with dogmatizing children to the Calvinist One True Way.