Old and new roots

 The most fruitful source of information on my family tree flows through my maternal grandmother.

The clipper Great Republic

All the other lines peter out but not before showing ancestors from Germany and England, which gives me German heritage on both sides of my family. And that makes my Irish heritage rather puny at this point, since I've not found anything on the grandfather who is the primary source of Irishness on my side of the family.

I bring this up because I've always been proud of my immigrant heritage because my parents often referred to their parents as immigrants. If you've read any of the early posts in this series, a certain amount of doubt has crept into the origin stories I was told about two of those grandparents, leaving only my German grandmother with solid bonafides as an immigrant -- I even found a listing for her on the Ellis Island website.

Imagine, if you can, my surprise in finding that I also have relatives who go back to some of America's founding British colonies. My people have been here a very short time and a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised to find that to be true of a very large proportion of current Americans. I could make comments trying to relate this information to the current immigration debates, but I'll skip it for now.

I mentioned previously that I when I look through our family tree, I tend to be attracted to the entries that have pictures associated with them. The first entry I ran into on my grandmother's limb was for George Little. His entry shows a family crest, but no information about the crest shows up in his listing. Perhaps I will find something as I chase his lineage, perhaps not. His wife's entry also has a family tree attached to it, but I haven't explored that either.

I was also attracted by the notation that said he had been born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1681. This colony appears in every American history text because the Puritans came to Massachusetts in the early 1600s, establishing colonies in places you might have heard of, such as Salem and later Boston. 

Perhaps you remember that the Puritans were a persecuted religious group who came to the New World for religious freedom and commercial reasons. I remember my school texts stressing the religious persecution angle without completely ignoring the commercial aspects. I don't really remember the part where full membership in the colony was predicated on being a Puritan, and those who were not Puritans were tossed out of the colony. I'm sure this information was in the texts, but we've always made such fuss about religious liberty being a key founding element for American that I suspect the irony of a persecuted group discriminating against others on the basis of religion gets lost in the noise.

My great, great, great, great whatever he is, George, was born in Newburyport, a town that still exists in the Old Line state. It is located about 35 miles from Boston, and as you might guess from the name, was a thriving maritime town. 

Newburyport claims a couple of distinctions. They consider themselves to be the birthplace of both the "true" clipper ship and the United States Coast Guard. 

Ships called clippers already existed, the Baltimore Clipper being a notable example. One Donald McCay, who moved to Newburyport from New York because of the ship building facilities there, built the first ship fitting the classic concept of a clipper, like the one shown above, in Newburyport, to service the coffee trade with Brazil. His design caught on, and the rest is, ahem, history.

Some controversy surrounds the claim that Newbury is the birthplace of the Coast Guard. Even though President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a proclamation to that effect back in 1965, some folks insist on being picky. Official Newburyport history says the town is where the first ship was built and put into service for the predecessor to the Coast Guard, the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service

But others point out that three other ships may have been put into service earlier. And the Coast Guard doesn't take a stance on the matter. Their website doesn't mention Newburyport, focusing instead on the official date of creation by the government. 

But the claims are good for the tourist trade, and that isn't necessarily bad for a seaside New England town.