Is a fence viewer anything like a train spotter?
I return to my part of the family tree and that most fruitful of the branches, the lines of Orpha Morse. As usual, I rummaged around in the names until I came on an ancestor whose listing contained biographical notes. In this week's case, the relative in question is Francis Holmes, also sometimes referred to as Francis Homes. Francis seems to be an immigrant from England who began life in America in the Massachusetts Bay colony. In 1636, he and his family sold their land to newly arrived Puritan immigrants and moved to Watertown, Conn. About the time the Holmses moved to Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, a Congregationalist minister who became known as the "father of Connecticut," decided to take a group of residents from Waterford, Conn., on a two-week journey, following a Native American trail, to a spot near present-day Hartford, where they began a settlement. One of the sources I found on Francis indicates that his family was one of the group, but I can't pin that do...