Taking the oath
Today's exploration of the family tree takes us back to colonial days, a time we seem to inhabit a lot. I've made the point before, I believe, but I find spending time in the colonial period to be somewhat discombobulating. Not so much from Sharon's side of the tree but from my own. The narrative I remember from growing up was that ours was a family with recent ties to immigrants. Grandparents were mentioned in terms of the countries they immigrated from, and the stories of grandparents who weren't immigrants were told. I assumed, wrongly I now realize, that I didn't have familial ties that went very far back in America's history. Finding so many relatives from the colonial period upsets part of my familial history, on the one hand, because my folks had no clue what their real roots were so I wrote the wrong story in my mind. On the other hand, it reminds me that those recent immigrants married folks whose roots go much further back in history, and if you go ba...