Not Rootless After All

My father bought a farm in southern Connecticut in 1928 when I was six years old. and he sold it in 1941. My childhood was spent on that farm and in retrospect it seems like a lifetime, but it was only thirteen years. I dreamed of growing up and buying up enough land around our 65 acres so that I would own all the land I could see from the front porch. I guess I had read too many western stories. Things didn’t work that way in Connecticut.

When WWII broke out, I had to wait until I was 20 to join the Navy WAVES, and by the end of the war the farm had been sold, my father was dead, and I no longer had a home. Mother was living with her parents in Massachusetts until she remarried a childhood playmate in 1946.

After I joined the Navy I married a career sailor and moved so many times I had to write it down to remember all the places we had lived. Most houses were rented and in town. I always yearned for a house in the country with at least ten acres around it. I didn't feel I really belong anywhere.

In 2003 I retired from a volunteer job at the local museum that I held for seven years, and moved to this Indian horse camp. I had recently acquired a computer so I began to record family documents. I dug out a genealogy from my father’s family that had been published in 1902. The book is in very bad repair and I thought it best to reproduce it on the computer. It is so tattered that many pages are separated from the spine. I am afraid copying it on a copier would completely destroy it. Typing forces me to read it more carefully, and that is a good thing.

What I found out is the revelation that back in Fairfield County, Connecticut I really was home all the time! My first American ancestor was Thomas Stevensn, the emigrant who arrived in Connecticut in 1643 and thereafter lived on the lands surrounding the Long Island Sound in both Connecticut and New York. When he first arrived there was a great Indian uprising threatening New Amsterdam (New York) and southern Connecticut, and he joined the militia to fight them. He may even have traveled across our farm in pursuit of Indians! His commanding officer was Captain John Underhill who was a veteran of the Pequot (Pequod) war in Connecticut a few years earlier. Thomas got into trouble when he and another militiaman were ordered to guard a prisoner. They locked him in an upstairs bedroom and left him alone while they sat talking before the fireplace downstairs. The prisoner escaped out a window and Thomas and his mate were to be court-martialed. Capt. Underhill came to their defense and rescue and thereafter seems to have become a friend and mentor for Thomas. They both lived for a while in Stamford, CT. By 1645 he had married a widow, Mary Bullock Barnard, whose husband had been killed in the Indian uprising of 1643 and Thomas and Mary and the Underhills were all living far out on Long Island, at Southold, NY on adjoining properties.

The story of Thomas the emigrant picks up again in court records in 1645. He had acquired forty acres of land at Newtown, Long Island. (I had a hard time finding the place on my Rand McNalley map but found it when the text in the genealogy mentioned his property was ten miles from the East River.) The Newtown Township had brought suit against him for re-routing a road without consulting them. His defense was that his house and barn were separated by the road, making it impossible for him to erect a fence to enclose his ‘plantation’ against Indian attack. (The English settlers called their farms ‘plantations’ and the Dutch called them ‘bouries’) The Dutch court in New Amsterdam, where the case was tried, allowed him to make the change, but he had to round off the 90-degree turn in the road around his property to make it easier to navigate. Another charge was that he had dammed up a stream. His defense was that it was not a stream at all, but simply rainwater that he captured with the dam. The judge allowed that, since the neighbors below could do the same thing. This information is available because Thomas was involved quite regularly in lawsuits concerning property rights initiated by himself or by others against him. He sounds like a cantankerous old coot.

Thomas died in 1666 and his descendants continued to live in Newtown, part of today’s borough of Queens, until about 1680 when four grandsons and grand-nephews took up land with a Quaker community in Hunterdon County, on the west side of the Delaware River in what was then called West Jersey. They all married Quaker brides and thereafter all the family were Quakers until my great-grandfather who's bride was not a Quaker and would not join them, so husband, wife and children were excommunicated.

Now, back in the 21^st century, whenever I hear news originating in Queens, New York City, I wonder if among all those tall buildings and underneath all that concrete, lies the land that my ancestor, Thomas the emigrant, farmed as he defended his family against Indians. The people living there now probably never even think of such a thing or of what it was like for the first settlers living there .