My Christian Background

As noted in part 1, shortly after we were married, we made the decision to leave Christian Science and find another church. Donna was in favor of a very conservative Baptist church near us (Cheshire Baptist), but that was too far from what I was familiar with. We decided that we needed to find a church that, while it might not totally meet either of our needs, would be a good compromise that we could both live with.  The choice we made was the United Methodist Church in Cheshire.  Unlike the UMC in Northern Michigan which was still trying to cling to the EUB roots, the UMC in Connecticut was fully mainstream liberal.  Not only were there no Bibles in the pews (actually chairs that could be rearranged), but there was no Bible on the pulpit as well.  But we joined the choir and started to make some good friends.  It was a good transition for me, and helped me to make the break from Christian Science, but it was not going to be fulfilling enough in the long run.

In 1975 we moved to Pennsylvania and needed to find a new church.  There was one just a few blocks from the apartment we lived in – a Church of Christ.  We visited a few times, but it was a bit strange.  This was the non-instrumental type of Church of Christ – that was different enough.  But what made it unacceptable was that the decision-making body was all males in the church who were 12 and over – so a single mom with a teenage son could not give any input but her son could.  But since we otherwise were ok with the philosophy, we instead drove to the “other” Church of Christ on the other side of Allentown that was a bit more traditional. 

After getting involved there, joining the choir, etc., I finally reached the point where I was able to realize what it was that was lacking in my life.  I was always the intellectual, always in control, etc.  It was while reading Matthew 19:25-26 that God was able to penetrate the shell that I had around me.  In that passage Jesus has told his disciples that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  The disciples were astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus responds, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

That was what I was missing.  I was trying to do it all myself, and it was impossible.  Instead I needed to allow God to do it instead!  At that moment, my life changed.  Now everything that I had been dealing with for the past several years all made sense.  The following Sunday I went forward during the invitation.  As was the custom of that church, my baptism was immediately afterwards.

While we were enjoying the Church of Christ, there were some logistical problems.  Donna had started working at the Lehigh Valley Mall and had to be on duty by 10am on Sunday so she couldn’t get to the morning church service.  As a small church that drew its membership from many miles around, they didn’t have evening services.

Our compromise was to look in the Saturday paper each week and find a church that was having something special that Sunday evening.  We went to a couple of different churches that way.  A few weeks later, a church in Emmaus, Bethel Bible Fellowship Church, was having a special song night featuring Al Smith of Singspiration.  We went and liked the church and the people, so we just kept going every Sunday evening.

After a few months of this we realized that we were essentially regular attendees of two different churches but not fully committed to either.  We needed to make a decision, and so made the decision to commit to Bethel and no longer attend the Parkway Church of Christ.  It was absolutely the best decision!

Unlike some new Christians, I had a couple of decades of Bible reading and knowledge of Scripture.  However, because CS had warped my definition of many Christian terms, I still had a lot to unlearn/relearn.  But this went relatively quickly and I was dedicated to the new-found sense of freedom I now had by relying on God and Christ instead of my own ability.

We also joined the choir at Bethel and got otherwise involved as we were able.  When our children were born over the next couple of years, we stopped by the church on the way home and had our own private dedication service when they were only a day or so old.

In 1982, when I was only 34, I was elected to the Board of Elders of the church.  At that time, we did not yet have deacons, so the Elders did many of the traditional deacon roles as well (preparing the communion elements, getting the baptistery ready when needed, etc.)  All these I took in stride.

Becoming a Christian, and being part of an active, evangelical church, has shaped my life in ways too numerous to mention.

Over the past more than four decades, my involvement in church activities has included a number of different aspects.

I didn’t learn how to sing parts in music (in fact I didn’t even know that I was a bass) until my college years (in the CS Sunday school you only sang unison).  But music has been very much a part of my ministry since then.  At Bethel, Donna and I were part of the choir until it disbanded due to the changes in church music ministry that have affected most churches.  I was also part of a men’s quartet, The New Life Quartet, for nearly 20 years.  And for more than decade I was a member of the Worship Team. When I began having problems with my feet, I had to resign from the Worship Team. However, recently we have restarted a choir and I am again part of a singing ministry.

In addition, I used my detailed skills when I was the membership chairman for a decade or so.  When I took over that position, we had a number that represented our membership but there were no details behind it.  Each year we simply reported the last year’s result, added in new members, subtracted deaths, etc. and published a new number.  I wanted to know what names were behind the current total.  Again, a series of small mistakes had added up to a considerable discrepancy.  One person had joined the church as a teenager, left when her family moved away (but had not been dropped as a member), then rejoined when she moved back to the area as an adult (with a different last name as she was now married).  A couple of people had been dropped from the rolls when they died, but they had never been full members, just regular attendees.  Now we have a spreadsheet that keeps track of all the names of the members that I have turned over to the new membership chairman.

I also started a ministry of working with families.  One of the services that I provide is writing wills/power of attorney/health care directives for these families.  I also have helped a few families who had financial difficulties, primarily because they were not managing their funds properly and didn’t know how to make a budget. 

A number of years ago someone challenged people in the church to have a personal mission statement.  Mine is “To use the talents and skills that God has given me in ways that will advance His kingdom.”  The above are just some of the ways that I am trying to fulfill that mission statement.

A few years ago, I retired as an active elder after 32 years of service on the Board of Elders.  I decided it was time to turn over some of my duties to some of the younger men on the board.  But that does not mean that I will stop serving Him in other ways.

My Christian Science Background

I suppose that many people get their religion at least initially from their parents, and I am no exception.  My father’s mother was a Christian Scientist.  I’m not sure how this came to be since none of her relatives, nor her husband were of that persuasion.  Perhaps she adopted it because of some experiences she had or from some neighbors.  It doesn’t matter, but it would be interesting to know.  Because she had divorced when her children, my father and his sister, were quite young, she was the sole influence on their choice of religion.  As a result, they both became Christian Scientists as well.  (Note that I’m not going to try to define this religion here, that’s a subject that is not pertinent to my eventual story.)

Both my father and my aunt met their future spouses through the young adult ministry of the Mill Plain Union Church just a few blocks from where they lived with their grandparents on Radcliff Avenue in Waterbury.  But by then they were in their late teens or early twenties and their religious persuasion had already been pretty well set.  They belonged to the CS church in Waterbury, and it was into this church that they also brought their spouses and their eventual children, including myself.

The 1950’s and early 1960’s were the height of the CS religion.  The Waterbury church was thriving.  In the basement there was a nursery, a preschool room which was separated from the rest of the elementary students by a heavy curtain door which drew across, and the elementary student Sunday school.  The high school students had their own room on the 2^nd floor.  The adults met in the sanctuary.  (I should explain that the structure of all CS churches was that you attended Sunday school up to the age of 20, then you went to the church service which met at the same time.  Adults did not have any Sunday school service.)

There was no youth group or any social life associated with the church, and the leaders in the church service were a pair of lay “readers” instead of trained pastors.  Also, eschewing medical treatment for the most part, there were CS “practitioners” to whom you could go if you needed assistance in either physical or spiritual problems.  The Waterbury church drew its members from not only Waterbury, but many other towns around it.  So while there were many young people at that time, the only ones from the town of Wolcott were myself and my siblings and my two cousins from my Aunt Dot and Uncle Bob.

One of the other nuances of the CS church is that they really don’t want to have anything to do with the medical profession.  Since all school students had to have a yearly checkup with the school nurse in the fall, each year my parents would fill out a little blue card which stated their religious objection and I turned that into the school office and thus avoided this contact with the school nurse.

The only immunization that I got as a child was the smallpox vaccination which was being given to eradicate this disease.  I’m not sure how my parents agreed to that – perhaps they were not yet strong enough in their faith at the time – I don’t believe my siblings ever got such a shot. 

Apart from my birth, I only had one other encounter with the medical profession while growing up.  When I was going to Boy Scout camp one year I tripped over a root while running down the hill to go to the evening campfire and fell quite heavily.  I wasn’t going to say anything, but the person with me told the scoutmaster and he sent me to the medical tent.  The person there suspected that I had broken my collar bone and called my parents to come and pick me up (this was a Saturday night).  My dad came to get me and I spent the next 24 hours in bed.  Evidently my parents had quite a discussion between them on Sunday as to whether medical treatment was necessary.  I think my mother won the case.  At any rate, on Monday my dad was driving me to school (I thought), but at the turnoff to the school he went right instead of left, then informed me that over his objection he was taking me to the hospital to get checked out.  ER procedures were not much different then than they are now, so it took most of the day before I was seen.  As it was so late, they kept me over night and I was released the next day with a figure-eight bandage around my shoulders, an appointment for follow-up visits with the doctor, and an excuse note to be let out of PE at school for the next several weeks.  We only went to the first follow-up visit, then just ignored any further treatment. My collar bone healed on its own.

Our reliance on spiritual solutions for any physical ailments also meant that I never took any medication, even aspirin.  As a result, I never learned how to swallow a pill and developed such an aversion to doing so that even today I cannot take pills without either crushing them up and taking them as a powder with applesauce, or crunching on them first.  Habits learned so young are very hard to break.

For a while in my high school years there was a movement to establish some sort of youth program.  There was a smaller CS church in Bristol and they organized what was called a “Youth Forum.”  We met at the home of Mrs. Yetkey and there were perhaps a couple of dozen high school-aged CS young people in attendance at their once-a-month meeting.  My Aunt Dot was one of the organizers – this comes into the story again a few years later. 

I had no exposure at all to any other religion, no interaction with any other church, and so I believed all that I was presented with.

As I approached the end of my junior year of high school I needed to decide where I wanted to go to college to continue my education.  I was thinking of some sort of math/engineering field.  I could have gone to the University of Connecticut like many of my high school classmates, but I wanted to make a break and go elsewhere.  In the end I applied to, and was accepted, at five different colleges/universities.

As a fallback, I did apply to the University of Connecticut, although it was my last choice.  I also applied to the University of Massachusetts – just a little farther away.  I did not visit either of these two schools.  The other three we visited as part of our family vacation during the summer of 1965 when we took a month and toured the United States.

One stop was at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, a mid-sized school with a good reputation in engineering.  It was a pretty nice campus, located in Lewisburg, PA, along the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg.  My final two choices were influenced by my religion.

There was (and still is) a CS college outside of St. Louis, MO, called Principia College.  Much smaller than all my other choices, it is only for Christian Scientists and would have continued the somewhat isolationist policies that I grew up under.  While it was a very nice campus, there was no engineering major and it seemed a bit too small for my liking.  So it was not my first choice.

The final choice was Michigan State University – at the opposite end of the size spectrum from Principia.  But there was a CS tie there too, and my cousin Bobby [Hill], who was four years older than I was and from whom I got all my hand-me-down clothes, was the connection.

Background on MSU and Asher

In 1946, eight young veterans, all Christian Scientists, returned from WWII to continue their education that had been interrupted by the war.  Wanting a place to live where they could also practice their religion, they found a place at the home of a Mrs. Asher in East Lansing.  They thrived in this atmosphere and more students continued to do the same each year.  In 1955 another home for women also opened.  Finally, in 1965, they built a separate large dormitory-like building about a half-mile from campus that could house a total of about 100 students.

My cousin Bobby was one of the students who had lived in the smaller men’s Asher House.  He would be graduating from MSU in 1966, after being able to spend his final year there in the new Asher House and thought that I might like it as well.  I was uncertain about going to such a large University (the total campus population in those days was 44,000, including 7000 freshmen, and I was about to graduate from a high school with a total senior class of about 160).  I thought that I would be “just a number” at such a large university, but we agreed to make MSU one of the stops on our vacation that summer.

I was hooked.  The small environment of Asher House met my needs and provided the appropriate relief from the large university environment.  Also, the out-of-state tuition at MSU was actually slightly less than the in-state tuition at UConn (excluding transportation costs).  So, while I was accepted at all five schools, I chose to go to MSU.

My cousin Bobby got married that summer and was living a few towns away from East Lansing, so I was not influenced by him during the years I lived at Asher House.  But living under that influence, and attending the local CS church (i.e. CS Sunday school until I turned 20, then the church services), I was still not exposed to much religion outside of CS.

Continuing the story hinted at above, during the summer after my freshman year, my Aunt Dot decided to play matchmaker.  There was a girl, Edie Salinas, who had attended the by now defunct Youth Forum in Bristol.  My Aunt and Uncle had also switched their membership to the Bristol CS Church and knew the families there quite well.  My Aunt decided that Edie and I would make a perfect couple.  She invited me to go to a movie, Ben Hur, which was showing in a local theater that summer.  Unbeknownst to me, she also invited Edie and had us sit together in the darkened theater.  While Edie was a nice girl, and I might have enjoyed dating her, neither of us appreciated being so obviously thrown together by my aunt.  So, we just enjoyed the movie and mutually decided to not see each other again as that would only encourage my aunt.

Here I need to introduce another thread to the story so you can how it twines together with my story.

My wife’s religious background

My wife grew up in the EUB (Evangelical United Brethren) denomination.  The small church near her, North Bay EUB Church, was a three mile walk from her house, but she attended faithfully during her growing up years.  Later the North Bay EUB Church merged with the Horton Bay EUB Church (about a five mile walk from her home) and then the EUB church merged with the Methodist Church in the mid-1960’s to form the United Methodist Church. 

The denomination as a whole was becoming more and more liberal, but the former EUB churches in Northern Michigan still clung to their conservative roots.  Since the pastors in the churches are appointed by the denomination, the denomination was sending a continual stream of new seminary graduates, with the latest in liberal thinking, to these small churches to “convert” them.  At one very vulnerable point in my wife’s life, when she was asking some serious questions, the pastor’s answers did a great deal to destroy the fragile theology that she held.

After graduating from high school, she had a job working in Kilwin’s Bakery in Petoskey.  The owners, Don and Katy Kilwin, took an interest in her.  It was at Don’s recommendation that she began taking classes at NCMC (North Central Michigan College) and then entered the EIP (Education Internship Program) at MSU because of a connection through a relative of theirs.  Don and Katy were also Christian Scientists and so Donna had begun going to church with them as well.  It was because of all this that when she had to spend a quarter (10 weeks) on campus at MSU in the spring of 1970 that she stayed at Asher House.

I was then in graduate school at MSU.  Without going into a lot of detail, I fell in love with Donna the first time we met. By the end of the quarter we were “pinned”, over the summer I visited her nearly every weekend, and at the end of the summer were engaged, then married the following summer. As a result, we were two Christian Scientists when we married.

During the year that we were engaged, I was becoming a little disenchanted with CS myself and was visiting other area churches – I tried Lutheran, Baptist, even Catholic, and a non-denominational church near campus.  CS was no longer satisfying, but I didn’t know what I was looking for or even where to look.  I knew that I was not comfortable with the liturgy in those that were more formal, but nothing was meeting my needs.

When we married and moved back to Connecticut in 1971 it was obvious that the CS church had shrunk drastically since the early 1960’s.  Of the total membership in the Waterbury church, there were only two other individuals besides myself who were younger than my parents.  The nursery was used so infrequently that when there was a child visiting, they had to disinfect all the toys and wipe off the mold that was growing from disuse.  The Sunday school rooms downstairs were no longer used and the ones upstairs were not much better.  It was not something that I felt comfortable going back to.

By this time, Donna was also feeling the need to get back to her “roots” and began shopping for a church which met her needs. Without going into a lot of detail, we eventually decided to both attend another church in the area. I have never looked back.

(Continued in part 2)

Ten seconds!

Just got to witness one of the marvels of technology. I was sitting upstairs in our living room and out of the corner of my eye noticed a truck coming down our lane and seeming to slow down as he approached our house. I got up from the sofa and moved to the window where I could see the section of the lane in front of our house as well as the driveway below me. By the time I got there, I could see the truck driver at the rear of the truck getting a box out of the back. I could tell from the markings on the box that it was an order we had placed at the end of last week for several books from Christian Book Distributors (christianbook.com) (CBD).

I knew from an email received on Saturday that this was being delivered by FedEx, although from my vantage point I could not see the front part of the truck where it was marked. As the driver walked from the lane to our front door (about 50 feet), he was using a portable device to scan the label on the box. He set the box down on the front door right below me and walked back toward the truck. As he disappeared from my view and walked around the front of the truck, I heard a ding on the smartphone in my pocket indicating a new email. I pulled my phone out and saw that I had a message from the book company noting that my order had been delivered. Marveling at the speed of the response, I was still shaking my head as I observed the truck backing up into the driveway across the street in order to turn around.

Think of what just happened. In the space of about 10 seconds, the wireless device in the driver's hand sent a notice of delivery via the cellphone network back to the FedEx headquarters noting that the driver had scanned a particular barcode while delivering the box. The FedEx computers matched that barcode to the delivery order and connected it to the company who had submitted that delivery order. They then sent a notice of delivery to CBD via the Internet with the identification of the shipment. CBD matched the shipment id to the order that I had placed, constructed an email with the list of books that were in that box and sent an email over the Internet where it got routed to a gmail server (which might be anywhere in the US). It was then routed to the several devices which are connected to my email address (my laptop, my smartphone, and my wife's smartphone), and each of these devices made the appropriate response to that incoming message - a beep on our smartphones, and a different sound on my laptop.

Ten seconds for all the above - starting with a scanned barcode on the driveway below me, routing of messages between computers and other devices located all across the US, and ending up with an email on the device in my pocket and an audible notice to me - and all before the driver even had a chance to get back in his truck and drive off!

When I went off to college in 1966 I didn't even know what a computer was. I was fortunate enough to recognize their potential, to major in that field as soon as a degree program became available in 1968, and to work in the computer field for the next several decades. But I am still amazed at where technology has taken us.

Ten seconds!

The John Pierpont Study Table

A while ago I subscribed to the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS). They have a quarterly magazine titled, “American Ancestors”. There are some articles of interest and others that are of less interest to me because they relate to individuals with whom I have no connection. But when I opened the most recent issue and began paging through it, I was quite surprised to discover an article entitled, “The Reverend John Pierpont’s Study Table: A Look at the First Furniture of the New England Historic Genealogical Society”.

The preface to this article notes that the essay is reprinted from American History, Art and Culture: Writings in Honor of Jonathan Lee Fairbanks, a book published in 2018. It was written by the President and CEO of NEHGS and is about the first piece of furniture acquired by the NEHGS and which formerly belonged to the Reverend John Pierpont (1785-1866) of the Hollis Street Church. Since the Reverend is my 2^nd cousin (6 times removed), this article was of interest to me both personally and because I am currently the co-historian of the Pierpont Family Association.

The below are excerpts from this article.

The first piece of furniture acquired by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, established in Boston in 1845 as the nation’s founding genealogical institution, is a round mahogany tripod study table that formerly belonged to the Reverend John Pierpont (1785-1866), of the Hollis Street Church, a multi-faceted man whose occupations included minister, lawyer, merchant, and poet, and who was also an abolitionist and temperance reformer. An object overlaid with historic associations and family traditions, it was a fitting choice as part of the initial furnishings of the country’s first genealogical society – and one also that can be placed in a genealogical continuum that ranged from the family’s interest in an English peerage it saw as slipping from its hands – to the varied occupations of its owner (and to some, its alleged maker) – to the elevation of descendants of the family through a fortune built by the owner’s grandson and namesake, banker and financier J.P. Morgan, Sr., and his son, banker and philanthropist, J.P. Morgan, Jr. Each of these themes are echoed in a March 5, 1919, Boston newspaper clipping, “J.P. Morgan’s Great-Grandfather’s Study Table,” just as the history of the study table itself sheds light on the founders’ efforts to furnish the fledgling genealogical society.

The 1919 press coverage of the study table not only identified its “genealogical” association to the owner’s great-grandson, J.P. Morgan, Jr., but also alluded to grand ancestral connections of the Pierponts in England. Three centuries ago, Pierpont’s great-grandfather – the Reverend James Pierpont of New Haven, Connecticut, a founder of Yale College – became curious about his family’s connections to the aristocratic English Pierreponts (e.g., the family of the Marquess of Dorchester, later the 1^st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull) and engaged an agent in England to investigate what he believed to be a close relationship. This curiosity led to generations of the American Pierpont family seeking information on whether they might be successors, in title or fortune, to their English kinsmen, real or perceived, with whom they attempted interaction. These ducal aspirations were so convincing to members of the American family that some came to believe they might actually “draw a coronet across the seas to grace a Yankee brow.” Reverend John Pierpont’s thoughts on his family ascending to a peerage have been lost to history, though he is remembered for an accomplished life and his son, James Lord Pierpont, was a noted arranger and composer best known for “Jingle Bells.”

Described in a 1989 valuation as a “splendid” Sheraton table “of impressive proportions,” the Pierpont study table measures 64-1/2 in. in diameter by 31 in. high, with the notable feature of a rotating circular top and eight bow front drawers.

Its association with the New England Historic Genealogical Society can be traced to January 23, 1846, when it was purchased at auction by Boston antiquarian Samuel Gardner Drake, one of the five founders of the Society and an editor of its journal, which commenced publication in 1847. This acquisition began the process of assembling appropriate library furnishings for a reading room at the genealogical society’s first quarters.

A centerpiece of the collections of the NEHGS, the Pierpont study table is today located outside of the Society’s third floor board room in a place of honor. Its history as the first piece of furniture owned by the flagship institution of genealogical studies in America and its association with a family of varied accomplishments – indeed one occupied across the centuries with its legacies – makes the Pierpont study table a treasured object in the decorative arts.

Wolcott Remembrance – Students Approve Vietnam Effort

A few days ago, one of my WHS classmates from the class of ‘66, Ron Bertothy, passed away at the age of 70. Besides the impact that comes from having someone who is the same age as myself pass away, I thought back to what at the time was a very significant event at WHS in which Ron played a key part.

The Players

Myself – In the 1965-66 school year I was a high school senior and in my final year of 12 years in the Wolcott public school system. I was then, even as now, somewhat of a “nerd”, with a focus on the academics. I was in the college prep track at WHS, taking world literature, calculus, physics, and a 4^th year of Latin. It was also my 3^rd time of taking a class from Mr. Robert Carroll – this time it was Contemporary Issues (CI). For extra-curricular activities I had many, including the coin and stamp club and the yearbook staff. I was also the president of the National Honor Society and the vice-president of the band. But despite my participation in prior years in the inaugural year of being on the WHS track team, I was not very athletic.

Ron Bertothy – Like me, Ron was a tall, 6’2” lanky guy. He and I were both in the college prep track and we were both in the band for 4 years, so we saw a lot of each other. However, unlike me, Ron was athletic and was on the soccer team. That gave him a level of popularity as then, like now, athletes are known throughout the school. But he was also a pretty nice guy and we got along well. Being in the college prep track, we were both in the same section of Mr. Carroll’s CI class.

Robert Carroll – As I noted in an earlier blog about my favorite teachers (*1), this was my third encounter of Mr. Carroll. I had had him as a 7^th grade teacher as well as for 9^th grade civics. In CI he had a unique approach. He would start each class with the appropriate topic for the day, but then let the class begin discussing it and if they got side-tracked, he would let us continue but with one caveat. That caveat was that he could stop us at any time, point to any person in the class, and if they could tell him what the original topic was and how we had gotten from that topic to what we were then discussing that we could continue. Thus it was that at some point in the early part of the year that we were discussing the Vietnam War.

The Situation

The US had been involved in SE Asia since 1950 as advisors to the French in the French Indochina wars. By 1964, the number of US troops in the area numbered around 23,000. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August of 1964, Congress gave President Johnson the authority to increase our involvement. By the end of 1965, US troop strength had increased to 185,000. This number continue to grow so that by the end of 1968 they numbered over 500,000.

During the initial part of this period there were conflicting views of whether the US should be involved. This was partly fueled by the Johnson administration following a policy of “minimum candor” to manage the media coverage (*2). As our CI class discussed this topic, most of us (and possibly because Mr. Carroll was a very staunch Democrat), came to the conclusion that we were generally in support of the US involvement.

The Project

I don’t recall who first brought up the topic, but we made the decision that we should show our support for President Johnson in some sort of concrete way. And rather than just do so with just our small class of 20-30 students, or even going school-wide, why not think BIG and get high schools across the country to join us in this support. But how to go about such a large endeavor?

With the support of Mr. Carroll, we organized into a multi-tiered group. This was going to be a project of the combined CI classes. Each of the five classes elected two representatives to the steering committee. These ten students, plus our class president, were responsible for the project. The two representatives from our class were Ron Bertothy and Jackie Mulholland. The chair of that group, which was called Project SAVE (Students Approve Vietnam Effort), was Ron Bertothy. Below this steering committee we had other subcommittees who were responsible for things like getting corporate sponsors to donate materials (paper, ink, envelopes, etc.), and a group who would type up the address labels (remember that this was in an era long before computers and printers – the school had only upgraded from manual typewriters to IBM Selectric Typewriters two years earlier. We were able to locate a company who could provide a list of all the high schools in the country (this was long before things like the Internet existed). We got rolling pretty quickly, and by early March mailed out over 16,000 letters, each with five pages of a petition attached. We also had a group who would handle the mail received from around the country – one student for each state. I was in this latter group and was assigned (by drawing names) the state of New Mexico. All incoming mail was sorted by state and I had to open each one from “my” state, count the number of signatures on any included petition pages, and put them into a rapidly growing pile of responses.

It was estimated that the project would have cost about $7,000 if the students had to pay for all the bills (*3). However, paper companies donated paper, envelopes, ink and other supplies. A local printed donated about $900 of free work and a list of high schools and addresses was provided by a company who printed such a list for a federal agency. None of these donors wished to be identified.

The Results

About two months later, a status report of the project was submitted to Senator Dodd from CT. He prepared a long article which was published in the Congressional Record of May 12, 1966 (*4). A few excerpts of this were:

“In a letter which I received from Robert F. Carroll, a faculty member at the school, the project initiated by Wolcott students was described in these terms:

“The students in my Contemporary Issues classes organized project SAVE (Students Approve Vietnam Effort) as a direct result of people throughout the country to shout and make their views heard on Vietnam * * *. These students mailed out 16,433 letters and five times as many petition sheets to every public high school in the country on March 8^th * * *. I am pleased to announce that returns are just beginning to come in and as of today 500 schools have made returns with a total of over 100,000 signatures.”

Mr. Carroll also noted:

“Many religious and fraternal organizations have made plans to make awards to the students involved and one man from upstate New York suggested that someone submit the project for a Valley Forge award.

“The students hope to deliver the results to President Johnson personally when the country-wide project is completed.”

By the end of the school year a month or so after this article was printed in the Congressional Record, we had received responses from over 1000 schools with a total of over 350,000 signatures. The WHS yearbook that year, like most years, was prepared and sent of to the printer earlier in the year and so did not have the results in it. But we had a supplement that was printed later that contained the final information on Project SAVE. In it was a picture of Ron in Washington, D.C. in July 1966 meeting with our US Representative, John Monagan, and Vice-President Humphrey (President Johnson was not available that day). The article also noted that our project was discussed on Radio Saigon between Rep. Monagan and General William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam. Senator Dodd did nominate us for the Four Freedoms medal from the Valley Forge Foundation and that was also received later that year.

In retrospect, this was a pretty massive project for the senior class from our little high school from Wolcott, CT. Our graduating class was only about 160 students, but we managed to receive national recognition for our efforts.

Mr. Carroll passed away in 2006 at the age of just 71. And now Ron Bertothy has passed away at the age of just 70. Sadly, the number of my classmates who are passing away increases each year. But there are many of us still around and we all fondly remember not only WHS and our class of 1966, but things like the Vietnam War and Project SAVE that helped to define our generation.

Notes:

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/03/wolcott-remembrances-my-favorite.html

*2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

*3 – Associated Press article distributed country-wide, 15 March 1966 – see example at https://www.newspapers.com/image/11726639/

*4 - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1966-pt8/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1966-pt8-7-1.pdf

Non-Great Migration Ancestors

This is part two of a two-part blog outlining my ancestors. In this one I will list my ancestors (that I have found so far) who were not part of the Great Migration, i.e. who did not come from England in the period 1620-1640 into New England. Because there are not as many here, I will give all the family names, rough dates of immigration, and country of origin.

My Russell Ancestors

Although there are people with the last name Russell in my family tree who were part of the Great Migration, they are ones who married into other family lines and are not the ones who passed along their name to me. My direct Russell line in this country began with my great*6 grandfather, Robert Russell, who emigrated from Scotland around 1750 into New York (*1). For the next several generations, Robert and his descendants lived in the stretch of NY, about 20-25 miles wide, between the CT/NY border and the Hudson River. It was not until after the Civil War that my great*2 grandfather, Walter Russell, moved less than 5 miles to the east into Connecticut.

During this period of time, the Russell men were marrying women from the same area of NY, thus connecting me to several other families. Some of these families were originally from England and who had been part of the Great Migration but who had since moved to the area around New York City. There were also some who were not part of the Great Migration. Records from NY are not nearly as available or complete as those from CT/MA. Thus, there are several family lines that I have not yet been able to trace back to their original appearance in this country. Nonetheless, here are the family names that I have been able to document:

·       Kipp/Kip – Hendrick Kip (de Kype) and his family emigrated to what was then New Amsterdam in the mid-1600s from the Netherlands.

·       de la Montagne – Jean Mousnier de la Montagne was born in France but had moved to the Netherlands and married there. He and his family emigrated in 1637.

·       Hunt – Thomas Hunt and his family came to NY from England in 1673.

·       Merchant – Francis Xavier Merchant came to NY from Switzerland in 1853.

·       Soan – Nancy/Anna Soan came to NY from Ireland in 1847.

·       Levy – My paternal grandmother was Vera Levy. Her grandfather, Alexander Levy, had come to NY with his parents and siblings from England in 1851. The Levy family were not English, rather they were Ashkenazi Jews who had emigrated to England from Poland and eastern Germany in the early 1700s (*2).

·       Isaacs – Alexander Levy married Phoebe Isaacs, was also an Ashkenazi Jew from England who had emigrated to NY in 1852 (*3).

My Pierpont Ancestors

My mother’s Pierpont family had been part of the Great Migration and had originally been in the Massachusetts Bay Colony until my great*7 grandfather, James Pierpont, was recruited by the Congregational Church in New Haven, CT in 1684 (*4). Being not only part of the Puritans who came from England, but a religious family and a preacher, the Pierponts had a much greater incentive to continue to marry into other Great Migration families. Thus, this side of my family tree is composed nearly entirely of English families who were part of the Great Migration. Here are the only exceptions that I have located:

·       Few – My great*2 grandmother, Sarah Shilling Few, came to the US in 1849 with her parents.

Notes:

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-major-flaw-in-my-family-tree-part-2.html

*2 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2018/03/tracing-my-jewish-heritage.html

*3 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2018/12/genealogy-story-phoebe-isaacs.html

*4 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/02/genealogy-story-james-pierpont.html

Great Migration Ancestors

This is part one of a two-part blog outlining my ancestors. In this one I will write about the part of my family tree that can be traced to those individuals who came to America as part of the Great Migration. In the second part I will discuss those family lines that came either from other places or at other times.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration is a descriptive term for the period from 1620 to 1640 where the New England states (colonies at the time) were populated by people coming from England (*1). These people, generally in family groups, were primarily English Puritans who were motivated by a quest for freedom to practice their Puritan religion.

The first of these groups settled in Plymouth, MA, in 1620 and are often referred to as the Pilgrims. Beginning around 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony began in the area around what is now Boston, MA. Some of these individuals moved on to other parts of New England over the following decade. Some went overland to establish such places as Hartford, CT (1635) and Providence, RI (1636). Others began settlements in the many coastal areas along the Long Island Sound (i.e. what became later known as Connecticut) in communities such as Fairfield (1635), New Haven (1638), Guilford (1639), and others. In the latter part of this period some ships went directly to these other port cities.

Roughly 20,000 people came to New England during this period. With the beginning of the English Civil War in 1641, the number of people emigrating from England dropped sharply and the Great Migration ended.

My Ancestral Roots

I was born in Connecticut in 1948. Most of the branches of my family tree can be traced back to individuals/families who came as part of the Great Migration. With over 300 years between that period and my birth, and allowing an average of 25-30 years between generations, that means that there are some ten to twelve generations that have elapsed in that period. With the number of branches in a family tree doubling with each generation, that means that I could have as many of 1000-4000 ancestors at the ends of each of the branches in my tree!

Fortunately, there are a number of reasons why my family tree is not quite that large. Some of my ancestors came to the US at later date so I do not have to go back quite so many generations. These are the subject of part-2 of this blog. In other cases, two people who were relatives of each other married and so their branches converge. I have discussed some of these in (*2, *3, *4, *5, *6). In yet other situations, one or more siblings married other individuals in my tree and there is further convergence. But still the number of branches in my tree is significant.

I could probably work full-time just building out and documenting all the connections and levels in my family tree. So even though I have been working on it several years, I am not close to being finished. There are a number of reasons that complicate this work. Here are a few:

·       Insufficient documentation – the focus of living is on the living part and not documenting it for future generations. Especially with the hardships of living in a new land, many events such as births, marriages, and deaths, were not recorded. The records in New England are actually quite good compared to other parts of the country, but they are not perfect and so there is often a great amount of uncertainty or just total lack of information in trying to trace some family lines. The US census is a great source of information, but it didn’t begin until the late 1700s and until the mid-1800s it only listed the name of the head of house (generally the father) with simple tic-marks for each family member in categories by gender and age.

·       Repeating names – families often reused the same names over and over again. Sometimes this was because they wanted to pass on the father’s name. I have documented one such instance where this practice carried on for 12 generations over 400 years (*7). If this was the only situation then we could differentiate between two individuals by their being a generation apart. But sometimes (using a generic name as an example), John Smith might have two sons, John and Robert. But John (the younger) might have a son also named John and Robert might also have a son whom he named John in honor of the first John. Then there are multiple Johns in the third generation. Also, with infant mortality being much higher back in the 1600s and 1700s, a family might have a child who passed away at a young age and then they would “reuse” that name with a later child. Coupled with a lack of adequate documentation, this only adds confusion.

·       Multiple marriages – when one spouse passed away at a young age (not uncommon, and often happening when the wife passes away due to complications of childbirth), the remaining spouse might remarry. I have one documented situation in my family tree where an individual had four children with his first wife and an additional six with a second wife. With limited documentation on the death of the first wife and/or the re-marriage, it’s easy to assign the wrong parent to the subsequent children. See (*8) for a few examples in my family tree.

·       Undocumented adoptions and name changes – in some situations both parents might pass away or the mother might pass away and the father feel unable to care for his young children. The young children would then be adopted by other family members or friends. The new family might even choose to rename the child that they adopted. Such events were not documented like they are now, so this discontinuity in the name of the child can cause difficulty in trying to build out a family tree. See (*9) for one instance in my family tree.

I don’t think I will ever be done building out my family tree. In the early stages of working on one branch, I will often take “short cuts” in rely on the research of others to get a basic outline of that branch, then go back later and do the research to thoroughly document the connections. But such short cuts sometimes mean that I will find that others have mistakes and I have to undo some of the connections. But I try to learn from these mistakes and I even document them (*10, *11).

Consequences of Great Migration Ancestral Lines

Even though my research is far from complete, I have a great many relatively well-documented family lines in New England, and especially in Connecticut. And that’s just in the backward-looking ancestral research. When you combine that with any forward-looking research you can find that you have some sort of connection to nearly anyone with ancestral roots in colonial Connecticut.

For example, a few friends recently posted in Facebook about a house that is perched atop a hill in Palmerton, PA, not too many miles from here. I’ve seen that house myself every time I am driving south on I-476 and wondered about it. They posted a link to a story about the house (*12), and in it I noticed that the man who built it had roots in Connecticut and I thought that the name of his mother had some familiarity to me. I was able to do some quick research on her ancestral line and then to document a few minutes later about the connection to me.

When I saw that Elisha Marshall’s parents were from Connecticut, I did some quick checking. I have found that Elisha is my 5^th cousin (several times removed). His mother was Mary Hotchkiss Ward and her mother was Abigail Wilcox. His great*4 grandfather was William Wilcoxson and William is also my great*10 grandfather.

In another bit of research I was doing for a close friend at church (*13), when I noticed that one of his ancestral lines went back to Connecticut I was able to document that he was my cousin in at least three ways!

Finding these types of connections is always a bit interesting and keeps me going through the sometimes tedious task of trying to find that next link that takes a particular branch of the family back just one more generation.

Notes:

*1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan_migration_to_New_England_(1620%E2%80%9340)

*2 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/marrying-my-cousin.html

*3 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/marrying-my-cousin-part-2.html

*4 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/family-connections-and-marrying-my.html

*5 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/02/marrying-cousin-part-3.html

*6 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/03/marrying-cousin-part-4.html

*7 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2018/04/400-years-of-johnjames-pierponts.html

*8 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2018/04/genealogy-story-divorce-death-and.html

*9 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/genealogy-story-benjamin-judd-rogers.html

*10 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-james-walter-russell-family-part-2.html

*11 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-major-flaw-in-my-family-tree-part-2.html

*12 - http://www.wfmz.com/features/historys-headlines/historys-headlines-mystery-man-of-marshalls-hill_20160530102524575/21513262

*13 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2017/07/genealogy-story-research-for-friend.html