Founders of Hartford

Recently someone posted a link on Facebook that contained pictures of the four sides of the Founders of Hartford monument. This monument, located in the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, contains the engraved names of all the individuals who were among the founders of that city (*1, *2, *3, *4, *5). The list of individuals is based on those who were included in the Book of Distribution of Land as settlers before February, 1640. Thus, it includes not only the original party of 100 who came in 1635 with Thomas Hooker, but those who came there in the remaining years of the Great Migration which ended abruptly when England got involved in a civil war.

The original monument had been erected in 1837, commemorating the 200^th anniversary of the renaming of the original settlement of Newtown to Hartford in 1637. It was replaced by the current monument in 1986.

I recognized several of the names on this monument as being in my family tree and thought I would see how many of my direct ancestors are listed there. In the early years of New England, the population of most towns/cities were relatively low, so there was much endogamy as the number of eligible individuals for marriage was limited. Thus, I found that roughly a quarter (41 of 163) of those listed were among my ancestors. These are listed below with the notation of ancestral relationship (e.g. g9gf = 9^th great grandfather). My wife also has some lines of her family tree back to colonial Connecticut and these are indicated by an “*”. There are 19 of her direct ancestors on the monument, 11 of whom are in common with mine. (There are others with whom one of us has a connection such as William Edwards who is the father-in-law of my great*9 aunt, but those connections are too complicated to try and list here).

Here are the four sides of the monument followed by the list of those individuals who are direct ancestors of myself or my wife.

 

 

 

·       Jeremy Adams – g9gf

·       Matthew Allyn – g11gf

·       Francis Andrews – g9gf*

·       William Andrews – g10gf*

·       John Arnold – g9gf*

·       Thomas Barnes – g10gf*

·       Nathaniel Bearding – *

·       John Bronson – g8gf

·       Thomas Bunce – g9gf

·       John Crow – g9gf

·       William Goodwin – g9gf

·       Samuel Greenhill – g10gf

·       Stephen Hart – g9gf

·       John Haynes – *

·       William Hills – *

·       William Holton – *

·       Thomas Hooker – g9gf

·       John Hopkins – g10gf*

·       George Hubbard – g10gf*

·       William Hyde – g11gf

·       Thomas Judd – g9gf*

·       Ralph Keeler – g9gf

·       William Lewis – g10gf

·       Richard Lyman – g9gf

·       John Marsh – g9gf

·       Matthew Marvin – g11gf

·       Reinold Marvin – g8gf

·       Thomas Munson – g9gf

·       William Parker – g10gf

·       Stephen Post – g11gf

·       Thomas Porter – g10gf

·       William Pratt – g9gf

·       Thomas Richards – g8gf

·       Thomas Root – *

·       Thomas Scott – g10gf

·       Richard Seymour – g9gf

·       John Skinner – g9gf*

·       Giles Smith – g10gf*

·       Thomas Spencer – *

·       Timothy Stanley – g9gf

·       George Steele – *

·       John Steele – g10gf

·       Thomas Upson – g8gf*

·       Henry Wakeley – g9gf

·       Samuel Wakeman – g9gf*

·       Andrew Warner – g8gf

·       John Warner – g8gf

·       Thomas Welles – g8gf

·       George Wyllis – *

 

 

Notes:

*1 - https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Founders_of_Hartford%2C_Connecticut

*2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hartford,_Connecticut

*3 - https://familypedia.wikia.org/wiki/Hartford_Founders_Monument

*4 - https://www.foundersofhartford.org/historic-sites/

*5 - https://www.foundersofhartford.org/founders-monument-names/

 

Surviving Home Schooling

 Home-Schooling Template

Well, this conversion to home-schooling has been interesting – to say the least. Requirements for home schooling differ from state to state, so we have had to familiarize ourselves with the requirements for PA. Fortunately, one of the home school associations provides a straightforward template for doing so. We used their template, with only a few simplifications, and submitted it to the East Penn school district office. 

Their other requirements are fairly easy to meet:

(1)   students in certain grades have to have doctor/immunization records and dentist records – not a problem since our kids were in a charter school and had them on file from there;

(2)   we have to have someone (a teacher with PA certification) evaluate the boys’ progress at the end of the year – also not a problem since we partnering with an outside institution which provides the curriculum and the grading and we have several teachers among our church who have done this for other home-schooling families;

(3)   students in some grades have to participate in standardized testing (including grades 3 and 5 which will affect 3 of the 4 boys) – we’ll have to figure this one out later in the year.

Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA)

As mentioned, we are partnering with LUOA to have a structured curriculum instead of a “roll your own” one. We looked at a couple of different options and this one seemed to fit our needs the best. Unlike many home-schooling families who start with their oldest child when they are kindergarten/first grade level and then add other children as they reach school age, we would be starting with all four grandsons at one and did not have the luxury of slowly getting our feet wet. We also wanted to go with a program that would give us the opportunity of having Caleb tested for third-grade readiness since he was so advanced in his skills (essentially skipping 2^nd grade). We had tried to do this with the Christian school we had gone with this summer, but while they did enrollment testing, they did not have the skills to help us.

The boys will each have five subjects – Bible, Literacy/Language Arts, Math, Science, and History – although for first grade history and science are each a half-year so Asher only has four subjects each day.

[A partial screenshot of the third-grade course list]

 

There is a good variety of methods used in the courses. Some days the lesson is only reading through a series of screens (e.g. learning the new vocabulary words and definitions for the module). Some have a short quiz to be taken online (T/F and multiple-choice question are graded by the computer when submitted, short answer questions will be graded by the teacher in the day or so following submission). Some have attached PDFs that need to be printed out – either because you will need to review them over the coming days, or because there are places to insert drawings or paragraphs that you write. And some are instruction sheets for experiments that you need to do. For the latter two types, you need to submit a picture of the completed page, a picture of the completed experiment, or perhaps a short video (more on this later under the technology subheading). There are also some required reading books in the literacy course. Some of these are available through online links, but others you need to purchase – they provide a list in advance so for only $50 or so we got all that are needed for all four boys for the year.

You can see a little bit of this variety in the attached partial screenshot.

[Module example]

 

The teachers will often return comments with the graded work. You can also communicate with your teacher via email for any questions.

A fairly robust program. We’ve discovered a few errors in the materials during the time we’ve been using the program. And there is a bit of inconsistency in the amount of work required by the various modules so it’s hard to predict how much time we’ll be spending online each day. But it’s better than having to develop all this stuff ourselves.

Technology

LUOA gives you good writeup of what technology you will need. We started out by purchasing two more laptops to supplement the ones we already had. (Then needed to get a third when one of our older ones died). These need to be full-function machines, some of the things that they use in the courses will not run on Chromebooks. We also had to purchase a printer as Kim did not have one in her house.

We also got a subscription to Microsoft-365 as we needed to be able to type some things, view PowerPoint slides, etc.

Besides one of the older laptops dying, the other one is running really slowly and may also need to be replaced. In addition, the first printer we got, while it seemed to work initially could not connect properly to the wireless network in the house, so we returned it (for full credit) and got one from a different manufacturer – it works great.

But there has been a fair amount of learning curve – especially for Donna who is not very computer savvy. Navigating all the screens is sometimes complicated. We’ve restricted the use of printing to adults only to avoid inadvertent misuse. And taking pictures (and even videos) of completed work for submission (several times a day with four boys each taking several courses) can be a bit time consuming. We’re getting better and quicker as we get used to things – but I admit to sometimes getting frustrated when too much is happening at once or something is not working the way I think it should!

How We’re Doing

On many days Donna and I feel like we’ve been “thrown into the deep end of the pool” and are struggling to learn how to swim. Because much of the first grade material needs a reading level beyond the average first-grader, Donna has taken that grade and has a lot of one-on-one time with Asher. I spend most of my time with our two third-graders, Isaiah and Caleb (he having scored over 90% on the readiness test for third grade), but they are working separately and not always doing the same module at the same time. Ethan is mostly independent and downstairs in his room, so I only have to check in on him from to time.

But I am also the go-to person for any technology issues that Donna is having and have to assist her (and Asher), and I take most of the pictures of things to be submitted. Kim is working from home (ensconced in her bedroom), but helps out from time to time and also helps with some of the “experiments” (such as making and decorating cupcakes with various types of candy to represent the parts of a plant and animal cell). 

One complication is that we didn’t switch to this program until 10/19, having spent the first nearly two months at the Christian school. LUOA allows people to start on any Monday, so that’s not a problem from their perspective, but it means that if we simply followed their typical M-F schedule for 180 school days, it would take 36 weeks and we wouldn’t be done with the school year until the middle of July (and all results need to be reported to the local school district by the end of June).

So, I had to put together a schedule that did six days of school each M-F by adding one additional lesson each day. I’ll figure out what to do with short weeks like Thanksgiving by the end of this month. I have used the calendar in the kitchen to post the daily requirements as you can see in the below picture. (By the end of this week we’ll be 3 days ahead of schedule.)

[Weekly schedule]

 

Most days we pretty well wrapped up by lunch time – which is good since we’ve also enrolled all four boys in our church’s after school program where they can get some socialization and activity. That also means that I have to drive them into town M-Th for a 2:30-5:00 program in addition to spending all morning being their supervising teacher. I’m pretty burned out at the end of the week. And it didn’t help this past week when Donna got sick and I had to supervise Asher as well! But we love all our children and grandchildren and they will appreciate this as they get older.

I’ve been tracking their grades each week and you can see how they are all doing – pretty much all “A” students. They are all different – different personalities, different interests, different learning styles. But after three rough weeks of transition, we are still all getting along. There are many more months of schooling, and I’m sure some days will be better than others. But we are a family and this is what families do.

[Current grades]

 

Semeraro Memories

Recently I was discussing some memories with my distant cousin, Robert Perry, who had posted about going trick-or-treating and that one of the neighbors he visited was my Aunt Vi and Uncle Tony on Midwood Ave in Wolcott. That brought back to my mind some of the interactions that I had with them over the years that I thought I would reminisce about.

Aunt Vi (Violet Pierpont) was the youngest of five children from my mother’s parents. She was born two days after Christmas in 1929 and was 5-1/2 years younger than my mother. Because WWII disrupted life so much, many people didn’t get married until after the war was over, so most of the siblings got married in the few years right after the war (my uncle Dick in June 1946 (age 20), my mom in September 1946 (age 22), my uncle Zeke in February 1948 (age 27), and my aunt Vi in June 1949 (age 19)). Here is a picture of the Semeraro wedding – my mother is the matron-of-honor, the best man was one of Uncle Tony’s brothers, and the ushers were my Uncle Dick and some of Uncle Tony’s other brothers.

[Semeraro Wedding Party]

 

Uncle Tony (Anthony Semeraro) was the 7th of 8 children from a family of Italian immigrants (from Sicily). He was 7 years older than my Aunt Vi. It was a unique marriage – he from a thoroughly Sicilian family where the mom only spoke Italian, and she from an entirely English background with 300+ years of deep roots in New England. They bought a small cottage near Hitchcock Lake that had originally been just a summer cottage. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a storage room off the kitchen (all rooms quite small). It also had an enclosed porch that ran the length of the living room. It had been built in 1938, probably for just seasonal use, but had been converted to year-round living. It also had a garage where Uncle Tony kept the WWII surplus jeep that he had purchased (more on that below).

The siblings used to visit with each other quite frequently, and for holidays used to all get together, rotating between the various houses.

[Pierpont siblings and spouses]

In later years, when they all began having children, there would be a separate gathering for all the grandchildren at my grandparents’ house, but the parents/grandparents continued to have their “adult” gathering. In the years when there were only a few of us grandchildren, my parents would take myself and my sister along on visits to the Semeraro home. We would be put to bed early – either in the second bedroom, or on a couch/day-bed on the porch.

In 1953 our family took our first family vacation (only two children at the time as the next sibling didn’t come along until late 1954). We rented a small cottage in Dennisport on Cape Cod (small bedroom, eat-in kitchen, and screened in porch). My sister was only 3-1/2 and so slept with my parents. I (at the ripe old age of 5) got to sleep on the screened-in porch. Cape Cod back then was not the overbuilt, pricy tourist place that it has since become. The beach was one block away. Uncle Tony and Aunt Vi rented another small cottage next door to us for the week. Since they had no children, my parents were more than willing to share!

[Aunt Vi next to cottage in Dennisport]

 

The two of them loved children, but they had none of their own for many years. So, they chose to enjoy all their nieces and nephews – of which they had many with 16 on her side of the family and many more on his side. Aunt Vi played the piano and organ and they had a piano in their house where she gave piano lessons to many of the next generation – both family members and other children in the neighborhood. I was not among them as I had chosen to play the flute instead. But when she had her annual piano recital for all her students to perform (to a packed living room), we nieces/nephews who played other instruments were also invited to play a piece to break up the monotony. Aunt Vi was also the organist in my church where she played the requisite three hymns and accompanied the soloist each week. But she was not a member, preferring to stay with Mill Plain Union church, so during the main part of the service she just sat on a chair back in the little organ room reading until being needed again.

Uncle Tony had two great loves that I recall. One was fishing. That is what he had done when we had our joint family vacation on Cape Cod. He also had access to Hitchcock Lake and had use of a property which he could walk to where he could indulge in his sport. But his other interest was his beloved WWII Jeep. He spent hours and hours working on it – taking it apart to fix this or replace that as it got older and older. In the end I don’t think there were any original parts left! My father constantly kidded him about it that it spent more time in the garage than it spent in a running condition. Uncle Tony once showed up in our driveway in it just to show my father that it could drive the 5-6 miles each way from his house to ours and back.

[Uncle Tony with fish]

As I got older and began riding my bicycle all over town, Midwood Ave became a frequent destination. I could always count on a warm welcome. I think all of us enjoyed our times with them because they were so other-focused as they did not have children of their own. In my mid-teen years, that finally changed when they adopted and began their own family – first Donna in 1963, then Roger two years later. By then most of we cousins were getting older and more responsible, so Donna especially was this little baby doll that the girl cousins could dote upon. So just as my parents had shared their children with them, they shared their children with us.

[Donna and Roger]

 

Uncle Tony was pretty handy with things and he did much of the work to add on to their house. This first involved removing the wall between the living room and the enclosed porch, raising the floor level in the porch (there was a step up between the two), and effectively doubling the size of the living room. He also built an addition with larger bedrooms, a larger bathroom, and a basement. The house had been built on a rock ledge, so one of the rather delicate tasks was setting off dynamite under the house to break up the ledge without having the charge so large as to damage the existing house. I’m not sure I would have tried that, but he pulled it off without a hitch. He also expanded the garage to have more space for his tools to work on his beloved Jeep.

I left for college 800 miles away in 1966, and was only home for the summer and occasional breaks, so I didn’t get to experience the growing up years of either my younger siblings or my younger cousins. But Aunt Vi and Uncle Tony were still given the “favorite aunt and uncle” status when I was home. When I got married in 1971 and lived in the next town for 4 years my wife and I would often stop by to “say hi”. And when we moved to PA in 1975, we still maintained a close relationship and would stop to see them each time we visited CT.

Uncle Tony had a massive stroke that left him wheelchair bound and unable to speak. His hello when we came was a wiggle of his fingers. But he remained at home with Aunt Vi taking care of him to the end. He passed away in 2005 at the age of 82. Aunt Vi lived until 2016 and passed away at the age of 86.

I’d like to relate one final story.

One Christmas we were visiting CT over the Christmas holidays and staying with my parents. Aunt Vi’s church, Mill Plain Union, was having a Christmas Eve service and she invited our entire family to go along with her. And since our entire family were singers, she asked us to go early and practice so we could be part of the choir for the service. As it turned out, if we had not then the choir would have been practically non-existent!

My wife only sings soprano. My mother (who also grew up in that church) knows how to sing alto. My father, like myself, sings bass. But there were no tenors among us. I have a wide enough range that I can sing tenor if needed (although if I do it too much I can’t speak the rest of the evening), and Aunt Vi also has a versatile voice and could sing most of the tenor range. So, I moved up in range, she moved down, and we got to sing together for the only time in my life. There were only three other people besides our family in the choir that night (another soprano, another alto, and another bass) so we essentially had an extended Pierpont family choir for the Christmas Eve service as we faced the magnificent Pierpont window at the opposite end of the church. It was such a pleasure to sing with my favorite aunt!

[Pierpont window]

 

My wife and I got to visit Aunt Vi for the last time when we attended my 50^th high school reunion in September 2016. She was, as always, her cheerful self and happy to see us. But she was obviously aging. So, it was not a surprise that she passed away just a month later. She was the youngest of the five siblings, all of whom lived into their eighties, and she was the last of them to pass away.

[Happy Aunt Vi]

 

Thanks for all the memories!

 

Scouting in our Family

The Boy Scout and Girl Scout movement began in the US in 1910, just a few years after it started in England. In 1934, when my mother was 10 years old, my grandfather enrolled her in the local Girl Scout troop that met at their church, Mill Plain Union Church, in Waterbury, CT. When they discovered that he had knowledge (self-taught) in things like plants and electricity, the troop included him as a badge consultant (see https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/stories-from-my-mother-1-my-dad.html).

My mother stayed with the Girl Scouts – first as a troop member, then as a leader. When she graduated from high school and moved to Hartford for hairdressing school, this involvement stopped. Shortly thereafter, WWII began, and after the war she and my dad married and moved to Wolcott where they purchased a home which they lived in together for the next 60 years. I was born a few years later, the first of five children, and about the time I started going to school at Alcott School, they enrolled me in the newly formed Cub Scout Pack, my sister in the local Brownie Troop, and my mother re-engaged in the scouting movement. She would remain involved for the next several decades, and, of course, all the rest of the family would be as well.

Early Memories

Our local Cub Scout Pack met at Alcott School and encompassed the entire northern part of the town. The den that I was a part of was run by the mother of one of my classmates, Jay Pikiell. Although the Pikiell home was quite small (the living room being perhaps 10x12), it was large enough for we rambunctious young boys to gather and get our initial exposure to scouting.

A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

I still remember the Boy Scout Law which I learned over 60 years ago.

[Picture of myself and my sister, Beth, in our Cub Scout and Brownie uniforms]

 

I worked my up through the various levels – back then they were Wolf, Bear, Lion – and got my Webelos badge as well (also back then the consonants in word were W/B/L/S for Wolf/Bear/Lion/Scout, but they have also changed). I then entered Boy Scouts. My sister had her “fly up” ceremony the following year when she moved from Brownies to Girl Scouts.

[Following picture has our family in 1956 with myself, Beth, my brother Chuck, and my sister Dawn, together with the MacBroom children – the oldest, Andrea (Andy), was my age. Mr. MacBroom was a good friend of my father’s at Scovill, and was in my parent’s wedding. They were also involved in scouting in Wolcott, but in different troops as they lived at the far southern end of town, and will show up again later in this story.]

 

[Here are some pictures from my sister’s fly up ceremony in the parking lot of Alcott School. The red and white 1957 station wagon in the background is our family car.]

 

Boy Scouts

The boy scout troop was for the entire town. We met at Frisbie School. One of my fondest memories of my time in boy scouts was when several of us were working on merit badges for hiking and outdoor cooking. Our parents dropped us off at the Grand Junction (on Woodtick Road near the Atwood property). At the time this was the access point for the Connecticut Blue Trail. We followed the trail, hiking eastward into the woods, then north along the edge of the New Britain Reservoir, then along the top of the escarpment a bit farther before taking the steep path down the escarpment into Southington to the trail end near the south end of Lake Compounce.

At that time there was a camping/picnic area along the west side of the lake which is where we ended our hike. We had been put into teams of two and each team shared a pup tent. After setting up camp, we had to go into the surrounding woods to gather sticks and other material for building a fire – each team also having been assigned a cooking fire area in one of the circles made of stones scattered around the picnic area. We had each brought our evening meal (hamburger, potato, and carrots, all wrapped in aluminum foil by our mothers earlier that day). Our task was to start a fire using only a piece of flint and a strip of steel. But that’s not an easy task! Some of the teams got theirs going, built up a good fire, then put their food in the coals to get it cooked. But our team (and several others), despite over a half-hour of trying to get a good spark to light the materials we had gathered, were not able to get a spark to “catch.” The leaders eventually took pity on us (after observing that we really were trying!) and allowed us to use the bed of coals that one of the successful fire-starting teams had produced.

We all slept well that night in our tents. In the morning the leaders started a fire (using matches) for cooking a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon. After packing up our tents and sleeping bags, ensuring that all fires were totally dead (having a lake just a few feet away across the tracks for the amusement park train was helpful), and making sure that the entire picnic area was picked up and there was no trace of our having occupied it, we walked the short distance along the shore, through the amusement park (which is not open in the early morning), and met our parents in the parking lot just beyond it.

 Here are a few pictures of me during this time – one in my uniform, and one of our patrol doing a winter hike]

 

While our patrol was active, the leadership of the troop at this time was becoming very ineffective. Thus, at one of our patrol meetings we all realized that we were getting nowhere. So, we voted as an entire patrol to withdraw from scouting to pursue other things. But this left me in a little bit of an awkward situation. For one of my service projects, I had been assisting a local Cub Scout Den which met a short distance away on North Street (just a 5-minute walk). As I was no longer a scout, I could not be the den assistant. However, the den mother appreciated my help and I liked helping the younger kids in their advancement in scouting. So, she, with the approval of the Cub Scout Pack leadership, had me appointed as the “Assistant Den Mother.” (At the time, all Cub Scout Packs were led by women as they were home in the afternoons after school when the dens met.)

My father, because of his involvement (through my mother) on helping with such things as setting up the Girl Scout camp each year (more on that below), had recently been elected to the Girl Scout District Council which gave leadership to the Girl Scouts in a large part of the county. So, he had a membership card for that purpose and was a “card-carrying Girl Scout.” This led me to reason, “If my father is a Girl Scout, then it’s ok for me to be an Assistant Den Mother.”

 

Other Family Members

I’d like to briefly touch on the involvement of the rest of my family in scouting.

My mother, in addition to her involvement before she was married, was a Girl Scout leader in Wolcott from shortly after I was born and continuing for a few decades. Sometimes she headed up a local troop, sometimes she volunteered at the district level, sometimes she was the Girl Scout cookie chairman for the entire town, and sometimes she had other roles. Being the cookie chair was always interesting, as after all the troops in town had sent in their orders, the truck delivering all of the cookies would come to our house. We would have to park our cars outside as there would be hundreds of cases of cookies to unload into our garage. We would sort them into piles for each troop, and then have to help load the cases into the car/pickup truck for each troop when they came to claim their cookies.

In 1976, as part of the bicentennial of the nation, my mother was recognized as a “hidden heroine” by the Wolcott Girl Scout Troop and was featured in the newspaper receiving the “rare Connecticut Trails Council pin” for all her contributions to scouting.

[Here is a copy of that newspaper article]

 

My father’s involvement was principally in support of my mother’s work. I’ll include his picture below as part of my writeup on Camp Sequena.

My other siblings were also involved – in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies, and Girl Scouts. Most of the pictures I have of them are marching in the annual Memorial Day parade in town.

[Here are pictures of my mother, my brother Chuck, and my sister Dawn]

 

For the 1966-67 school year (while I was in college) our family hosted an exchange student from Norway, Ingrid Klykken. She had also been involved in the scouting movement there, and we involved her here in meeting with some of the US Girl Scouts in town.

[You can see her here meeting with a Brownie troop as well as in her Girl Guide uniform sitting next to my mother at a Girl Scout gathering]

 

Camp Sequena

The Connecticut Trails Council of the Girl Scouts owned a large tract of land near Otis, MA, which they used as a summer camp ground. There was a Revolutionary War-era farm house, a large barn (used for storage of the tents and equipment), and camping areas scattered in the woods that contained raised wooden platforms for tents. Besides my mother and sisters going to the camp during the summer, our entire family would often go up for a weekend in the spring/fall to setup/take down the tents. In the spring we also had to clear out any trees that had fallen during the winter that were blocking the trails or lying on the tent platforms.

[I’ve included several pictures of these activities below: my sisters helping take down a tent in the fall, my mother and Mrs. MacBroom clearing cobwebs out of one of the latrines (I told you I’d get back to her!), my father and I clearing a fallen log (what red-blooded teenaged male wouldn’t like to spend a weekend in a girl scout camp!), and my father warming up next to the fireplace in the farmhouse after a cold late spring day of working outside (note the long underwear also drying out on the fireplace screen).]

 

It was not until many years later when doing some research that I discovered that the Camp Sequena property had 345 acres and had been purchased by the Girl Scouts in the 1930’s and had subsequently been sold to a developer in 1972, not too many years after these pictures were taken. But of interest was that before its use by the Girl Scouts it was the home of one of the first nudist colonies in the US (https://moam.info/otis-nudist-colony-was-one-of-nations-first-otis-wood-lands_5a2fb2461723ddc8b42a1708.html).

Participation in scouting had a positive impact on our entire family.

Playing the Flute

While I now often express myself musically through singing, that was not always the case. I didn’t learn to sing in parts until I was in college, but my flute playing goes back much further.

I am quite happy to admit that I am not very artistic. As I frequently say to others when I see those who are, “They have more ability in their little finger than I have in my whole body.” But for my appreciation of the artistic side of things, I have to include Mr. Pontecorvo in my list of favorite teachers.

When I started school, it was in first grade at Alcott School. There were no nursery/preschools those days and the only kindergarten was a very small private one at the far end of town. Since the schools were still quite small and there was not yet a high school in town, there was also very limited art/music available. And instrumental music was non-existent.

In 1958, with the new high school being built, the school board hired an instrumental music teacher, Mr. Pontecorvo. He divided his time among the various elementary schools. Because no one owned instruments, they had a plan of “rent to buy” where the family could make payments of so much a month and at the end of the plan they would own the instrument.

Because my mother knew how to play the piano and wanted her children to have some exposure to music, my sister and I had been taking piano lessons from my aunt. But my Aunt Dot was a hard taskmaster and I was not enjoying it at all. I was only at the point of picking out the melody one note at a time with my right hand and trying to play a chord with my left one. This instrumental plan from the school was a way for me to “escape” my aunt and I jumped at it. I chose to play the flute – perhaps because most of the boys went in for things like trumpets and drums and I wanted something different. The other flute player that first year was my classmate, Jeanne Wilson.

Lessons were held weekly by instrument, i.e. all the flutes together, in the only available space in the school – the boiler room. It sometimes got pretty toasty during the winter months. That first year there was only Jeanne and I, then the following year we were joined by Bev Williams who was a year younger than Jeanne and I. We practiced in that boiler room for three years until Jeanne and I moved to the high school in the fall of 1961.

(An interesting historical note about this. Because the instruments that Jeanne and I ordered were obtained together by Mr. Pontecorvo, we had identical flutes with consecutive serial numbers. My mother had saved the receipt for my flute. More than a half-century later I came into possession of the receipt and the warranty when my mother passed away and I discovered that the flute – that I still had – did not match the serial number on the warranty – it was off by one. At some time during the several years that Jeanne and I were both playing the flute and we had them next to each other, we had inadvertently gotten them switched. So, for all those years I was playing her flute and she was playing mine!)

In high school the weekly school lessons were replaced with the opportunity to join the high school band. For the first few years we had no uniforms and just appeared in dress pants/skirts, white shirts, and ties. Later the school got uniforms - gray flannel trousers (for the boys, the girls had gray flannel skirts), white shirts with a skinny black tie and a tie-pin, and scarlet blazers – the school colors were scarlet and gray). We were primarily a concert band as the school was not large enough to have a football team, but we did have a small group that played as a pep band for basketball games, and we also marched in the town’s annual Memorial Day parade.

The band met twice a week during the “activity period” – the last period of the day on Tuesday and Friday. And as it was also for the high school which served the entire town (Alcott only served the kids in the northern tier of town), there were other flute players – some of whom only played for a few years, others who were there every year. The ones I can recall, besides myself, Jeanne, and Bev (a year behind us), were Mike Truziewicz (a year older than myself, Colleen Malloy (a classmate whom I am still in touch with), and Elise Marcil.

Here is a picture from a Memorial Day parade in eighth grade – from left to right are Jeanne, Colleen, Mike, and myself. Elise had leg problems and was not able to march.

 

The friendships made in band made us pretty close. Here is a picture of myself with Colleen, Elise, and Jeanne at our 50^th high school reunion!

 

My senior year I decided to expand a little bit and purchased a piccolo at a music store in New Haven. Our band teacher then featured me in the spring concert by having us play John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. It was somewhat scary having to stand up by myself and play it from memory with the eyes of the entire audience upon me!

During my high school years, I also private flute lessons for a while. One year I had a music teacher in Waterbury who lived off Long Hill Road. (An interesting event from that year – my mother was driving me to my lesson after school in our 1957 Ford Fairlane station wagon. At the light at Lakewood Rd, the car in front of us stopped quickly and my mother didn’t react in time and rear-ended him. The hood on that car was hinged in the front, so the impact caused the hood to fly open toward the front and blocked our view. This was in the days when the Pine Drive-in was still in operation and there were not many other businesses in the area, so I had to walk/run down the road to the gas station across from the drive-in (it was an ESSO gas station in the years before they became Exxon) and call my dad at work to come out and help. Needless to say, I didn’t make my lesson that day!)

Later on, I was going to a music teacher who lived in Cheshire off of Mountain Road. (Another car-related story – that was the year I was learning how to drive. I had passed my driving test at the high school, but in a car with an automatic transmission. My mother insisted that I had to learn how to drive a stick shift before she would let me get my license. Our car by then was a VW Beetle. My driving lesson each week was driving to/from my flute lesson. The intersection of Mountain Road with the Waterbury-Cheshire Road was the bane of my existence. You had to stop on a slight incline as you waited for traffic to clear and then pull out. And my mother’s requirement was that I be able to stop on that incline, then manage the gas, brake, and clutch with enough skill that I didn’t roll backwards while doing so. It took many weeks to meet her approval!)

As an undergraduate in college at Michigan State University, I wanted to continue my musical exploits. MSU had a well-known marching band, but I was not eligible to play in it as membership was limited to brass and drums (I was a member of the marching band for two years – but one year in their flag unit and one as an assistant manager). So instead I joined the “activity band”. We met three times a week in the Music Building at 8AM. Grading was based on attendance – and the door was locked exactly at 8AM so if you were late your grades suffered. I did make friends with a pretty flute player sitting next to me and we actually dated a couple of times.

One summer I also was invited by a friend from our former high school band to join the pit band for the Waterbury Parks Department musical which they put on each year. The music that we used had been rented from a Broadway show so we couldn’t even put pencil markings in it. And my book was for “first wind”, which meant that some songs were written for flute, some for clarinet and some for alto saxophone. While that may have been fine for the professionals playing on Broadway, it was beyond my expertise as I had no training in other instruments, nor did I own any others. So, because the flute is a C instrument, the clarinet is a B-flat instrument, and the alto sex is an E-flat instrument, that meant playing the flute parts as written, transposing on the fly a full-step in one direction for any clarinet parts and transposing on the fly a step-and-a-half in the other direction for any saxophone parts. It was a real test of my musical abilities to do so, especially when the part went from clarinet to saxophone from one page to the next and you couldn’t even pencil in the key that you were supposed to be playing in!

After college, my playing was somewhat sporadic. I briefly played in a small group at our church. But in my 30s, all that came to an end. I had always had a small jaw and a receding chin. But it, along with the lack of access to fluoride treatments when growing up, meant that I had dental problems. One of the eventual consequences required a jaw operation to cut off my lower jaw, move it forward to correct my bite, and screw it back together. A side effect was that one of the nerves that is connected to my lower lip on one side was stretched and I lost the feeling in part of my lower lip. This meant that I no longer had the necessary embouchure for flute playing and so I had to stop permanently.

By then, I had come to enjoy singing (bass) and still had a musical outlet. But I’m grateful for all the years that I was able to play and enjoy the flute. That introduction to music led to a life-long love of music. Thanks to Mr. Pontecorvo for bringing the instrumental program to the Wolcott school system!

Philosophy of Writing

I have a friend on Facebook, Robert Perry, who has many things in common with me. Although we have never met face-to-face, we grew up in the same small town of Wolcott, Connecticut, we both moved away when we pursued our further education, and we both enjoy writing. He is several years younger than I and so we have no friends or significant experiences in common. However, through genealogical investigations we are distant cousins of each other, having several ancestors from New England/Connecticut history in common. But we have very different writing styles and philosophies – even when writing about the same or similar topics.

Many of my writings take the form of what I call “Genealogy Stories.” Focusing on a particular character, or set of related characters, in the history of Wolcott or of Connecticut, or other ancestors of mine or my wife’s, I tell the story in a way that incorporates both the genealogy of that individual, but that also includes the greater context in which that genealogy exists. This can include historical events (what else was going on at the time), geological information (where it was taking place), societal context (what life was like at the time), etc., and usually more than one of these types of context. So, while the main theme is that individual’s life story and the significant dates in their life (birth, marriage, children, death), it’s never just a series of facts, but trying to put that individual in the context where all those things happened.

I also tend to list a number of references about where I found that information, thus encouraging others to continue to read these other references for themselves. And if the individual is related to me, I will also mention that relationship to show how we are often personally connected to others beyond our immediate sphere.

Because there are so many facts given in these stories, I am conscious of breaking my writing up into easily managed chunks by using small-to-moderate sized paragraphs and the white space between the paragraphs to allow others to read the story without getting too confused by the amount of information. I generally keep the story somewhat short – about 3-5 pages in document format – because my purpose is to encourage others to appreciate the context (history/geography/etc.) and make the story more “real” and not just a series of dates and events.

I have chosen to present these stories in a blog for a couple of reasons. First, it keeps them all together and in a place where people can find them. And second, because that medium allows me to preserve most of the formatting in paragraphs, etc.

I don’t have thousands, or even hundreds, of followers, so I post links to these blog entries in social media. And I have learned that because our society is so visually focused, that putting one or more relevant pictures in the blog will cause the picture to show up in the news feed and help encourage people to then click on the link to my blog (although I did not do this the first few years, so my older postings remain just textual).

In contrast to my style of writing, Bob relies on a much different one. His is deeply personal and written from that perspective. As an example, when he wrote about the 100+ year old statue of the horse on the Waterbury green, it was in the context of his seeing the statue as a small boy, wondering why it was there, and eventually making his way to the local library where a kind librarian helped him find the information he craved about the horse, its owner, and why the statue had been built.

 

He writes in long, descriptive sentences filled with colorful adjectives and nouns, and lots of commas to separate the many phrases of his rich explanations. While my writing has an educational slant to it, his is very emotive and seeks to draw the reader into the environment of the story and to feel personally connected to it.

He then posts the relevant picture to an album on his Facebook page and copies what he has written into the accompanying post. In doing so, most of the formatting is lost and the post is one long string of words below that initial picture. But while that would be harmful to my writing style, for his it is not. Rather, his readers find themselves getting lost in the jungle of descriptive words and long, run-on sentences and thus even more drawn into the world that he is presenting. Overwhelmed by the beauty of his descriptions, they relate to this world in an intimate fashion and see everything through his eyes.

Both of these styles of writing are useful, but they come from different philosophies of writing. I want to draw people in by showing how all these stories are part of the larger context in which we all live. Bob wants to draw people in by getting them to relate personally to the story. In a sense, one is outside-in, and the other is inside-out. But we both want to help others learn about and appreciate our history.

Bob put it this way:

“How to tell the stories of our ancestors, the many other Americans who gave us our great country and the progress of America so as to generate not merely interest but appropriate and strictly truthful regard for the legacy enjoyed by all of us, whether their lineal or much more broadly cultural descendants, has become a chief concern of mine. These stories, surprisingly only some of which have been written about at all even after centuries, almost in every case need to be made interesting for those now alive, who too often have been taught an unnecessary hostility to them if they consider history relevant in the least.”

I am a big fan of his writing, and he is a fan of mine. The world needs both of our philosophies.