Genealogy research is never done … you’re welcome to pitch in

The Orphan George Chronicles detail my long quest to discover where my Hodson line came from, beginning somewhere in the dimness of late 1800s southwest Ohio.

I hope you find the results posted on this blog informative and interesting, all the way back to mid-1500s Cumbria, England.

I thought I was finished, but a realization flashed through my head around the time of my father’s funeral.  In my desire to unearth the unknown, I had leapt over my grandparents in the project, people who had been right in front of me in my earlier years, They were also people who were no longer living, to be pressed for answers.

So I turned to the last living member of my dad’s nuclear family to see what I could glean from her memories, leading to invaluable insights in what I present as the latest postings on this blog.

Especially her quip at the airport – “You know your grandfather’s slogan, used on all of his advertising, was ‘Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber’?” – this clue, told by the last of the family who would have remembered, instead becomes the key to my finally knowing both grandparents, years after their deaths.

What emerges is a profile of a generation that left not just farming but other traditions that had been practiced in this country for the previous two centuries, as they moved instead to the city and its new ways.

Just who are grandparents, anyway? And what is their role? What is discovered may be far from what is expected, as this personal exploration reveals.

And from there, we start going back … and back much further.

~*~

Let me also repeat my invitation to my wider kin. If you have photos, letters, memories, or other materials about any of the families discussed on this blog, I’d love to share them, if you’re willing.

As always, your comments are important. I look forward to hearing from you.

Advertisement

Where we start, as far as I can tell

Cumbria, at the far northwest corner of England, is said to have the highest concentration of Hodgsons in Britain, and from the surviving records, I can attest that the surname comes in at least 20 variants as early as the mid 1550s.

If my linkage through Ireland is correct, our ancestry was part of Pardshaw Monthly Meeting of Friends, Quakers who met for years outdoors, summer and winter, in the shelter of a large rock outcropping known as Pardshaw Crag. Eventually, worship moved indoors into homes during the winter, before this meetinghouse was constructed. I’m assuming some of our family is buried in the meetinghouse yard, but at a time long before headstones were permitted.

Our line, meanwhile, lived in Lumplagh nearby.

Pardshaw Friends meetinghouse in the northwest corner of England

 

Quaker meetinghouse and school, Pardshaw, near Dean, Cumbria

Seen from the air

 

The meetinghouse grounds approached from a village lane

 

Grandpa and his crew

Grandpa hired a photographer and scheduled this shot in the park with his crew and trucks. It was used in his promotional materials, often with the slogan, Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber.

 

Here he poses, right, with his foreman and nephew, Delbert Hodson.

Triggered by a ’50s Christmas like theirs

As we step across the hallway from an 18^th century parlor into a mid-20^th century living room decked out for Christmas, I freeze in mid-stride. Not simply because of the contrast between the dimly lit, austere Puritan chamber we’ve just left, where Christmas would have had no place, and the gaudy materialism of post-World War II America we’re entering. This self-guided museum tour is supposed to be a re-creation of history in a neighborhood of Colonial and Victorian houses and stores in seacoast New Hampshire. How is it that Candlelight Stroll, this panorama of New England antiquity, so unexpectedly drops me into my grandparents’ living room in Ohio, 872 miles west-southwest, a half-century before?

On that dressed blue spruce has bubbling colored glass lights the shape of small candles identical to theirs, as is the television, with its black-and-white program. “Howdy-Doody,” as I recall or perhaps imagine afterward.

Now that I think of it, Grandpa and Grandma were the first we knew to replace theirs with a color TV set, but that would have been a few years later than this display from the heart of the Eisenhower presidency. As would their aluminum Christmas tree, seemingly all tinsel, illuminated by the revolving plastic disc of colors in front of a light bulb; who knows what happened to the old bubbling decorations after that?

Circling slowly in the room, I keep repeating to my wife and daughters as much as to myself, I’m not that old. I’m not historic. This scene mirrors my own childhood, tinsel and ribbons and all, my own lifetime. History is what comes before us, at least after the last of a generation is buried and preferably much earlier.

In reality, Grandpa and Grandma have both been dead a quarter-century by this time, and that house sold after her death and his remarriage.

What I don’t voice as we pass through the room is my vague, underlying apprehension. No sense of warmth is stirred by encountering these objects from my childhood – no, “Oh, look!” accompanied by memories of comfort or affection, much less any impressions of individuals brought vividly back to life. If anything, that room represents something I’ve spent most of my adult life dodging.

But what, exactly, prompts this reaction?

As I’ve discovered, genealogy research leads to far more than names, dates, and places.  It connects bone and blood over centuries.