The lineage of a family is often relegated to a neat table of relatively obscure names organized to show who begat whom and when. It can be easy to forget that each of those names identifies a man or woman who cherished the same hierarchy of needs and desires that guide our lives today albeit colored by the times in which they lived.
My own search for a genetic past has taken me on a journey backwards through the American experience to a relatively short street called Hosier Lane in London somewhere around the year 1560. It begins with a man named Isaac of whom we know very little other than he did live, and that he, and his forefathers, live on embedded in a genetic code carried by me and thousands of others.
The family continued to live in the Hosier Lane neighborhood through most of the 17th Century. In 1665 bubonic plague decimated the population of London yet the family survived. The cemetery in which Issac, his son, grandson, and great grandson rest also holds mass graves filled with plague victims. Yet the family survived the plague only to face the Great London Fire of 1666 which decimated most of north London…including Hosier Lane.
In 1682, an ancestor named John loaded up his oldest son John Jr., a teenager, and set out for the new world on a ship named Welcome along with a leader named William Penn and about 100 other Quaker colonists bound for Pennsylvania. Smallpox broke out on the ship killing about a third of the people on board. Yet to my relief, the men bearing my genetic makeup survived to settle in Bucks Township Pennsylvania. John Sr. then returned to England to retrieve his wife and other children. Unfortunately his wife refused to go on a long sea voyage and John Sr never returned to the new world. John Jr. however did remain in Pennsylvania and began a tree one which of branch is the one on which I am perched.
Nearly four hundred years separate me from the men who witnessed the plague of 1665, the fire of 1666, and the smallpox on board the Welcome and from the women who bore their children and stood with them. Four hundred years of history that includes adventures in the new world, a lineage that spread out from Bucks County Pennsylvania to Virginia and on to the Mississippi Territory with branches reaching into Ohio and Tennessee and Texas.
There are no kings or princes, great statesmen or noted generals perched on those branches. A few were heroes, a few were scoundrels, but most were ordinary men living ordinary lives for the time in which they lived. They left little mark on the world other than a unique genetic marker that says they were here. Their loves and hates, joys and worries, triumphs and defeats are for the most part lost in the mists of time. Yet I can sense a kinship with the men, and women, who so long ago survived disease, disaster, disappointment. For I am they…and they are me.
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While Hosier Lane is still there, nothing from the 17th Century other than one Quaker meeting house remains. Rebuilt after the fire in 1666, the neighborhood was totally destroyed by German bombers.
Bunhill Fields Burying Ground, an unconsecrated dissenter’s cemetery, was closed in 1854 and is the last remaining small London burying ground (as opposed to churchyards where Anglican and Catholics were buried.) Issac, his immediate descendents and their wives rest there in good company with the likes of George Fox, William Blake, John Bunyon, Daniel De Foe, John Gill; et al. (Somehow it’s comforting to think of the spirits of my ancestors hobnobbing with the ghosts of an array of religious activists, poets, writers and others who reached beyond the mundane.)