A Halloween Gift

[smokingboot]

I always assumed that our American connections began out of 18th/ 19th century immigration, spurred by the desperate realities of these islands at the time; destitution facing the post-clearance Scots, famine in Ireland. Pursuit of my paternal line reveals something entirely different, another time another motive. Turns out YDNA and a well kept line of descendants in a US family indicate a close match to an ancestor in England in Elizabeth's time, whose son became part of the puritan migration out of Dorset; said son moved to the new world where he made a life and a family for himself, and had his own son in 1637...

In Salem.

Looks like we left before things got hairy, an instinct that seems to have deserted us in later generations. It's strange to think of my hard-drinking, womanising, fighting, devotedly Roman Catholic father being born from a line of Massachusetts puritans who made their first American home in Witchcraft Central. But real stories are never well behaved.

We have yet to establish which branch of the family we belong to, a pursuit that is going to require a lot of tact and research skill. And I have real work to do as well as lots of exercise to shake off all the hospitality/party based goodies of the past fortnight.

Still, as a Samhain present from the ancestors, this one's a doozy.