“Why are you looking to do this now, in this particularly crazy time?”
“I’m not saying it’s going to happen fast, and I’m not in a hurry. But it seemed to me I could kill two birds with one stone: when I do research on my own family—on my own time, not at work!—I can collect anecdotes and interesting small facts that don’t usually make it to the textbooks—the things that make history come alive. I’d keep a running file of them, and when I think there are enough I could pull them all together. Maybe in time for the next school year? Something like, ‘A day in the Life of John Doe in 1775’?”
Leslie nodded, once. “Okay. I can see where you’re going with the idea. How about this? You collect your entertaining facts, and at some point—after this month is over, please!—you put together a draft of your presentation, and I’ll look it over. I do like the local angle. You have somebody specific in mind?”
“Not yet, or only hints of possibilities—I haven’t found anybody here for certain. I’m really a novice at all this genealogy stuff, but if I stumble over something interesting, it seems a shame to waste it. And I like to do this kind of research—it makes the people so much more real than a list of vital statistics.”
“Okay, go for it. And your three minutes are up.”
“Thanks, Leslie.” Abby scrammed before Leslie could ask any more questions that she couldn’t answer. She felt a little guilty, because now she’d obtained what could be interpreted as permission to spend time on her own genealogy on working time. She didn’t plan to abuse it, and she would pull together anything interesting that she found. She thought the idea had potential as a teaching tool, whether or not she found her elusive Corey family in the neighborhood. And she didn’t want to let Leslie down.
But there was never enough time. Sure, images from the original nineteenth-century vital records were available online, but where was she supposed to look? She did enough research to know that once, back when it was first created, Concord had been a much bigger place, in terms of geography. Ever since then, bits and pieces had been peeled away to become new towns. Sometimes the lines between towns were not set for years or even decades after that. So where to look for vital records kind of depended on what era she was looking at: early on, in the seventeenth century, it would be in the Concord records, but later it could be in any of nearly a dozen surrounding towns, each with its own records. And that didn’t take into account marriages in which the woman wanted to be married in her own town, which could be somewhere else. Local records were kind of inconsistent about noting where one of their men might have been married.
And then there were the misspellings! The same name could be spelled four different ways on the same page. Was it all one family, and the name had been mangled by one or more illiterate clerks? Or were they different lines that had split and chosen to change their spelling? The funny thing was, she had seen the same thing on adjacent tombstones in local cemeteries. She had to conclude that people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren’t so hung up about the correct spelling as modern people.
None of which made her task any easier. Sure, she could print out all the relevant names in all the relevant towns, but then she would have to cross-check them. Worse, people within families often used the same first name, over and over. As a result, she could find three Jameses or Lucys with the same surname, all born in the same place within a couple of years of each other. Or, if there was a father named James and he sired multiple children, the wife’s name sometimes differed. Were there two father Jameses or one James with two sequential wives?
Worst of all, she was trying to fit all this cross-checking in after a long day at work, and it was easy to make mistakes or transpose the lines she was reading on a blurry printout or on-screen.
If she looked at older histories, were they likely to be accurate? On the one hand, it seemed as though the writers in the nineteenth century were closer to the actual events, but on the other, she’d seen more than one instance where a single story was repeated for years, with no verification. Not unlike a YouTube video going viral these days—and it was very hard to erase. And sometimes there was no way to prove whether it was true. If once there had been evidence, it was long gone. Or the information had come from a conversation with a person, rather than a written document, and that person was also long gone.
Maybe she needed a change of scene. Maybe she needed to take a look at some original records, compare them with the printed or published versions and see what errors might have crept in. Littleton would be the best place to start, because that’s where she’d seen the man on the green. Nobody else had “visited” her since. But the Littleton Historical Society’s hours were so limited! Abby, it’s stupid to let that hang you up. You’re a colleague by way of the museum, and a legitimate researcher. Call them and make an appointment! So she did, for the following Saturday.
Which then spurred her to redouble her efforts to narrow down the focus of her search. She started at the beginning again. She had seen the man on the green in Littleton, so it seemed logical to assume he was part of the militia there. After all, he’d been holding a weapon, so it was unlikely that he was just an onlooker. She had the list of men who had marched to Concord from the green. There was a slim possibility that “her” man had had a brother or son watching him at the green; would he have been a minuteman too? And how the heck was she supposed to link any of this to the one name she had, Mary Ann Corey, who had married into the Reed family? There were no Coreys on the Littleton monument, although there were Coreys in the town, as well as adjacent towns. Finally she gave up: she’d have to ask the person at the historical society what his or her recommendation was.
• • •
Abby presented herself at the historical society promptly at ten on Saturday. There was no doorbell that she could see, but the nineteenth-century door sported a large brass knocker, so she tried that. A woman’s voice called out from inside, “It’s open,” so Abby pushed the door open, to reveal a woman who looked to be about a hundred years old—and whose weight matched. Abby swallowed her first response: maybe this woman had actually known the minutemen.
“Hi, I’m Abigail Kimball I have an appointment to meet someone to help me with my family history.”
“I’m Esther Jewett. Come in before we lose all the heat in here—it’s expensive. Wish spring would hurry up.”
Esther waited for Abby to enter and close the heavy door behind her. “What is it you’re looking for?” she demanded.
“I’m trying to find an ancestor who I believe was a Littleton minuteman.”
“What’ve you got so far? Oh, we might as well sit down. This might take a while.” She led the way to a massive oak library table. Abby took a moment to admire the handsome building—nineteenth-century, with high ceilings and lots of woodwork. “Sit,” Esther said in a no-nonsense tone, gesturing toward a chair. She took one on the opposite side of the table.
Abby sat as ordered. “I work at the Concord Museum, but I’ve lived in the state for only a few months. I discovered some relatives I never knew about, buried in Waltham, and they led me to Weston and Concord. I’ve been looking in the communities surrounding Concord to see if I can identify anyone else from my family.”
“Who’s buried in Concord?” Esther snapped. She was certainly direct, and not one for social graces. Maybe at her age she’d decided it was a waste of time.
“My three-times great-grandmother, Mary Ann Corey,” Abby told her. “She married William Reed. It’s the Reeds and the Flaggs I found in Waltham.”
“No Coreys among the minutemen,” Esther said with a sniff.
“I know—I checked.”
“When was your Mary Ann born?”
“1821,” Abby told her, from memory.
“Huh. Too late to be a daughter of a minuteman. Maybe granddaughter. What’s your source?”
“That’s what the cemetery record said. Mary Ann was the first one buried at the family plot at Sleepy Hollow. I
would have looked further back, but then I got this new job and moved, and I got busy. But now I want to see if I have a link to the battle at the Bridge in Concord, and I understand the men from Littleton took part.”
“Patriots’ Day stuff,” Esther said dismissively.
“Yes, exactly. But I’m having trouble finding my Mary Ann Corey, going back.”
“You check the vital records?”
“Of course. I didn’t find anyone who fit.”
“I’m not surprised. Sometimes those transcribers back in the day were idiots, or maybe illiterate. Plenty of mistakes. But I think you’re in luck. We just wrapped up a project, scanning all the records in the town clerk’s office. You been there?”
Abby shook her head. “They’re only open days. My job keeps me pretty busy, and I haven’t been working there long enough to have any vacation time coming. Are those records online?”
“Not yet. But we had a professional hard copy made—some people like to look at the real thing, not a picture on a screen. Cost a bit, too. Want to see them?”
“Of course I do!”
“Wait there,” Esther said, and disappeared into another room. While she was gone, Abby stood and strolled around the room, examining books on the shelves, pulling one out now and then. Even from a quick inspection she could tell that there was a wealth of information here. There were typed manuscripts on flimsy paper; there were transcriptions of someone else’s earlier diaries; there were copies of individual families’ Bibles. If it had been food, Abby would have been drooling shamelessly. As it was, her fingers itched to start leafing through the books.
She was startled when Esther spoke behind her. “Come on back,” she said. “We keep them in the back to protect them. Sometimes people think they can help themselves to whatever they want.” Abby followed her into another room, where Esther pointed to a pair of folio-size bound volumes laying on a table.
“That’s the entire history of the town?” Abby thought there would have been more.
“That’s just births, marriages, deaths, burials and the like up to 1850. The town records are in other volumes. Thought you wanted to find specific people?”
“I do. Thank you. This is a great place to start. Tell me, do you work here?”
“I’m a volunteer. I’ve been working on my family’s history most of my adult life, and I’ve spent a lot of time here. Once my husband died I got bored, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life polishing the furniture. So I started helping out here. I come cheap. You can pay me by the hour, though.”
“Sure, fine.” Abby wasn’t about to quibble: she had research to do, and the clock was ticking. “Are you staying around or do you have to be somewhere else?”
“Trying to get rid of me, are you?” Esther softened her comment with a flicker of a smile. “I let you in, so I’ve got to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t stuff our documents down your shirt.”
“People do that?” Abby said in dismay.
“Sure do. I’ve got to watch them like a hawk. If you want to be alone, I’ll go sit in the office—the chair’s more comfortable in there. Yell if you need me.”
Funny woman, Abby thought. She settled herself at the table and pulled the first heavy volume toward her. It took her a few moments to get used to the handwriting, although it was still remarkably legible after a couple of hundred years. They certainly knew how to make ink back then. She wondered if the originals would outlive anything produced now.
All right, she knew when Mary Ann had been born, and when she died. She also knew that she had married William Reed in Concord in 1845, so that narrowed her search. The bound volumes didn’t make it easy, though: when they had been started they had been neatly divided into categories like birth and death, but some parts had filled up earlier than others, so later dates ended up out of sequence; details like deaths had been inserted on the same page as births. In addition, the amount of detail given varied from entry to entry. Some death records gave only a date, while others added burial, where interred, cause of death and even more. It was interesting reading, and as the same names occurred over and over, Abby began to feel as though she knew the people of Littleton, in a different time.
The first volume yielded nothing pertinent, although Abby enjoyed reading through the entries. She swapped it out for the second one and started over. This one picked up around 1840, Abby guessed. The writer had changed again, and his handwriting was crabbed, his spelling atrocious. Still, this was the original source, so Abby plowed through the pages. Then stopped.
There was Mary Ann Corey of Littleton marrying William Reed of Concord. That part she knew. But what was new to her was the name written in parentheses after the “Corey”—in the same hand, with the same ink—that said “Perry.” Was this a correction of somebody’s earlier mishearing of the surname? Or something more?
Abby started leafing through the pages in reverse order until she came to pages for 1841 and stopped. Mary Ann Perry, daughter of Reuben Perry and Hannah, his wife, had married Stephen Corey in 1841. Making her Mary Ann Corey. Who had married William Reed four years later.
There was a Perry on the Littleton monument—two, in fact: Henry and Benjamin. She had her man on the green.
8
She was so boggled by her find that she found herself leafing through the books randomly, hunting for other Perry appearances. There were plenty. Who was this Henry Perry? Perrys cropped up regularly in the books in front of her, and she hadn’t even touched on any of the surrounding communities. She’d have to start from scratch with them.
She was jerked out of her focus by a cough from Esther, now standing behind her. “Hey, you been here four hours already. I didn’t figure you’d take so long, being your first visit. Kind of like a scouting trip?”
Abby wanted to snap at her to go away and leave her alone, but she figured she’d need Esther’s help later. “I’m sorry, am I keeping you from something? Actually I should go—I want to sort through what I’ve found and work out what my next steps are, and I shouldn’t waste your time by doing it here. Can we get together again? I mostly have time on weekends. I could manage an appointment at night, if you’d rather.”
“I like my shows at night, and I don’t drive after dark. But weekends are good. How about this? You go home and sort out your notes, then we can figure out a good time to meet again. Don’t know that you’ll have time the next week or so, what with Patriots’ Day and all that fuss. You might want to come watch the real muster here.”
“I saw the guys practicing the other day—that’s what started me thinking.” Not exactly the way Esther might have imagined, but true enough. “That sounds like a plan. And thank you for pointing me in the right direction.”
“You owe me sixty dollars—I charge fifteen an hour.”
Abby thought that was extremely reasonable, but maybe she was still giddy with her discovery. “Check? Cash?”
“Cash is good, if you’ve got it.”
Abby rummaged through her purse and came up with three twenty-dollar bills. Esther said, “Just leave it on the table for now. Good luck.”
“Should I call you?” Abby asked.
“No, just call this place and set up something. I’m always around.”
“Thanks!”
Esther walked Abby to the door, then disappeared back inside. Abby stood on the steps for a moment, breathing deeply. She had a name: Henry Perry. He was the right age to have fought in the Revolution. She could check his military records online. Esther was right: no need to waste her time hunting for information she could get somewhere else. Abby’s mouth twitched at the thought of Esther—it wouldn’t surprise her to learn that Esther was providing research services on the side, at least in part. But at least she was affordable, and more important, knowledgeable.
Abby checked the time: it was closer to three than to two. Esther had been generous. Abby had time to run her weekend errands, and then she wanted to go home and start digging. But as she walked
to her car, she wondered if she should look around at bit more, since she was already in Littleton. There was an old cemetery right in the heart of town—she could at least stop there and take a look and see if there were any Perrys there. She turned her car around and went back to where she had seen it, then parked.
The cemetery was midsized by local standards, and most of the stones were slate, which suggested dates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. That would be about right. They were scattered in no particular order rather than in tidy rows. Not that Abby cared at the moment: this was a first pass, and she wanted to see who was there. She stopped at the gate that led through the stone surrounding wall: should she be worried about meeting more relatives? Did she want to, here? She felt like a hunting dog, sniffing the air for … spirits? She was glad there was no one else nearby, because she’d look like an idiot, stopping every few feet not to look at a particularly interesting stone but to see if she could pick up any vibrations or emanations or … This is ridiculous! she told herself. Just get on with it. Find out if there are any Perrys here and say hi—and see if they answer.
There were none. If she had any deceased relatives in this nicely kept and pretty cemetery, they weren’t interested in communicating with her. She wasn’t disappointed: if there had been Perrys in this town, they could have been buried somewhere other than the center of town, even on their own land, which was not uncommon in earlier centuries. Or they could all have moved away, after the Revolution, looking for better opportunities farther west. Or … No, too many questions that she couldn’t answer while standing here and staring. She needed to do more homework, then come back. And there must be a newer cemetery too, but she didn’t have time to investigate that yet. It was beginning to get dark, and she still had to stop at the market on her way home.
Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 6
