Untangling Roots

The East Hartford schoolhouse attended by my great grandmother Ellen Maria Kilbourne 

January, 2013

Time passes so quickly these days. I started this writing in the late summer of 2012, and now it's months later. My metaphorical journey has taken me to East Hartford and dumped me there. I've run aground in the land of my maternal, rather than my paternal, ancestors. I've discovered that several of them were sailors, and that two of them died at sea. There appears to be a richer vein of stories in this side of the family, while the Griswolds all seem restless but indistinct. But the questing, the restlessness, that I feel, seems to derive from the Griswolds, the romanticism of my great-grandfather Oscar, the idealism of my father. And the relocations of his father and mother from town to town. There is the curious sense that this respectable and fairly prosaic family – my Griswold grandparents – produced a daughter (my aunt Mary) who got a masters degree and married an artist. That artist then opened up my own horizons to possibilities that would probably never have occurred to me, and that thwarted ambition of mine, to be an artist (in the romantic and unrealized sense of my great-grandfather), in turn somehow or other, has been handed along to my son. It's too soon to see where that artistic bent will travel with him – but already he's got more self-confidence and direction than I had.

My challenge with this walk is in developing some focus. This is always the challenge of my life. I see all the possibilities, they all seem so attractive and viable, and my talents are equal to pursuing all of them, but none of them jump out in a compelling fashion. Choosing to walk from Norwich to Orwell is somewhat arbitrary – I am following the family with the least amount of story attached to it, leaving behind the family with lots of stories – located, so far, in 19^th century genealogical tomes, in the public record, in a biographical history of Hartford, in family tales passed down through both an oral and a written tradition. I venture into the more shadowy territory of the family that was not rooted in either story or place.

I’m planning to take a long walk. This is at least partly to enter into a literal quest to match the figurative quest that is trying to figure out my life. I made a fairly arbitrary choice to start my trek in Norwich, Connecticut, and to go to Orwell, Vermont, because that traces the journey a family ancestor took. Once I started looking at my family history, though, I realized that it makes a ton of sense for me to start in Norwich. I made a cursory review of ancestors who were founders of the town of Norwich, and have come up with 9 out of 35. That’s one quarter of all the founders, and there may be more, because I didn’t research the female side and all these notable men had wives, who had to come from somewhere. And there were other generations of men and women, not just the founders, who lived in Norwich as well.

And that’s probably at least part of why we had that illustration that haunted my childhood. Our last family representative left Norwich in 1902, and the great grandparents died I think in the 1920s or 30s, effectively ending the relationship with the city. My mother had great affection for her grandparents though and Norwich was always, for her, a scene of great childhood happiness, even after she was able to remember little else. 

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So I’m thinking that perhaps I’ll start my walk at Yantic Falls, as the psychic center of this quest. East & West Town Street seem to be where the home lots were for those early settlers, but from Googlemaps it looks like that’s now a state highway and even if the houses remain, there’s not going to be much of the spirit that remains. Nonetheless, maybe I’ll start there and go to the Falls. Or maybe vice versa.

Walking to Vermont: A Journal

Starting at Norwich, Connecticut

The Falls at Yantic

A small 19th century print of a wooden bridge over a steep, gorge-like waterfall was haphazardly framed and hung behind the sofa in our main family room. No one ever remarked on it, I had no idea what it illustrated or why it was hanging there, and no one ever thought to enlighten me. Never did I ever think to ask about it. It was simply there, one of a few of the slightly frightening totems of my mostly happy and secure childhood. It created a slightly pleasurable buzz and was part of the unquestioned background of my daily life.

This image was part of the mysterious, slightly attractive and compelling terrors that both repelled and drew me to them. I would evoke this image after I’d been put to bed and the lights were off. Just before drifting off to sleep, I would call up this image and experience a strange vibration. It felt as if it encompassed my whole body, or at least my head, though it was not a vibration that involved any moving parts. It’s hard to describe, but it  was both comforting and disturbing at the same time. In one sense, I suppose, I was experiencing falling into sleep in an almost literal, visual way as I thought about falling through the floor of the bridge, or it collapsing under me. Scary and attractive, the image was deeply a part of me. 

I think it was the combination of the height of the bridge, its fragile qualities, and the gorge with the violent waterfall over which it spanned. There are the little tiny figures going to and fro on the bridge – and in my imaginings, I was there with them. Maybe I could see the falls below my feet, as in my imaginings I passed over the bridge and looked through the slats of wood on its floor. Maybe I conflated it with some other images – sources unknown – of rope bridges over deep chasms, or maybe even some forgotten direct experience with heights and rickety bridges. I don't know, but this is where my story seems to start.

It turns out, although I never knew this until long after I had grown up and the picture had gone elsewhere and I somehow or other pieced it together, that this picture was from the town where my mother had spent a happy year living with her grandparents. It must have had some significance for them, and some significance for my mother, to have been saved and framed as it was.

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