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.