PandaBaby is True Fiction.

Welcome to my Pandababy Blog. A panda bear is an unlikely animal - a bear that eats bamboo - a contradiction in every aspect. This blog is true fiction, also a contradiction in its essence. Yet both are real, both exist - the bear and the blog. Both can only be described by contradictory terms, such as true fiction. Please be pleased to enjoy these stories of our ancestors. They are True Fiction. Every person in my blog lived in the time and place indicated. They are my ancestors and relatives, and their friends.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

The Amazing Story of Springfield, Massachusetts - a town with a big heart - OR - Why it is Important to Read the town Histories in your Family Tree

Editha Stebbins went with her brother Edward to listen to Thomas Hooker, a charismatic Puritan preacher in Braintree, England. When Rev. Hooker sailed to the new colony of Massachusetts, many of his followers went with him, including Edward Stebbins and his sister Editha.

 
Cambridge was too crowded for the newcomers. After four years in Cambridge, Rev. Hooker led  them into the wilderness, where they built a city on the banks of the Connecticut River. They named it Hartford.

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Drawing by S. H. Clark: frontispiece of "Hartford in the olden time; its first thirty years" database, Internet Archive (accessed 10 Nov 2013) extracted from book of the same name by Isaac William Stuart. Hartford, F. A. Brown, 1853. (Kilburn Del was a wood engraver of some fame c. 1853) 


Editha married Robert Day, a young Deacon in their newly built village church. They had four children in just twelve years of marriage, and then Robert Day died. John Maynard, another Puritan Deacon, and a bachelor all those years, wed Editha soon after Robert Day died. He must have been a good father to Robert's children, for the youngest child named his own son Maynard Day in later years. Editha didn't have any more children, and John Maynard died ten years later, when Editha's children were grown. Elizur Holyoke, a widower from Springfield, Massachusetts married Editha that year. Editha's three adult children married that same year. The death of Elizur's wife had left him with six young  children to raise, but now he had help - Editha.
 
Stebbins-378.jpg

 Elizur's youngest child, Mary, was only two years old when Editha came into their lives. After founding a town in the wilderness and building it up for twenty years, Editha now lived in a well developed town, and plenty of resources to raise her new family.

Fifteen years later, in 1675, when Elizur's children were grown, the Indians burned Springfield. Springfield thought they had a fool-proof plan - their militia would go to the aid of nearby towns, and vice versa. So when they had a message to come help Hadley,
forty-five of the strongest men in Springfield's militia  marched to their defense.

While the militia were gone, a messenger on a lathered horse arrived to shout a warning: the Indians were not attacking Hadley - they were going to attack Springfield. Editha and Elizur, carrying food and a few valuables, fled to the nearest fortified house, prepared for just such an attack.

The night was quiet, the morning was ordinary, and a few people left the fortified houses - why stay cooped up like sardines in a box, the whole town squeezed into three houses, when nothing was happening? Then a wounded scout rode up to gasp a warning with his dying breath - the Indians were right behind him. They first burned the corn mill and the saw mill, then looted and burned three fourths of the homes and barns. When Springfield's militia returned, it was too late. The town was in smoldering ruins.

Dissuaded by the Massachusetts governor from abandoning their settlement, the people with homes left standing shared their roofs with those who were burned out. Three quarters of the town was living with one fourth of the town that winter, and food was scarce.

Editha lived through the attack, and her house was left standing - and crowded to the rafters. Click on "Editha Stebbins" link at the top of this page to see the rest of her story, with timeline and footnotes.

A footnote for those working on their family trees: I found Editha's story of surviving the Indian attack and then sharing her home and food all winter by reading the history of Springfield. I had previously skipped investigating 'background' material like town histories, and I almost missed Editha's amazing life.



When Did Your Ancestors Immigrate to America?

I used to think that an immigrant was someone with dark skin who spoke with a funny accent. That has surely changed! You see, this is one of the ways that genealogy taught me to think in new ways. I learned that two of my grandparents, and two of my husband's grandparents, were immigrants.

Since the one set spoke mainly Finnish and the other set mainly German, they actually did have "funny accents". Except I thought my grandmother's way of speaking was adorable. My husband loved his grandparent's accents, and the way they spoke. Of course, he also loved them. My husband was not a bigot, but I grew up in a cult that literally taught that people with black skin were inferior and that it was God's Will.  It took awhile to wrap my brain around the idea that my own grandmother was an immigrant, just like all the people I thought of in "that category"

One day it hit me -- in America, EVERYONE is either an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants (except of course the indigenous people, vastly outnumbered now by the newcomers). 

Our Ancestors? Of course they were immigrants. My grandmother came here from Finland in 1912 on the Lusitania. My grandfather also came from Finland in 1912, on the Tunesian.  Goldibear's grandparents were Germans born in Odessa, Russia, and came with their parents - his grandmother a ten-year old sailing on the Spaarndam in 1892, and his grandfather a twelve-year old sailing on the Scandia also in 1892. Oh my goodness! I Am the descendant of Immigrants! So is my husband!

Well, that puts a different light on things - I mean, our family is good, so immigrants are good, right?

What about our other ancestors, from long ago? Oh,  they came on the Mayflower in 1620, and on the Mary & John in 1630, and on many other ships from 1620 onward.  They came from England, from Germany, from Wales, from Scotland and Ireland, (and the Netherlands where they had been refugees from persecution in England, because they were Puritans). They were good too, as good as they knew how to be - but that is another story, for Chapter Two.