My daughter asked me to unroll the handwritten family tree I assembled for her thirty years ago. It is three feet wide and more than ten feet long, even though limited to direct ancestors and excluding collaterals.
The information here will allow her to fill out the ancestry pages in the baby book she is starting for her own soon-to-be-born daughter. My son-in-law's family is busy putting names and dates together also. Without doubt the new baby book will before long contain the names of all sixteen great-great grandparents, which is surely as much as any 21st century newborn is likely to wish to know.
There was particular interest in the spelling of the worthy lady's name above – a prodigious constructor of afghans, blankets, bags and rugs – several of which have come down to my daughter and are still in daily use. Mabel raised a family of five children on very little money, and all five grew up agreeing that she had done a splendid job. They were "poor but proud," one of the daughters told me, "like The Five Little Peppers."
The tree I constructed on the long scroll of paper was essentially an attempt to gather whatever information remained in the minds and the document-hoards of elderly relatives. I didn't do any original research, and consequently didn't discover much about the Northern European ancestors who lived and died in Europe. What records I could find usually commenced when a branch of the family moved to America.
The adventurers from England, Scotland and Ireland (maternal side, below) mostly made their journeys to the New World in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many arriving in time to participate in various wars of expansion against indigenous resistance.
The Swedes in my daughter's background (paternal side, below) came later, crossing the Atlantic late in the 19th or early in the 20th century. Farming people, they were descended from numberless generations of Scandinavian peasants, religious and illiterate. People who were unlikely to leave any individual records of their lives at all. A black-and-white Bergman movie set forever in the Middle Ages is how I imagine them.
