Because they were educated on the West Coast, my children were taught next to nothing about the original colonies beyond the reductionist claim that the Pilgrims were “colonizers,” a word now used less as description than as accusation.[1] They learned to dismiss the charming saccharine gloss of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving with knowing irony, andContinue reading “Thanksgiving as Strategy”
Tag Archives: King Philip’s War
The Wadhams Surname
In Genetics and New England Pathology, I sketched a possible line to medieval England to illustrate a simpler truth from population genetics: the number of ancestral positions doubles geometrically, while the number of people who actually left you DNA shrinks via pedigree collapse. From this follows an unsettling comfort: living humans are orders of magnitudeContinue reading “The Wadhams Surname”
Taft / Messinger Lineage
Daniel Edwards Messinger married Eliza Carter Nichols on October 31, 1848. They lived in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, before becoming members of Adin Ballou’s “Hopedale Community” (the dale of hope) in 1852. Their placement in the Messinger line and their connection to Uxbridge and Hopedale are documented in The Descendants of Henry Messinger of Boston, 1637 (privatelyContinue reading “Taft / Messinger Lineage”
Protective Arts 