I am inspired by Christina’s comment about her Mayflower ancestors versus her German Jewish ancestors.
I, too, come from a mixed “Mayflower” and Jewish background And its pretty clear when you look at me, which side I resemble.
My mother’s ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower. The Mayflower landed in New England in 1620. I’m told that the Mayflower was set for the Virginia Colony, but somehow, was misdirected and landed in the Massachusetts Bay.
However, we have traced an early Virginia ancestor who came to the Jamestown Colony in 1611, named John Price. And another ancestor, my 4thgreat grandfather, who got a land grant from King George III in Augusta County, VA sometime in the early 1700s.
When my mother got married to my dad in 1986, at Beacon Hebrew Alliance, my grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles attended. Their other 3 daughters all had church weddings with a simple reception in the church social hall. Now, my mother was getting married in a synagogue, and would also have her reception in the social hall downstairs. There, they met my father’s family, including my Uncle Eugene.
Uncle Eugene had some kind of a severe mental illness. He most likely was on the autism spectrum or had schizophrenia, but no one correctly diagnosed him. When he was a child, he was shy and socially withdrawn, but he made it through college, graduating from Marist with an English degree. He was still fairly functional He even wrote down 9 pages of family history from sitting and talking with Great Aunt Molly before she died, of Horowitz family history. Molly’s parents, Jacob and Anna Horowitz, sailed in through Castle Island from Minsk in 1895. His writing is neat, legible and coherent, for the most part.
But after my grandparents died, Uncle Eugene deteriorated. He’d say things sometimes that were inappropriate or odd. However, if you knew him well enough, you knew what he was trying to say. In 2018, just a few years before he died, he asked how Beverly and Sarah were. They’d long since passed, Beverly in 1995 and Sarah in 2009. They came over on the Mayflower, didn’t they?”
No, Beverly and Sarah didn’t come to America on the Mayflower. But I know what he was trying to say. They descend from the kinds of people who came to America on the Mayflower.
I like very much how the narrator could understand so easily Eugene's bizarre statement. She knew what he meant.
ReplyDeleteI always loved my (maternal) grandmother's take on being a descendant of people on the Mayflower, "They were all horse thieves, that's why they left England!"
ReplyDeletelol, yes, alot of them were criminals! But I always thought that the passengers of the Mayflower itself were Puritans.
DeleteI also like the relationship with Eugene...the compassionate understanding of what he really meant.
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