Predictions, Money, and Mid- Air Motor Failures

           

This photo was taken two years after the letters were written

            There are a lot of unanswered questions about my parents that I had hoped to find in the pile of letters I’ve been reading.  I find unwavering devotion exhibited in the letters that never bring up the two most common problems in a marriage; money and mistrust. The money problem actually does come up repeatedly in the letters but only in discussing some mutual resolution.  There are never any accusations on the mishandling of it. The letters unlock a narrow four month window on their lives, but money was very tight, and at one point my mother is forced to sell our chickens and the rooster for the $17.08 they brought.

My father on the left and his business partner Topper

On his personal time in Manhattan, my father is giving private flying lessons to men and women, and comments “I don’t know where they get all their money.”  I don’t think my dad squandered his extra income, or chased skirts, but I question some of his business decisions in the years before and following these letters.  I’m also thinking of some of the lame brained business decisions I made myself at his age.  I guess one of my unanswered questions is why my mother never questioned any of my father’s decisions.

           

I chose parts of two letters to share; a letter from my father that has two poems on the back side of the page, and the letter my mother writes in response.  The first of my father’s poems is a silly nonsense poem about his smelly feet; the second describes a frightening mid-air engine failure. I’ll share the second poem, but first I must digress a little:

           

The first time I set these two letters aside I was focused on the poems.  The second time I read the face page of my father’s letter, I discovered a precise prediction he made on when the U.S. would make their major assault on German Forces in Europe. He starts the letter asking about the family and his younger brother, Everett, who is home on leave from the Navy. Then he complains about the unpredictable Kansas weather that keeps him out of his favorite element, the air.  Then this:

            “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the big invasion in the next two months, from the way things are looking now.”

        As the tides of war were turning in our favor he’s writing about the anticipated assault on German forces in Europe by Allied Forces. .My father’s letter was written April 5^th, 1944. The highly classified "Normandy Invasion" was being planned under great secrecy and misdirection, and General Dwight Eisenhower was pacing and chain smoking for fear that the secrets would be leaked and the Germans would catch wind of the attack.  Before his Presidency and his heart attack, Eisenhower was smoking up to four packs a day. Under this intense pressure Eisenhower was probably smoking even more than usual.

             

            My father, on a relatively small air base in the middle of America, is watching leaves being cancelled, his pilots shuffled elsewhere, and pilots with special skills pulled out of his unit, and makes the prediction that the big invasion will come in the next two months.  Allied Forces launch the "Normandy Invasion" exactly two months and 24 hours after my father writes this letter.

            At the bottom of the face page of the letter my father writes:

            P.S. on the other side of page is my reaction to the first motor failure I ever had in the air.  It was fun after I got down.

           

My dad is 34 years of age when he wrote this letter and still getting a buzz from the adrenaline rush of a dangerous situation.  There are numerous accounts and photos of him walking a bridge rail, standing atop a flagpole, which was a fad for awhile, and doing hand flips over cars.  Transitioning from that youthful feeling of invulnerability to a more sedate path was not my father’s first choice.  I enter as evidence the stunt flying he takes up after the war.  My mother was mildly encouraging the transition to a more earthbound career, but never in an overt way and she never gives voice to any fear of his flying. Here is the poem on the engine failure:

           

Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the horrible fright, of your Pappy dear

While flying today, in the clouds so high

My motor konked out, and I thot I would die

That good ole propeller, that pulls you along

Well it stopped dead still, and that was wrong

I looked in the mirror, and to my surprise

There sat the poor student, with fear in his eyes

One hand on the ripcord, and one on the door

He was going to leave me, and that’s for sure

I talked to him gently, on me he must trust

To bring him back safely or together we bust

So I must think of something, I must I must

Ah, here is the answer, the answer I’ve found

I must point the nose of the ship straight down

The swish of the air, as we drive for the ground

Should make our propeller go round, and around

By golly it’s moving, it’s starting to go

I am a son of a gun, well what do you know

The motor has started, Oh what a relief

This all happened to your dear Little Chief

Pappy

            Several days later my mother writes back in verse without directly addressing the motor failure.  Possibly she shared my father’s belief, that as a seasoned pilot with an untarnished safety record, he had little risk compared to less experienced pilots.

The children are fine and sleep without fear

Although so far from their daddy dear

Danny is fine and tough past belief

He’s afraid folks won’t know he’s the son of a chief

He jumps and he laughs as he tells of his Dad

He’s the son of a chief and that’s why he’s glad

He had a tumble and found to his grief

That the floor didn’t know he was son of a chief

As I suffer the pounding of this little boy

I really don’t care- and I murmur with joy

I’m the mate of the chief, who is Dad of this boy.

            I have no recollection of the trouble I must have been as a toddler, but I send apologies to my mother looking down from that heavenly cloud she resides on.

My mother always had an unflagging respect for a man in uniform, be it a scout uniform or a military one.  I think she was very proud of her husband in his CAP uniform and his position as Chief Pilot serving his country and training other pilots.

One of those unanswered questions is when and where did the flying start?  There was a little airport in Independence, Missouri, less than three miles from my father’s home.  It had the added attraction of a fishing lake.  The “Independence Memorial Airport” was basically two graveled runways near where the Independence Mall sits today.  It was abandoned years ago. Vesta Ailshire inherited it from her Aunt Minnie in 1945.  It had some history before that date that I haven’t been able to find. Vesta Ailshire, who everyone called “Mrs. A” was quite the businesswoman and operated a grocery, a restaurant, a small airport, an airplane repair shop and a school for pilots. I‘m guessing this is where my father, and possibly my mother, got their first taste of flying before Mrs. A took it over. Somewhere in the vaporous past I hear a voice saying that my father was part owner of this Independence airport. If he had some deal with Aunt Minnie and worked his way up as part owner by exchanging labor there was never a legal document to substantiate it. 

After the war ends my father gets involved in a similar situation with “The Heart of America Airport” in Kansas City where he operates the “Blue Valley Flying Service,” offering flying lessons and repairing planes. The repair service included shuttling the plane to the client.  My brother Dale remembers being the wingman when my father delivered an old plane to a client in Springfield, Missouri.  Dale said “it sounded like it was coming apart.” The “Heart of America Airport” was a very small airport like the “Independence Memorial Airport.”  It consisted of three graveled runways and was shut down years ago.  If there was any legally binding paperwork to substantiate my dad’s partial ownership of the “Blue Valley Flying Service” at “The Heart of America Airport” it was missing from the airport safe following the accident.  There was a lot of speculation about the honesty of his business partners. 

Getting back to the love of flying that my parents shared, here is a little prose in one of the letters that probably pushed the love buttons on my mom.

The sides of these rolling little hills are strewn with little flowers, from top to bottom. The little brooks that wind in and out between the hills are clearing up, and from the air they look like pretty blue ribbons that had been tossed in the sky and had fallen in weavy little patterns on the ground.  The wheat in the fields is growing so fast it seems to move while you are watching it, and when the wind blows it back and forth it looks like rippling waves on the ocean.  Farmers and little boys doll size are in the fields with tractors stirring up little clouds of dust as they plow and harrow the ground.  Load after load of feeder cattle are being turned out in the hills and they look like little ants as they go single file up one side and down the other.  Everyone seems busy.

Whenever I see something beautiful and lovely like this I think of home and you.

I’m just completing my 75^th flight path around the Sun.  Most men on this planet circuit the sun sixty seven times before their ticket to ride expires.  Math has never been my thing, but I can read a simple longevity chart. I’ve been dragging my feet on finishing the family blog because I expected to get smarter and better organized as the universe expands. Things don’t always turn out like you expect.

I’ve been reading letters my parents sent to each other when my father was Chief Pilot and a flight instructor for the Civil Air Patrol in Manhattan, Kansas, and my mother was home in Fairmount, Missouri with her demanding clutch of four young children.  There are quite a few letters so I was surprised to find they were all written in a short span of four months between March and June of 1944. The country was in full war mode and many items were in short supply. The military used graphite as a lubricant so my parents scrounged for soft lead pencils. Good writing paper was also hard to come by so some of the letters were written on odd scraps of thin paper with such hard lead that they can only be read under a bright light.

The letters reveal that my father joined the Civil Air Patrol to do his part for the war.  He was respected by his base commander for his experience and safety record. He often complains of the paperwork and the Kansas storms that kept him and his students out of the air.  There were hundreds of pilots being trained in Manhattan and many were eventually used to shuttle military personnel and supplies.  Although Civil Air Patrol planes were unarmed they did fly surveillance flights along coastal waters.  It was a Civil Air Patrol pilot that spotted a German U-boat off the coast of Cape Canaveral that was subsequently destroyed by the Air Force.

There are interesting insights into small town life and concerns regarding the war, but the letters primarily deal with family matters.  They don’t answer some of the compelling questions I have about my parents, but they show an unwavering blind love they had for each other. The “Love is blind” proverb applies primarily to my mother who never questioned any decisions my father made though some might have appeared unwise to an objective observer.

Most of the letters start with Dear Sweetheart, Honey, My Darling Husband, My Dearest Wife, etc. Every letter reveals the pain of being separated. If my father had a pass, and his old car with bad tires was running, he would drive home on the weekends.  Several times he took the dreaded five hour bus trip.   Often the week end visits were followed immediately by forlorn letters written the following day.  I can’t imagine the trauma if my dad had been in the Air Force and sent overseas on the standard eighteen month deployment

My mother writes a note at the edge of one of the pictures of her and my father when they were dating.  “We dated four years and always behaved ourselves.” The last thing any child wants to think about is their parent’s sex life; even though that child’s very existence is prima facie evidence his parents had one.  I know that the word behave had a very narrow and specific meaning.  The word “behave” didn’t include the time they were kicked off the Independence trolley for a public display of affection.  We all know what she meant when she said we “behaved.” I won’t delve further into this briar- patch of subject matter.  I confess I did check the marriage date against Dale’s date of birth.  My mother’s integrity remains intact!  My judgment for checking could be questioned.

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The letters include interesting insights on my three older siblings. Most of the letters to my twelve year old brother Dale involved efforts to toughen him up.  Dale had decided not to go out after dark because of wild animals.  He was also terrified of the rooster, possibly warranted.  My brother might have had more instinct for self preservation in his nature though than our father. In one letter to our father he encloses a newspaper article about a plane accident and cautions him to be careful. Dale also had more gut feeling about the future tragedy than our mother, although she relates one dream where Leonard sees his grandmother and steps over a line and disappears

Here’s a short letter from my dad to Dale.

 “Dear Dale, you better get toughened up cause when I come home I got a new hold I am going to pin your ears down with.  Listen, you Pole Cat, why didn’t’ you answer my last letter, for 2 cents I would come home and give you a punch in the nose and you would probably see stars.

Maybe if you are a good boy and help your mama real well I may not be as tough on you.  I might just poke you once.

Say, did you pass in school. why don’t you write me and tell me how you came out, and what you are doing in the Cub scouts.  Love Daddy”

 I am a frequent subject of the correspondence because I’m the newest member of the Sherman household. I’ve learned detailed information on when my teeth came in, when I was potty trained, and when I was circumcised.  I find I was a biter like my sister Sherry, that I peed on objects indiscriminately, and even though there were competent Rabbi’s in my ancestry, my foreskin was detached unceremoniously by an alcoholic Presbyterian doctor.

            Halfway through July in 1943 I was one of over 3 million babies born in the U.S.  My brother Dale was born in 1933, my sister Judy in 1936, and my sister Sherry in 1938.  Somewhere in that five year interlude between Sherry and me my mother miscarried. I don’t know the details.  Last, but not least, my sister Ruth is born a year and half after me in 1945. 

Our Puritan forefathers, I should say foremothers, had an average brood of eight to ten children.  Today the normal is 2.5 children, the exact number attainable only if you share a kid halftime with a neighbor.  In 1944 my mother dreamed she had a set of twins followed closely by a set of triplets. The dream didn’t seem to bother her but the prospect of adding multiples drew an alarmed response in a letter from my father.

I think my three sisters would agree with me that our mother deserves a posthumous award equivalent to the Nobel Prize for her patience and physical endurance in rearing us.  I’m sure our deceased brother Dale would agree.  Our mother was always the primary caretaker, but her parenting became an even tougher solitary task after our father’s accident in 1946.

Our mother had an inherent loving nature, but there were times that we tested it.     There were times I’m sure she would have liked to abandon one or more of us on someone’s doorstep. Usually punishments for our garden variety of sins were administered by my mother in a non-corporal but effective manner but there were times she had to think outside the box. There was one isolated case of water boarding.   I think she was field testing a behavior modification technique on my sister Judy, when all else had failed.  In another incident my bare buttocks remembers being on the receiving end of the backside of a hairbrush administered by my mother with Old Testament ferocity. When Sherry was biting Judy and leaving bruises mother suggests she might have to bite her back.

With each advancing year I regret that I was such an unappreciative whelp at the time I was under my mother’s tutelage.  Only now do I realize the total dedication she had to her children.  She was the constant guiding force in our universe, a force like gravity that pulled us in and kept us from going astray.

According to the letters I’m reading the world revolved around me for about a year and a half as the newest member of the household.  Then my sister Ruthie showed up and I was bumped to an outer orbit. My older siblings had their own individual times at the center of the universe, but sadly most of those tales are not documented in the letters.

My sister Judy would have been eight years old in 1944.  Here are a few excerpts from my mother’s letters regarding Judy.

“Judy had a little skinned place on her knee this morning and tried to pretend that she couldn’t walk, but I finally got the poor little invalid off to school, much against her will.”

Another excerpt: “The last two mornings Judy has been so mad because I made her put on galoshes that she said she was going to walk to school real slow and be late.  Yesterday she started off walking as slow as she possibly could, but when she heard the school bell, you should have seen her coat-tails fly!”

This is a short letter from Judy to dad.

“Dear Daddy

I love you very much.  How are you today?  I hope you are O.K.

Danny is a bad boy.

What can we do?

Love from Judy Jo Sherman

        Talk about calling the kettle black.  I notice Judy doesn’t mention that she had broken a window in the Linhares home up the street.  Mother writes “I thought little girls didn’t do things like that.”

        My mother wished she had kept a list of all the funny and odd things that my sister Sherry would say as a child.  At least one is preserved in the letters I’m reading.

            “Sherry told me that Mr. Thurman was getting ready to burn another house –I said – Why Sherry, what makes you say that? – Well, mama, he’s a ‘sawing again.”

       

            Sherry must have thought Mr. Thurman built houses only to burn them down again.  Maybe Sherry missed her calling as an insurance fraud investigator although Mr. Thurman was probably innocent of arson.

Sherry liked her personal space and seemed to set her own agenda when it came to kindergarten.

            “The kids seem to feel pretty good, only Sherry cried and wouldn’t go to school today, but felt good as soon as the danger of school was over.”

        In another letter:

            “Sherry decided to stay home and play with dolls.  I let her be the judge of what she feels like doing.”

        Part of mother’s leniency with Sherry is because she had a cast on her arm.  While laying on his back Dale had balanced Sherry on his feet, then tried to flip her over the clothesline. The result was a compound fracture of Sherry’s radius and ulna.

        Here’s a letter from Sherry to dad.

`           “I love you very much daddy, tomorrow I am going to use my puppy pencil.”

        As for me, here are a few of the many comments from mother’s letters proving Judy’s assertion that “Danny is a bad boy.”

            “Oh, Oh Danny is in the flour.”

        “The next two years are not going to be restful in any way.”

        “Danny is a wildcat in his jeep.  He tore through the house this morning, banged into furniture, pulled out books, pulled out the bread pretzels and crackers, and the newspapers in the back hallway – all in about ten minutes.”

        In other letters: “Danny is upstairs stomping and shaking his bed.  Dale, Judy and Sherry are up there laughing at his tricks.”

        “Danny is rip snorting around here, anybody that gets in his way it’s just their hard luck.”

        My dad recommends in a letter to mother that “You may have to put the wildcat on a leash to keep him on the reservation.”

        In the next blog I will share some of the poetry my parents wrote to each other in the 1944 letters, and one poem to the family that details how he resolves a frightening mid-air engine failure.

Wolf Sightings and Cybersecurity

This early morning in the pre-dawn I see a wolf briskly walking the other side of the road that faces our home. It is a lonely road this early hour before the birds leave their nest, or any colors emerge from the shadows.  Our home sits alone on this stretch of street, and the wolf and I are semi-acquainted. He or she is wary of me but not unduly disturbed by my presence.  He will not increase his pace or detour into the woods, but will turn his head in my direction to show me the feral flash of yellow from his wild eyes, the only color in the gray morning. I suspect the wolf is headed home to his den after a night of hunting.  Across the road lies undisturbed forest that stretches into southern Missouri.  Caverns pocket this whole area, and I suspect he has found one with an opening that serves as his lair.  I only refer to this wolf as male because of his size.  He is far too big in height and girth to be pure coyote. He is a wolf dog, some odd mix of coyote with a very large domestic dog.  Whatever the blend is, it has the look of an authentic wolf, one that has just walked off the page of a Grimm’s Brothers Fairy Tale, or maybe the wolf made famous by Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”  There is zero chance it could ever be mistaken for a domestic dog or a common coyote. It is a viscerally pleasing way to start my day.

            This morning we back our road weary but durable Ford F150 out of our driveway.  It is loaded with a craft tent, pop up tables, and an assortment of birdhouses and wall décor made from reclaimed wood.  We are headed to the Bentonville square where we will join our gypsy brethren to sell our wares at the Farmer’s market.  There is not much produce this early, beyond asparagus and leafy greens, but there are handmade soaps, organic eggs, grass fed beef, goat cheese, leather workers, ironsmiths, and plenty of musicians who showcase their talent, or lack of it, with their instrument cases open and suggestively primed with a few crumpled bills. 

            In the semi-darkness we set up our booth and I wander off, with the blessings of my wife, who wants her space and private time. This morning when I leave she is wrapped in a blanket with a book in her hands. Nothing much will happen for crafters until later in the morning.  Much of our business is with repeat customers, who as a rule my wife remembers, complete with their names. For me, names and faces are stored in some distant part of the brain I seldom visit.

            This morning I don’t want to lose my parking space, so I hoof it four blocks to McDonalds for oatmeal and coffee.  Paper read, oatmeal and coffee consumed, I exit the double doors where a man is struggling with a baby buggy between the doors.  Looking out and up at me is a brown eyed precocious one year old who is downloading data with her brand new brain .

            Tom, the father pushing this carriage, has also walked the four blocks from the square, where his ten year old son has set up a booth selling lemon bars. Tom and I converse on the way back The carriage takes the full width of the paved walk so I walk on the grass beside him dodging tree limbs.  Tom is an import from New Jersey and teaches cyber-security classes at Walmart.  I share with him my paranoia about Facebook and the data they collect, and joke about our rug robot mapping our room layouts and selling the info to Nebraska Furniture. He has his own bigger problems. He tells me that every day there are 1 .5 million attempts made to hack into Microsoft’s Cloud System.  His conversation is feeding my paranoia.   He tells me to leave my phone within earshot and discuss a trip to Disneyworld or the Bahamas with my wife and see if we don’t get some advertisements for those destinations.  Jiminy Jumpin Jesus, do I now have to worry about the lethal threats my wife makes on our Commander in Chief, or about the ominous dialogue my phone picks up from Netflix murder dramas?  I have apparently sent a few disturbing text messages while simultaneously voice texting and watching Longmire or Dexter. Even though the TV is ten feet away from my recliner it picks up dialogue from the set.

Tom is a gregarious friendly guy and shares a lot of information.  It appears we are all being tracked and targeted by cell phones, fit bits, smart refrigerators, and those handy virtual assistants like Sirius and Echo.  These clever devices we purchase compromise our personal privacy.

            As we wait for the walk signal within sight of the tents surrounding the granite statue of a Confederate General in the center of the square I ask Tom the question that has been bothering me since I started this blog back in August of 2017. Should I be worried about sharing my blog publicly on Facebook?  It’s been handy to share family history with kinfolk and friends spread all across the country, and sometimes out of the country. This useful technology comes with a dark underside I worry about. Sharing too much information might be useful for a scammer or hacker to use in the future. I don’t get a definitive answer from Tom, but he doesn’t say much to allay my fears.  He introduces me to his son who is wearing a white shirt with a black tie looking like a very young Walmart executive, while another boy about his age in ragged shorts and t-shirt rips by on his skateboard. 

            I check in on my wife to give her a potty break.  She likes to use the clean restrooms at the Walmart Museum that is housed in the original 5 and 10 dime store owned by Sam Walton.  In the museum store you can buy a slinky, Teaberry gum and other items reminiscent of the fifties. She hands me a hundred dollars worth of mixed bills she uses to make change with, and heads toward the museum store. I fold the money and put it my billfold. She returns with a Chai tea and takes my cell phone because the Square App for credit cards on her phone is not working. Without a worry about practical matters in the real world I wander off again with all the cash she handed me before her potty break. I am now unreachable because she has both of our phones. I find out hours later I left her with only one dollar.

            I wander guilt free towards the 21 C hotel which is the epicenter for the current Film Festival that fosters diversity.  Geena Davis and Meg Ryan are milling about talking with visitors outside the hotel.  I head to the tents behind the hotel and unknowingly breach the security perimeter where guards are keeping people out because the area is not open until 11 a.m.  There is everything from Barbie Doll displays to new security apps to shield your privacy.  Two booth operators who are just setting up beckon me over to field test their virtual reality demonstration. I place the monstrous goggles on my noggin and strap myself into a chair that resembles one used in executions.  I have never tried virtual reality and naively don’t ask why I need a seatbelt.  I gave up the adrenaline rush of roller coasters thirty years ago but soon I’m on a dizzying death defying coaster ride with my adrenal glands in overdrive.  I’m wondering if this would count as my annual stress test. I can turn my head in any direction for a 360 degree panoramic view and at the end of the stomach churning ride I am abruptly launched out into space over the ocean.  I can see where this is going.  Soon I will be able to experience a Wallenda like walk on a tight rope over the Royal Gorge or bypass security at the Trump Tower and launch myself off its roof in a squirrel suit.  Those morons paying millions of dollars to Elon Musk for a ride on Space-X are just wasting their money.   Too soon I’ll be able to take the same ride for little of nothing with virtual reality headgear sitting in the safety of my nursing home wheel chair.

            The creaky outdated computer attached to my neck from birth directs me to the Bentonville library and the comfortable chair that sits by the sunny window in the periodical section.  After scanning some half dozen current issues of magazines like New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and Mother Earth, I take a short nap of forty winks, but I wasn’t really counting. Refreshed, I return to the square at “High Noon” and am met with a withering “look,” that “look” that spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e, with a capital T. I am let off with a warning and probation because most of her customers used the credit app on my phone, paid with cash, or used the ATM machine in front of the Arvest Bank.

            Since that day at the Market last week I have returned to the question I asked Tom. “Should I be worried about posting this blog publicly?” Since my first blog last August I have had over two thousand page views. .Known family members read the blog from Puerto Rico and Ecuador, but I have had page views from unknown people in sixteen other countries, including Kyrgyzstan and Russia.  Recently I had 42 page views from Russia that doubled in a day to 84 page views. I don’t think this is some average Russian curious about Americans. Am I being targeted by some Russian troll factory?  I think this suspicious statistic answers the question of “should I be worried?”

 I will be taking the blog out of the public domain. I will continue to alert friends and family on Facebook, and share it with them privately if they want to read it.  I will leave what’s out there intact and accessible but from this point forward new blogs will be private.

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I started out describing the ghostlike feral wolf that passes our home so early that there is only his gray outline and the flash of feral yellow from the iris of his eyes.  I’m not sure what draws me to him?  There seems to be to some embedded magnetic attraction between canines and man.  It must go back to the dawn of civilization when some primeval wolf circled the campsite of some prehistoric hunter. Staying just outside the reach of light emanating from the fire it was not stalking the man, but curious. I like to think of this wolf that frequents the road that faces my home as a throwback to those early inquisitive wolves that led to the lasting bond between canines and modern man.

I’m aware that I may have augmented the image of this wolf with my imagination and failing senses. I’m also reminded that that the flash of yellow from his eyes is only a wavelength that my brain converts to yellow.  Yellow and every other color in the spectrum are only wavelengths that do not exist in the real world.  They exist only in our minds. I will take a pass on questioning the existence of things outside my mind for now.

This wolf may only be in my head, but I wait for the next sighting of him with unexplainable eagerness. He is a reminder of a past life that was not so complicated and cluttered with digital toys and devices that separate us from the real world as we once knew it.

Postscript Caveat –       

Be cautious what you share on the web on your medical history, especially those who have had their DNA tested for specific genes that affect health. As a hypothetical example, let’s say a man has his DNA tested by “23andMe” and finds he has a set of genes that code him for a short life due to cardiac failure.  If he puts his DNA test on the web to find relatives, he could unwittingly make the info available to insurance providers. Down the line his children might find they are uninsurable because of that trait in their gene pool.  Most companies like “23andMe” are reputable but you put your trust in the hands of the site administrators.  There’s also the possibility the information could be hacked in the future.  Just saying!

John Sherman: Colonial Renaissance Man

During a span of 200 years, five generations of my Sherman ancestors remained in the Suffolk area of England. If one of them had decided to move to New Zealand or board a ship to Paraguay they would have been harder to track. Strong religious belief is the primary bond that held them together so tightly. In New England, my Sherman ancestors were just as obliging. In a span of four generations, all Sherman’s in my direct lineage stayed within a tight geographic area of Connecticut. Once again, it was their religious beliefs that held them together. The Bible itself may have been the main gravitational force their lives circled around. In colonial Connecticut, my 10th great grandfather Samuel, was referred to as “The Worshipful Samuel Sherman.” His fifth son, John, becomes my ninth great grandfather and was too busy to be anything more than a deacon in the church.

John Sherman was a colonial force of nature. He must have met himself coming and going. He was the fifth son of Samuel Sherman, the Connecticut ancestor from Dedham, England, who was a major figure in Connecticut history himself. After helping to found several Connecticut towns, Samuel eventually settled in Stratford, Connecticut. He was instrumental in the initial planning and purchasing stage of establishing the town of Woodbury, but due to his advancing age, Samuel sent his son John to act in his behalf. John put down roots in Woodbury and lived there all his adult life. He wore many hats in the Puritan courts. He was Justice of the Quorum, associate county court judge for 44 years, a representative of Woodbury to the colony of Connecticut’s legislature for 17 sessions, Speaker of the Lower House, and Woodbury town clerk. He was also the first judge of probate for the District of Woodbury. Just to fill in the time between these duties and fathering eight children, he served in the militia during the Indian rebellions and fought in the Revolutionary War at Ticonderoga. Oh, he also served as a deacon in the church as I mentioned. Then there’s the six acre iron-ore mine he owned on Mine Hill in Roxbury. Beginning with the 22 acres he was allotted as one of the first citizens of Woodbury, he must have acquired significant wealth; during the Revolutionary War he gave 2,718 pounds and seven shillings to the families of soldiers who were away at war. Two of his brothers, Daniel and Matthew, also moved to Woodbury, but neither of my great uncles matched the achievements of John. One of John’s sons, who is not in my direct line, deserves a blog all of his own, though I might not get to it. His name is the Honorable Daniel Sherman (I’m not named after him), and he was a member of the 1788 Convention of Connecticut and voted yes for the ratification of the United States Constitution.

John has made it easy for me to track his whereabouts. Other than trips to the Connecticut General Assembly in Hartford, Connecticut, and trips outside Connecticut to fight in the Revolutionary War, he stayed home in Woodbury. There was an occasional 36 mile trip to Stratford to see family members.

 

If you want to read the complete history of the initial establishment of Woodbury, you can log in to an interactive digital book on the “History of Ancient Woodbury” beginning with the first Indian deed in 1658. In a previous blog, I noted that the first parcel of land for Woodbury was purchased for a little gunpowder, a hatchet, and a homespun gray jacket. Samuel Sherman signed off on this contract. A small number of Pootatuck tribe members placed their marks on the contract. The Indians were not happy with it and the contract was renegotiated some years later in 1685. This time, nine members of the Pootatuck Tribe made their marks. Samuel’s son, John, was in the middle of implementing this renegotiated contract. Finally, in 1706, a confirmatory purchase was made that covered all previous grants and purchases. This was signed on behalf of the residents of Woodbury by John Sherman and others. Originally, the tract of land was called the Pomperaug Plantation, but later was officially changed to Woodbury. There was a cluster of nearby towns with the “-bury” ending, Southbury, Roxbury, Westbury, Middlebury, etc. Bury is a shortening of borough or burg meaning a dwelling place. Woodbury literally means “a dwelling place in the woods”.

King Philip, aka Chief Metacom

Woodbury’s isolated location away from the more fortified coastal towns is a problem when “King Phillip’s War” breaks out in 1675. Having never set foot in Connecticut, and having neglected colonial history for 74 years of my life, I had no idea what this war was about. As it turns out, “King Phillip” is not who I imagined. He was the Indian leader of the Pokanoket Tribe within the Wampanoag Indian Federation. There is more Indian history here than I ever expected to encounter. King Phillip’s real name is Metacom, and he’s upset, to put it mildly, about the incursion of English into his ancestral lands. He gathers an alliance of other tribes with the intent of utterly removing the white race from the New England territory. The war affected all the eastern colonies, and nearly six hundred colonists were savagely killed in the war. The General Court of Connecticut put the entire colony under martial law.

Ironically, the remaining members of the Pequot tribe who weren’t massacred by colonists at Mystic, Connecticut, choose to side with the colonists and help fight King Phillip. This may have been because that, in the intervening years since the Pequot tribe was terrifying settlers and other neighboring tribes, the Indian populace had been absorbed into the community. The Puritans considered the Indians inferior as a race and treated them condescendingly, but they did make an effort to convert and educate them. Many of the Indian settlements ended up within the boundaries of the growing Puritan towns.

As a frontier town, Woodbury was fortified immediately at the onset of King Phillip’s War. Two men were sent out daily to watch for any signs that the enemy was preparing to attack. A lookout was stationed in the belfry of the meeting house in Woodbury, and one third of the citizens were required to be armed and ready to fight at any moment. All men were required to rise one hour before dawn since this was when men slept most soundly. This was well known by the Indians, who made pre dawn a favorite time to attack the villages. Fearing that some of the Indians in Woodbury would side with King Phillip’s warriors, John Sherman was ordered to forcibly take several of the Pootatuck and Wyantenuck Indian leaders and escort them to Stratford as insurance against members of the tribes joining the rebellion. The hostages remained docile and nothing came of it. At one point in the war, nearly the entire population of Woodbury moved temporarily to Stratford for their safety.

 

Battle of Ticonderoga

It turns out that my great grandfather was a dedicated patriot. I mentioned earlier that he contributed a large amount of his personal wealth to aid the families of Woodbury that had men serving in the Revolutionary War. He was also instrumental in making Woodbury one of the main Puritan towns supplying and stockpiling supplies and weapons to fight the British. In 1776, the town supplied  arms, saltpeter, and lead. They collected 159 pairs of shoes, 165 pairs of stockings, 144 woolen shirts, 117 overalls, 29 linen overalls, 2 great coats, etc. All this was to arm and clothe the soldiers from Woodbury. In all, it was about a half million dollars worth of supplies to help achieve our country’s independence. Initially, Woodbury soldiers at Ticonderoga came away unscathed. A common remark was that “the musket balls would not hit the Woodbury boys.” The population of Woodbury had soared over 5000 since its founding, and nearly 1000 of its men and boys served in the war. In other battles, like Washington’s retreat from New York, the Woodbury boys didn’t fare that well.

After John Sherman, who distinguished himself admirably in the colony, it will be a little harder to track my relatives. John’s son, Samuel, is my 7th great grandfather, and the last direct Sherman relative who remains in the vicinity of Connecticut. Elkaneh, my sixth great grandfather, wanders westward to the area of Ohio. A portion of what is now Ohio was called the Connecticut Reserve and was claimed by the colony of Connecticut and later by the state of Connecticut. I’m not sure what the deal was with Pennsylvania between the two areas geographically. Elkaneh dies in Kirtland Ohio, and I am looking for the reason that so many New England Puritans moved into this area.

I hope to have a short blog on my great grandmothers in New England, if I can find enough information.

Witches and Wolves in Wethersfield

I try to imagine what life looked like through the eyes of my Puritan ancestors in New England. I’m not happy with twenty- first century fears of nuclear war and climate disasters, but not for a minute would I trade places with one of my Puritan forefathers. Although they were highly educated, they lived their lives in fear of going to Hell. There were murderous Indians, witches, and wolves that threatened them, but fear of going to hell was foremost in their minds. They held an Old Testament concept of God, without the New Testament’s message of love and redemption. They believed they were “the elect”, meaning they were predestined before they were born to go to heaven. All they had to do was live a perfect life so that God would not change his mind and send them to hell. This feeling of being the “chosen people” comes up three centuries later in the Latter Day Saint beliefs of my more recent grandfathers. Unfortunately, this belief in one’s own “God given righteousness” has been a recurrent theme that has lead to much intolerance and bigotry.

Education was central to the Puritan culture, with the main intention being the ability to read and understand the Bible. My Sherman forefathers were fervent in their pursuit of learning. We can see it back in England, reflected in the Sherman wills, where they established schools and funding for needy students. You might remember a previous blog on “Roaring John Rogers,” the Puritan preacher back in Dedham, England, who would mimic the screams from hell of those who failed to follow basic bible teachings. The Sherman family not only supported “Roaring John Rogers” financially, but revered his teachings. They loved and cherished their Bible, and its Old Testament fundamental message.

These deep-rooted fundamental beliefs are how my Sherman family viewed witchcraft. Views that originated in England were brought with them to the New England colonies. The Bible has a lot to say about witchcraft. The penalty for practicing witchcraft under the Mosaic Law was death. The book of Exodus 22:18 states, “you shall not permit a sorceress to live.” Leviticus 20:27 says “A man or a woman who is a medium or necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.” The Bible is full of scripture on how Satan could inhabit a person, and this could only be extinguished by death. Unfortunately, it became a misguided tool to accuse a neighbor who might simply be odd, old, or an adversary you wanted to settle a score with.





The Salem, Massachusetts witch trials have been made famous through books and movies, but Connecticut had the first witch trials, and many followed, hitting a crescendo of trials coinciding in time with those in Salem. Most of the Connecticut trials occurred between 1647 and 1692. Samuel Sherman, my 10th great grandfather, was one of the early founders of Wethersfield, Connecticut where the very first witch trial occurred. In all, Connecticut heard 43 witchcraft cases, with 16 of these ending in execution. Of these trials, nine documented accusations occurred in Wethersfield, resulting in three executions.

In 1648, Mary Johnson, a resident of Wethersfield, confessed under pressure without a trial, and was the first person executed in Connecticut in 1648. Although it’s likely that all the early witch trial proceedings in Wethersfield were documented, many of those documents no longer exist for one reason or another. I find it amazing that with all that was going on with Indians and religious strife within early Wethersfield that we actually have quite a few court records. As far as I can determine, Samuel Sherman and his family were residing in Wethersfield between 1637 and 1640, prior to the execution of Mary Johnson. If there were trials before that, where they were involved we may never know. There is a fictional children’s book titled “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” that has won several awards in literature. Its setting is in the Wethersfield area.

Decades after these first witch trials, Samuel Sherman was on the Grand Jury of the last witch to be convicted in Connecticut in 1692. It is likely that, because of his age and standing in the community, he was selected as the spokesman for this grand jury. Samuel and the other eleven jury members voted to indict Mercy Disborough and submit her to a jury trial. She had been accused of possessing a teenage girl. Mercy pleaded not guilty. There is no record of any attorney acting in her defense. Shortly after her arrival at the county jail in Fairfield, Mercy requested “to be tryed by being cast into ye watter.” Her plea was granted the next day. The water test consisted of tying Mercy’s right hand to her left foot and her left hand her right foot. After securing Mercy with ropes she was thrown into a pond. If she floated this was looked upon as an indication of guilt. The theory was that water, as a pure element and an important part of Christian baptism, would refuse to accept a witch, thereby causing one to remain buoyant. If she sank this was considered a sign of innocence.



In sworn testimony presented to the Court it was stated that Mercy, after she was put into the water, swam upon it. It’s hard to imagine this kind of proof being used in colonial America by educated citizens. She was then sentenced to death by hanging. It’s a good turn of luck for Mercy that she did not sink in the pond since the Connecticut General Assembly granted her a reprieve. Today, the pond has been filled, but at the turn of the 19th Century it was used by the students of Fairfield Academy for ice skating in the winter and boating in the summer. There was a persistent rumor in Fairfield that the pond was haunted and that the official records of the trial, conviction, and reprieve of Mercy Disborough were inaccurate. The local scuttlebutt is that Mercy actually drowned while undergoing the “witch test.” Was her reprieve posthumous?



Wolves, as well as witches, were a ghost-like presence in colonial Connecticut. There were stories of wolves closing in on lone travelers. In reality, wolves steered clear of the Puritans and the Puritans steered clear of the wolves. I don’t think there is even one substantiated account of wolves killing a person in Connecticut. One Puritan in 1637 described wolves as “fearfull curres” who would run from a person just as would a “fearfull dogge.” Their baleful howling may have been frightening, but the only real problem with wolves was when they killed poultry and livestock. There may have been a biblical element to the Puritan hatred of wolves which led to the view that they were “skulking criminals” characterized by greed and theft. Killing a wolf was also a sign of domination over nature. Scripture entitled man to have dominion over all the earth, and “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” It was not uncommon to see the head of a wolf nailed to the door of the Puritan meeting-house.



It’s not surprising that my Sherman ancestors, Puritans to their core, were involved with the killing of wolves in colonial Connecticut. The circle hunt became popular in Stratford, Connecticut, where community members would surround large sections of forest and, at the designated time, gradually walk towards the center while making great noises and killing all the wild animals enclosed in the circle. It was a popular event, and after the hunt there would be feasting and bounty payments paid to those who had killed a wolf or a bobcat.

In Stratford, on April 17, 1693 a monster wolf hunt was organized since the wolf population had increased significantly. The bounty for a wolf was 12 shillings. These hunts extended several days, and every participant was given 3 shillings a day out of the town treasury. Two of Samuel Sherman’s eight sons, Samuel Sherman Jr. and Nathaniel Sherman, were voted on by the town’s people to help oversee the hunt. All persons participating were “to be ready by seven of the clock in the morning, and meet upon the hill at the meeting- house, by the beating of the drum.” How much this circle hunt cost the town, or how many wolves were killed is not known. A later hunt in 1696 cost the town fourteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and six pence, which would have put a significant dent in the town treasury.



What would become a 300 year animal extermination campaign in Connecticut, along with deforestation, led to the disappearance of wolves, bears, moose, and turkeys by the year 1880. Improved forestry policies have remedied some of these problems in modern-day Connecticut, and a wolf-like canine has returned. Known as the Eastern Coyote, it has a wolf-like appearance, but is smaller than the colonial wolf. A DNA study shows them to be 62% western coyote, 14% western wolf, 13% eastern wolf, and 11% domestic dog.

Meanwhile, here in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, I often see coyotes or hear their singing. On multiple occasions I have seen broad shouldered domestic dog-coyote hybrids that resemble wolves. There are no murderous Indians or witches that I know of, so life is good. I am spending more time watching the birds on the feeder and less time watching the news.

My 10th Great Grandfather in the New England Wilderness

Tracking Samuel Sherman, my 10th great grandfather, through the New England wilderness has been difficult. Fortunately, he was prominent enough to leave evidence of his travels in the history books. Huntington’s History of Stamford and Cothren’s History of Woodbury have been particularly helpful in following Samuel Sherman’s whereabouts in this unsettled country.

In a previous blog, I wrote that Samuel Sherman and his family set out for the relative safety of Stratford, Connecticut immediately following the Pequot attack on their small vulnerable settlement in Weathersfield, Connecticut. Wrong, me was! Two revisions are necessary. First, it seems the Sherman’s were not as afraid of Indians as I assumed. They remained in Weathersfield for several years following the Indian massacre. Second, Samuel and his family first moved to Stamford, not Stratford. They settled in Stamford for four or five years before they moved to Stratford, Connecticut.

It appears that religious differences may have been the foremost reason for the Shermans move from Weathersfield. Starting with their break with the Church back in England, the Sherman family seemed frequently to be in the middle of some controversy when it came to their Puritan beliefs. At Weathersfield, there was evidently an ongoing bitter quarrel within the Puritan church hierarchy. That, not the murderous Pequot Indians, was the major factor that compelled them to leave Weathersfield. If Huntington’s history of Stamford is correct, Samuel, his family, and other disillusioned members of the church left Weathersfield and arrived in Stamford, Connecticut in 1640. This indicates that they remained in Weathersfield nearly three years following the Indian massacre in 1637.

In October of 1640, Samuel Sherman, along with an unknown number of his family members and other dissenters from Weathersfield, organized the Weathersfield Company, and bought land in the southwest corner of Connecticut along the banks of the Rippowam River. They purchased it from Nathaniel Turner, an agent of the New Haven Colony, who was eager to sell it to fellow Puritans. The town of Stamford is on the Long Island Sound only 35 miles from Manhattan, New York.

Samuel Sherman is listed as one of the first freeholders of the town of Stamford.  In 1640, each of the new settlers contributed to the purchase of the Rippowam plantation, which was eventually re-named Stamford. Samuel Sherman contributed five colonial pounds, and “3.1 bushells of corn.” Evidently we’ve dropped the extra “L” in bushel somewhere in the last 378 years. Some of the funds Samuel used to buy into the “Rippowam Plantation,” may have come from the sale of a lot he co-owned with Richard Guildenslieve in Weathersfield, which they sold to a Captain John Talcott.

In the summer of 1641, Samuel Sherman, along with 27 other would-be planters and at least two “Negro servants” began building a meeting-house and their own homes on high land above the harbor in Stamford. In addition to the 28 men, we need to add all of their wives and children. The total number of members in Samuel Sherman’s household is unknown. Samuel’s wife Sarah Mitchell, and possibly Samuel’s father Edmund were in Stamford with him.

Their first son, Samuel Jr. was born in Stamford in January of 1641. I added the Jr. to Samuel’s name to avoid confusion. There are three Samuels in my direct lineage, but this Samuel, the son of Samuel senior is not one of them. Samuel Sherman’s fifth son, John Sherman, is my 9th great grandfather. It is John Sherman’s son, Samuel, who becomes my 8th great grandfather. All these Samuel’s make me want to repeat the only real expletive I heard my grandfather P.A. Sherman blurt out after hitting his thumb with a tack hammer. “Sam Hill!” I’ll revise that curse to “Samuel H. Hill!” Several of the books I’m reading fail to distinguish which Samuel they’re referring to, so I may have scorched the edges of this blog with my own expletives. Serial killer David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, is not related.

Samuel Sherman, the senior, sold his house in Stamford in 1654, but he had previously moved to Stratford, Connecticut before that date. It appears that Samuel took every member of his family with him. After 1654, there is no trace of any Sherman living in Stamford. The dates above throw doubt on historians who claim Samuel Sherman lived in Stratford for fifty continuous years.

Puritan life in the 1600's.

When the town of Stamford was set up initially, it’s interesting how the land was allotted to each of the original 28 settlers. It’s useful to remember that in the Puritan villages government and church were completely connected. One by one, each man to receive property was sent out of the meeting room while the other 27 voted on how much land he was to receive – then called back in to see if that gave him “content?” Samuel Sherman received 10 acres. Eight men received more land than Samuel, based on their age and their standing in the church. Samuel was still a young man of 21, yet he received more acreage than many of the older men.

To follow the path of Samuel Sherman from the time he first arrived from England in 1634, it seems he stayed several years in Watertown, Massachusetts with his father, Edmund. Then he moved, first to Weathersfield, Connecticut, then Stamford, Connecticut. He then finally moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where he played a prominent role in the church and the town’s business. He was instrumental in setting up the town of Woodbury, Connecticut, and even owned property there, but never actually lived there. He sent his son, John Sherman, to Woodbury as his proxy. It is in the history of Woodbury, Connecticut that I find some information on this John Sherman, my 9th great grandfather.

Just shrug the following off if you want. I need a little break from the two digital books I’ve been scanning through like a not so clever gumshoe trying to find breadcrumbs a Sherman might have left in New England. Combined, the books have over 1500 pages of information on Puritan towns where my ancestors were living. Adding to my woes or joy, depending on how bad my neck or eyes hurt, I found another 700 page book authored by our more recent relative, John Sherman, in 1895. It is full of Sherman history and interesting little anecdotes.

I ran across this little story about “Uncle Dan” that caught my attention. I am not sure yet how this Daniel is related to me. By the nineteenth century the New England coast is full of Shermans, due to their tendency to produce many offspring. This “Uncle Dan” is the son of Taylor Sherman.

Taylor Sherman was appointed to survey the region which is now Ohio, which is how his son Daniel got into this little incident. The whole Western Reserve was being gifted to those who suffered from the Revolutionary War. However, it was a wilderness, “with not a single white inhabitant.”

Imagine: 75 miles of this, on foot, with the distinct
possibility of hostile Indians hiding behind each tree.

‘Uncle Dan’, in the spring of 1812, when twenty one years of age, was sent by his father to survey and make improvements on land in Huron county, by building a log cabin and opening a clearing. “He had with him a hired man of the name of John Chapman, who was sent to Milan, twelve miles away, to get some corn ground, it being the nearest and only mill in the county. Either on the way there, or on returning, Chapman was killed by Indians. “Uncle Dan” did not hear of this until the next day. When he heard, he started for Mansfield, forty miles away. For thirty miles there was a dense and unbroken forest without a settler. He arrived at a blockhouse, six miles from Mansfield, but concluded that was not strong enough to protect him. He then went to Mansfield, where they had a better blockhouse, but he heard so many stories of Indians that he did not feel safe there, and walked thence to his brother’s home in Lancaster, about seventy five miles away, through an almost continuous forest.”

This anecdote caught my attention not only for the name, but for the realization that if I had been the link to you, you would be as non-existent as an honest politician. I have no sense of direction. If I take the road less traveled I am in trouble. The 700 miles in our village of Bella Vista, AR are a maze that has left me lost within a few miles of my home. A recent study of rats, bats, and monkeys reveals there are problems in the hippocampus region of the brain for directionally challenged people like me.

How “Uncle Dan” found his way through continuous forest to his brother’s house seventy five miles away is a super power I don’t possess. Back in the seventies, I took a group of my Ecology students for a weekend camping trip to a 1600 acre ranch deep in the Ozarks bounded by the National Forest. My brother was caretaking the ranch for a group of Kansas City investors, and he and his family were living in a two story colonial styled house in need of repair. One of the environmental exercises I had dreamed up was for each student to separate themselves and commune with nature silently. The further they could distance themselves into this reverie of the surrounding forest the better. I arbitrarily set one hour as sufficient.

Setting myself to the same task, I enjoyed the quiet birdsong and rustling squirrel sounds, and at the end of the hour realized I had no idea from which direction I had come. With no compass I thought I might orient myself from the moss on one side of a tree, then realizing I wasn’t quite sure how that worked. Had it not been for one of my students calling “Mr. Sherman! Mr. Sherman!” I might still have been lost in the woods to this day. I marvel now at those family members like Captain John Sherman, who set sail from England using a compass and the stars to arrive at exactly where he was headed. If I had been the Captain we would have bounced around on the Atlantic waves until our food supply was exhausted and the passengers had tied me to the mainmast.

I understand the fear that “Uncle Dan” must have felt when his hired hand was murdered, and fearing that every step of that seventy five mile journey could be his last, with hostile Indians behind every upcoming tree. I still think there’s something to that recurrent dream I had as a child where some of that fear of Indians was telegraphed forward in time to my sleeping head. The only close facsimile to an Indian I ever actually encountered was my younger sister, Ruth, nicknamed Shooting Star. Wearing a head band with a feather, she would sometimes sub as one of the murderous Indians that constantly threatened our backyard chicken-house/fort. Other than “Ruthie,” I had no reason to fear Indians, since my Puritan ancestors had diminished the Indian population. There was a full sized Indian carving sitting outside the barbershop in Independence, and there was that great three dimensional movie in Byam Theatre, where Indians threw spears at Lash Larue and me. I remember ducking behind the theater seat.

I’m just saying that, left to me, with my damaged hippocampus, the Shermans would have been lost at sea, or irretrievably lost in the American Wilderness. Thankfully, we had some forest savvy pioneers like “Uncle Dan” who, propelled by the fear of being killed by the Mohicans, was able to get to his brother’s house safe and sound.

Surprising New Insights on Sherman History in Connecticut

Sherman descendant travels the same coastal rivers as Pequot Indians and colonial ancestors.

Looking into my family history was never intended to reach beyond my great grand parents. In the box that my three sisters delivered to me here in the Ozark Hills years ago were childhood pictures taken with our black box camera, hand written letters and poems, and other odd memorabilia they had saved over the years about our parents and our life as children when we lived in a working class suburb sandwiched between Kansas City and Independence, Missouri.

Somehow, curiosity led outside of the box into family history as far back as the fifteenth century. We had wealthy bankers and gifted architects on my mother’s side, with a few rogues thrown in. On my father’s side in that same century we had wealthy English cloth merchants and educators, with a few lawyers in the mix who loved to litigate.

This 23rd blog reminds me that we have 23 pairs of chromosomes carrying thousands of genes that control our physical characteristics and more personality traits than we might want or expect. Now I look at the pictures in the box of my mother and realize how truly regal and beautiful she was, how easily she would have played the role of countess in a Florentine household. I look at the photos of my father and try to imagine photo shopping his image into photos I’ve now seen of founding father Roger Sherman and General William Tecumseh Sherman. The physical similarities are not easy to see, but his adventurous personality would have linked my father to Samuel Sherman, who eagerly boarded a ship to come to the American Wilderness in 1634. I look at my sisters now, and try to imagine which parent they physically resemble more; though it’s obvious to anyone who knows them they have our mother’s inner strength and resolve. And I wonder about my poppa bear brother, who had the warm countenance of my mother, but doesn’t seem to fit any of the other ancestors. I’m amazed at the similarities we all share with ancestors, and at the same time the differences that makes each of us unique.

Sherman ancestors were here.

I realize we’re all linked with traits that determine our health, physical characteristics, and yes, maybe even personality traits that make us shy or outgoing. Go back far enough, and there’s probably some undiscovered Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal cave painting authored by one of our ancestors who would prefer to stay indoors. Blowing blood and pigments through a hollow reed to paint a picture on the cave wall was safe. Let those extroverts go out with the gang to chase mastodons.

I think it’s exciting to see younger relatives become interested in their heritage. My sister, Judy’s granddaughter, Megan, and the grand daughter of my middle sister, Sherry, just returned from Florence, Italy, where they walked on some of the same cobblestone paths trod by their ancestors. They also crossed the Ponte Vecchio Bridge that spans the Arno River close to the fifteenth century homes of their medieval Alberti family. Their adventure yielded some tantalizing clues that may help solve the parentage of my great grandfather Albert Anatole Alberti. In April, my daughter, Trish, and her husband, Chip, will visit Italy and look for further clues, and maybe test the local wines and view the beauty of Florence without the inconvenience of the black plague or a medieval ceramic pot beside their hotel bed. Last week, I find that my sister Ruth’s son Doug, and his wife Chelle, are kayaking, hiking and working smack dab in the middle of Sherman history on the New England Coast. I’ll elaborate on that down page.

There are a few mysteries and questions yet to be solved – one big one for me is when and where did my mother get a pilot’s license and why didn’t she reveal it to any of her children. There is an intriguing clue that my wife Sharon found regarding a program for female pilots during the Second World War. Was my mother willing to go to war to defend the country and her family if needed? The joy of flying, apparently shared by both my parents, lives on in the DNA of my sister Sherry’s son Michael, and her grand daughter Kara.

The blog has been an interesting tool in that it lets my brother’s boy Ben read it from his phone in Ecuador, and allows another of his sons, David, to follow on his device in Puerto Rico. A third son, Danny, along with his mother Bess, my brother’s widow, read the blog from their home near Saint Louis. There are definitely some advantages to sharing a blog on Facebook, but then I wonder why someone in Kyrgyzstan might be reading it, and it’s intriguing that there are some Italians that check in from time to time. The blog statistics show which countries blog lookers are from, and even which device they are using, but no names or locations are revealed. Anyway, I’ll continue to blog unless I think someone from Russia is stealing my identity and voting for a candidate I don’t approve of. There were 17 page views from Russia one day last week. I hope it was a single bored Russian deep into a bottle of vodka with nothing better to do.

I mentioned upstream in this blog that my nephew Doug and his wife Chelle ended up living right in the middle of their Sherman history on the New England Coast. Doug is a chemist and on the board of the Conservation Commission in North Stonington, Connecticut, dedicated to planning and regulating the natural and historic resources of the area. Chelle works at the Pequotsepos Nature Center in nearby Mystic, site of the epic Indian massacre of the Pequot Indian tribe in 1637.

Doug and Chelle live about 80 miles down the coast from Watertown, Massachussetts, where Samuel Sherman , Doug’s 11th great grandfather, lived for several years when he first arrived from England at the age of 14. They live approximately fifty miles from Weathersfield, Connecticut, where Samuel first set roots in a small Puritan Village. Samuel left after the Pequot Indians murdered some of his neighbors and took two village girls hostage. Doug and Chelle live about an hours drive north of Stratford, Connecticut, which was Samuel’s final residence for fifty years, until his death in 1670. Chelle works directly with some of the descendents of prominent players in the Pequot War, like John Mason, who led Puritan forces against the Pequot Indians in Mystic, which led to their final demise. Doug and Chelle kayak and hike many of the same inlet waterways and trails used by their Sherman ancestors and their Indian adversaries nearly 400 years ago. This Sherman history just recently came to light for me, so I’m thinking that Doug and Chelle may be just as surprised as me to find that they put down roots in the same area as their ancestors.

Pequot Indian dugout canoe.  Doug and Chelle's kayak is a bit more modern than this.

Below is a list of some new information brought to light from links Chelle has sent me.

1. It appears our Sherman history is heavily tangled with that of the Whiting and Gould families, beginning with the first Puritan colonies established in New England. Mr. Whiting was on the committee with Samuel Sherman that declared war on the Pequot Indians. Mr. Gould was on a war committee with Samuel Sherman some years later, when the colonists were on high alert expecting a coastal attack from the Dutch. I suspect the connection with the Whitings and Goulds may have originated in England.

Declaration of War by a committee including Mr. Sherman and Mr. Whiting.

2. Samuel Sherman was appointed to a position in the General Court at Weathersfield at the young age of nineteen. He was selected over a score of older men, his own father Edmund among them. His excellent education in Dedham, England must have made a very favorable impression on his Puritan neighbors.

3. Samuel served three successive years in the General Court in Stratford, Connecticut, beginning in 1662. For his capable service, the Court rewarded him with two hundred and fifty acres of land. Fifty acres was outside the bounds of Stratford in the county of Fairfield, Connecticut. Over the years he acquired additional land, and gave much of it to his children before he died. As an old man, he moved in with his son Samuel, then living in Woodbury, Connecticut.

Colonial Woodbury home near Sherman properties.

4. In 1672, at the age of 64, Samuel Sherman was granted liberty from service. He, along with Lt. William Curtis, Ensign Joseph Judson and John Minor, received a grant to erect a plantation at Pomperaug, Connecticut, which eventually became the town of Woodbury, Connecticut. With permission from this grant, Samuel Sherman and the other three men purchased a large, fertile, four mile long tract of land from the Pootatuck Indians. The land was purchased for one homespun gray coat, one hatchet, and ten pounds of powder and lead. I found the sale agreement and the signatures (marks) of the three Indian elders who sold their tribal land.

Signatures of three Indian chiefs who sold the land that is now Woodbury, CT.

5. Just as I’m about to post this blog I ran across some more information on Samuel Sherman and some of his sons in Woodbury, Connecticut. I posted earlier that I had no substantial information on Samuel’s sons, but I found Cothren’s “History of Ancient Woodbury,” which promises to fill in some missing details on some of Samuel Sherman’s eight sons.