LAND!

I was born in Dayton, Ohio. My ethnicity estimates indicate that my ancestors came from across the Atlantic. Sometime in the past, they had to venture from there to here in order for me to be born here.

They came centuries ago. I imagine that some came because of religious persecution. Others came because of famine conditions in Ireland or other lands. Some came to escape neverending war. Perhaps a few may have simply had a strong case of wanderlust and adventure. The lure of great amounts of available land must have been a draw for most of these souls; souls dreaming of owning land and a home of their own.

I will be the first to admit, I am a landlubber and happy to have my two feet planted on dry ground or at the most in the shallows at the beach. I recall the first time that I saw the ocean; I could not believe its vastness. I KNEW that it was vast but I hadn’t really imagined just how vast, vast really is.

My ancestors "haunt" me and seeing the ocean in front of me brought them to my mind. I tried to imagine the greatness of the sorrows they were running from or perhaps the joys they imagined running to, in order for them to actually get on a boat and cross that endless horizon of ocean.

How would they have crossed that great breadth?  Now my ancestors may or may not have come over on the Mayflower, but most of us are familiar with the Mayflower that brought the Pilgrims to the New Land. The Mayflower was a wooden ship and likely measured about 100 feet from prow to stern and was about 25 feet wide at its widest point. That is relatively small. The length of a football field is three times as long as the Mayflower.

The Mayflower, about 1621

  

The Titanic, another well-known ship was just over 882 feet long and about 92 feet wide. It had four smokestacks and each of those was 62 feet tall, each almost 2/3 as tall as the Mayflower was long. 

The largest modern cruise ship in Carnival Corporation is the Regal Princess which is nearly a quarter of a mile or nearly 1320 ft long.

The Titanic, 1912

The Regal Princess, present day

                                          

So, what I am saying is that the ships that my ancestors came over the ocean on were more akin to a collection of glorified floating toothpicks than they were to modern ships!

I cannot imagine being willing to board a small wooden ship like that and set sail across that vast ocean but I try to imagine what that journey may have been like. What I imagine is akin to hell and I am pretty certain that my imagination pales in comparison to reality.

So, my ancestors decided that they were willing to risk the journey. Now, most of my ancestors were poor. In order to leave their country of origin and sail to America, they had to arrange for passage on a ship and that passage was not free. I suppose that some may have been able to purchase passage but most could not. Many had to enter into indentured servitude.

When a person became an indentured servant, they would sign into a contract with the person paying their passage. The contract holder would pay for their passage to the New World and provide for the person; in exchange, the passenger would agree to work for a period of usually one to seven years. At that time, the person was released from their contract and may have been given a suit of clothes, a horse, perhaps even some land.

If a person traveled with family, each family member would have a period of servitude. Children were usually released from servitude at the age of 21, regardless of how many years had passed.

The person who held an indentured servitude contract was free to sell that contract to another person. In this way, a husband could be separated from his wife, parents from their children… I cannot help but wonder at the desperate conditions that would have made this look like an acceptable alternative. A story goes that a couple of my young male ancestors had boarded a ship as stowaways. When the ship was at sea, they were discovered and were given the opportunity to agree to a contract for indentured servitude or be tossed overboard. Indentured servitude was a wise alternative in this case.

My ancestors, some with families, after assessing the risks and arranging for passage, boarded a small wooden ship, likely a third again longer than a smokestack on the Titanic was high. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 2750 miles and it likely took about two months to cross.

I imagine family members boarding the small ship to cross that vast ocean. I imagine them settling down below deck in a very tiny, dark spot; a spot that will likely be their home for two months. I imagine those family members below deck in the belly of that ship, day after day of their ocean crossing.

Food and water, never plentiful, are becoming depleted. Basic personal hygiene is impossible. There is sickness all around; disease from poor nutrition such as scurvy, disease from poor sanitation such as dysentery, normal childhood diseases such as measles…The smell of that disease, the stench of vomit, sweat, body wastes, the putrid stench of infected wounds… I imagine this almost suffocating miasma saturating the air.

I imagine mothers and fathers listening to the cries of their suffering children, hating the sounds of those cries and yet fearing that those cries would cease. I can picture family members watching the bodies of parents, spouses, children, slip below the waves when the sounds of suffering have indeed ceased.

I imagine the terror struck within the hearts of men, women, and children alike when storms roil the sea. I feel the ship tossing, rolling, water perhaps leaking down from waves crashing over the deck above, the boards of the ship creaking and groaning as though they would rend apart, the sound of terror in the cries of children, fervent prayers escaping desperate lips…

I imagine all of this and then I imagine the storm ending, the sea calming and how terribly, terribly sweet their relief must have been to finally hear the cry of “LAND! LAND!”

Most of my folks would end up owning their own bit of land. I have had great-great-greats… who owned hundreds, probably even thousands of acres. Back in the day when Eastern Kentucky and other areas of Appalachia were being settled, it seems that a person could pretty much go out, survey, stake and claim any unclaimed land. That is exactly what some of my ancestors did. It didn’t much matter that the native peoples probably held the original claim. It seems that they didn’t count.

In the early 1900s, I had great-grandparents and grandparents who owned a few acres of land. Most of it was in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky where narrow ribbons of bottomland were surrounded by steep hillsides. My grandparents used hand tools and mule-drawn plows to prepare the tillable land for their gardens. Sometimes, if there was enough of a level ledge on the hillside, they might even turn the earth and plant a single row of corn. That corn would literally be growing nearly parallel to the ground of the hillside.

                           

Grandpa and Grandma's place, Eastern Ky

These grandparents had large families and they coaxed their living from the land. Gardening was not a hobby, a pleasant pastime; the survival of the family depended upon the garden and knowing how to preserve the fruits from that garden. 

My ancestors also planted fruit trees and nut trees to provide more sustenance for hungry and growing families. They raised chickens for eggs and the occasional chicken dinner. They raised cows for milk, cream, butter. They raised hogs to slaughter during cool weather. They knew how to smoke, salt cure, sugar cure,, render and can that meat. Their preservation of the harvests of the bounty ensured their survival during the times of lean.

These same ancestors knew how to hunt, fish and trap to add to their diets. They knew how to forage plants, fruits, nuts,… from wooded hillsides. Those plants could add to their nutrition but could also provide medicinal benefits. This knowledge was passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter, over and over again.

These folks had little if any money. They may have raised a little tobacco base as a cash crop but their need for cash was not huge. They grew or raised much of what they ate. They did purchase coffee, sugar, flour, meal… but they could likely barter eggs, butter, a chicken instead of needing cash. These ancestors truly lived off of the land.

And after that living was over, their bodies would be prepared. The body would be placed within a pine box made by a family member or a neighbor. That pine coffin would lie in the front room of the place that the deceased had made home. Family, neighbors, friends would drop by to pay their respects. A mule-drawn wagon would come to carry the pine box to the little hillside cemetery that served the community and there it would be buried in a hole that had been dug by family and friends.

That ancestor had lived off of the land for his entire life and now he returned to her and she cradled him like a wee babe. Gradually over time, that pine box would disintegrate. The body would do likewise and gradually, it too would become a part of the land, a part of the richness that he had loved in life; a part of the land that might one day sustain and be cherished by future generations!

Upper Sadler Cemetery, Clay Co, Ky

Ecclesiastes 12:7

“Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”