I am Not the Person I Thought I Was

Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812.  Oddly, this war has led to some startling revelations about myself.  

I’m not the person I thought I was.  Few of us are, but usually we learn this bit by bit.  Everyone who labors in the dusty halls and musty graves of genealogy knows that right about the time you think you have a good bead on your family, one more fragile slip of paper shows up and any preconceptions you may have arrived at—no matter how well constructed—are tipped on end. 

Several years ago I became my family’s truth seeker.  It isn’t the job I wanted but it is the job I got.  When your failing mother sends you her tirelessly gleaned but randomly arranged portfolio on the family, you don’t tell her that she really needs to rattle the rest of the family tree for a willing participant.   You thank her and start sorting. 

Ten years later I had turned the papers, my own research and a love of the “small” stories of American history into That Blaisdell Blood: A Novel.  I gave lectures on the message and the means I had used in writing the book.  I thought I knew as much as any person about how my mother’s family (arriving at Pemaquid Point, Maine in 1635) grew with the nation.  I thought all of that until a few days ago.  The rest of this story unfolds like an episode of Murder, She Wrote.

In a recent flurry of cleaning and culling, I was going through my files for the book, including the original manila folder that Mom had given me.  I started, yet again, going through every envelope.  It was all there, just as I remembered, even the totally inappropriate 5 x 8 envelope with Mom’s frustrated scrawl across the outside “All of this amounts to a big nothing!”  I opened it up and took out the folded collection of articles she had stuffed in it all about the Recreational Vehicle lifestyle, acquired when my husband and I bought our first RV and went a-Viking (to Mom’s dismay).  I would have discarded this years ago but for Mom’s little notes all over the first page.  This time it was going in the trash. I tossed it toward the discard pile and that is when a scattering of typed pages angled their way out of the newsprint.  

And that, as they say, is when the fight started.  I was looking at information that put me at odds with what I had been told by people I assumed were entrusted with the truth and willing to share it with me in unadulterated form.  Oral history, which I had taken as gospel, was now fighting with written documentation.  To accept one, put me at odds with the other.  To disavow those I have respected for a lifetime means hooking my star to disembodied bureaucrats in a distant office of vital statistics.

Embedded in those press clippings was a six-page chronology of records compiled by a genealogist in Toronto, Ontario.  It was headed with the name “Ezra Blaisdell, 1767-1850.”  I am Ezra’s 6^th generational descendant. I have always known the name; I did not know the man.

When I started this climb up my family tree I had seen all of my ancestors as variations on one theme—the grandfather I had always known.  Would not all of my ancestors be people of infinite patience, iridescent humor, understated character and supportive love?  I had never seen my grandfather Blaisdell in any other way so that is the perception I imposed on each preceding generation.  If I was willing to place that much certainty on the complex Blaisdell ethos, was I not equally adamant about the historical backdrop of their lives?  The rational part of me said that mine was a family like every other family, filled with a full arc of human personalities, strengths and failures, but my sentimental side always thought the good guys won.  

My initial research had already disabused me of one idealistic notion.  I was first shocked then curiously amused to find that during the Revolutionary War my branch of Blaisdells were Royalists—Crown supporters.  A small group (my group) had fled to Canada during the War for Independence!  I also learned that they went west into what was then called Upper Canada (now, Ontario).  I did not know exactly when or why they re-entered the United States, but family oral history said they fought honorably in the Civil War.  I have photocopies of land grants given to my Great-grandfather, Marshal Newton Blaisdell, in Rock Country Minnesota.  One of these is signed by Chester A. Arthur, another by Grover Cleveland.  All of this, I had been told, was for Civil War service.  I liked that scenario.  Those were my people, fighting the big fight for equality that I had joined on a much smaller scale during the Civil Rights fight of the late ‘60s. 

But now, examining the data in front of me, my latter-day righteousness vis a vis a Civil War freedom fighter was being tested.  

Except for the land grants, which are real enough, the rest of the Civil War story was hazy history.  Ezra Blaisdell, on the other hand, was now resting in my hands as a fairly fleshed-out human being.  Ezra was not the Canadian ex-pat I assumed he would be.  This blacksmith, plate caster and boiler maker was born in New Hampshire, paid taxes in Vermont during the entirety of the War of 1812, and did not move to Hawksbury, Upper Canada until 1822! Both he and his wife, Lydia, died in 1850.  While we don’t know what caused Ezra’s demise, I am assuming Lydia’s death may have been connected to having giving birth to 12 children in 19 years! 

Certainly, the border between Canada and the burgeoning nation of the United States had been a permeable and illusive reality for some time.  People moved often, but for small distances, putting up disposable homes and small scale land, subsistence farms.  How fluid was this Blaisdell diaspora?  And why weren’t these people behaving according to my assumed narrative?  I read on.  

Their first son, Marshall Newton Blaisdell, was born in 1799 and he, as my great-great-grandfather, was of interest.  This plucky lad was a soldier/drummer in Capt. Malachi Corning’s company, Eleventh Regiment of Infantry during the War of 1812. 

The War of 1812!  Now here is a piece of history that most Americans know nothing about.  Well, next to nothing.  There is the story of Dolly Madison saving George Washington’s portrait before the White House was burned, but, for most of us, that would be the end of 1812 knowledge. 

This sheet of historical minutia was also the first clue in my family’s confused heritage.  The Civil War is easy to place, define and defend in one’s mind.  The War of 1812 is a loosely placed two pages in the history books, no well-defined heroes, no master of mood and strategy in the White House and no lingering shadows.  Why put an ancestor in the War of 1812 when you can just as easily plop him down in the middle of the Civil War?  Did any of this fit with the documents in my hand as opposed to the stories in my mind?

Marshall Newton Blaisdell was at the battle of Queenston Heights and Lundy’s Lane.  These two battles, both fought on the Niagara River and on both sides of the then contested United States/Canadian border were two of the bloodiest and costliest battles of the War of 1812.  To know that my grandfather’s grandfather was a player in ground-zero history was both fascinating and sobering in equal parts.  And what did this soldier-in-the-fray look like?   Don’t picture him as a strapping fighter.  His discharge certification describes him as “about thirteen years of age, four feet ten inches high, light complexion, blue eyes, brown hair and by occupation when enlisted a Farmer.”  

The mind spins: thirteen years old, a farmer, a soldier, a survivor!  And, while he provides a pretty good description of me at that age, he sounds very little like the dark haired, gray eyed (but diminutive) man my grandfather was.  And he evidently held no grudge against the British for his military service, because he followed his father to Canada in 1826.

It was probably the promise of bounty land in Minnesota that brought Marshall Newton back to the US in 1853.  He received 160 acres in Rock County, Minnesota.  I had no problem with a good entrepreneurial spirit bringing my ancestors back to this country.  This was a time when land was worth gold.  But I felt short changed, trading in a Civil War hero for an 1812 drummer.  

His 8^th child, my great-grandfather, Marshal M. Blaisdell (born in 1845, also in Canada) would buy land adjacent to his father’s.  This may or may not be for Civil War service.  The line of descendants ran on, but the narrative stopped on the pages I had in front of me. 

What I thought I knew I do not.  What I thought was true may be true only in portions.  What I need to find out is a great deal.  We like to think of our family as a neatly composed picture.  Even the difficult members of the group belong in their own little sub-group with all of their definers arranged in bulleted precision.    We also tend to assume that what we are told as children is correct and confirmed by the people we trust with all of our other truths.  Maybe this is just one more lesson in independent thought that we need to acquire as we grow older and see our parents as humans, subject to all of the frailties thereof, and not just as the super human called “parent.” 

Does any of this matter?  Certainly we are all free standing individuals.  We are neither responsible for the bad actions of those who came before us, nor can we take credit for their good deeds.  But looking at the people whose DNA brought us here can give us a sense of continuity.  I believe it can make us better people.  Who wants to be the weak link in that chain?  

Mother, it turns out, knew what she was doing all along.  I have kept the faith.