Ancestral Musings

I am making an effort to catch up today while waiting for the delivery of a new range for my kitchen!  Of such things are our days composed, while we wait for the novel coronavirus to subside. Tombstone.   I haven't made it to cemeteries to view ancestral tombstones in the course of my genealogical research, but I have seen photographs of a number of ancestral stones thanks to the work of the volunteers for FindAGrave.com.   I just went looking and found a picture of the tombstone of Israel G. Belknap, my 2nd great-grandfather, and found that tomorrow, May 27, 2020, will be the 139th anniversary of his death!  He is buried in Kalamazoo, Michigan and I am currently in Washington state (though I did honeymoon in Kalamazoo almost 43 years ago, yes, it is a story) so I won't be visiting his grave soon.

If anyone reads this in years to come, we are still pretty much locked down by the COVID-19 pandemic.  My county (Skagit) is getting close to being able to open up due to declining numbers of new cases (I think only one in the last week or so) and no new deaths.  As you can imagine, this has put a crimp in any travel plans I may have had!  Nonessential travel is out for the moment:  the furthest I've gone is to Renton to pick up my new sewing machine, which I did over a month ago.  And travel has always been a feature of my life so this is getting kind of hard. As to that travel:  My father, Cecil Prewitt, always had an itchy foot.  The story he always told us was that he ran away and joined the circus around 1933, after he finished high school in Olympia, Washington.  Now, my father was a bit of a story teller and this never seemed like an incredibly likely event, but lo and behold! there is some confirmatory information, if not of his particip...

Service is a broad category--I am cheating a little as I'm a week behind, but I looked at the featured posts in Amy ,Johnson Crow's email about what people had written this week and it did include everything from indentured service to service in the armed forces.  I've written about some of that anyway:  the first Prewitt was an indentured servant in 1636 in Virginia and many of my ancestors served in the army or navy of their time:  Moses Case who was in the Revolutionary War briefly, having died of illness in August of 1776, and others on both sides of my family who also served in that war.  There was also apparently a Tory sympathizer, part of a plot in New York, who was trying to thwart the Revolution, not sure I'd say he was in service of anything but history!

I've seen a few wills in my searches for ancestors.  I've even seen the wills of my immediate antecedents, and I've had one of my own (in dire need of updating) but the ones I can't forget are the ones leaving enslaved human beings to the children or grandchildren of the owner.  So, there is some murkiness about the relationship here but I am apparently descended from a man named Joseph Elgin of Charles County, Maryland whose daughter married a Prewitt.  He was born in Port Tobacco, which did pretty much what you would expect from the name:   they shipped tobacco from this spot on the Potomac.  The river eventually silted up and the town has been stranded inland for many years now.  Why do I know this?  Because one of my children briefly lived a few miles from this spot, totally by accident as we had no idea at the time that we had any connection to Maryland's history.  Port Tobacco in 2020 is a town of 13, the smallest incorporated town in...