Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

5Migrants West

105 5 Migrants West Some families define themselves by where they settled and stayed. Other families, like mine, are distinguished by journeys and crossings. Their stories, involving individual courage, risk, tenacity, and persistence, fuse with sweeping national narratives of the opening of new lands, innovations of transportation systems, and epochal manias. Historians of families like mine must weave together stories of individual families and narratives of national transformations. Lending their hearts to stories of a singular migration, they have to test their heads on such matters as changing economies and demography, the rise and decline of industries, and mutations of whole environments and societies. Each of my composing families tests me on themes of migrants and immigrants. The Amato and Notaro families of Sicily and the Acadian Boodrys demonstrate the most recent and the most ancient of my migration stories. Grandmother Frances’s maternal family, the Sayerses, who intermarried with the Boodrys, are the subject of this chapter. Of obscure English origins, they left their impoverished life in St. Lawrence County, New York, on a steamboat for the developing region of Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago. After a decade, without establishing themselves on the land or finding steady work, they trusted their fate to the railroad’s promises of new settlements in Kansas, where they homesteaded two more places before retiring to a small town in south-central Kansas , not far from where east-west and north-south continental trails cross. They traveled farthest west of any of my families, and more than the others, they belong to those poor and restless Americans of whom poet Stephen Vincent Benét wrote: Americans are always moving on. It’s an old Spanish custom gone astray A sort of English fever, I believe, Or just a mere desire to take French leave, I couldn’t say. I couldn’t really say. Jacob’s Well 106 An ethnic accounting of the marriage in 1867 of Sylvester Boodry’s son James to Ellen Frances Sayers, the fourth daughter of Leonard Sayers, could be depicted as a synthesis of the two great and opposing families of Europe, the French and English. However, this betrays, as ethnic explanations often do, a simpler and more humble fact: James and Ella married for the sake of their personal wishes and practical needs. James and Ella shared a contemporary rural inheritance based on enduring marriage, unregulated production , endless toil, and aspirations to establish a secure condition for old age. By strength of will and necessity-cropped imagination, they were simply and totally their parents’ children. This humble condition set them apart from the refinements of wealth and luxury of choice, as well as the quarrels of kings, the distinctions of theologians, the arguments of philosophers, and the well-turned words of poets and writers. Their family creed was the givens of everyday life: the need to earn one’s daily bread and secure one’s place as best one could against hunger and debt. Formed around the trinity of family, work, and land, it stood on the legs of a faithful and hardworking husband and wife, a mutually helpful family, and cooperative neighbors, who equaled their weight in gold in migration as in settlement. However, bred on the same begrudging poor and stony New England soils, the inheritance Sylvester and Leonard fashioned was more than a creed. It was also a calculation. The spread of markets, the infusion of capital, the circulation of money, and the availability of cheap land led all nineteenth century North Americans to a complex and finally inconclusive arithmetic that sought to judge available capital, risky migrations, possible rewards, and varying risks. Land, in particular, gave rise to the most important and complex formulas. It could be bought, sold, rented, borrowed against, willed, and, of course, speculated on. Land, the most and least tangible of things, anchored wealth, afforded subsistence, provided income, and furnished security for old age, while awakening dreams and occasioning speculation. People as humble and common as the Sayerses and the Boodrys saw the connection between land and money. Cheap travel and the chance for cheap land tilted the equations of many in favor of going west. Migrants West 107 Sylvester and Leonard also became market and migratory creatures. By choosing to join the widening and lengthening trail west, however, they did not abandon traditional concepts of the family and forsake the help of relatives and neighbors. Going outwardly west, their...