Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

4Up and Down the Hills of Maine,and Off to Wisconsin

87 4 Up and Down the Hills of Maine, and off to Wisconsin The conflict of the empires cast the Boudrots like alien seed in remote and Protestant Scituate, Massachusetts. Their material condition, which presents a challenge for the local historian to construct, came not to differ from the great majority of poor colonists. With only a tenuous hold on place, they lived impecuniously in a freshly established and indebted society , rich only in the promise of land. Home did not guarantee subsistence or security; locality provided less of community and support and more of deprivation, insult, rejection, and even expulsion. Spare a friendly neighbor, a helpful church, a benign landlord, and a begrudging, parsimonious town dole, the family was only one bill away from the road. For their children to have something, anything, they had to choose migration. It is of this common plight, so rich in variation yet scarce in detail, that family historians must learn to research and write. They must seek their subjects not by membership in century-long communities, towns, and cities, but in the context of obscure rural places. Without uplifting narrative themes of the certain advance of prospering democracy or the sure entitlements of moving west, they must trace individual migration from small and thin-soiled valleys to non-commercial patches of land on the infertile slopes of mountains. Family historians of the migrant poor also use histories of national expansion, government policy, and industrial growth. They can supplement their work with studies of the changing American family, environments, and economic life. At least, I found much of this to be true in the case of grandmother Frances’s family. From Massachusetts to several parts of Maine to Wisconsin, in a succession of moves over three generations, the Boodrys sought a place where they could succeed. Their migrations, unique to them, were typical of hundreds of thousands of poor American families who had their hopes and sought their place in the interior of the new and expanding republic. In colonial America, as was the case in Pierre’s Acadia or Rosalia’s Sicily , the family household functioned as a commonwealth unto itself. The Jacob’s Well 88 family braided together human biology and culture. Ever subject to matters of reproduction, nutrition, shelter, and care, the household dictated a person’s well-being and conduct. As the hub of local mutuality and at the heart of traditional morality, the family household dominated social life in the countryside and city until recent times, when the abstract state and distant markets came to dominate. American colonial historian James Henretta concluded that “family life could not be divorced from economic considerations ; indeed the basic question of power and authority within the family hinged primarily on legal control over the land and—indirectly—over the labor needed to work it.” On this count, the early American family, patriarchal and conservative by tradition, was not that different from its European counterpart.1 The individual without family and the family without land belonged nowhere, and they were unwelcome everywhere in times of scarcity, judged by others as a public burden. Barely casting a shadow on the landscape, the family without land has no rights, no basis to borrow money, no patrimony to marry off its children. A bad season, an unexpected accident, or any significant shift in circumstances could render the American poor homeless— perpetual migrants and illegal squatters; they traveled on the broken trail of crushing necessity and unexpected opportunity. This fragile and mutative condition shaped the destiny of the majority in the early American Republic, including the Boodrys of Acadia and Massachusetts, who migrated to and within Maine and then to and within Wisconsin. As with other large families who did not have a hold on the land, the Boodrys’ fertility caused them to slosh over the brim of the stingy soils of Raynham, Taunton, and New England. At the same time, the Atlantic economy produced the indebted new Republic that pushed the Boodrys and others like them to migrate. The patriarch Pierre’s meager patrimony did not provide his family with a firm platform in Raynham and Taunton society. Multiplying at rates of ten, fifteen, and twenty children per family, which described Acadian and Yankee patterns equally, the Boodrys’ reproduction outstripped local impoverished lands and scarce jobs, leaving emigration their answer. Up and Down the Hills of Maine, and Off to Wisconsin 89 The disjuncture...