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1. Father
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1 Father T he surname Beckwith is Anglo-Saxon, and it means “beechwood.” My father’s branch of the family traces back to the emigration of Samuel Beckwith from his birthplace, Pontefract in Yorkshire, to the area near New London, Connecticut, in 1638. His is the first of twenty-five alphabetically listed names of land grantees in the village of Lyme (now Old Lyme), Connecticut. After he died in 1680 or ’81, his children and grandchildren continued to live and work in the area. There is a Beckwith Lane and a Beckwith Hill in Old Lyme, and the name was still to be seen on a few rural mailboxes when my son Lawrence and I visited in 1977. Samuel’s great-grandson John, born at Lyme, seventh son of James Beckwith, emigrated in 1760 (at the mature age of fortyseven ) with his wife Jane and their children to Cornwallis, Nova Scotia. He was among the New Englanders who benefited from the cheap settlement offers made by the British on the expulsion of the Acadians at that period. Thus, I may be described as a descendant of “Nova Scotia Yankees.”An opportunist rather than a loyalist, this John may have been a prototypical Canadian “survivor”: he died in Cornwallis in 1810, aged ninety-seven. Other John Beckwiths in the family include his son, his great-greatgrandson , and his great-great-great-grandson; the last two were respectively my great-grandfather, John Albert Beckwith, and my grandfather, John Leander Beckwith (1856–1934). A colleague of mine at the University of Toronto, the political economist Wilbur Grasham, once sent me a page from a parish minute book in Braintree, England, which he was researching ; it contained the following entry dated 6 September 1619: 3 Notice is given us by William Stebbing of a wench intertained at John Beckwiths dwelling on Cursing greene that is supposed to have a greate belly, which the constables have warning to looke affter and to take order to remmove her if they find the report to be true. A very distant cousin, no doubt. Other remotely or unrelated cognomens include John Christmas Beckwith, the late-eighteenth-century Norwich organist and composer, and the English art historian John Beckwith, with whom I have sometimes been confused in library catalogues. The British army officer Lieutenant Colonel (later Sir) Thomas Sydney Beckwith, one of four Beckwiths found in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (two New Brunswick natives and two British émigrés), was described in a contemporary quotation as “certainly a very clever fellow, but a very odd fish.” He served briefly during the War of 1812, but as his DCB biography remarks, “his talents do not seem to have been put to the best use in North America”; he died in India.1 The most illustrious of Dad’s Nova Scotia forebears was named not John but Mayhew. Born in Cornwallis in 1798, great-grandson of the original Nova Scotia Yankee, he was a prosperous merchant, a pillar of the Baptist Church, one of the founders of Acadia University, and member for King’s County of the Nova Scotia legislature for twenty-one years. In registering my birth and later at my baptism, my parents gave me the name John Mayhew Beckwith. This was a nice historical touch, but my growing egalitarian and socialist leanings in my early twenties led me to suppress the middle name, and with apparent success: at least, as far as I know, among the few researchers who have probed my career none has ever discovered it. Perhaps today I feel more relaxed and less of an inverse snob about all this; my paternal family background has become for me a matter of interest and curiosity, and not of either pride or shame. Photos in the Middleton, Nova Scotia, museum show the grim faces of John Albert Beckwith and his wife Rebecca Barnaby. He was born in 1830, eldest of the eleven children born to Mayhew and his wife Eunice Rand, and operated as a farmer and fruit grower and packer in Nictaux. He died in 1900. According to an obituary (1898), Rebecca “engaged in every good work, beloved by all, and left an influence for good that will live while time lasts.” No penetrating view of her personality emerges from this. In those days you had to clench your teeth in order to hold the pose during the long photo exposure, so the stern looks of the pair are similarly unenlightening: they may have been...