Woodchurch to Cincinnati in 579 Years

In the village of Woodchurch,
in the county of Kent, in the country that called itself England was born a
girl named Katherina to the wife of Richard Endingham. The year was 1435. She
may be my 16th great grandmother. 



She married a man named Robert
Clarke. One of their sons was named William Clarke. William married a woman
named Benedicta Ashburnham. They had a son named Richard. The year adult Richard's wife had a daughter named after her mother was 1504. The place was called
Wellbourne, in Lincolnshire. 



When Margaret Thomas Clarke
grew up she married a man who was made a Knight of the Realm, Sir Richard Smith. Together,
they produced thirteen children, the eldest of whom was born William, in 1518.
His daughter Eleanor, grew up and married Alexander White. Sometime around 1546
or so, they had a daughter named Frances. 



They also had a daughter named
Katherine, who would grow up to travel with her husband, John Carver across the English
Channel to Holland. A couple of years later, they would take a small ship
across the Atlantic with a group of religious dissenters to start a new life in
a wild land near the James River in the New World. That trip would be
interrupted by bad weather and that group of Protestant dissenters, later
referred to as Pilgrims, landed and named Plymouth in 1620. Frances did not
follow her sister. Instead she stayed behind in England and grew up to marry
another Francis. 



Frances and Francis also followed her sister to Leiden, Holland, but at some point, they ended up going back to England.  Their son, John, was born in Leiden in 1602. Sometime after 1620, John made his way across the Atlantic in the
great Puritan migration, and ended up in Connecticut. He married a woman name
Johanna Whitmore. Their daughter, as was the custom at the time, was also named
Johanna. 

When little Johanna became a
young woman, she married a man named John Burrows. To them was born another
John Burrows in 1671 in Groton, New London. Young John married a woman with a
name typical of the time and place, Patience. Patience later gave birth to
Eunice. 



Eunice grew up to marry a man
named Jonas Curtis. Jonas and Eunice lived for time in Stratford, Connecticut,
where their daughter, Hannah, was born in 1739. Hannah grew up and married my
fifth great grandfather, Henricus, known also as Henry. Henry Ellsworth saw
action as volunteer for the Revolutionary militia. He had a famous lawyer for a
cousin by the name of Oliver Ellsworth. Oliver would become the third Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court a few years after helping to write part of the
Constitution of the United States. Oliver was also a friend of George
Washington. 



Much more ordinary Henry and
Hanna raised a family containing one son named John. John became a man and
married Mary Whitney, probably in New York state. They had two sons, one of
whom fought for the Union in the American Civil War. His name was Freeman. 



Before going off to war,
Freeman married young Scottish immigrant, Jane Smith. They had several children
before Freeman's unit went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1863. This was where
Freeman probably died of dysentery. 



Jane had to raise the younger
children, the last of whom was a spunky but mildly deformed girl named,
Marilla. Not one to let a little deformity deter her, Marilla met young Orlando
Richmond, whose family was also from New York. 



They married and had three
children. Their son, Harry was born in Ohio in 1875. He grew up in North
Baltimore, Ohio. Harry met and married a young Pennsylvanian girl named
Ninetta, who insisted on being called Nina. Nina rhymed with china. In North
Baltimore, Nina gave birth to Gladys, Grace, and Harold. Gladys was born in
1903, the year those Dayton boys, the Wright brothers, flew a motorized vehicle
in North Carolina. Early in the 1920's, Gladys, having gone to the teacher's
college in Bowling Green, married a man who towered almost a foot over her five
foot, one inch height. 



His name was Forest Borough.
Being from Weston, Ohio, Forest and Gladys bought a house half way to North
Baltimore, in the village of Deshler. Gladys and Forest had only one daughter.
Her name was Roberta, but like her grandmother Nina, she insisted on being
called by her nickname, Bobbie. Bobbie grew up to become a nurse and married my
father in Cincinnati, in 1951. I was born in 1958, third of four children.
Cincinnati was a long way from fifteenth century Woodchurch in Kent. By the
records written and maintained by many other people, I found my way there in
2013.

January One is an Excuse to Produce

     How many hundred 750 Words writers are starting today's writing mentioning the date.  Yes, it is the beginning of the year.  Yes, it is the first of the month.  And yes, it is a beginning.  That is okay.  Beginnings are a good place to start.  Start your week, your month, your year of writing, today.  Yes, start.  That is what is important.  Is writing necessary to you? Do you have things to say? Is expression vital to you?  By all means, start writing!
    Personally, I would like to invite everyone I know, who has any interest in writing, to use New Year's Day as an excuse to begin writing as a habit.  It will take about thirty or more days for it to begin the habit of writing.  There is a website called 750words.com.  It is a convenient place to start that habit.  Whether you want to write a journal, a novel, some poetry, an article, or maybe a wikipedia article, 750words.com is a good place to begin those pieces.  You can store the writing, here.  It will count your words for you.  It gives you an automatic community of writers, where you can be a member.
     You, who may never have been published.  You, who may have never belonged to any writing group.  Or, on the other hand, you, who have written three novels that you cannot get published.  Or you, who write in your journal every day since you were ten years old, may need some encouragement.  Or, as I implied above, you, who have something to say, can and should say it here.
     Today, I write.  Today, I tell myself, I will begin to write everyday, for a week, month, or, if I am disciplined, a year.  Yes, I will write 750 words or more, every day that I can, for as many days in a row that I can.  Yes, I will.  I have that many thoughts and words inside me, that are bubbling to the surface, daily, for many days in a row.  The row is not important.  How many is not important. Those percolating thoughts put into words are what need to be put down for whoever might read them.  It might only be you.  It might be 500,000 reading it online.
     New Year's Day is a fine day to start anything.  Maybe I will take one or more photographs, everyday for the next year as well.  I could be quite busy.  Write 750 words, minimally, daily, and take a photo or more, daily, everyday, from now until January 1, 2015.  It sounds very doable. Looking back over the last year, 365 days will go by in a flurry, and next year will be here in a couple of shakes of the head.
    What will I have accomplished. If nobody notices, nobody reads what I've written, nobody sees my photos, did I do anything?  Perhaps, but that would be the most negative and discouraging way of looking at it.  Minimally, if I write and photograph daily, for hundreds of days, I will have much more experience in both.  Anybody doing something like writing or taking photos daily, for any prolonged period, is going to get better at it, if only by doing it slightly faster.  Any awareness of increasing quality while performing regularly, will produce increased quality.
     I would invite anybody, who practices any skill, to begin to practice it with more regularity, today, January 1, 2014.  Then continue on January 2nd, 3rd, and continue.  If you have not shown yourself as much discipline as you know you need to accomplish your goals, start practicing today. Then do it again, tomorrow.  Is it important to you to get better?  Do a third day.  Do you really want to get good.  Do it a twelfth day.  How expert do you want to be? Do it a thirtieth day.  Go.  Be you.  Develop your skill.  Make it yours.
     That's it.  I am not going to encourage you more.  It really has to come from within you.  If it does not, you may quit on day six.  Ask yourself, how important is what you want.  For someone to give it to you is just not as important as you conceiving of it, thinking about it, and making it come to pass.  To not do it is failure.
     These are really my words to myself.  I write to myself.  Write more.  Write more frequently. Write more originally.  Write more imaginatively.  Write more tightly, more efficiently.  Be more interesting.  Be more compelling. Write like your life depends on it.