Review: The Promised Land by John J. Vrooman (6-27-06)

I found this historical novel, written in 1958, in a used-book sale somewhere, perhaps even a local garage sale. I am so happy I bothered with it. It’s not exactly best-seller material, even for 1958; one might even say it plods. Its subtitle says it all: “The Story of the Palatine Emigration from their Rhineland homes to the Hudson and Schoharie Valleys” (the Schoharie flows into the Mohawk west of Schenectady, NY). The book transforms some minor chapters in the history of Europe and the settlement of the colonies into a melodrama, one that nevertheless humanizes otherwise remote goings-on. The book’s chapter-by-chapter bibliography at the end assures that the events are historically accurate. (“Minor liberties have been taken with characters lifted from the pages of history. But names and genealogies, as well as dates, are substantiallly correct,” Vrooman writes at the start of the bibliography.) The author is himself a descendent of early New York settlers (albeit Dutch not Palatine), and he includes Adam Vrooman, presumably an actual historic person, as a minor character in the novel.

Early chapters convey the European background by introducing characters suffering the brutality of Louis XIV’s campaign to re-Catholicize France and Germany. French refugees come together with German Lutherans to make the trek to America, after an offer from the Queen of England to pay their way to settle in British colonies. The sheer arduousness of long-distance travel in those days is shocking to a modern reader: truly, only the toughest could have endured the trip up the Rhine on a log raft, months of confinement in ad hoc camps at each stop along the way, constant exposure to the elements and near-starvation, and relentless uncertainty about the future. The trip, much of spent stalled in various refugee camps, takes ten months to the coast of America, and then nearly another ten before the band arrives at their destination, the Schoharie Valley. All the while, the emigrants live in the most primitive conditions, building log huts and homes with their axes, roofing with thatch and sod, sleeping in bunks or on the ground in close quarters, eating weeds from the forest, corn grown from scavenged seed, and hand-out grain from the Patroon. Clothes fall to rags, disease overcomes hundreds, and Indians both provide kindly tips on survival and attack when piqued.

The novel shows a texture of life not so different from today’s. Decisions of all kinds involve government approval or registration; funding large-scale events and projects is difficult, and the have-nots suffer at every turn. Official promises are not always kept; trade and land and commerce of all kinds is monitored and regulated by the government. Naively, one might assume people came over to America on boats and struck out for the wilderness, then put up a fence in a place they liked and called the land theirs. But in reality, land had to be negotiated away from Indian owners, and then a patent acquired from the governor. Surveyors surveyed, boundaries were set, patents dispensed, deeds signed, over a period of months. All was made more complicated when language barriers had to be overcome: Germans needed translators; Americans of all sorts had to learn Indian languages or rely on bilingual natives.

And the expenditure of national funds for the settlement of the new continent was not without controversy. Those remaining in England begrudged the expense. The lower classes literally waged war on the refugees stalled in London; the middle classes and the pious practiced charity on them. Someone had to pay the doctors who accompanied the voyages and recompense their expenses for supplies. Extorting funding from the emigrants was difficult: few had the right skills in the right place to produce material of value for the crown.

Oddly, for a novel about an emigration inspired by the need for religious freedom, there is sparse religiosity in the book. There is an occasional and seeming brief impromptu prayer session; the travelers notice the existence of churches wherever they go; major life events have a minister to baptize, pronounce vows, or sanctify the dead. But the quest is really for life: a life without the threat of attack and destruction by imperialist neighboring states, a life lived in peace. As religious difference was seemingly a premise on which imperialism could be practiced in Europe, freedom of conscience is more a background than a motivator as the characters struggle to find a place to live in peace.

Genealogical note: When I took a look at Henry Z. Jones’s books on the Palatine immigration in NY, I was startled to see the name of Conrad Weiser and other characters from this book. I shouldn’t have been: Vrooman did his research; Weiser actually was significant enough to have quite a bit of research done on him which Vrooman had access to. Seeing my Burchhardt-Burger relatives on the lists in Jones’s books where Vrooman’s characters also appear confirmed my enthusiam for Vrooman’s work. It appears, though, that my ancestors did not take part in the same drama of settling the Schoarie valley as did the characters in this book; instead, they seem to have stayed in the Albany area and then moved south to Ulster and Dutchess counties.

Irish Interlude

A month without writing! I’ve been on the go, first to Lake Placid, and then to Ireland. I had not been to the ancestral sod since college, decades ago, I’m afraid. I never returned because my short visit as a student shocked me with the poverty and provinciality–two things I was already trying to get over from my actual life. But of course, I have heard about the Celtic tiger. I remember, in fact, the NPR segment about it that I heard while sitting in my car waiting for a skater to emerge from the rink, how surprised it left me feeling. The Irish, successful?

So I finally got myself over there to take it in. Or rather, be taken in. I had a lovely time, but Ireland is probably more expensive that Paris. It overflows with tourists, but about a third of them are not American–they’re German, French, Dutch, Asian . . . everyone’s out to see the pre-historic ruins, while the incense of religiosity has faded in the wind.

We drove extensively, discovering that all the towns are spiffed up: fresh paint on all the stores, bulging flower boxes and landscaped parks, excellent (though narrow) roads. The historic sites are all well-managed, the signage is quite good, and every one has a recent car. There is a building boom: new develpments going up everywhere, far out of Dublin, and often the hotel clerks and so forth are not Irish, but from Poland or other European country. One of the papers had an article about a construction-job fair held in Poland to recruit workers for Ireland.

I was grateful for the attention that’s been paid to maintaining ancient sites and documenting the past. In particular, we found the national museums full of treasures and beautifully done. The “Museum of Country Living” near Westport documents and preserves artifacts and folklife from rural Ireland, and I found its exhibits on old customs and way of life quite touching.

We also went to the Corlea Trackway, which preserves a piece of a log road across the otherwise unbreachable bog land, a road built in prehistoric times which sunk quickly into the peat through its own weight. The topography of Ireland is quite varied for such a small area, and the bog phenomenon is quite fascinating. The National Museum in Dublin displays many artifacts and even corpses preserved and then recovered from the anaerobic depths of the bogs. They still mine peat from the bogs and use it as fuel; in one guesthouse we stayed in, they had a peat fire burning in the main room.

Eurostyle has overtaken quaint in Ireland, and not just in the cities. It’s great for them. While my trip was not a genealogical one, I did go through Roscommon County to Elphin and ask for the locale of Tansiefield, where my Grandma Jennie, yes, one of the washerwomen, was born. We drove up the road and had a good look around. It’s beautiful there now, still rural, but hardly impoverished.

A Life in Stone/ A Life in Paper

After reading “A life in Stone,” (April 5, 2006), a reader questioned how I knew that the Jane and Jennie I found in the 1880 New Paltz census were my Hannah J. and Emma J. It’s a valid question, of course. Since I am writing about the process and about the existential issues piqued by my research, I don’t always explain all of the reasoning behind my conclusions. In the case of Hannah and Emma, I believe the evidence is pretty solid (see my comment (#3) after “A Life in Stone” for the details). In general, I work the evidence pretty hard before connecting the dots.

Yet often, evidence is barebones, and possibilities lure me along.

I recently acquired a big piece of solid evidence: the marriage certificate of my father’s paternal grandparents. I had discovered Walter Scott Davis in the online “Groom’s Index” for Kings County, 1876. This certificate is one of my earliest family documents, and I am so pleased to have it.

Although I have quite a bit of information about great-grandma Josephine, the family of Walter Scott Davis has been a blank up to now.

From this document I learn that Walter, 23, was born in Brooklyn to William Davis and Kesiah Perry. Now, that his father was “William” Davis is not a surprise; “William” is a frequent name among descendents, and in fact Josie and Walter named one son William (of course Josie had a brother William as well). But “Kesiah Perry”? That caught me off-guard.

So I started hunting. And when you hunt, you find, though what you find may not be yours. And with what I found, I made up a story of their lives.

The 23-year-old bridegroom, Walter, was about 7 at the time of the 1860 census. He turns up, though listed as age 6, along with four older brothers, John, William, Samuel, and George, ranging from 17 to 8, in the household of an Irishman, William Perkins, and his English-born wife, “Keziah” Perkins. There are also two Perkins children, the same age as Walter and his next-older brother George. William and Keziah are both on their second marriages, and Keziah brought five sons with her to the new family. Her first husband—surely it’s my great-great-grandfather William—died sometime after Walter’s birth about 1853-54 and long enough before the 1860 census for Keziah and William Perkins to marry. Keziah and William’s first three sons were born in England, letting me know the family emigrated between the birth years of the third and fourth boys, 1846 and 1852.

By 1870, the Perkins family seems to have dissolved. Three of the Davis boys—Walter, George, and the second oldest, William—are living together in Brooklyn with a 67-year-old English woman named Sarah Davis. Perhaps she is their grandmother. Since William is 25, this could just barely be true. Or perhaps she is an aunt, an older sister of their father’s. Did she come to America after their parents died, to take over—this would be perhaps after Kesiah died, sometime in the 1860s. Or had she been in America the whole time, living somewhere else? I have more searching to do to keep this story going.

There are other details that convince me that these Davis fellows are the family I seek. In 1870, the young Walter reports he is an engraver on steel. On his marriage certificate six years later, he lists engraver as his occupation. Later he will be a “foreman in mill,” perhaps the mill where he had formerly been an engraver. By the time he dies, though, he has become a policeman (I have a death notice from a Brooklyn paper that aligns with the cemetery receipt for his interment that I found among my own personal papers). He dies of lung disease. I wonder if his early occupation caused his later susceptibility to chest ailments.

I acquired yet one more piece of paper, and through it I met my great-great-grandma, Kesiah, and quickly invented a narrative of her life. Is Kesiah Perry Davis real, or is she a character of fiction. Is there really any sense to such a question?