Back in December 2019, when we all lived in a world unbelievably unconcerned with life under COVID-19 & I still lived on the Caribbean coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, I tuned in to the final session of a Wheel of the Year course offered by a witch I really respect.
The last class focused on cultivating long-term rituals & practices for transformation, and the witch talked about using online genealogy tools like Ancestry.com to seek out & cultivate missing links to Ancestors & Elders who most certainly play a role in shaping our inner selves & our greater purposes as we spin around the sun year in and year out.
I grew up listening to my dad’s frequent reminders of where he came from-- Born in SALEM! The city of WITCHES! With the DEVIL inside of him!
Family lore passed around by the enthusiastic storytellers that raised me made it easy to imagine that there might be some curious characters lurking in the higher-up branches of my tree.
The witch’s suggestion called to me.
((A caveat: Both the witch & I agree that there are some major issues with the mainstream genealogy industrial complex represented by for-profit family history research sites like Ancestry.com or data-harvesting DNA services from biotech companies like 23andMe. They are what Audre Lorde might call “the master’s tools” -- that which works to keep the foundational violences of white supremacy & patriarchy in place. Follow my post next week for a deep-dive into the personal & political stakes of doing genealogy & ancestral work as a white person in the 21st century))
From what I’d heard from the Whitmore side of my family (my dad’s dad’s side), our roots stretched deep into the landscape of colonized New England.
First, we were settlers: shipbuilders and revolutionaries from Salem and Newburyport and other coastal Massachusetts towns whose indigenous names were obliterated alongside so much more in the originary theft of that land.
Later, firmly settled, we were locals -- film projectionists and Vaudeville actors and furniture salesmen and professional trumpet players. Alcoholics, many of us.
On the Santos side of my dad’s family (my dad’s mom’s side), we were early-20th century immigrants--factory workers and carpenters and fisherman from the Azores, an autonomous archipelagic region of Portugal made up of nine islands formed when volcanic rock busted through the floor of the North Atlantic about 8 million years ago.
The lives and textures of these grandmothers & grandfathers were mostly lost to me when my dad lost his first-generation mother to breast cancer when he was a young kid.
She was 28 and he was 7.
Had I known her, I might have called her Avó, but she was mostly a mystery to me growing up, as were her family members and the stories they might have shared.
However, a hint about her father’s magic -- his ability to cure one’s illness by taking a hair from the sick person’s head into another room and doing his thing with it -- surely made me wonder if there might be some bruxaria in my line.
On my mother’s side, both parents were children of Polish immigrants. First generation factory workers and truck drivers and farmers, some of whom gained enough capital & connection to purchase land in Western Massachusetts and seed that land with new potential, which grew up each passing season as asparagus and tobacco and cucumbers.
Alcoholics, too. Some of us.
It would not necessarily be a light set of bags to unpack, but something told me that the records organized and held behind the Ancestry.com paywall might reveal something I wouldn't or couldn’t anticipate (lucky as I am to have records to access).
So, I signed up for a free trial offer at Ancestry.com committed to meeting my Ancestors. I went about the process intuitively--seeking and following connections to names, dates of birth, numbers, geographic locations, or other biographical details that rang a bell or seemed interesting or strange or somehow compelling. I followed my nose, which, as a life-long researcher and writer, is pretty much what I do best.
Within the first 24 hours of scrolling through the app’s suggested “Hints,” I came across a name that piqued my curiosity: LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE. I’m still not sure what about this specific name called to me, other than its lyrical ring and the strangeness of meeting a Larkin born in the 18th century.
I put his name into the Google machine and quickly found a match embedded within the website of a historical research project belonging to the archivist SJ Wolfe at the American Antiquarian Society. (Side note: when I went to publish this blog post, I discovered that the original site I looked at in December was no longer active. You can still see some of Wolfe’s related work here). The project seemed to be about “Mummy Mania,” or accounts of Egyptian mummies in 19th-century America.
Huh?
LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE, an empty name and a placeholder in history just a few seconds before, began to materialize before my eyes. A vessel for a story.
A few more keystrokes across Ancestry.com and Google and some of the other genealogy tools I had just been learning to use to track public records quickly returned more juicy Larkin bits.
He was, it seemed, a sea captain and a merchant. He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in the early fall of 1780. A Virgo. He mastered vessels to Caribbean and Mediterranean ports. He was born 5 years into the Revolutionary War to a father, Seward Lee, who was also a ship captain and who fought for independence in the Beverly regiment, survived, and then died of yellow fever in the West Indies a few years later.
And, perhaps most shocking, according to the archival research of American Antiquarian librarian SJ Wolfe--LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE was a mummy importer.
On one of Larkin’s merchant voyages to Mediterranean port cities, he purchased an Egyptian mummy in Leghorn, Italy (now called Livorno) and imported it into New York City in August of 1824.
He then arranged for the mummy’s public unwrapping by two surgeons in New York City in December of that year. Wolfe’s research shows that Larkin’s was the first public mummy unwrapping in the U.S. at the time.
Less than a year after the event, LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE perished at age 44 on the exact same day his father had died 20 years before--August 2. The recorded cause and location of death? “Of anxiety, off the coast of Africa.”
What?!
As I knitted these details together, my curious mind immediately wanted to know everything.
What was this Ancestor doing “off the coast of Africa” in 1825?
What the hell did “anxiety” mean back then & how did one die from it? exactly
Why did Larkin's date of death (August 2) match his father’s date of death exactly 20 years earlier?
Why did father & son both die on sea voyages to places of intense colonial violence?
Who were his family & what did they think?
Was he an alcoholic? Was he a slaver? Was he an asshole or a good guy?
What residue did his deeds leave?
I could tell right away that this story would be a loaded one and that I needed to know it and write it in all its complex glory.
So, I began to write for 30 minutes every day. No judgement, no undo. Just flow.
I started by trying to conjure the environment, the politics, and the family ties that bound up this emerging cast of people: Salem and Beverly harbors. The ships. The trade routes. The politics of the early Republic. The weight of a generation born into Revolution and into a nascent nation-state built on paradox, contradiction and uncertainty. The advent of American capitalism & the merchants who drove its growth.
These are the things I could latch on to. My experience as a historical researcher in the areas of race, gender, and sexuality has trained me to do this work -- to seek out the deep, deep historical context of what appears to be an uncomplicated given, to notice where bits of the story are missing or handled without care and to attend directly there; to deploy research skills and imagination together to fill or at least take note of the holes and silences in archives, institutional histories, and even family lore by the ongoing work of erasure.
What I couldn’t quite latch on to so easily was the feeling element of this cast of characters:
What made them tick and talk and try new things in the environments they moved through?
What made them pull up anchor and leave behind a wife and 4 children and sail to Italy and purchase a mummy and then defile it in public?
Their dreams and fears and desires still feel far away, but the shape of it all continues to reveal itself as I commit to the work.
A few weeks into the process, I met someone I wasn’t expecting to meet. More archival research brought me to Larkin’s wife--Betsey Lovett Lee, a figure just as fascinating as the captain himself. After her husband’s untimely death at age 44 (off the coast of Africa, of Anxiety), Betsey lived another 50 years as a widowed woman.
The records tell us that she won a case she brought to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which awarded her money for one of her husband’s ships that was captured by the French in the War of 1812.
Betsey shares a birthday with my dad -- August 17. They are only 169 years apart.
She was born at the tail end of the Revolutionary War and lived through the War of 1812 and the Civil War, before finally passing in Beverly in 1870. She is a grandmother with stories to tell me.
Today, I know that time isn’t linear & that I am a vessel for divine creative inspiration.
Today I know that my encounters with Larkin & Betsey are not a coincidence & that doing history with imagination is just another way of knowing.
Today I know that when I visited Larkin’s papers in an archive this past month he became less paper, more flesh.
I know that purchasing & unwrapping a mummy that was likely exhumed & stolen by French soldiers during Napoleon's occupation of Egypt could not have many positive effects. I know those effects are carried in me still.
I know that curse is just another word for the lingering energy of harm & that the salty air that Larkin breathed is the salty water that poured from my own dad’s eyes.
Today, I know that I am the vessel.
I know that the sea is deep and that it never forgets and that Larkin is down there waiting for me, alongside so many others who were not Masters or Merchants when they crossed.
So, let’s pull up the anchor & dive the fuck in.
Come with me on this journey & I’ll share what I discover & what I desire to discover.
I’ll tell you what’s working in my research process & what it means to this story.
I’ll talk about the ancestral & political & emotional dimensions of history & why those things matter in 2020.
We can map this story together & if we're lucky, we can find some other futures in the process.
MORE WILL BE REVEALED!
XO
Already captivated!
Fascinating,Leo!!