Grave Reservations

I reached the place in Horse where the young slave makes a break for the Ohio River on the Horse and could not turn it back on.  My vivid imagination made it too hard to listen.  I have received reassurance from buddies that he does indeed make it to the river, but no reassurance that bad things won't still happen,  Still I plan to turn it back on today. 

In the meantime I turned on this book that I had bought on audible at bargain price.  I would have found the book to much more to my taste if the author had not thrown in the kind of language that rubs me the wrong way.  The book was light hearted and the premise that the heroine had psychic powers is fun.  But I would have trouble recommending the book.  Still I did finish it and the end leaves the reader satisfied.

 

Horse

I started the book on the day before Thanksgiving while recuperating at Sarah's home in Boston

after knee replacement.  Oh, my....Books such as this one don't come around every day.  I have always loved Geraldine Brooks.  I have read most if not all of her books.  But this book is really one of those books just meant for me!  I love it.  I am listening and knitting.  Here is a short bit of a review found on Amazon:

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South......

 

The Messy Lives of Book People

 

I needed a very mindless book for the first days home from total knee replacement.  And this fit the bill.  I did finish the book, but it was not my favorite.  The heroine is appealing.  The rest of the characters are of interest.  But the story line is a bit "trumped up"

Undaunted Courage

 On my way home from the Cheer competition today in Parkersburg, I thought about the fact that I had crossed the Ohio River three times.  And the fact that Paige Cruz is going to speak to us this coming Saturday about the Lewis and Clark Expedition 

The first chapters are a biography of Merriweather Lewis.  He was a man from the gentry.  His father was a Revolutionary war hero who not only bought his own uniform but also paid for his own keep as a contribution to the cause.  Unfortunately his father died young after a visit home as he prepared to return to the Revolutionary War arena.  His horse drowned while trying to cross a river and he made it back home totally wet and cold and died of pneumonia soon after.

His early years were spent on a plantation that according to this book looked to the west through Rockfish gap on the east side of the Blue Ridge mountains in Albemarle County.  It is very interesting to me as my Morrison family lived in the general area.  Although the Morrisons had moved to Pittsylvania County by the time Merriweather Lewis was born.  But the author points out that the place of birth and early years of Meerriweathre Lewis was influenced by the fact that his home faced to the west the frontier and to the east with the privileges of education and gentility and that Lewis loved both.

In the first few chapters William Clark is named only briefly as the two men met while serving in the army of the young United States.  

The Lost book of Eleanor Dare

From the Amazon review:  What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age.

I was not so captivated by the book that I read it quickly.  Probably my favorite part of the book was a fictional story of what happened to Eleanor Dare and her child, Virginia.  The author chooses to have her meet a man who is a spy for the English in St Augustine which is a Spanish settlement in the time of Eleanor's life.  He is a surgeon and is very likable.  They travel down the coast and marry once they reach St. Augustine.  The couple die in an epidemic but Virginia survives and is the second generation down from Eleanor.

 

Pendle Water/ The Kendal Sparrow

 I don't usually write about a book before I have started reading a book.  However, I just bought a paperback book on Amazon called the Kendal Sparrow

Barbara sent news of her book via the Bush River Quakers facebook site.  It is a private site for those of 

us who research the families living in the area before and during the Revolutionary War.  By chance 

my own research has moved to the general area in which this novel takes place.  The midlands of England 

in the 1600s.  I have a Quaker Elliott family that would have been living in the general area as well as 

at least one non-quaker family.  It is of great interest to me.  

As a bit of back ground before the book arrives, I have googled Pendle Water.  

Using the above close up, I find the general area on a larger map below.

It is possible that our Elliott family may have been from just northwest of Nottingham and Derby.  And 

From Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer: (page 438)

"The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania and West Jersey came from every part of England.  But one region stood out above the rest.  The Friends' migration drew heavily upon the North Midlands, and especially the counties of Cheshire, Lancaster, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.  In a list of English immigrants who arrived at Philadelphia between the years 1682 and 1687, more than 80 percent came from these five contiguous counties."

and

"On both banks of the Delaware River, these Quaker immigrants distributed themselves in small settlements according to their places of origin in Britain.  Country Quakers from Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire settled mainly in Chester and Bucks Counties.  "the farmers amoung them poverty stricken dalesmen from the moors of northern England." writes Frederick Tolles, "headed straight for the rich uplands of Bucks and Chester"  The lands around Trenton were occupied by emigrants from the Peak District of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.  London Quakers preferred the city and county of Philadelphia.  Emigrants from Bristol founded a town of the same name on the Delaware River.  Dublin Quakers occupied  Newton, West Jersey.  Emigrants from, Wales colonized the "Welsh Tract" west of the Schuylkill River"

My research on my Elliott family led me to making this my next book to read.  The book received excellent reviews.  

Earlier in the week, I sent the following information to our group that are matches on yDNA.  We believe this to be the family group connected to John and Sarah Elliott who took a certificate with them to Nottingham MM in 1722 but were accepted by New Garden MM. 

But the BIG thing is that when Jeff’s results came back as a match to us at 111 markers, I quit looking at much of what I had looked at and am now concentrating on the idea that the common ancestor for Jeff Houghton and for our Elliott line is a man who was living in the area of the North Midlands of England.  The Book Albion’s seed says:

From Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer: (page 438)

"The Quaker founders of Pennsylvania and West Jersey came from every part of England.  But one region stood out above the rest.  The Friends' migration drew heavily upon the North Midlands, and especially the counties of Cheshire, Lancaster, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.  In a list of English immigrants who arrived at Philadelphia between the years 1682 and 1687, more than 80 percent came from these five contiguous counties."

and

"On both banks of the Delaware River, these Quaker immigrants distributed themselves in small settlements according to their places of origin in Britain.  Country Quakers from Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire settled mainly in Chester and Bucks Counties.  "the farmers amoung them poverty stricken dalesmen from the moors of northern England." writes Frederick Tolles, "headed straight for the rich uplands of Bucks and Chester"  The lands around Trenton were occupied by emigrants from the Peak District of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.  London Quakers preferred the city and county of Philadelphia.  Emigrants from Bristol founded a town of the same name on the Delaware River.  Dublin Quakers occupied  Newton, West Jersey.  Emigrants from, Wales colonized the "Welsh Tract" west of the Schuylkill River"

So what led me to make this book my next read?  It was Jeff's comment that I add below:

Now the shock horror news of the Elliot's, they are bad, bad Vikings who came over with William and maybe a connection to the Britons of old.(Brittany for 500 years. ) Right history lessons and NOT Scottish by origin LOL

and the link that he sent to read:

https://selectsurnames.com/elliott/

These put the idea that perhaps our Elliott line did indeed come with the Norman Invasion.

 The author is telling the story of how Edward the confessor had come to power as King of England.

So the author is setting the scene and he says that the Anglo-Saxons had driven the Celts to the west and north,  And they had founded the kingdoms shown below.  The author does not mention Wales, so I am not clear about if this was an Anglo-Saxon area.  But with the coming of the Vikings, First Northumbria fell to the viking and then Mercia and East Anglia.  But the kingdom of Wessex remained and was ruled by Alfred the Great.  And then later by son and grandson.  They successfully fended against the Vikings.  They began adding land to the north until they were successful in driving out the Vikings from North in York.  Alfred did not set himself as a conqueror.  He stressed their common chronicle.  It was written in the every day language:  Land of Angles....Engleland.

He was a direct descendant of Alfred the great.  By the time of Edward's birth the Vikings had returned and harried, burned, slew as they moved into the area.

And the author explains that Normandy comes from the land of the North Men who moved into the area in:

The Normans (from the Latin Normanni and Old Norse for "north men") were ethnic Scandinavian Vikings who settled in northwest France in the early 9th century AD. They controlled the region known as Normandy until the mid 13th century.