thomas leverett weblog

general report

I was chugging along peacefully, somewhat burnt out on ESL, when our family decided not to go back to Texas in the summer of 2016 and stayed up here high in the mountains of southeast New Mexico. It's a slightly isolated environment, but we have a community, and though our online connection is spotty, we each get to use the internet when the others are asleep.

I have kept my online jobs: tutoring at the writing center at Texas Tech, and teaching Chinese children online, and pretty much let go of substitute teaching in the public schools, which I was doing in Alamogordo. I was getting older (65) and the kids were getting younger, and when we moved way out to the country, it became too far to drive for too little reward. Also, we have a situation at home that requires much more of our attention; our youngest adopted children have grown and require a unique kind of attention now. So, I'm down to two jobs.

In my writing, I've become somewhat absorbed in my ancestry; this happens sometimes when you are my age. In my case the line of Leverett descent is a little foggy, especially around the American Revolution (1760-1780) and the witch trials (1692). Those times were especially intense for those who lived in Boston (as most of the Leveretts still did) and they got caught up in things, rather than writing it all down carefully. There are two wild things about that: one is that much more is online now than ever before. In other words, I can find stuff that previous genealogists in the family had no access to, and I can find it without leaving my chair; most of the ones who did anything about it, including my parents, actually made trips to Boston or Salt Lake or wherever, and still didn't find any more than I have.

But second, there are really fascinating things that were happening back then, and it just gets thicker as I go. There was a movement among many of these relatives to go to Windsor, Vermont, a small village on the Connecticut River, as apparently there was land there and a fine old mansion not far from the village. This one guy had fourteen kids, but he was a gentleman farmer, apparently because his father had made enough money that he didn't have to worry too much about income. But the father, who had sold British goods in a warehouse on the Town Dock in Boston, lost everything in the occupation of Boston by British troops, when suddenly selling British goods was the wrong trade to be in. And somewhere in there, an ancestor is lost. Somebody ended up out on a farm in Needham, Mass., and the guy in Vermont, though he had fourteen, none of them seem to be ours at all. One of them started an axe factory, though.

So you see where my passions have gone. I'm not finished yet. I'll update this blog and put some of this stuff up here, for, as long as I have a professional side of me, I'll keep this going. I still have a personal blog that collects the personal side of me and where I will archive what's going on with my family. What happens there is that I like to have family pictures, but I don't like the labels to make it easier for them to show up on google images. So I put the labels on other pages, and it's a little more tedious. But my genealogy work has convinced me that it's important to let future people sort out what happened and how. Somebody will tell my story, and when that happens, I want them to have some decent material.

posted by tom @ 7:05 AM