I photographed all the tombstones (abt 270) in the Quaker (Friends) Cemetery in South Yarmouth. They are being transcribed at:

http://magravestones.com

To see hi-res images of these photos just check out

http://www.SearsR.com/quaker_yarmouth/

Let me know if you make any connections.

Ray

Cape Cod Gazetteer

I have been collecting place names and other gazetteer information for Cape Cod and Barnstable county for many years.

Here is a sampling of the letters A-B. http://www.searsr.com/CCGZ

It is interesting how many duplications there are. Were the folks just not very imaginative when it came to naming places or were they honoring the name by using it more than once.
There are four David Baker houses -
1) Upper County Rd, Dennis
2) 3118 Main St, Barnstable
3) Main St, Dennis
4) Bound Brook Island, Wellfleet

Francis Baker has a house in Brewster and one in Falmouth.

Just wait til I take a look at some of the ponds! How many Long Ponds are there on Cape Cod anyway?

Boston Tea Party

With the recent Tea Parties being held around the country to protest government spending (and resulting taxation) I am reminded of the Cape Cod folks that participated in the Boston Tea Party on Dec 16, 1773. My Great4-Grandfather Capt Edmund Sears (1712-1796) was listed as a member of the colonists who threw boxes of tea into Boston Harbor. He was definitely for independence and all four of his sons served in the war supporting the patriots from Yarmouth. Tea smuggling was big business in the middle 1700s.

Upon Edmund's return to the Cape soon after the Tea Party, (as a sea captain he had been long absent from home), on entering the house he went straight to the "bowfat," and without saying a word to any one, seized the teapot and caddy, and threw them into the garden with a crash.His astonished wife whispered to the children, "your poor father has come home crazy."He then proclaimed that from theat time henceforth none of his family were to drink tea, or wear upon their persons any articles of British manufacture.

Sorry Grandpa but I guess I am violating family tradition by becoming an avid tea drinker. Maybe he would excuse this since we won the war and later Cape Cod family fortunes and the shipping industry of the 19th century depended on Clipper ships racing from Boston and New York to China to bring home the latest tea harvest.

My current cuppa is from a box of twenty different flavors I received for Christmas labeled Boston Tea Party tea from the Boston Tea Company, established 1949. The English Breakfast variety is very delicious and the only thing puzzling me now is that the back of the box says
Boston Tea Company
Hackensack, NJ www.bostontea.com


"Some like pictures of women and some likes 'orses best,
But I like pictures of ships, by Gum, and you can keep the rest,
And I don't care if it's North or South, the Trades or the China Sea,
Shortened down or everything set, close-hauled or running free;
But paint me a ship as is like a ship and that'll do for me."
http://www.eraoftheclipperships.com/shipsstoreweb.html

Enjoy a cuppa tea soon!

Consanguinity - The Cousin Factor

I have posted about connections among cousins before. I believe there is a high degree of consanguinity amongst Cape Cod residents up to about 1880. Cousins marrying cousins was a necessity or at least a common occurance in isolated communities like those on the Cape.

My PAF database has most of the descendants of Richard Sears of Cape Cod and many of those of Thomas Howes. By adding to this collection from the Cape Cod Library of Local History and Genealogy series, the Nickerson Family genealogies, Burgess family, et al I believe I can study these relationships more closely.

From PAF I can export the family number of each individual and whether they are a spouse in another family.

Then I can create a database table of each person in the database and all of their descendants.

Finally I can then count the number of common ancestors shared by each pair of individuals in the database and calculate the distance to the ancestor. For example if the distance to the common ancestor is 2 the ancestor is a grandparent(the two people are first cousins). If the distance to the common ancestor is 1 then the ancestor is a parent (the two people are siblings).

I will generate some preliminary results based on Sears and Howes in my current database and let you know what they look like. I know of many second, third and fourth cousins in these two families that intermarried.

I've been keeping up with the rowing and completed over 600,000 meters since June. At this rate I could row 600 miles in 2010 if I combine "on the machine" and "on the water" rowing totals!

I have been using my Christmas break to work on the sketch of the Sears Family Tree. I have only been able to include descendants of Richard Sears with the surname Sears so women tend to lose out when they get married. In my database though, I carry any and all descendants of Richard. http://www.SearsR.com/richard1/

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas. Blessings for the new year as we start this decade. Where did the "naughties" go?

Cape Cod Stories

I was searching for information about my favorite subject - Cape Cod Consanguinity (the relationships of one Cape Codder to another) and stumbled upon a trove of stories written in the 1920s

http://www.oldandsold.com/articles17/cape-cod-21.shtml

Pirates, geniuses, the County and others. I just finished reading the Pirates in two parts and although names are fuzzy and sometimes missing, the overall image is clear.

I hope you enjoy this new website find!

Blogging is difficult - rowing is harder

Wow, I didn't realize how difficult it is to maintain a blog! I've been rowing on the Oklahoma River since June. There are hundreds of us down there every week rowing at the Chesapeake Boathouse, now home of the US Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Training Center. We row in boats that are from 20-60 feet long and about 2 feet wide known as rowing or sculling shells. A Cape Codder might look on one of these boats as quite useless but the boats do have a pedigree. Wherries have been in use since the 1500s as a means to carry people on the rivers.

The 1535 Coverdale Bible translates a portion of Ezekial as "All whirry men, and all maryners upon the see…" so I am proud to be counted as a whirry man.

The Thames Wherry of 1555 was "22½ feet long and 4½ wide 'amidships' and could carry up to five passengers."

These days our boats carry only rowers - anywhere from 1 to 8 people pulling on sculls or oars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wherry

"During the eighteenth century rowing competitions for watermen became established on the Thames, and the prize was often a new wherry. The Sporting Magazine describes an event on 6 August 1795 as 'the contest for the annual wherry given by the Proprietors of Vauxhall by six pairs of oars in three heats'."

I've been keeping track of my progress and so far have rowed 280,000 meters (We like to count everything in meters because it looks more magnificent than just saying 175 miles).

I was in two races last Sunday, the first a mixed (men and women) quad (4x) in which we placed 6th and the second in a mixed 8+ where we took the Bronze medal. The Boot of the Oklahoma River Regatta saw teams from all over the country numbering more than 200 boats and 1300 athletes. This past week I have been sidelined with a sore wrist (some tendon is complaining) probably because I was not pulling the oar properly. So that gives me a minute to blog.

I saw a sign recently that said "Rowing never gets easier, you just go faster!" That's me. I am having withdrawals from not being out on the river.