My Dad has always been a hard worker and a builder. Today he's not building our family home on his free weekends, or our river cabin, or my childhood playhouse in the back yard. But he's still working hard, logging in the same long hours, but instead of a hammer and nails he's using his typewriter. Instead of blueprints and creative sketches of his own mind's vision for a house, or deck or cabinets, he's studying family trees, finding the missing pieces of information and then planning where to next search. Many of you probably know that Dad has written and published a book on the Ground/s side of our family entitled Plymouth Rock the Pacific, and that besides the IMFA newsletter his quarterly newsletter for the Ground/s family is now in its fourth year. Yet I didn't think our reunion in England could have had such a beautiful “form”, be so visible, not like a house, book or newsletter, yet something you could “walk into”, “look around” and “touch”.

But arriving in England, being met by David, watching him, Dad and Mom meet for the first time after such long arduous work via the mail planning this detailed tour of family landmarks, it seems as if we walked across a bridge and then into this new framework. Dad and David had created a space for all of us to walk into, and once there took us on the grandest of tours any one of us could have imagined. So very many images are packed into our six-day journey from London to Liverpool and back again. Thank goodness for photographs and brochures and historical books that I can now browse through as I return in my mind.

My Dad will always be a builder it seems, and now its bridges to the commonality between otherwise complete strangers. If it weren't that our family trees branched together, we would perhaps have no reason to stop our busy lives and get together to meet one another. We came together on this tour many as strangers, and as many who were finally putting faces with the names they had spent hours with in correspondence. We boarded the coach, wearing our name tags, returning the friendly, excited smiles.

New friendships have begun, old ones solidified, and all because we are related - family. Dad has built this bridge over continents, connecting English, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander, and I am so very proud to be so “closely” related.

The tour helped make history more alive for me imagining “family” members from generations now gone living in both hard and easy times, times of emigration, of the pioneer spirit, of the industrial revolution and the importance of cotton which sustained the slave trade to America as well as child labor in England, times of the landed gentry on large estates. All these aspects of life fell into a historical perspective that I have not experienced before. Because these were the life and times of our relatives.

It has made the search for family names, the identification of photographs, the elusive parish record of birth, death or marriage have such meaning, for these are the planks in our bridge. Our great-great-great grandparents are at one point in the bridge that we keep on crossing, taking us further and further back in time.

This tour made real so many clues we have about the class struggle and the life struggle that families endured, as well as the lives of those who held great wealth and power.

It is easier to imagine the calamities of life that all families endure regardless of class position, mothers who died in childbirth, children who died of disease, warriors and soldiers who died before their lives were fulfilled.

But of course, you who are reading this now know this feeling far better than I. And I'm sure you understand this part of my Dad in ways I can't, since I'm still on the - fringes of genealogical work. My part has only been to help in the printing of a newsletter' so I came to England rather like a “green shoot” among the many well rooted tall cedars of genealogists.

And what I have come home with is a full heart. I have always told my friends proudly of the work both Dad and Mom do. Mom's an accomplished genealogist in her own right, as well as Dad's right hand and soul-mate, always there to do more typing, more organizing, and more late night fruit cobblers to keep him going. I have come home understanding better what it is really that genealogists do. It's not only work that follows one “line” but it untangles the many lines that intertwine between families, and, ultimately of course, genealogy connects us all as sisters and brothers, parents, grandparents and “cousins” on planet earth. While I had thought this thought before, I have come home feeling it, in my heart. Thank you both, Dad and Mom.

Marie Mullenneix Spearman
August 1988