The Charles River - Boston, Massachusetts 

Welcome to Wherever You Are

During the week of August 13, I took my parents on a genealogy-based tour of New England. My mother’s ancestors are mostly from Massachusetts and Maine, so those were our primary destinations. Along the way, just to keep things interesting, we also paid a visit to the homes of some of my literary heroes.....

DAY 1

Our first stop on Sunday the 13th was at St. Thomas Seminary in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where we visited Father Henry Dery – the family genealogy expert. I am related to Father Henry through my maternal grandmother’s father, Jeremiah Alfred Dery, Henry's half brother.

Jeremiah was born on October 28, 1894, in Winchendon, Massachussetts. He served in the U.S. Army (Massachusetts – Pvt. 2 Co. 151 Depot Brigade) during the first World War, then married Gertrude Abbie Bergevin (May 28, 1904 – February 18, 1940) in her hometown of South Ashburnham around 1921. They had four children: Gloria Jeanette (October 16, 1922 – March 7, 1993), Dorothy Rita (August 20, 1924 – February 3, 1969), Jeremiah Daniel (March 16, 1927 – April 19, 2004) and my grandmother. After Gertrude’s death, Jeremiah’s sister Flora Mae helped raise the children at their home on Maple Street in Webster, Massachusetts – our next stop.

Jeremiah worked as a furniture upholsterer in Webster. The Dery Brothers Upholstering Company occupied the Joslin Building at the corner of Main and Mechanic. My mother remembers visiting him at work, where he would entertain his grandchildren by spitting out nails and hammering them into place with lightning-quick reflexes. She also has fond memories of nearby Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg – or, at least, she likes saying the name, which is allegedly a Native American word for “You fish on your side, I’ll fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle.”

Afterwards, we drove north through Worcester, where Jeremiah’s father (my great great grandfather) Adelard J. Dery lived for a while before moving to the Webster-Dudley area. Adelard was born in 1873 in the town of Granby in Shefford County, Quebec. He appears in U.S. census records for 1910 and 1920 as a resident of Worcester. Adelard worked as a dairy farmer and store owner in Dudley, where he was living at the time of his death on December 26, 1933. Adelard and his first wife, Emily O’Leary Desmarais (who died in December 1907), had ten children: Jeremiah Alfred, Flora Mae, Aldege (January 6, 1898 – September 1977), Dorilla, Bibianne, Maurice O. (March 14, 1895 – January 1, 1974), Joseph, Emile, Adelard Jr. (January 1, 1907 – January 30, 1940), and a baby girl who died in infancy.

According to the genealogy research of another relative, Adelard J. Dery is descended from Nicolas D’Hery, who was born in Havre de Grace en Seine, France, in 1625 and died on January 16, 1680, in Quebec, Canada. It has been suggested that the name Dery may have evolved from one of three towns in France with the name Hery, and that the surname was originally spelled D’Hery (“from Hery”).

Adelard Dery (1873 - 1933) 

Emile, Henry & Jeremiah Dery. Jeremiah and Emile were sons of Adelard J. Dery and Emily O'Leary Desmarais. Henry is the son of Adelard and his second wife Anna Lachance.

Jeremiah & Gertrude Dery, and daughter Gloria - 1923 

Main Street - Webster, Massachusetts

Note the name of this shopping center... and check my spelling

Lake.... Chargogg

DAY 2

Monday was my mother’s day to reminisce. We spent most of the day in Winchendon, Massachusetts, where she was born and spent summer vacations as a child. We also drove through Hubbardston, East Templeton and South Ashburnham.

The big draw in Hubbardston: a giant rock painted like a watermelon. (It’s a small town.) The rock sits in front of the home of my great aunt (Gertrude Bergevin’s sister), who lives along Route 68 near the town line. It was originally painted to resemble a steak during the Great Depression.

The nearby towns of East Templeton and South Ashburnham were home to my Bergevin ancestors. Gertrude Abbie Bergevin, my great grandmother, was the oldest daughter of Pierre Donat Sibiam Bergevin and Stella Collester Felt. Pierre was born on April 30, 1885 in Sainte-Martine, Quebec. He was naturalized as a United States citizen on December 24, 1919, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and was known thereafter as Daniel Peter Bergevin. He died in August 1959.

Daniel’s wife Stella was born on February 4, 1887, in South Ashburnham, and died on September 28, 1947. Her father, James Wilson Felt (February 15, 1842 – April 17, 1919), was a native of Sullivan, New Hampshire, who moved to East Templeton in 1859 to learn the cigar maker’s trade. James served in the Union Army (as a private in Company A, 2nd New Hampshire Infantry and later as 1st Lieutenant of Company G) and fought in 24 battles of the Civil War. He married Abbie Jane Foote (February 16, 1853 – February 14, 1914), daughter of Alonzo Foote and Sarah Jane Thompson of New Hampshire. Stella was the youngest of their five children.

Toward the end of the day, we visited St. Joseph Cemetery in Fitchburg, where Daniel Peter Bergevin and Stella Collester Felt are buried in a family plot alongside two of their children – Daniel Henry (August 3, 1907 – 1934) and William Edward (December 3, 1910 – February 28, 1986). I saw the name Bergevin on several other tombstones in the cemetery, but wasn’t able to determine a connection to my line. I also recognized the surname St. Germaine on one of the tombstones. Daniel Peter Bergevin’s mother was Zoe St. Germaine. She married Honore Bergevin in Sainte-Martine sometime before 1871.

Honore is descended from Jean Bergevin dit Langevin, born in Angers, France, on March 11, 1635. Jean immigrated to “New France” (Canada) in 1665. Researchers interested in this line can find more information on the webpage of Jacques Trempe. His information is supported by details in a book called The Bergevin Beginnings, by Jerry Longeuay dit Bergevin.

Daniel & Stella Bergevin 

watermelon rock

watermelon rock
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

The pride of Hubbardston, Massachusetts

DAY 3

On Tuesday, we took a break from family genealogy and stepped into a broader current of American history in Concord, Massachusetts. Concord has been called the birthplace of the American Revolution (the first “forcible resistance” to colonial rule occurred just north of the town center) and the birthplace of American literature (Concord was home to key figures of Transcendentalism, the first distinctly American literary movement).

We started our day at North Bridge – where one of the first battles of the American Revolution took place on April 19, 1775. On opposing banks of the Concord River, two stone monuments serve as reminders of the event – one in memory of the British Redcoats who lost their lives, and one in honor of the colonial farmers who fired “the shot heard round the world.”

Just north of the bridge sits The Old Manse, the one-time home of Reverend William Emerson, a patriot who participated in the battle on April 19, 1775. It was in this house that Rev. William Emerson’s son, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote his first published essay “Nature.” Years later, the house was also home to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote some of his most famous short stories – including “Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” – while living there.

Next, we visited Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a sprawling old burial ground that extends for two-fifths of a mile on Bedford Street, and contains about 10,000 graves. In the main part of the cemetery, there is a section known as Author’s Ridge – where literary figures Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott are buried. Visitors to the cemetery have placed small pebbles and coins on the tops of many of the tombstones – I’m not sure what the significance of this is. In the town center, there is an even older burial ground, where most of the gravestones are made of slate, and are too thin to accommodate such acknowledgments from visitors.

In the afternoon, we went hiking at nearby Walden Pond, made famous by the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who lived here briefly (two years, two months and two days) in a 10 x 15 foot cabin that he built himself.

The Old Manse 

The Old Manse 

North Bridge (and The Old Manse, visible through the trees)

North Bridge (and The Old Manse, visible through the trees)
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Author's Ridge - Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Author's Ridge - Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Burial site of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson... among 10,000 others.

Emerson's rock

Emerson's rock
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

This giant piece of granite serves as a grave marker for Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is buried in a family plot alongside his wife and daughter.

Walden Pond

Walden Pond
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own work and laws and worship.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

Site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond

Site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Replica of Thoreau's cabin

Replica of Thoreau's cabin
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“Men frequently say to me, ‘I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.’ I am tempted ot reply to such – This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we most want to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.”

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Replica of Thoreau's cabin

Replica of Thoreau's cabin
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Walden Pond

Walden Pond
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought bottomless.”

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Walden Pond

Walden Pond
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

DAY 4

On Wednesday, we went up the coast to Maine. Our eventual destination: the seaside town of Bath, which was once home to my maternal grandfather’s family – the Kingsburys. We made a few stops along the way.

Since I’m a big fan of Stephen King, driving into Maine was like crossing over into a land of myths. This is a corny statement, but it’s true. I felt the same way the first time I went to London. King was born in Portland, and lived his teen years in the rural town of Durham, twenty five miles northwest of his birthplace. It was here, in the attic of his aunt’s house on Methodist Corners in West Durham, that he discovered a trunk full of pulp fiction novels and magazines (left behind by his father, who abandoned the family when King was only two years old), and started writing stories of his own.

We drove through Durham, then on to nearby Lisbon, which some say is the real-life basis for King's fictional town of Castle Rock. As a teenager, King commuted every day from Durham to Lisbon High School, riding in a converted hearse (!) with a fellow student named Dean Hall, who is now a teacher at his old alma mater. (This according to one of the school secretaries who kindly allowed me to go in and take some pictures of the school… She added, shyly, that she too attended high school with King, and that he “was not what you’d call popular”). King and Hall were accompanied in the hearse by the school’s biggest outcast – a girl who inspired the character of Carrie White in King’s first novel. No doubt King could sympathize with her lack of social graces – he himself was taller (6’2” by age 12) and heavier than most of his peers and, in his own words, "very uncoordinated."

The town of Lisbon sits just north of the Androscoggin River. Crossing the bridge into Lisbon Falls, we saw the old Worumbo Mill to the left. Just the sight of it made me think of King’s short story “Graveyard Shift” in the Night Shift collection - about a group of blue collar workers trapped in the basement of an old mill with giant mutant rats. In his nonfiction book On Writing, King says that he worked there during the summer of his senior year in high school. He describes it as being “like a workhouse in a Charles Dickins novel.” Worumbo has been closed for decades (today, many of the local citizens are employed at nearby Bath Iron Works), but it is still an imposing presence on the landscape.

A few miles southeast of Lisbon, we visited the Shiloh Chapel – built in 1896 as the home base of an apocalyptic evangelical group known as “The Kingdom.” Shiloh appears in King’s short story “The Body.” According to King’s biographer George Beahm, Shiloh may have also been an inspiration for the Marsten House - a haunted house on the hill that looms over the fictional town of Jerusalem’s Lot in King's second novel.

Finally, we left for Bath – where my great great great grandfather, Lewis Kingsbury, lived. According to Bath Families in the 19th Century by Alfred T. Holt and Lewis's obituary in the Bath Daily Times, Lewis was born in 1821 in Quebec. He moved to Bath as a young man, and worked at Bath Iron Works as a seaman and laborer. Lewis died on September 30, 1897, and is buried in the sprawling Oak Grove Cemetery in Bath. The grave marker names only Lewis and his wife, Mary L. Ambrose (1825 – December 2, 1901), but other family members are also buried in the family plot: their son Alexander (July 8, 1863 – May 13, 1942) and several grandchildren.

I have been unable to determine the heritage of Lewis Kingsbury. Family legend says that he was not born with the surname Kingsbury. One version claims that he believed he was responsible for the death of a man at sea, and so jumped ship and changed his name. Another version says that he was descended from a Frenchman whose name was anglicized to “Kings” and eventually “Kingsbury.”

My great great grandfather, Frederick Kingsbury, who also spent his life in Bath and was employed at the Iron Works as a riveter, is buried in a separate family plot in Oak Grove, alongside his wife May Florence Wainwright (August 17, 1864 – August 21, 1937), daughter of Joseph Henry Wainwright (November 18, 1832 – August 18, 1899) of Hamilton Parish, Bermuda. Frederick and May were married on December 21, 1891, in Belgrade, and had three children: my great grandfather Earl Wainwright (June 23, 1897 – October 24, 1970), Beatrice M. (stillborn on February 7, 1902), and “Charlie” (July 1899 – April 26, 1904). Also buried in the plot, according to cemetery records, is Annie E. Vincent (who died on November 19, 1931 at age 70) – I’m not sure what her connection to the family is.

Lisbon High

Lisbon High
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Stephen King's alma mater

Lisbon High

Lisbon High
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

I imagine Charlie Decker, the anti-hero of King's early novel "Rage," in these halls.... and King himself, looking like Jerry O'Connell in "Stand By Me."

Lisbon High School gymnasium

Lisbon High School gymnasium
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

The setting of Carrie White's prom night bloodbath?

Worumbo Mill on the Androscoggin River

Worumbo Mill on the Androscoggin River
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“Outsiders think they are the same, these small towns – that they don’t change. It’s a kind of death the outsiders believe in, although they will call it ‘tradition’ simply because it sounds more polite. It’s those inside the town who know the difference – they know it but they don’t see it.” – Stephen King, “It Grows on You” (short story)

Worumbo Mill

Worumbo Mill
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

A workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel. A death trap in a Stephen King short story.

Shiloh Chapel

Shiloh Chapel
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Inspiration for the Marsten House in "Salem's Lot"?

Fred & May Kingsbury at home in Bath, Maine.

Bath, Maine

Bath, Maine
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Route 1 over the Kennebec River, near Bath Iron Works.

tombstone - Lewis Kingsbury

tombstone - Lewis Kingsbury
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Lewis Kingsbury is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Bath, Maine, alongside his wife, one child and several grandchildren. Not too far away is another Kingsbury family plot, where Lewis's son Frederick is buried with his wife and two children.

DAY 5

Thursday was another history & literature-themed day. We started out in the historic town of Salem. An important port for early colonists, the town was made famous by the 1692 witchcraft trials.

Our first stop was the old cemetery where John Hathorne, the “witchcraft judge” and an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, is buried with his family. Adjoining the cemetery is a memorial to those who were persecuted as witches – a row of stone benches with haunting inscriptions. On the other side of the cemetery sits one of the houses where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived as a child. On the way out of Salem, we drove by Hawthorne’s birthplace and “the House of Seven Gables,” made famous by his novel of the same name.

Next stop: Cape Ann, a scenic seaside resort. Cape Ann is unquestionably beautiful, but the real attraction for me was the role that the area’s landscape plays in the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

Eliot grew up in St. Louis, but his family roots were in New England – he was a descendant of one of the founding members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Every summer, his father Henry Ware Eliot would take the family to Gloucester – a fishing community known to contemporary moviegoers as the setting of The Perfect Storm. The Eliot family stayed in the Hawthorne Inn on Main Street until Henry built a house just up the hill from what is now the Gloucester Harbor public beach access.

We followed the rocky coastline up toward Rockport, from where we could see the Cape Ann Light Station. This landscape made an indelible impression on Eliot, and the title of the third section of his masterpiece Four Quartets (“The Dry Salvages”) is a reference to a group of treacherous rocks off of Straightsmouth Island, near the Cape Ann lighthouses.

At the end of our day, we breezed through Woburn and Lexington, home place of my maternal grandfather’s mother’s family – the Blodgetts. According to family researchers, all of the Blodgetts living today are descended from the same man – Thomas Blodgett, born on November 18, 1604, in the parish of Stowmarket in Suffolk, England. Thomas was the first generation in America, and none of his relatives in England survived the plague. He arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in late July 1635, with his wife Susannah and sons Daniel and Samuel, on board the ship Increase. They settled in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, where Thomas received land and began pursuing his occupation as a “glover.” He died on August 7, 1642.

Other Blodgett family genealogy researchers have provided me with excerpts from a seven-volume history of Thomas’s descendants, through which I have been able to trace my lineage. I am descended from Thomas’s son Samuel (July 12, 1633 – May 21, 1720), who moved to Woburn after his father’s death, and became a landowner and a prominent official there; and Samuel’s son Thomas (February 26, 1660 or 1661 – September 29, 1740), one of the most active and prominent citizens in the Lexington, who contributed money toward the purchase of the first town Meetinghouse, and toward the purchase of the Lexington Common in 1711.

Jumping ahead… their descendant Leburton Kimball Blodgett (September 6, 1863 – September 18, 1922) was a musician, following in the footsteps of his father James Leburton Blodgett (June 12, 1833 – November 8, 1919), who played violin with the Boston Symphony. Leburton was also the father of my great grandmother, Mildred Blodgett (May 6, 1897 - September 19, 1963), who married Earl Wainwright Kingsbury Jr.

In Westview cemetery in Lexington, Leburton is buried alongside his wife Marion E. Richardson (1873 – July 1968) and four of their children: Mary Richardson (March 2, 1903 – December 29, 1980), Grace Emery (May 3, 1907 – February 3, 1988), Frank Richardson (October 9, 1908 – December 21, 1987) and Marion (November 6, 1910 – May 21, 2002). Mary’s tombstone cites Revelations 21:3-4. “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

The Minute Man - Lexington, Massachusetts 

Lexington Common

Lexington Common
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Site of the first three houses in Lexington, Massachusetts. Thomas Blodgett (1660/61 - 1740) contributed 5 shillings to the town's purchase of this land in 1711.

Leburton Kimball Blodgett (1863 - 1922) at the time of his high school graduation.

Children of Leburton Kimball Blodgett and Marion E. Richardson: Mildred (center), James Herbert (born on June 19, 1899), Ida Lovejoy (born on May 2, 1901), Mary Richardson (March 2, 1903 - December 29, 1980), John Little (May 12, 1904 - October 1979), and Grace Emery (May 3, 1907 - February 3, 1988). This photo was probably taken in early 1908.

The Burying Point - Salem, Massachusetts

The Burying Point - Salem, Massachusetts
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

tombstone - Judge John Hathorne

tombstone - Judge John Hathorne
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

In the foreground: the tomb of Judge John Hathorne. In the background: a pair of museums devoted to the infamous witch trials that he oversaw.

Witch Trials Memorial

Witch Trials Memorial
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Each of the stone benches on this square bears the name of a citizen condemned as a witch in the summer of 1692.

Witch Trials Memorial

Witch Trials Memorial
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

House of Seven Gables

House of Seven Gables
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

The house made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne's second novel. The author grew up across the street. This house was owned by relatives.

Eliot House

Eliot House
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

This house - on Edgemoor Road in Gloucester, Massachusetts - is where T.S. Eliot spent his summers as a child, just up the street from Gloucester Harbor.

Gloucester Harbor

Gloucester Harbor
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

Cape Ann

Cape Ann
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

“Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer. We might just as well ask why, when we try to recall visually some period in the past, we find in our memory just the few meagre arbitrarily chosen set of snapshots that we do find there, the faded poor souvenirs of passionate moments.”

– T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920)

Cape Ann Light Station

Cape Ann Light Station
Originally uploaded by longblackline.

The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.

- T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"