It’s easy to pinpoint the moment when I became caught up in family history research. My great aunt, Dorothy, had just died, and my dad came into possession of her collection of photos and documents. I remember it clearly. We were in the TV room on one of my visits to our house in Niles and my dad pulled a large cardboard box out of the closet. He said that she had left this box and that I might be interested in its contents. We talked about her, about the last time I’d been to see her, and I took the box. Let’s say, I took the box seriously. It clearly contained a lifetime of treasures and I suddenly felt responsible.
What happened next was what you might expect. I went through and sorted as best I could the photos and certificates, the xeroxed pages, the jewelry, and the mementos until I got it into some preliminary order. Obviously, I had more questions than answers since many of the photographs were not identified. I was guessing that the older women were likely her aunts, her mother, and in at least one photo, her grandmother. But I was enthralled. I wanted to be able to know these people. I wanted to be able to learn more about them, so I joined Ancestry dot com on a free membership and started building my family tree.
For simple clarity, I’ll call the rest of the events that lead up to my needing to write these stories “stages.” They are the key moments of discovery, and they are not unlike that PBS show with celebrities who find their ancestor was burned at the stake as a witch. I’ve got one condemned witch in my background too, but I am not a direct descendant of hers. We will call the acquisition of that box my Stage One.
Stage Two is where it got interesting in a hurry. As I compiled information on more and more people, adding them one by one to my tree with whatever information I had, mostly from my own recollection of aunts and uncles in my dad’s family, the more I would find. It’s the endless tunnel of Ancestry, I could call it. Sometimes there’s a light at the end, and sometimes, you just have to retrace your steps and start all over.
Stage Three is where I hit the proverbial pay dirt. I had no idea at the time that it would lead me to establishing kinship with kings, but I was happy with the addition of one very young man to my tree. His name is John Chilcott. And I found him by accident on Ancestry when I was sitting on my couch in the Bronx, watching Law & Order SVU in the background with my daughter.
My grandmother’s maiden name is Chartier. Her father had married a young girl named Bessie Chilcote: note that there are two common spellings of this name, Chilcott and Chilcote. I had gone back a few generations with the help of the Ancestry database and traced that family to England. But en route, this John Chilcott showed up on a marriage license in Barbados at the end of the 17th century. All the Chilcotts are in England save this one who is getting married in Barbados. I figured I had taken a wrong turn somewhere – it’s easy to do when you use this website – so I did what any amateur genealogist would do. I Googled him. And found him.
This John Chilcott was the son of a wealthy family in England when he found himself on the wrong side of history, fighting against the crown in the Monmouth Rebellion in July of 1685. He was captured when Monmouth’s men were defeated, he was convicted of treason to the Crown, and he was shipped to Barbados from Bristol Harbor, and sold into slavery. I started reading up on Monmouth and, ultimately, I was able to construct a simple timeline, going forward to my generation, for this John Chilcott.
At roughly the same time, I came across an older man posting photos on a local Facebook group called something like “Do you remember Niles, Michigan?” I do remember lots, because I was born in Niles, but the threads of discussion in this group are pointless. Let’s call this Stage Four. I messaged him and found out he was in fact a distant cousin of ours. My great grandfather and his great grandmother are brother and sister. I must have harvested a dozen black and white images from his posts and I suddenly felt connected to their story in a way I hadn’t even begun to realize.
But there were no photos of Delia, his great grandmother and my great aunt. So, I called my cousin, Marian, and whined to her that although I had found lots of wonderful pictures of the family, I had nothing of this woman and I really wanted to know what she looked like. Marian was interested and suggested I go back to this man and ask him directly, “Do you have photos of Delia?”
What followed next was astounding. He had photos of her as a young married woman, of her with her husband, Bill, their ten children, her friends, and her guests at the beach resort she owned with Bill. I was so glad I had taken Marian’s advice. It also led me to my cousins who lived only 30 minutes away from me.
I called to tell Marian the good news – that I wanted photos of Aunt Delia and then, I got photos of Aunt Delia. And Marian replied, “Yes, of course, you did. It’s the Communion of Saints.” She was calling up the spiritual, cosmic interconnection we all have with each other and with the people who have gone before us. We are all members of the Communion of Saints. And even though I was willing to chalk it up to dumb luck, that I had simply clicked on a Facebook page at random, she convinced me that there was something more out in the ether than I had acknowledged and had somehow become its beneficiary. Maybe it’s my living family aiding my research, or maybe it is these now-gone individuals themselves making sure I got the stories I was looking for – I have no idea. But I remember my dear cousin every time I hear that expression at Mass: “I believe in the Communion of Saints.”
I moved into Stage Five just a few weeks ago. I had read someplace that the Mormon ancestry teams will do research for you when you have distilled your enquiry into just one question. In other words, you need not trouble them if you haven’t done the work. I had my one question and it was about that young man who was sold into slavery in Barbados. His lands had been confiscated. My question was, “Were they, in fact, his lands,” or was he simply bringing a hardship to his family who were now stripped of their property for his actions against the Crown. I did some digging and found that that his father had died before the Rebellion, so, as the eldest of his sons, John must have owned the lands.
Now, I’ve answered my own question. But that was too easy, and never let it be said that amateur genealogists go the easy route. I simply asked, “Who owned it before this John Chilcote?” That’s when I also saw numerous references to John’s father being a lord. His grandfather was also a lord. They lived in Somerset in the southwestern area of England, on the way to Wales. Then I put it all away and left it at that. Interesting, how my ancestors were lords. What are the odds?
What are we, Stage Six now? I had sold my house in Michigan and moved back to New York, bringing with me all of my great aunt’s treasures, along with my mother’s, my dad’s, and my cousins’ memorabilia. I packed it all into roughly a dozen storage containers and only recently started going through it all. I pulled out a particularly lovely photo from the 1930’s of my grandmother’s parents, Bessie Chilcote and Edmund Chartier. And I thought, I don’t have very many old photos up in my house, let me frame this one and set it up. That was on a Friday, late June.
The next day, I was going through a family storage unit and my daughter asked if I wanted to take back a mantel clock I had given her about ten years ago. It was their wedding clock from 1896. The Chilcotes are from England, yes, but the Chartiers came to northern Indiana from Canada. It’s an important note because it was that day that I read that there is new legislation that stipulates that Canadian citizenship can now be claimed by descent; my great grandfather, who died when I was a child, had suddenly bestowed his Canadian citizenship on all of us. Four days later, it was Canada Day – July 1. And their 130th wedding anniversary. And a week later, I left for Québec City to give a talk at a conference that had been planned last year.
This is the Communion of Saints in force: the photo, the clock, their anniversary, and my trip to Québec.
While I was in Québec, I was able to visit a local history museum and see where my ancestors’ house had been, built by a mid-17th century sailor named Michel Chartier who had moved to North America from France during the reign of Louis XIV and which led to generations of Chartiers living on the Île d’Orléans and later near Montréal. I had closed a beautiful loop I didn’t fully appreciate was there.
Then I went back to see what more I could find about the Chilcotes, all the while I am eternally grateful to my dear great aunt for sending me into this treasure trove of stories about the people in my family I never would have known about any other way.
As I start to see more and more information about John Chilcote’s lordly father, grandfather, great grandfather, it suddenly becomes easier and easier to find stories, connections, published genealogies – all of which I innocently attribute to his simply being a lord. I had determined that a lord likely married a woman from another wealthy family and in this business of researching family trees, it’s easier to find a lord than it would be to find his mailman.
Stage Seven – This is where I find we are the direct descendants of King Edward IV, whose great-great granddaughter married a man in Somerset named George Chilcote. It was George’s great-great grandson who fought in the Monmouth Rebellion.
Reading the family history of a king of England isn’t easy, since they married their own family members all too frequently, but it is all out there. This is where it got fun. I started reading about Edward IV, the Princes in the Tower, who I now know are my many times great grand uncles, and Uncle King Richard III. Then I asked another question: who were Edward’s ancestors. I found not only the entire line of Plantagenets, bringing me to Le Mans, one of my favorite towns in France, but there was a cross reference to the medieval kings of León in northern Spain. One of my many times great grandmothers was Isabella of Castile. Isabella’s lineage leads me in a kind of full circle, because it brings me back to a volunteer job I had in Spain for two weeks in 2014, greeting pilgrims in the Pilgrims Office in Santiago de Compostela.
While I was there, I had loads of free time, most of which I spent learning about the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. So much so, in fact, that it prompted me to write a guide to the church based on the people who had been there, not on all the building programs. It was published in 2021. In that book, I took what I had learned in 2014 and wrote about a queen who tormented an archbishop, a king who brought his young son to the consecration of the building in 1211, and the man who had decorated the new church with glorious sculptures. That queen, that king, his son, and the man who paid the sculptor are members of my family. They are the ancestors of Isabella of Castile. And I wrote about them six years ago because I was drawn to the people who were buried in that building and I needed to tell their stories. I just had no clue that they were, in fact, grandfathers and grandmothers to me.
A Communion of Saints.
In this book that I am writing now, I will tell the stories of several of these people, including my mom and dad, who are the only ones that I know personally. My dad lived his entire life in service to other people and it brought him considerable joy. My hope is that these stories will bring you some joy as well. My family witnessed history: the building of great cathedrals, the unification of two realms in Spain, the War of the Roses and the end of the Plantagenet Dynasty, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the treatment of mental illness in rural Indiana in the 19th century, the establishment of pediatric medecine in the United States, up to the flag raising on Iwo Jima in 1945. I don’t know if I have accomplished very much during my lifetime, but I am convinced my role in this family is to tell these stories.
NOTE: If you would like to read the stories about some of the people who have been in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, just click on My Bookstore and you’ll see If You Stand Here. It is available on Amazon, Bookshop.org, and by special order at your favorite independent bookseller.
The Backpack Press 