Finding Family

While out East Granny Coco took us to Salem.  The very Salem that is famous for Puritans and witches.  It is also where my family - on both sides of the family tree - were once based.  The kids and I have visited Salem once before (click here for post), but it was years ago in the summer and the kids do not remember it.  On that last visit we spent a lot of time in the big graveyard looking for Saltonstall graves. On this visit we went to the Peabody Essex Museum.

The highlight of the visit was finding old family portraits (so much better than graves) and the 'china house'.  My family(s) were Salem merchants and did a lot of trading with China back in the day.  The Peabody Museum does a good job documenting this era of Salem history.

The 'china' house is an entire family coumpound complete with courtyard that was transported from china and rebuilt in the museum.  Brick by brick, board by board.  It is pretty cool (and as an aside as a museum person I am totally envious and wish the Alutiiq Museum had the space to do something similar but with an Alutiiq house).  You could walk into the rooms and imagine yourself living in the family compound in china.

The family portraits were also cool.  The ancestors portrayed are clearly from a different era and really have nothing in common with our life today.  And yet that is my family roots.  Those people lived in a different time and had a completely different outlook on the world (hence the witch trials!). And a little bit of their 'culture' is my culture.  As an archaeologist I generally use very different 'data' to get a feel for how people lived in the past.  Nothing quite like a portrait to get a feel for past personalities!
Patrick

This guy was an ancestor on my mother's side - he sort of look like my uncle Lincoln