Confessions of an Inbred Townie...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
I have a mouth on me, as you may have noticed. It was a constant source of amazement to my bemused and very proper relatives that I ever managed to get a graduate degree or hold down a real job. And then there are the tattoos. Heavens.
When, a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday, I talked a tattoo artist into inking my upper right arm in a design made from the initials of my friends, Aunt Emily pursed her lips and tutted. “You look like something out of National Geographic,” she said. My mom was genuinely sad but could only come up with this paean to opportunity lost: “Well, you’ll never be a secret agent now.”
But back to my mouth. Last Saturday, I attended the annual meeting of the Sons and Daughters of the First Settlers of Newbury, a group dear to many of my family and friends. The term “family” gets weird here, as everyone at the Sons and Daughters calls each other “cousin.” The newsletter is addressed as such. Everyone wears their most researched Newbury ancestor on their name tag (just the male ancestor, though there are no rules about whether the descent is through a male or female line). I have never submitted the paperwork to join this venerable organization, though I am eminently qualified. I am descended from no less than 52 of the first European families on the list.
And so, I sat myself down at a table at lunch. “Hello, cousins!” I exclaimed. One gentleman looked confused, searching for my ancestor on my handwritten name tag (I was a late registrant). “Oh, I’m a Poore,” I said brightly. He peered at me over his glasses. ‘Which one?’ he said. ‘The inbred townie one,’” I replied, laughing. Me and my mouth. It went over like a lead balloon.
But, well, it’s true. My Poores are not a dynamic people. We live in the Poore House on the Poore Farm on Poore’s Lane. Have for seven generations.
The Poores have covered the globe, founded banks, mined for gold, sailed ships and…stayed within the same square mile as their parents and married their cousins.
Guess which branch I descend from?
I remember overhearing a conversation between Aunt Emily and her sister, Louise, as they pored over the family tree. “We’re lucky we don’t have seven fingers,” said Louise. “And crossed eyes,” said Emily, and they giggled, crossing their eyes, two very dignified woman who were little girls again only with each other.
Their parents were fourth cousins.
My relationship with genealogy is complicated. It is undeniably problematic. For generations, it has been used by many in the service of exclusion. Elites have always kept the best records. Their villages were less likely to be emptied during pogroms, or their names changed to be more palatable to an immigration official or to allow an unrelated orphan to get on a ship with a refugee family. It has been used both offensively and defensively, to claim privileges not personally earned, but also to bar the door to others.
Throughout the 20th century, my family was terribly poor, beset with tragedy and hardship, but we always had the name, and a good joke. “Poore by name, poor by nature,” Aunt Emily would say, even as she suffered from the lifelong effects of scant childhood nutrition. There was no indoor plumbing in the Poore House until 1949, but we were “impoverished gentry.” At least we could be proud of our ancestors. And yet…
The Poor and Poore spellings were used interchangeably well into the 20th century.
One of several other Poor(e) houses was occupied by the family for eight generations, and served the town as a tavern for over a century. Captain Jonathan Poore kept the tavern until 1806 when the Boston and Newburyport Turnpike diverted traffic to a new route.
It was finally demolished in 1890. The sign is in the collection of the Museum of Old Newbury. From the collections of the Museum of Old Newbury. (Courtesy photo.)
