About My Blog
I blog about the history of the lower Merrimack Valley region and about doing genealogical research. I grew up in Lawrence, Mass. Before I became a lawyer, I was a Park Ranger at Boston National Historical Park (1992-1994), where I cut my teeth doing historical interpretation. Follow me on Twitter @OfAPlace
Sometimes you have to move away to realize how unique something is. When I was eighteen, I left home for college. College led to law school. Graduation led to jobs in Seattle, London, Frankfurt (Germany) and finally New York. I have been a New York lawyer for about twenty years now. Business travel took me all over the world, from Hong Kong to South Africa to every country in western Europe. I saw the world, and settled down in Manhattan. I have no immediate intention of living anywhere else than NYC.
Yet...something kept pulling me back. It started when people asked where I was from. Instinctively, I would say I was from Boston. Maybe because I grew up watching Boston television stations...listening to Boston radio stations...and cheering for Boston sports teams. But after a while, this did not seem accurate. Growing up, we hardly went to Boston. Everyone's parents worked locally rather than in the big(ish) city. For vacation, we headed to the coast, Hampton Beach, Salisbury, southern Maine, or maybe a lake in New Hampshire...not to the Cape.
I noticed another thing. When I mentioned where I was specifically from, Lawrence, Mass., people either looked at me blankly (because they basically never heard of it), or with some combination of confusion, derision and pity. Yes, Lawrence is a pit. It is a densely-populated, fairly run-down, post-industrial city with perpetually failing schools. Yes, it is the poorest city in Massachusetts, in terms of per capita reported income.
However, it is also a special place in so many ways. It's walkable, vibrant and pretty safe for how poor it supposedly is (update - less so recently, with the latest drug epidemic). It has decent public transportation links and is part of a wealthy metropolitan region. Now it is economically vibrant again, albeit in a sort of mom-and-pop way. In other words, it's a shangri-la for new immigrants, who can have their communities as they please, and start a small business (anyone need a barber?), without some of the expense or hassles of big city neighborhoods. These days, Lawrence is the Dominican (and maybe Latino) capital of New England. Eighty percent of its eighty thousand residents are Hispanic. That's just one of many unique statistics about Lawrence proper. Hopefully you'll come to appreciate its specialness by reading my blog.
Furthermore, the city does not exist in a vacuum. Anyone who is a resident of Lawrence is a resident of an interconnected region, and that's the place I write about.
When I was a kid, the immediate region was called "Greater Lawrence" and it was comprised of Lawrence, Methuen, North Andover, Andover and Salem NH. Essex Street in downtown Lawrence was the retail hub, with three department stores (one even had elevator men!) and dozens of stores. People in the neighboring towns said they were going "over city" - by streetcar until those were torn up in the 1950s, then by automobile - meaning they were going shopping at Sutherlands, or one of the other big stores downtown, or to the movie theaters along Broadway.
With the coming of interstate highways, suburbanization and shopping malls, all that was gone by 1985.
That was probably when Greater Lawrence ceased to be a concept. But the region, the Merrimack Valley, persists. Partially, it's because most of the people who live in the towns along here used to live in Lawrence...or their parents did. Or: their grandparents did, back in the Old Neighborhood that everyone remembers fondly, whenever they make nana's special recipe.
The concept of the Merrimack Valley region also persists because it is a very old and culturally consistent region, marked by a shared history. Look closely and you'll see the history in the numerous former mill buildings that line any stream in any town, from Machine Shop Village in North Andover to Ballardvale in Andover to the Spicket Falls area in Methuen (not to mention the enormous former mills lining the canals of Lawrence). Same goes for numerous other towns along or near the Merrimack, like Haverhill, Billerica, Amesbury (automobile body capital of America until 1929 or so), which have a high share of old red brick former mill buildings.
Scratch the surface a little more, and in practically every town here you'll find the old Puritan meetinghouse, or a white clapboard church in its place, a vestige of the region's settlement by English Puritans from the 1630s onward. When the parish got too big, they'd organize another one and that would become another town. North Andover split off from Andover. Methuen split off from Haverhill, and then Salem, NH split off from Methuen. Amesbury split off from Salisbury, and then Merrimac split off from Amesbury. Et cetera. Later, other faiths built their churches, many of which are sadly now closed. These help to tell the story of the history of the region, particularly its rich influx of immigrants from mainly Catholic countries starting in the 1840s and continuing to this day. Part of the story I hope to tell is of the waves of immigrants that overran the place and then, in subsequent generations, became Americans: the Irish in the 1840s-50s, the French-Canadians in the 1870s-80s; German immigrants in the 1880s; the Italians around 1900-1920 along with Syrians, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews at about the same time.
And that leads me to the genealogical and historical part of the blog. Yes, I grew up in Lawrence, like my parents, and like their parents. But that's not all. It turns out I am really from this region, the lower Merrimack Valley.
Around the turn of the millennium, when I lived in London, I heard about ancestry.com. I logged on, and started poking around. I plugged in some names of great grandparents I had heard of, and found their birth records. I saw them in the federal census. And the state census. And I even found old photographs of them that other subscribers posted.
I documented who all my great grandparents were, and then all my great great grandparents. Following the lines of their siblings and their offspring down toward the present, I identified dozens of distant relatives, third or fourth cousins, often one or two times removed (i.e. cousins within different generations of descendancy from our shared common ancestors). I even determined that some people I knew growing up are related to me.
Nearly two decades later, I am still going strong, having put together a family tree of over 2500 individuals! AND GUESS WHAT? ALL OF THEM WHO WERE BORN IN THIS COUNTRY WERE BORN IN NEW ENGLAND NORTH OF BOSTON. And very nearly all of them WERE BORN WITHIN TWENTY MILES OF WHERE I GREW UP.
The way I like to summarize it, some ancestors of mine showed up during the so-called Great Migration of Puritans in the 1630s, landing briefly along the north shore in places like Ipswich and Salisbury, before settling in the newfound frontier towns of Haverhill (founded 1642) and Andover (founded 1646), twenty-odd miles up the Merrimack River from the coast. They got killed and captured in Indian raids, of which there were many from the 1670s until about 1720; they got caught up in Witch Trials (I am related to Mary Ayer Parker of Andover who was hanged as a witch); they farmed and traded; and they got caught up in great changes that swept the region like the Great Awakening in the 1740s and the Unitarian controversy of the 1830s.
So if you are from this region and your surname is Abbot (single t), Barker, Lovejoy, Osgood, Peavey or Stevens (all old Andover names), or it is Ayer, Greenleaf, Hale, Moody, Peasley, White or Whittier (old Haverhill names), you are probably related to me. So for example, I am related to poet John Greenleaf Whittier of Haverhill, as well as Sarah Abbot who founded Abbot Academy in Andover, although neither of these ancestors had children of their own.
These settlers of Haverhill and Andover and their descendants stayed, and become mixed up with other folks who came to the region. The next group in my tree were a bunch of descendants of the original settlers of Wells, Maine, all of fifty miles away. These ancestors were cut from the same Yankee cloth as my first set of ancestors, having also arrived in the 1630s.
Following the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, after about seven generations they gave up trying to farm their rocky soil. Cheap and abundant grain from the fertile Midwest could come by boat and undercut their harvests. Starting at this time, a lot of people left the frosty, rocky, sloping farms of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. These folks trekked over the Appalachians to greener pastures in the Northwest Territories, or along the Oregon Trail. My ancestors, however, were not so adventurous. Instead, they decamped for the new mill towns of the Merrimack. So if you're from the Merrimack Valley and your last name is Hatch, Hill, Hobbs or Littlefield, you're also probably related to me.
Then there were my more recent immigrant ancestors who also passed through upcountry New England in the latter half of the nineteenth century, lured by cleared farmland at bargain basement prices: my Scottish forbears, surnames Patrick, Horne, McKinley, who passed through upcountry Vermont for a couple generations before descending down to the mill town; and their protestant Irish neighbors, the dairy farmers the McCarthys, the source of my surname, whose progenitor Florence supposedly walked barefoot all the way from Montreal, where he had disembarked, to take up the land in Wakefield, Vermont.
Both families came to the Lawrence area with the stamp of upcountry Yankee culture. Many of my Scottish relatives are buried at South Church in Andover, which was staunchly Congregationalist for most of its history. And these McCarthys from Vermont attended the South Congregationalist Church in Lawrence, where my father was baptized as an infant. (Later, as an adult he was rebaptized as a Roman Catholic, but that’s a separate story unto itself.)
My Swedish and Danish forbears also had a similar experience in upland Kingman, Maine. There, around the turn of the twentieth century, they eked out a rural living among the remnants of Yankee New England, far north of Boston, before giving up after a decade and coming down to the mill town -- although not before stopping a few years in Concord New Hampshire, far up the Merrimack River. They came from Aalborg Denmark and Christianstad Sweden. Here in the new world, they intermarried, putting petty national rivalries aside. They also came down from Maine and New Hampshire imbued with some of the Yankee culture. My half-Swedish, half-Danish grandmother would say her words in the drawn out way of upcountry New England: paaaaath for path, baaath for bath. She also attended the South Congregationalist Church in Lawrence.
Last but not least, I have my Irish Catholic forbears, who comprise half of my ancestry. Starting in 1847 when the Potato Famine broke and the ones who could flee left, they began arriving in droves. The new, bedraggled Irish immigrants basically overran the Merrimack Valley, seeking work in the growing textile towns, just as they overran the port cities of the northeast. They swelled the urban population by up to 50% in some places and took up residence on marginal land in shanties. First they labored, building the Great Stone Dam that permitted large scale industry in Lawrence; then they hustled and welcomed. After a generation, a large portion of my Irish Catholic immigrant forbears on all sides ran rooming houses, probably to avoid having to do backbreaking labor in the mills, or having to work as someone's maid. In later generations, they ran hotels and motels, butcher shops and funeral parlors, dealt in real estate and were generally very enterprising. If you're from the area and your surname is Driscoll, McDonnell, Kenealey or Doherty, you're likely related to me.
And that's me in a nutshell, at least for purposes of this blog. In some ways, I feel like I encapsulate the two main historically significant groups in Massachusetts, Irish Catholic and (to a lesser extent) Yankee. My genealogical exploration necessarily explores the transition and supplanting and disbursement of groups, as well as reintegration and assimilation, just as continues to happen now with newer arrivals in the Merrimack Valley.
Yours truly,
Carl Benedict McCarthy
New York, New York
So what is this blog about? It depends on what I am interested in. As of now (late 2017), my interests include:
Yet...something kept pulling me back. It started when people asked where I was from. Instinctively, I would say I was from Boston. Maybe because I grew up watching Boston television stations...listening to Boston radio stations...and cheering for Boston sports teams. But after a while, this did not seem accurate. Growing up, we hardly went to Boston. Everyone's parents worked locally rather than in the big(ish) city. For vacation, we headed to the coast, Hampton Beach, Salisbury, southern Maine, or maybe a lake in New Hampshire...not to the Cape.
I noticed another thing. When I mentioned where I was specifically from, Lawrence, Mass., people either looked at me blankly (because they basically never heard of it), or with some combination of confusion, derision and pity. Yes, Lawrence is a pit. It is a densely-populated, fairly run-down, post-industrial city with perpetually failing schools. Yes, it is the poorest city in Massachusetts, in terms of per capita reported income.
However, it is also a special place in so many ways. It's walkable, vibrant and pretty safe for how poor it supposedly is (update - less so recently, with the latest drug epidemic). It has decent public transportation links and is part of a wealthy metropolitan region. Now it is economically vibrant again, albeit in a sort of mom-and-pop way. In other words, it's a shangri-la for new immigrants, who can have their communities as they please, and start a small business (anyone need a barber?), without some of the expense or hassles of big city neighborhoods. These days, Lawrence is the Dominican (and maybe Latino) capital of New England. Eighty percent of its eighty thousand residents are Hispanic. That's just one of many unique statistics about Lawrence proper. Hopefully you'll come to appreciate its specialness by reading my blog.
Furthermore, the city does not exist in a vacuum. Anyone who is a resident of Lawrence is a resident of an interconnected region, and that's the place I write about.
When I was a kid, the immediate region was called "Greater Lawrence" and it was comprised of Lawrence, Methuen, North Andover, Andover and Salem NH. Essex Street in downtown Lawrence was the retail hub, with three department stores (one even had elevator men!) and dozens of stores. People in the neighboring towns said they were going "over city" - by streetcar until those were torn up in the 1950s, then by automobile - meaning they were going shopping at Sutherlands, or one of the other big stores downtown, or to the movie theaters along Broadway.
With the coming of interstate highways, suburbanization and shopping malls, all that was gone by 1985.
That was probably when Greater Lawrence ceased to be a concept. But the region, the Merrimack Valley, persists. Partially, it's because most of the people who live in the towns along here used to live in Lawrence...or their parents did. Or: their grandparents did, back in the Old Neighborhood that everyone remembers fondly, whenever they make nana's special recipe.
The concept of the Merrimack Valley region also persists because it is a very old and culturally consistent region, marked by a shared history. Look closely and you'll see the history in the numerous former mill buildings that line any stream in any town, from Machine Shop Village in North Andover to Ballardvale in Andover to the Spicket Falls area in Methuen (not to mention the enormous former mills lining the canals of Lawrence). Same goes for numerous other towns along or near the Merrimack, like Haverhill, Billerica, Amesbury (automobile body capital of America until 1929 or so), which have a high share of old red brick former mill buildings.
Scratch the surface a little more, and in practically every town here you'll find the old Puritan meetinghouse, or a white clapboard church in its place, a vestige of the region's settlement by English Puritans from the 1630s onward. When the parish got too big, they'd organize another one and that would become another town. North Andover split off from Andover. Methuen split off from Haverhill, and then Salem, NH split off from Methuen. Amesbury split off from Salisbury, and then Merrimac split off from Amesbury. Et cetera. Later, other faiths built their churches, many of which are sadly now closed. These help to tell the story of the history of the region, particularly its rich influx of immigrants from mainly Catholic countries starting in the 1840s and continuing to this day. Part of the story I hope to tell is of the waves of immigrants that overran the place and then, in subsequent generations, became Americans: the Irish in the 1840s-50s, the French-Canadians in the 1870s-80s; German immigrants in the 1880s; the Italians around 1900-1920 along with Syrians, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews at about the same time.
And that leads me to the genealogical and historical part of the blog. Yes, I grew up in Lawrence, like my parents, and like their parents. But that's not all. It turns out I am really from this region, the lower Merrimack Valley.
Around the turn of the millennium, when I lived in London, I heard about ancestry.com. I logged on, and started poking around. I plugged in some names of great grandparents I had heard of, and found their birth records. I saw them in the federal census. And the state census. And I even found old photographs of them that other subscribers posted.
I documented who all my great grandparents were, and then all my great great grandparents. Following the lines of their siblings and their offspring down toward the present, I identified dozens of distant relatives, third or fourth cousins, often one or two times removed (i.e. cousins within different generations of descendancy from our shared common ancestors). I even determined that some people I knew growing up are related to me.
Nearly two decades later, I am still going strong, having put together a family tree of over 2500 individuals! AND GUESS WHAT? ALL OF THEM WHO WERE BORN IN THIS COUNTRY WERE BORN IN NEW ENGLAND NORTH OF BOSTON. And very nearly all of them WERE BORN WITHIN TWENTY MILES OF WHERE I GREW UP.
The way I like to summarize it, some ancestors of mine showed up during the so-called Great Migration of Puritans in the 1630s, landing briefly along the north shore in places like Ipswich and Salisbury, before settling in the newfound frontier towns of Haverhill (founded 1642) and Andover (founded 1646), twenty-odd miles up the Merrimack River from the coast. They got killed and captured in Indian raids, of which there were many from the 1670s until about 1720; they got caught up in Witch Trials (I am related to Mary Ayer Parker of Andover who was hanged as a witch); they farmed and traded; and they got caught up in great changes that swept the region like the Great Awakening in the 1740s and the Unitarian controversy of the 1830s.
So if you are from this region and your surname is Abbot (single t), Barker, Lovejoy, Osgood, Peavey or Stevens (all old Andover names), or it is Ayer, Greenleaf, Hale, Moody, Peasley, White or Whittier (old Haverhill names), you are probably related to me. So for example, I am related to poet John Greenleaf Whittier of Haverhill, as well as Sarah Abbot who founded Abbot Academy in Andover, although neither of these ancestors had children of their own.
These settlers of Haverhill and Andover and their descendants stayed, and become mixed up with other folks who came to the region. The next group in my tree were a bunch of descendants of the original settlers of Wells, Maine, all of fifty miles away. These ancestors were cut from the same Yankee cloth as my first set of ancestors, having also arrived in the 1630s.
Following the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, after about seven generations they gave up trying to farm their rocky soil. Cheap and abundant grain from the fertile Midwest could come by boat and undercut their harvests. Starting at this time, a lot of people left the frosty, rocky, sloping farms of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. These folks trekked over the Appalachians to greener pastures in the Northwest Territories, or along the Oregon Trail. My ancestors, however, were not so adventurous. Instead, they decamped for the new mill towns of the Merrimack. So if you're from the Merrimack Valley and your last name is Hatch, Hill, Hobbs or Littlefield, you're also probably related to me.
Then there were my more recent immigrant ancestors who also passed through upcountry New England in the latter half of the nineteenth century, lured by cleared farmland at bargain basement prices: my Scottish forbears, surnames Patrick, Horne, McKinley, who passed through upcountry Vermont for a couple generations before descending down to the mill town; and their protestant Irish neighbors, the dairy farmers the McCarthys, the source of my surname, whose progenitor Florence supposedly walked barefoot all the way from Montreal, where he had disembarked, to take up the land in Wakefield, Vermont.
Both families came to the Lawrence area with the stamp of upcountry Yankee culture. Many of my Scottish relatives are buried at South Church in Andover, which was staunchly Congregationalist for most of its history. And these McCarthys from Vermont attended the South Congregationalist Church in Lawrence, where my father was baptized as an infant. (Later, as an adult he was rebaptized as a Roman Catholic, but that’s a separate story unto itself.)
My Swedish and Danish forbears also had a similar experience in upland Kingman, Maine. There, around the turn of the twentieth century, they eked out a rural living among the remnants of Yankee New England, far north of Boston, before giving up after a decade and coming down to the mill town -- although not before stopping a few years in Concord New Hampshire, far up the Merrimack River. They came from Aalborg Denmark and Christianstad Sweden. Here in the new world, they intermarried, putting petty national rivalries aside. They also came down from Maine and New Hampshire imbued with some of the Yankee culture. My half-Swedish, half-Danish grandmother would say her words in the drawn out way of upcountry New England: paaaaath for path, baaath for bath. She also attended the South Congregationalist Church in Lawrence.
Last but not least, I have my Irish Catholic forbears, who comprise half of my ancestry. Starting in 1847 when the Potato Famine broke and the ones who could flee left, they began arriving in droves. The new, bedraggled Irish immigrants basically overran the Merrimack Valley, seeking work in the growing textile towns, just as they overran the port cities of the northeast. They swelled the urban population by up to 50% in some places and took up residence on marginal land in shanties. First they labored, building the Great Stone Dam that permitted large scale industry in Lawrence; then they hustled and welcomed. After a generation, a large portion of my Irish Catholic immigrant forbears on all sides ran rooming houses, probably to avoid having to do backbreaking labor in the mills, or having to work as someone's maid. In later generations, they ran hotels and motels, butcher shops and funeral parlors, dealt in real estate and were generally very enterprising. If you're from the area and your surname is Driscoll, McDonnell, Kenealey or Doherty, you're likely related to me.
And that's me in a nutshell, at least for purposes of this blog. In some ways, I feel like I encapsulate the two main historically significant groups in Massachusetts, Irish Catholic and (to a lesser extent) Yankee. My genealogical exploration necessarily explores the transition and supplanting and disbursement of groups, as well as reintegration and assimilation, just as continues to happen now with newer arrivals in the Merrimack Valley.
Yours truly,
Carl Benedict McCarthy
New York, New York
So what is this blog about? It depends on what I am interested in. As of now (late 2017), my interests include:
- Irish genealogy: Figuring out where my Irish catholic forbears are actually from in Ireland, which only recently became possible with the online publication of Catholic parish records but which is fraught with difficulty. Til now, the best I could do for most of them was figure out what port they departed from. At some point, I will have to visit Ireland, which I have only visited once, for a long weekend in 2001.
- New England ecclesiastical history: Somehow the region went from being Puritan only, with churches funded by the state, to a multi-denominational Protestant society, to a largely Catholic region that it is today. I am exploring this history. I have always thought an understanding of religion, as a social organization force, is essential to understanding history almost anywhere. I am also very interested in the organization of the Catholic church historically in the region, and the "national parish" concept wherein churches were organized by immigrant group and language.
- Tips on doing genealogical research in this region: As part of my genealogical journey, I have joined the Mayflower Society by proving that I am descended from William Brewster, which required me to prove my lineage back thirteen generations! (I know, I know! He was down in Plymouth and so that upsets my regional narrative; I'll cover that in the blog. There is also my whole Charlestown, Mass. line that I failed to mention, who go back to the 1630s). I also jointed the Sons of the Revolution (not to be confused with the Sons of the American Revolution) by proving that I am descended from Major Daniel Littlefield of the Maine militia. He was killed attacking a fort in Castine, Maine in 1779. This required a mere nine generations of genealogical proof. The point is that I can safely say that I now know a lot about recordkeeping and doing genealogy in Massachusetts.
- Industrial history; When I was a toddler, apparently I used to draw the mill buildings and smokestacks I saw around me in Lawrence. Wherever I go in the region, I can't help but notice signs of the industrial age: railroad beds that no longer have railroads, canals that are now silted over, foundations of mills that are no longer standing, old mill buildings now converted to other uses, dams that no longer power any waterwheels. The history of industry in the Merrimack Valley goes back well into the 1700s, albeit on a smaller scale than emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
- Native (Indians) as part of written history: The original English settlers of Anddver and Haverhill bought their land from natives, who amazingly signed the deed with their symbols. These two towns were basically settled at the same time; their respective puritan meetinghouses were organized on the same day in 1646 at the puritan meetinghouse in Rowley. Many of the natives who lived immediately near Boston adopted English customs and names, and engaged the English courts to assert land rights. And the puritans expended great resources translating the Algonquin language into English and writing it down for the first time, so that they could produce a bible for the Indians. This bible was the first book published in New England. The Indians who decided to become Christian lived in "praying towns", of which there were a number right under our noses, such as Wamesit in East Chelmsford. Eventually everyone was wiped out or driven off, reducing English-Indian interactions to violent proxy encounters in the struggle between the empires of France and England.
- Shifting the narrative on a lot of things: I don't like the current narrative that seems to prevail about Lawrence, I don't like the current narrative that seems to prevail about the town of Andover, I don't like the narrative around the Bread and Roses Strike, I don't like the misunderstanding about the decline of the textile industry in the region, I don't like the narrative that "the mills moved south", etc. There also needs to be a narrative where there isn't one: the unique history of the New Hampshire border towns, like Salem and Plaistow; the current social and economic inter-connectedness of the three cities of Lawrence, Methuen and Salem, NH; the unique culture of this neck of the woods (claiming southern New Hampshire and the upper part of the Merrimack Valley for this), which led to the formation of so many leading boarding schools in one place..