Genealogy and Potatoes Redux: In Praise of American Ancestors’ New Family Heritage Experience

The facade of American Ancestors'
about-to-open 
Center for Family History,
Heritage & Culture 

I had the opportunity last week to visit Ryan Woods, the President of American Ancestors, at the organization's home office, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, on Newbury Street in Boston. Ryan and his team are scheduled to cut the ribbon on the new, very cool American Ancestors National Center for Family History, Heritage & Culture at 97 Newbury Street on April 24th. 

This spectacular new center is part of a multi-structure building complex named after American philanthropist and preservationist Thomas Bailey Hagen and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The center will house the Brim-DeForest Library, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center, the Brue Family Learning Center, museum store, staff offices, and the Family Heritage Experience—an interactive museum experience that will introduce visitors to the joys and possibilities of family history. 

Acquiring the building next door to NEHGS’s long-time library was an opportunity that first presented itself in 2012, the final year of my term as Chair of the organization. The owner of John Lewis Jewelers paid a visit and led us on a tour. Now, after much planning, fundraising, and hard work, the center has been conceived and is (nearly) completed.

The new entrance to the Center is top left followed clockwise by the facade in 2011, showing the old John Lewis
Jewelers; below, our friends the Kyles admiring the design in 2011, and (bottom right) Ken Burns speaking at the first fundraiser
for the Center that same event and year, 2011.

Ryan was kind enough to take me for a tour and even allowed me to snap a few pictures. I don’t want to (and can’t possibly) give everything away, but the Family Heritage Experience is destined to be a top 10 Trip Advisor recommendation in Boston, something full of fun and interactive activities.

Arrive at the Center and place yourself on the map--where you belong!

Pick a disc, scan the barcode on the back, and get started on your genealogical journey.

The famous, or infamous Shattuck family painting. Like our current administration, if you don't like history, you just make
it disappear. That bush in the middle used to be, well...

As we were talking, Ryan reminded me of a brief talk I gave in 2008 when I was elected Chair. The talk, which I had forgotten, compared genealogy and the potato. Fortunately, I found it buried on this blog. So, I dusted it off and present it here.

I hope it will help you imagine the new Family Heritage Experience as an Idaho Russet potato fired at 117 feet per second through a hose into a finely sharpened grate, coming out the other side in a perfect French fry cut.

"We Wuz Robbed": A Tale of Innovation, Genealogy, and Taffy-Pulling Machines

Hildreth Velvet candy is
essential to our tale.
Thanks to
Barbara Cain Froman,
the great-granddaughter
of Nelson Hildreth,
for sharing her wonderful
collection of cards
and pictures with me,
and allowing me to
share them
with you on this blog.

When it became apparent last year that the COVID lockdown was going to last not days or weeks but months, I committed to three goals. 

First, I wanted to give Innovation on Tap a fighting chance, so I did as many Zoom presentations and podcasts as I could, casting my fate to the wind (and face to the web), from Boston and Florida to California and the Philippines.

Second, I wanted to survive open-heart surgery, which I’d put off until my cardiologist at Beth Israel made me an offer I couldn't refuse. As I wrote about here, in January 2021, I got a pig.

And finally, I decided it was time to read my grandmother’s journals, more than thirty years of daily entries beginning in the late 1950s through her death in 1993. I’m pretty sure I was the first, and almost certain I will be the last person ever to take on this task.

And therein--goal number three--lies my tale.

“Wuz I Robbed?”

If I was expecting to read all about me in those journals, I was sorely disappointed. Oh, I showed up now and then with a broken leg or maybe a new job, but I was one of a flock of grand, great and great-great grandchildren, and more or less, in literary terms, an appendage to my mother. Her generation got all the love.

In reading the journals, I was committed, as the biographer Robert Caro advised, to “turn every page” on the off-chance that Nana, as we called my maternal grandmother Baker, would drop her guard and really let loose. This reading strategy was tedious and yielded many school committee meetings and trips to the supermarket, but also an occasional juicy tidbit.

For example, I learned some things about my grandfather I. did. not. need. to. know. And then there was the relative who abandoned his wife and then returned, all while I was trying to master long division in second grade. (Who knew?) There were also the elderly great-relatives, always nice to me, maybe because, most days, they were three sheets to the wind by noontime.

My grandmother's journals. Robert Caro said, "read every page," so I did.

But the entry that caught my attention, and soon had me powering up my Family Tree Maker software along with Ancestry.com and American Ancestors websites, was this:

"Eva’s brother was Lester. He lived in Needham. He was a stockbroker. He married Myrtle Hildreth. Her father and her uncle invented the machine that made saltwater taffy. Someone gave them a big story and talked them out of it. Then he turned around and sold it.  Aunt Myrtle used to cry over it."

What? Invented the machine that made saltwater taffy? Aunt Myrtle? Who was Aunt Myrtle?

Had I been denied my rightful inheritance and life fortune by some skullduggery that happened long before my birth?

Wuz I robbed?

This required an investigation.