Progress Report

I'd set about combining two of the ancestors, Joseph Leverett and his son James Walker Leverett, which made one book, Prairie Leveretts, span many years, roughly from Joseph's birth (1804) through the remarkable wagon journey of 1834 (1600 miles overland in a stage), and James Walker's life taking us into the early 1900's. Roughly a hundred years, I had, all put into a single book. But remarkably, I found a trove of information about the Turners, joseph's wife's family, and the journey itself. I decided to make Joseph and Mary their own book, focused on the journey and pioneering in illinois in 1834, and I wrote away for information about the underground railroad, that apparently went through the Turner's house.

So, the book on James Walker Leverett was set aside temporarily, and the one on Joneph and Mary, it's set aside too. I took to rewriting Pioneer Leveretts and Eighteenth Century Leveretts, which are good books but poorly written, and sloppy with grammatical and formatting errors. I wanted both of them to be in my own voice, as if I sat my descendants down at my side and just told them everything I knew. When I sit down and write them straight through, as I've been doing, that's what I get. And it's been flowing right out of me. I about finished the first, and halfway through the second.

Meanwhile I've had some unexpected readers of those books. People like the kind of byzantine world of colonial Boston. And they should - it's really quite a bizarre place. The more I can play that up, the better, it's clear to me.

I find out things every once in a while that change things. I don't think I have the whole story for anyone.

The gap in the genealogy is still there. But I've become more and more convinced that whatever we do, we have to account for the various stray people who appear in Boston in the early days. They did not appear to be sailing back and forth a lot, until about 1750 or 1760. In their society one married early and married someone nearby. There wasn't much of this going to another town to bring back a wife.

And that's why, if I could shed light on some of these stray people, it would be a huge victory.

The woman who wrote the book on the underground railroad never answered my e-mail. I have a bad feeling about it. That information might be gone forever.