Families are funny; sort of like that old game of Telephone where kids stand in a line and whisper a phrase and everyone laughs at how the phrase changes from the beginning to what it comes out to be at the end of the line.Family folklore is like that. In my family, the story was of poor Kittie Gallagher crossing the Atlantic by her wee lonesome self at the tender age of 13 to escape the horrors of the potato famine. When in fact her mother and possibly her grandfather were the immigrants and Kittie was born in Connecticut 14 years after the famine in Ireland. But the kernel of truth in there was that Kittie was Irish and the family might have come over because of the potato famine.
In most family folklore there is usually a kernel of truth, sometimes it’s a very small kernel and you may waste some time chasing false leads. But never discount a family story out of hand, because there’s usually a good reason the story got started down your family’s “Telephone” line.
In a recent chase, I decided to look again for the family of my niece’s Massachusetts-born husband. He had asked me years ago to see what I could learn about his great-grandfather, Thor Trefethen, a Norwegian sea captain from a line of Norwegian sea captains stretching back probably to the Vikings. For many Scandinavians this is the equivalent of having Mayflower or Royal heritage; everyone has it, if we could only find the proof. But with a name like Thor Trefethen, that seemed like proof in itself.
I dutifully scanned the online sources but found little I could pin down, although there had been some activity by one or possibly two Thor Trefethens in the Portland area about the right time.
But a great deal has changed in the last decade and I was trying to put off some real work so decided to dabble in his Trefethen research again — and hit the proverbial jackpot! I found several lines of Trefethens and within hours had traced his line back almost 300 years to (apparently) the original immigrant from Cornwall, England, where the name, meaning tree in a meadow, seems to have originated.
Huh! But wait! What about the line of Norwegian sea captains? Well, it turns out there really was a Thor Trefethen, who worked as a steward or other ship-related service most of his adult life. There were Trefethen family members all over the Portland area for generations. And many of the better-known Trefethens were mariners and ship builders.
So our Massachusetts boy not only had a large kernel of truth in his family folklore, he also has a very rich Maine family history including a Town of Trefethen, a cemetery, and a house on the National Historic Register. (With Norwegians in other family lines.) Now I found about 14 Henrys, his father was George and I still don’t know where the name Thor came from, but it just adds to the fun.
I also found out he is distantly related to my Dover-Foxcroft-born sister-in-law, whose mother was a Trefethen. Families are funny.
Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft is a longtime genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader emails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com. Her semimonthly column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society which meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Caribou Public Library at 6:30 p.m. Guests are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501.
