I often hear the phrase “multi-tasking” and those who use it usually seem to feel it is a modern invention, but really, our ancestors were multi-taskers if there ever were any. My Italian grandmother managed her own multi-story house, a boarding home, a grocery store, a tavern and nine children all while acclimating to a new country. My Irish great-grandmother had three husbands (not at the same time), four children that lived, a photography business and was a landlord and property owner in Hartford, Connecticut. My ancestors seem to have been typical rather than exceptional.
I grew up with a picture in my head of smiling buckle-shoed Pilgrims, who after a hard voyage landed at Plymouth Rock and made a colony of good people who settled the U.S. They had the first Thanksgiving and invited the native peoples who had helped them through that tough first year.
I was years learning that things were much harder than I ever knew. Some things maybe they chose not to tell us as children; that more than half the passengers were dead by spring, men, women and children alike. I didn’t know that they were city folk, not farmers. They only brought three axes and few provisions, many of the seeds they brought could not take the hard Massachusetts climate. It was three years before more provisions arrived so their clothes and shoes wore out.
Talk about multi-tasking! I cannot imagine having to not only build my own cabin, but having to build enough to house a colony when I had to chop the tree and make the lumber itself with the shared ax and almost no nails. Meanwhile hunt fish, plant a garden, guard the settlement, attend hours of church services, establish and maintain a new society, and keep the home fires burning, literally. (By the way, without stone chimneys!)
All of our forebears, at some time or other, were some kind of immigrant, (except for the very earliest African proto-humans from whom we all came, of course.) They had to be able to adjust to so many new things and not lose touch with their past. Trying to grasp that past, I was just looking at pictures of my grandfather’s hometown in Italy, admiring the beautiful buildings knowing that my great-grandfather was a mason; knowing that those stone lintels were carved long before mechanical tools.
Did he take part in making some of the amazing beauty I was admiring on my screen? I’ll probably never know that. But I know from reading my grandfather’s Italian birth certificate that great-grandfather Antonio was a mason, my great-grandmother was a seamstress and she had many children. We know they had to have had a garden, and because she was a seamstress, probably had sheep and carded wool for yarn. They lived in a small mountain village, so did she weave the fabric for the clothes she sewed?
I cannot know how my ancestors lived their everyday lives, but there is enough historical information that I can be sure that multi-tasking is not a new way of life.
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 Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center at 6:30 p.m. Guests are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501.
