UNCONNECTED CONNECTIONS

A common experience among the Transcribers with whom I work is coming across some odd bit of history that might catch our attention for some reason, and with the Museum's allowing us, often encouraging us, we put aside the assignment we are working on and consult various documents, researching what has an equal chance of being nothing or an important historical moment which, up to the accidental discovery might have remained hidden. Some of these are true events and true connections. Some are just coincidental. Either way, there is no certainty until researched. Sometimes the research journey becomes an adventure.

THE TANGLED WEB

     A few years before moving to New Bedford, I began volunteering as a docent at the Edward Gorey House Museum when I retired for a bit on Cape Cod. The House is known to most, especially tourists, because of Edward Gorey while long time locals know it as having been owned by a sea captain in the area of Route 6A in Yarmouthport known as Captains’ Mile. Way back in time, unlike today, there were few trees between what is now Route 6A and the Port of Yarmouth, so sea captains were able to see the port and their ships from a comfortable distance. 

     For reasons varying from not liking how the Plymouth Plantation was being run to a possible commission of a crime, the Hawes family, alternatively spelled “Howes”, left the Plantation and moved to what is now Yarmouthport where Ebenezer Hawes would marry Thankful Thatcher, the daughter of the town’s leading landowner, in 1819. Because Ebenezer was a sea captain and would be away for weeks at a time, the Thatchers, whose descendants still live in the ancestral home next to the Yarmouthport Commons on Strawberry Lane, built a small Cape Cod style house for the bride and new mother where they could keep an eye on her and her son William Thatcher Hawes and be there for her when the husband was away. 

     From 1820 to its purchase by Edward Gorey in 1978, the house had stayed in the family until the 20th Century when it was purchased as a summer home by a family who grew tired of it over time as it had grown from a simple Cape Cod style house to a large sprawling, unheated house with multiple additions and remodels, and was eventually abandoned by the time Gorey purchased it.

     Since my mother was a Hawes whose parents came to the United States from Nova scotia, having the same name in the family and my grandfather’s father having been a steam ship captain on the Nova Scotia/Boston run, I found it quite the coincidence that I was a docent at a museum I had known connected to one name, that of its last owner, only to find out after a while that it was built for someone named Hawes. I would add this little trivia to my tours to give the patrons a wider perspective on the building itself along with its Gorey contents.

      Because of that Henry VIII business, part of the Hawes family had remained Catholic while part went Church of England, and as the Hawes family is listed on one of the Mayflower’s passenger lists, I assumed the Yarmouth family was from the Protestant side of the family. Considering the relevant dates like 1620 when the Pilgrims arrived and 1635 when the Hawes family moved to the Cape, I felt while there may be a relation through blood, distant though it might be, there was a chasm between branches caused by religion.

      When I moved to New Bedford, although I continued to do my once-a-week docent work at the Gorey House, I volunteered at the New Bedford Whaling Museum where I transcribe old historical documents most often Ship log books.

     After finishing one ship’s log I had been working on a few years back, not many, I was given a list of logs to chose from, and on the list was the ship Arnolda captained by William Thatcher Hawes, the son of Ebenezer and Thankful, and the raison d’etre for the existence of the Gorey House.

     Small world about to get even smaller.

     Most old sea captains, although great at what they did ship-wise had little formal education and although they might have followed the standard structure of log entries with the inclusion of dates, weather, longitude and latitude, and what luck they may or may not have been having regarding whales spelling was often phonetic and inconsistent which requires digital transcription for the sake of those who do not have the time to decipher each captain’s unique spellings and sentence structure. For his part, William Thatcher Hawes wrote in such a way that each syllable of every multisyllabic word was treated as an individual word which causes confusion in words such as “a gain” being either one word “again” or two which would change the meaning of the whole entry, and spelled his words according to the old Cape Cod regional accent which I recognized having spoken with people on Cape Cod whose families had been there for generations, if not centuries, and who were content never to cross the Cape Cod Canal onto the mainland. Usually transcribing alone in a room, I got to read the log entries out loud as I typed them and could enjoy hearing the old dialect.