15 Sprague Family History
Upwey is a small town in the south of England, a few miles from the coast. Sometime in October of 1609, our ancestor William was born the youngest son in a family that thought the Church of England didn’t go far enough in its separation from the Roman Catholics. Upwey was hundreds of miles from the real center of people who believed like they did, a group we now call Puritans. William was only six when his father died, and with few prospects of making a living under the religious persecution that his family saw coming, in 1629 he joined his brothers Ralph and Richard on a ship called The Lion’s Whelp, for the two-month journey across the Atlantic. Soon after their arrival in Salem Massachusetts, the governor asked the Sprague boys to explore the area between two nearby rivers. After quickly making peace with the local Indians, they formed a new settlement called Charlestown, in what is now the oldest neighborhood in Boston.
William was 26 when he married Millicent Eames, the daughter of a ship’s captain, who bore him 10 children, including Jonathan, who was born in 1648. Jonathan named his son after his grandfather William, born in 1690 when the family moved to Rhode Island. William Jr in turn had a son, Joshua (1729), who moved northward to Novia Scotia and had a son Nehemiah (1770) who had a son Thomas (1804). By then the family was living in Ohio and had a son Fellman (1849), who moved to Wisconsin and had a son named Howard (1887). Incidentally, Howard had an uncle named Lafayette, who died in 1862 at Antietam fighting against slavery.
Howard lived well into the 1970s, and I was about 10 years old when I met him and his wonderful wife (and my great-grandmother) Delia. They had a son, Donald, who married Ruth Faerber, and had a son they named Donald Eugene Junior (1940) – my grandfather.
A family like ours has zillions of stories, most of which seem too mundane to bother repeating, but which somehow end up in our collective memories. Oh, not quite memories – more like feelings and intuitions, attitudes about life that seem natural to us because that’s how we were raised, but might seem unfamiliar or strange to others. Most of these are too boring to notice, like how much we slouch in a chair; some are more important, like how (or whether?) you feel guilty when you’re late or how much you trust others – and whether you think there’s a difference between lying and fibbing. You didn’t learn those things from a book or school; we got them from your parents, who got them from their parents and on and on, all the way back to William.