Welcome to Labor Day… As kids return to school tomorrow, teachers all over the country are gong to ask, “What did you do on your summer vacation?”

Remembering how I loved that question, this blog entry is inspired by my lost youth, and the lost youth of so many of my forefathers. It was they that I discovered during my summer vacation… And I found a whole lot of adventure and excitement, that dates back to the 1720’s in my family.

I returned to Maine (my home state) on my summer vacation with Jose, as Jo Ann Clarke Diaz… Going there brought it all home, so to speak.

We first visited with cousins in Falmouth. This is the Clarke side of my family, and before we changed our names to married ones.

My cousin handed a book to me about our family, written by E. Joshua Lincoln, another cousin in our family.

From our visit with cousins, we went off to a family friend’s wedding. Jennifer Lynn Heutz became the bride of Gregory Christopher Waters at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, in Kennebunkport, Maine.  There’s a lot of irony with this, because it was my great grandfather William Blackstone (nine times removed) who founded the Episcopal Church in the United States, for which the book is written, and I’ll talk about in a bit. I can’t even begin to tell you what that’s like, as I stood there in front of that old church and considered the concept.

Next, we went to a Clarke Family reunion, where I grew up on Sabattus Lake. Places like this are why people from the rest of New England and New York state continue to send their kids to Maine “to camp” for two weeks every summer. I was lucky enough to live the life from Memorial Day until Labor Day, with the exception of two weeks in Stoneham, Massachusetts, with other cousins, digging Boston each summer.

Our last day in Maine, we went to Popham Beach, looking for my sister Bonnie amid the crowd of people. We missed each other… I still had my camera, and captured that part of Maine to look at in images, until I can return again with time on my hands.

[Image of Rev. William Blackstone is borrowed from Blackstone Valley, Rhodes Island’s Website.]

The Blackstones and Their Indian Paradise (Old Damariscotta), by E. Joshua Lincoln

I could write a play about this one… About how a Blackstone came to marry a Clarke.  If you know a Clarke or a Blackstone, this is possibly their history.

Meanwhile… I read the book my cousin had given to me. I was talking about our great grandfather the Reverend William Blackstone having founded Boston, and she gave a book to me. She had been given two of them, so she shared one.

And… in the midst of all of this traveling (Thursday through the following Monday), I read the family story about how Patience Blackstone (Granddaughter of William Blackstone) came to marry Josiah Clarke, my great grandfather (six times removed)

Having a great grandfather (nine generations removed) who founded Boston is pretty amazing. Being there and digging deeper was fascinating. Finding a real hero in my family, who married the young girl he rescued from Native Americans, who had stolen her during a horseback journey, was even more thrilling… It was the kind of stuff that becomes a great movie to watch, with tons of real life adventure, not a dreamed-up forest fantasy.

I have a genealogy book that traces the Clarke side of my family. This book allows me to trace the Clarkes to the 1620s, when Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth rock and my great grandfather was being born in Scotland…

It begins with my great grandfather John Clarke, who is known to have been in Massachusetts by 1661. He was living in Salem (1692) during the witch trials.  (I’m so sorry about that, because I know I would have been one of them.)

• John Clarke (b. about 1620 in Scotland) had seven children (eight generations ago)
  • Elisha Clarke (b. 1665) was born to John Clarke (seven generations ago, the second of seven children)
    • Josiah Clarke (b. 1704) was born to Elisha (six generations ago, the sixth of eight children)

It’s Josiah that became the hero of The Blackstones and Their Indian Paradise.

Another side of my family, that collides with the Clarke side, is the Blackstone family.

• Another great grandfather ~ Reverend William Blackstone ~ was born to John and Agnes Hawley Blackstone, on March 5, 1595 in Gibside, Whickham, Durham County, England… Although he’s a generation ahead of John Clarke (above), his great granddaughter will marry John Clarke’s grandson Josiah. (Blackstone married much later in life.) William married Sarah Stevenson in 1659 (he was 64 years old).  He was still virile enough to produce one son, John Blackstone. William Blackstone was sent to New England to preach the King James version of the Bible, landing in what we now call Boston, becoming its founder in 1623.
  • Rev. William Blackstone (b. 1595) had one son John Blackstone (nine generations ago)
    • John Blackstone (b. 1660) had one son William Blackstone (eight generations ago)
      • William Blackstone (b. 1691) had four children (seven generations ago)
        • Patience Blackstone (b. early 1700’s) was the oldest of William’s four children (six generations ago), and the damsel in distress in the story.

The Blackstones and Their Indian Paradise

Patience Blackstone eventually married Josiah Clarke (m. 1730).  This segment is the most intriguing story of my family, that plays out like a “Raiders of the Lost Arc” epic. The book my cousin had given to me kept me reading from start to finish (small booklet), without wanting to put it down… on my summer vacation in Boston and Maine. (We flew into Boston, because I wanted to spend some time there, too.)

This retelling of that story is a very abbreviated form, and dedicated to both the Clarke and Blackstone families. It’s important to continue to hand down these stories, from one generation to the next. (Isn’t the Internet a fabulous place for these things?)

While this might be an ordinary story of that time, it’s an extraordinary look back into the early settling of  New England by Old England and King James, and the challenges that the settlers faced daily.