That time I visited Ye Olde Country from whence my ancestors came

The English part of my ancestry can be traced back to a man name Cornelius Bronson (or Brownson) in a village called Earls Colne, Essex County. I went there with Rosie, my native English guide, to see what I could track down and take some pictures to show my dad.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at the place where my great-great-etc-and so on grandfather was born 400 something years ago.  I found a quaint, rather conservative village with a few pubs on the small High Street and a pretty old church.  I didn’t feel any mystical connection to the past as I looked for any Bronsons on the old tombstones of the church’s grounds.

We stepped into The Castle, one of the two pubs on High Street. It had a cozy interior and a some nice ales on tap, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. Of course, what I was expecting was silly and unrealistic: some connection to my own personal history, as if there’d be an old barman maintaining the oral history of the Bronsons. The pub dates back to the 13th century, but the staff is very much in the 21st century.

It’s not Earls Colne’s fault that I didn’t feel any connection. Life moves on, and a lot can happen in 400 years.

George Albert McEvoy

There he is, top row, second from the left, the disgruntled one with arms folded across his chest.  Great-Grandpa George was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Irish immigrants.  Of all my ancestors, of whom various amounts of documentary evidence exists, he’s the one who interests me the most.  I suppose it’s because in the few pictures I have of him, he stands out more than any of my other relatives.  In the most superficial sense, he’s the only one with a beard.

Due to the long exposure time of the cameras, you never see people smiling in old photos.  Still, George seems to be smiling even less than the others.  Here he looks like Snidely Whiplash, only less cunning, and more morose.  I like to think of him like a character from a Gabriel García Marquez novel.  Actual details of his life are hard to come by.  The huge gaps in his timeline, for all I know, may only be filled with the same kind of minutiae one finds in the life of any late 19th, early 20th century, New Englander.  I, however, prefer to imagine those gaps filled by mythical and heroic deeds.

What I do know to be true:  His father was Phanton McEvoy, a wool sorter, and his mother was Catherine Guilfoyle, who lived 82 years and mothered 7 children.  George was the second youngest in this particular large Irish American family, born in 1872, 16 years after Peter, the oldest sibling.

George on a boat

When George was young he traveled to Europe on a banana boat.  What he studied and where precisely he traveled eludes me.  Did he get caught up in phrenology?  How about using opiates to treat neuralgia?  Did he travel to England?  Prussia?  In 1899, which could be before or after his European adventure, George graduated from Harvard Medical School.  Eventually, he set up practice in Newton, Massachusetts and attempted to make a living as a physician.

George married twice.  According to his son, my grandpa John, his first wife Rose, a widow and an organist, died a year after their marriage at the McEvoy beach home in Salisbury Beach.  Rose’s death certificate, however, indicates her death in 1919, 15 years after their marriage.

George and Rose

Whatever the discrepancy with his first wife, George eventually married her sister-in-law, my great-grandmother, Marion Grace.  Together they raised two boys.  They died three years apart, George in 1942, in the midst of World War II and Marion in 1945, at its conclusion.