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This chart doesn't adequately portray who and what the clan were.
One gets the idea. But in fact, much of the clan were elders and
leaders of their meetings. SEveral picked up the blood lines of
prominent early Quaker leaders, including the missing emigrant
Miller (from this chart); he married the daughter of one of the
most prominent early Quaker ministers. When the Quaker movement
split in the 1830's, between those who were traditional Quaker
in orientation and those who wished to mainstream and think and
worship like other Christians, the Thompson elders of the lines
of the family that became Orthodox became for all practical
purposes ministers.
Another thing these charts fail to capture is the fact that
three complete male lines of descent from Daniel Thompson and
Elizabeth Miller who married in 1764 became doctors, lawyers,
teachers, public officials, state legislators, as well as
elders. Eli's was one of these lines. William H Sr and
Mary Emma came from very similar families. Their three sons
became a lawyer, Delaware state legislator and member of the
Delaware Board of Education, a bank executive, and a doctor.
William H SR and Mary Emma were both school teachers, in addition
to living on adjacent farms.
It is clear that much of my father's personality came from this
clan, and I think that so did much about his orientation and
his interests, including his love of hunting and an aptitude for
carpentry! Ezra Thompson was a farmer, but he died owning a
complete carpentry shop with the correct implements to carve
furniture, and a half dozen lots of fine wood.
It is of much importance that these people, and the entire
family group even more so, were among the most committed of the
Quakers and often were leaders. One of this family, and another
of the family group (a third emigrant Miller brother's wife) were
of the families of very prominent early Quaker ministers. It is
also important that these people were Quakers from an early
period in time, though I don't yet know exactly when they became
Quakers. The Quaker movement began in the 1650's, and spread
quickly in Northern England and among the lower aristocratic,
professional, merchant, artesian and yeoman farmer classes.
Yeoman farmers in Northern England were often very prosperous and
often had their fingers in industry and trade, and not
infrequently gave rise to families of professionals, artesians
and merchants. A Chambers family of Yorkshire was such a
family, though I don't know if that was my Chambers family.
The Quaker movement drew mostly from the Puritan movement, both
in England, and in Ireland. Many Puritans were already settled
in Ireland for one political reason or another. The Quakers
of the New Garden area came mostly from England via Ireland.
Regardless of when they got to Ireland, often soon after the
Quaker movement was founded, most of these families knew their
roots back to exactly 1650,like that generation or the one that
followed it started keeping track. The Quakers believed in
Biblical style keeping track of one's genealogy, and this is
why they kept records.
The reasons behind the Quaker movement have alot of bearing
on the temperament of the Thompson-Chambers-Miller clan and on
that of my father's family. The Quakers split from Puritanism
for three reasons. One, both their mode of worship and their
ways of knowing God and knowing about God were far more mystical
than those of the Puritans. Two, that bothered the Puritans.
The Quakers thought intuition was a better way to know God than
the Bible, and the Puritans thought that was heresy and hence
the Quakers were in league with the devil. Three, the Quakers
thought that the Puritans did not take many kinds of matters at
all seriously, from who was allowed to worship to life itself,
and that the Puritans were not anything like serious and intense
enough in their quest for salvation. Get this, now. This was
the PURITANS. Not nearly serious enough, and not nearly intense
enough.
There were positive spiritual experiences, but the
typical conversion experience included a childhood spent too
quiet and too serious to play (like my father; such behavior in
childhood really stands out, and is symptomatic of depression),
and a lifetime of miserable obsessive rumination on the state of
one's soul and on the miserable sinful state of a world where
even Puritan clergy sometimes had fun! That latter issue really
got to them. It reads fully like part of my experience with
clinical obsessive compulsive disorder. People with this
disorder often are generally prone to take things too seriously
and to an exaggerated sense of responsibility, and religious
scrupulosity is one of the common forms of this disorder. THat
description also fits my father to a tee.
IT is hardly surprising, then, that bouts of deep
depression with no apparent cause were very common among the
Quakers. They discussed and wrote about
this freely, as they thought this was a means of
divine discipline and a sign of divine grace! The Quakers
believed that Man could do nothing to bring about his own
salvation. They were mystics in the ancient and medieval sense
of the word. The things of the material world are inherently
evil, and man is inherently evil because he is made of matter.
They thought God had to more or less brutally strip people of
human emotion and all human emotional attachments and desires,
in order to achieve mystical aescetic union with the Divine.
I recently had lunch with a group of Quakers I met at a
Quaker meeting. It was the old style of meeting - everyone sat
in dead silence for an hour - eyes closed, meditating, intense
expressions on faces. Occasionally someone got up and
made some very intense observation or other. At this lunch, it
came out both that three of the five people there had intermit-
tent bouts of or chronic depression, and that for every one of
those people, that underlies the Quaker tendency to get very
upset about perceived things going wrong in the world and do
something about it. All of those people are leftists or involved
in social activism. Two of us noted how we tend to fly off the
handle when directly involved in something gone seriously wrong,
while the other three commented that they get very depressed when
they drive down the highway and see all the litter and all the
environmental pollution. One of those three noted that that
syndrome completely cleared up after his doctor diagnosed that
he had depression and put him on prozac! This gets to the
functional side of mood and anxiety disorders. People who have
them are likely to notice if something is genuinely wrong, get
upset, and try to fix it, and that has always been a fundamental
part of the Quaker temperament. Most interesting of all, none
of these people were raised as Quakers. THey were attracted by
the mystical religious style and the tradition of social
activism.
My father acted true to their nature when he founded the
Bolton Conservation Club. This was in the early 1960's. My
father was a nature lover by his own definition - he loved to
hunt. His one truly social activity was autumn deer hunts, and
this of course involved him with a circle of men who loved the
woods. We lived on a large lake in the Southern Adirondacks,
surrounded on three sides by the beginnings of the Adirondack
Mountain Range. One of the one or two large-scale businessmen
who lived in the town was a lumberman. He wanted to cut down
all the trees on one of the two mountains behind our village,
or something of the sort.
My father was the minister of one of
the village's four little churches. He organized the Conserva-
tion Club to oppose the effort to deforest the mountain. He
did no rabble rousing. He provided the church hall for the club
to meet in, he served as club secretary, wrote the club
newsletter, and printed it on the church's printing equipment,
and because he provided the resources and got the people
together, he chose the people he felt comfortable working with.
My father's style of choosing leaders was always intuitive;
he picked people who would have fit in in the environment he
grew up in. He picked stable, responsible, established people
who often ran a local business or had previous organizagional
experience of some sort. I don't know if it is still there, but
twenty years later the Conservation Club was certainly still
there. The Conservation Club won the battle with the lumbermen,
and my father had the lasting enmity of the lumberman and
several other people in the town who shared their general
corporate and radical Capitalist orientation.
My father never
understood that his Old Middle Class values stood in sharp
contradiction to theirs; he thought they weren't good Christians.
He didn't realize he was in the vanguard of the environmental
movement, either. When it came to the movements of the sixties
and seventies, he listened to people from the environment he
grew up in! Efforts like his in time brought about the
allocation of the Adirondack Park.
Notice that my father's style
of organization matched that of his Quaker ancestors. They, too,
were very quiet people, who organized by mobilizing resources
that were available to them. They provided the meeting place,
the money, and the land. They called people and got them
together. They served as directors of the meetings they created.
They had the kind of temperament and the sort of ethics that make
for stable organizations.
My father also demonstrated for him quite uncharacteristic
courage in standing up to the lumberman. He always ever after
thought he had been a fool. My father doesn't even BELIEVE in
courage. He got it the same place his Quaker ancestors got
theirs - simply from his strong feelings about the matter.
Here are pictures of Mary Emma Thompson Smith, and her daughter Mayme.
I imagine her eyes were closed because of the camera lights; but Mary Emma
looks EXACTLY like the people I watched at the Quaker meeting in Buffalo
for an hour. Same lines on face, same appearance of quiet but intense
emotionality. Look also at how Mary Emma is dressed. She looks extremely
nice. She has her hair VERY nicely done up, it is clean and shiny, and
she is wearing a nice but simpler than was the style dress in the style of
her prosperous Quaker people. Contrast it with the similar but greatly
laced and puffed-sleeved dress that her contemporaries of the Dehart
family wore to have their pictures taken. In the picture that shows her
sitting on the porch of the Smith farm house, she similarly has on a
stylish but simple dark colored gown.
We'll never know if Mayme's eyes lit up her face. But several things were
very clear. I suspected as much from the one nice dress and single piece
of nice jewelry, a brooch, that my family inherited from her, and the
contents of her makeup case that I was given to play with. My family got
everything when she died. She had three little class cases, and if
anything was in them at all, it was plain pressed powder. I also got her
bathrobe and "bedjacket", both plain; the bathrobe was long and dark
maroon. I was nine or ten at that time and eventually outgrew it as I
grew to a skinny 5' 8". She must have been short and skinny, as she
appears in the photo. She can't have been out of her twenties, but already
her face is lined and her hair thin. When I met her when I was a small
child, and her husband, both were small, unsteady very elderly people
tottering around and complaining about falling alot. Their little
apartment in a large apartment building in Philadelphia was nicely for the
time when they decorated it but rather plainly decorated in dark heavy
wood furniture, light beige (walls, rugs, neary everthing) except for some
red-toned oriental rugs, brightened with some sky blue and maroon here and
there. In this picture of young Mayme, she isn't very dressed up; she has
on some sort of ordinary jumper, and she is wearing no makeup at all,
unless she has that pressed powder on her face. Her lips are thin and
compressed - and no lipstick. In short, I was right; I got my taste in
hair, dress and makeup from my father's Quaker line. Amanda looks more
normal but hardly ornate; I don't even know what happened to her, except
she married someone named Wilson. I believe it was Mayme who was close
with my father and his parents.
Email me at cl001@freenet.buffalo.edu or dorasmith@oocities.com.
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