What am I doing eating lunch in a graveyard?

It was my definition of a great vacation day.  Sitting in an old church cemetery eating lunch at the grave of an ancestor.

Creepy? Nope, not for me.  And not for many cultures throughout the history of mankind either, from the ancient Gaelic celebration of Samhaim which eventually got wrapped into the Christian Halloween . . . and the pre-Spaniard indigenous people's festivals of the dead in Latin America which evolved into today's Dia de los Muertos celebration in Mexico and other parts of region.

Earlier in the day, I had taken a sharp turn east while heading home from a high school reunion in upstate NY.  I had granted myself the day to pursue what is a passionate avocation of mine, geneaology.

It works like this: whenever I vacation near a likely ancestral location (NY, CT, PA, OH, Ireland to name a few places) I give myself a "bite-size," manageable quest to research.  Sometimes my wife and daughter indulge my fun and accompany me; other times they, ahem, "encourage" me to head off on my own ;-).

Now let me state right up front. I for one do not get carried away with long lines of colonial ancestry. That has its place, but my experience has been that if you get too concerned with that, you very likely will become disappointed at some point. I find that the fun is in the search itself and tying together individual lives with what was going on in the world around them. 

Perhaps just as important, my findings over the years have also helped me to better answer the question we all ask of ourselves, "Who am I?"

I was traveling solo on this particular trip.  And on this day, I was hoping to locate more information about the Dakin line, the family of my 4th great-grandmother on my mother's side, in the area of Duchess County, NY, which is on the east side of the Hudson River near the border of CT and NY.



This is beautiful country, and I was there at a prime time of the year, the fall.



I got lucky with my search.

I had done some online research previously, and after a quick stop at the local library in Middleton in the township of North East, where I obtained some valuable clues from the friendly and knowledgeable staff, I ended up at a small church cemetery (the building is now gone) established in the 1770's by my 6th great-grandfather, Simon Dakin (1720 - 1803), a Baptist minister.

                                    

                                     

Many of the gravestones were illegible and/or overgrown.

I did not find one for Simon nor of his son Joshua, who was my great-g-g-g-g grandfather (1744 - ?), but I did find one of the family.  It's the leaning gravestone in the foreground of the above picture, and it's the one behind me in the picture at the top of this post where I am eating lunch. 

Below is a closeup of the headstone.  It's of Jacob Dakin (1775 - 1836), a son of Joshua, and brother of my g-g-g-g grandmother, Charity Dakin, who married a neighbor (see census data below), Elisha Driggs.

And next to Jacob was is the gravestone of Olive Clark, his wife.

So I sat down and had a lazy picnic lunch with "family" on a beautiful fall day.  As I mentioned, there used to be a church standing next to this graveyard.  Hmmm, I remember how I used to run and play in the chuch graveyard after Sunday service while growing up in Schenectady.  So I could easily imagine my ancestors doing the same here.

As I said above, I like to ponder these finds in the context of what was happening in their world at the time.  For example, in the census of 1800, both Jacob and his father Joshua had a slave listed as being part of their  households. (see last column in 1800 census for these guys.) Wait, a minute, slaveholders? . . . in this rural area of Duchess County, NY?!

Well yes, it appears so.  I don't have all the answers, but here's a plausible explanation . . . and an example of why I find genealogy searching such an engrossing avocational pursuit: 

If you remember your history, the election of 1800 was where Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent Federalist president, John Adams.

The state of New York played a pivotal role in that election by being a swing state for Jefferson.  You may ask, how did that happen, a northern state not voting for John Adams of neighboring Massachusetts?  Well, that was partly enabled by the well-organized politicking of Aaron Burr, a Jeffersonian "Republican" who outmaneuvered Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, on getting the vote out in New York City (yep, the famous duel of several years later had deep roots of simmering acrimony.)

But there was more to why NY was for Jefferson in 1800.

New Yorkers never have really considered themselves as part of New England, even when many of the migrations of Eurpoean settlers into New York over the centuries originated from neighboring CT and MA.  Something about leaving the Berkshire Mountains changed them.  My theory about that is that those that headed into New York were looking for a new life away from the "confines" of New England, much like pioneers in later decades who moved far to the Great Plains, Rockies and beyond.

For whatever reason, the agrarian populist theme of Jefferson's platform resonated with these rural New York farmers and pioneers.  You see evidence of the devotion by towns named in the region like Monticello and Jeffersonville.

In 1800, many in the country felt that the Federalists had overplayed their "aristocratic hand" by cozying up to England (ghast!) and stacking the federal judiciary.  And then this became a real palpable fear amongst many in the country with the passage of the ill-advised, Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Act, which was meant to squelch raucous pro-French sentiments.  Result?  To a growing segment of the population, the Federalists threatened the sacred rights won in the Revolution, while Jefferson represented "a second revolution to save the first."

Few others in this area had a slave listed in that census, but hmmm, maybe, just maybe, if the famous patriot Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, perhaps having a slave in rural New York was also acceptable at that time?

But then I asked myself, weren't these Dakins fervent god-fearing Baptists?  How could they have been slaveholders?  History has an answer for that. While certainly not excusing the horrible practice, let's remember these were different times.  As escaped slave / abolitionist Frederick Douglass so eloquently wrote in his autobiography several decades later in 1845, it was certainly well known amongst the slaves themselves that the masters who were most pious were often the most fervent supporters of slavery.  Such believers followed the skewed theological reasoning that scripture ordained slavery as being part of the will of God.

But then again, maybe I have this all wrong.  Perhaps there is another completely different story to the marking of a single slave in these ancestors' households in the census.  For example, maybe these are instances of charity somehow . . . efforts to shelter runaway slaves -- claiming them as their own slaves so as to protect runaways from being sent back South.  And what about those entries to the left of that far-right column, for "free non-whites," which usually was marked to indicate native americans in the household?  Perhaps some sort of missionary effort?

Ah, the search continues . . .  But first, where did I put that delicious apple cider I bought along the roadside?