Publisher's Synopsis
For nearly forty years, Barry MacDonald has sought and documented the genealogical bones of his ancestors. In that process, he has often gained insights into many of their personalities and actions. In this volume, MacDonald puts meat on the bones of five of his ancestors whose lives spanned parts of six centuries and two continents, yet remarkably, lived much of those lives no more than 100 miles apart in what is now Massachusetts. Highlighted are: June (Pennell) MacDonald, the author's indomitable mother; Percy Leon Covert, a veteran of the First World War; Samuel Haynes Jenks, a 19th-century newspaper publisher and politician on Nantucket Island; Richard Thayer, a land speculator in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony; and Stephen Hopkins, whose adventures took him to Bermuda in 1609, Jamestown in 1610, and New Plymouth with the Pilgrims in 1620. Their collective stories reveal many of the complex attributes of the human condition: altruism, perseverance, patriotism, ambition, materialism, and the eternal desire to search for what lies just over the horizon. In the final chapter, MacDonald discusses the enigma that surrounds his quest for those who bore his own family name in generations past. He concludes with a review of the genealogy that links his current-day family to the principal families portrayed in the book: Carr, Covert, Heaton, Jenks, MacDonald, Pennell, Thayer, Snow, and Wood. An index of names and places follows.
