Donna: This is a picture of me at the grave site of my 9x great-grandfather in Connecticut, and this is a wolf stone that he picked out from his own pasture. A wolf stone was put there to protect the grave, to keep the wolves from digging it up and this is the whole little cemetery near Stonington, Connecticut, which is on the harbor, and its named Wequetequock Cemetery. 

And his information, it doesn’t show up in the picture, but his information is etched--in very crude letters--on this side of the stone and his wife Grace died shortly thereafter, and she’s buried here also and her info is on the opposite side. He came to…well it wasn’t the United States…he came to America in 1630, and his father-in-law came in 1629. They are both co-founders of Stonington, Connecticut which is right on the shore and is a beautiful little town. 

I visited Connecticut. This was in 2007. Several of these graves surrounding here are also Minor children, his name was Thomas Minor and this was in May 2007; my sister went with me.

I was on a fact-finding trip hoping to find more information about my father’s mother’s family, which is the descendant of Thomas and it was early in May we visited the lighthouse Museum in Stonington and it was early in May before a lot of tourists had come. And I mentioned to the curator that I was interested in anything to do with Thomas Minor, and she disappeared, came back few minutes later, she handed me this little pewter wash basin and said, “this belonged to Thomas Minor” and it was probably one  he had made himself, probably used it most every day of his life for who knows how long. 

He died. I don’t remember the exact year, but he was probably 1660’s... and the idea of being able to physically touch something that he had touched almost 400 years earlier, still sends shivers up my spine. 

It was a profound moment for me, the whole trip was interesting but this part, particularly, for the first time in my life I felt that I really belonged to this country. My ancestors had helped build the country. 

There were very few people here when Thomas Minor came to this country. He left Massachusetts to go settle in Connecticut, went through some of the early wars in Connecticut. He was a leader in the township, built his own farm, raised nine kids. His oldest son was also a founder but he went west, and he was the co-founder of Woodbury which is in the western part of the state (Connecticut).

So you know there’s a deep history there, it really made me feel a real connection to the country, it made me feel proud. My grandmother probably never knew past her grandparents, would been very proud to have known she had an ancestor clear back to the 1630s. So it was very meaningful, I was so glad that I was able to actually see his place and see, you know, the area he lived in. 

You know I never cared much for colonial history until I started doing my family history. I have a lot of colonials... and it became fascinating to me to learn how they survived. My earliest ancestor on my side of the family came in 1623. He was a part of a fishing crew, he was very young. I don’t think he was even 20 and he was single, a part of a fishing crew for a company in England and they left him there that winter in this small group. 

Maybe 20 people, and they left him there so they could get a head start the next spring to fish and by the time the ship would arrive from England they would have a load of fish ready to go back and the boat could get back rather quick and the company would get a head start on the market. It was strictly a marketing ploy but I often thought how that young man felt, and the group felt as they saw that ship sail away. There’s no mini market down the street, they were alone out there. It must have been a terribly lonely feeling. You know, they were up near the coast of Maine, so they were quite a ways north and it had to have been a pretty tough winter. 

Yeah, this whole family was pretty fascinating. One of his (Thomas Minor) and Grace’s…I’m trying to think if it was their granddaughter or daughter…anyway she married into the grant family which led to Ulysses S. Grant. So he’s a pretty close connection all those years back. The family of the man who was part of the fishing crew led to Franklin Roosevelt and his family, so we’ve got connections. I think my dad was his 10th cousin 5 times removed or something. 

Mariah: So in leading up to all your research, was it more like looking for a sense of identity to this land?

Donna: Not necessarily for me, I started it, my whole project, because I was probably the last of my family.

I had three sons, they didn’t know much about their grandparents, and I realized I didn’t know much about my parents’ background. I knew a little about my grandmother primarily because I was raised around my grandparents but beyond that, I knew very little and I thought, “you know…my ex husband had died years before and most of his brothers and sisters were gone, his mother was gone, and there was nobody left to tell my sons you know about their ancestors.” We had just moved my parents back from Texas to Lander, so I had some time with them. And I thought, “I better start learning.” 

I got involved in it and a distant cousin called one afternoon and I had just begun. He had been doing some research into his wife’s family, which was my dad’s cousin and so he offered to share with me information he had gotten and boy, that got me started. I decided that I would write the genealogy and not just genealogy but the stories. That’s to me what makes the history, and I decided to write about my four grandparents and my husband’s four grandparents.

Since then, I have probably written a hundred biographies of their extended families. It’s been a vocation not just a hobby, I’ve worked steadily on it and luckily, I’ve had the internet because of where I live it was necessary because there’s no original documents and that was part of why I went to Connecticut was to learn more information and that got me going and I’ve since completed most all of the close relatives, I think I’ve written my grandfather’s and grandmother’s biographies. 

Mariah: In collecting these stories, was it difficult to find them documented or were they passed down orally or anything?

Donna: My aunt my father’s sister had tried, she’s a published author--Helen Butler--and she had tried for years to write the biography of her father and worked on it, worked on it, worked on it. When I started doing family history, I kept asking her for any information and she kept saying the book will tell it all. 

When she died, she still hadn’t gotten it published, the publishers wanted to cut down the size of it or embellish it, but she refused to embellish it because she said “my father’s life was fascinating the way it was.” But when she died then, her granddaughters (she had two) were not interested in carrying on with it. Her son tried to get the book published and finally gave up. Then he died, so eventually all of her notes and things came to me. 

I’ve decided that I probably have to quit doing research. My granddaughter asked me when I was going to write my own story, so for the last two or three years. I’ve been trying to do that, but I can’t write in the first person. First person is hard, and I had a lot of trouble deciding how to present it. I finally decided to just start putting things together, things that happened as I think of them and stick it in the computer. 

Then eventually, I can put it all together. I was sick for quite a while this spring, so I’ve kind of backed away from it. Maybe this will motivate me to get back to it. I do need to finish. My granddaughter has agreed to be the keeper of all my stuff. 

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.