Roots

 Passenger Ship Samuel

My family can trace its roots back to the arrival of the Barnhouses in North America from England in 1638.  One of my great grandfathers, Captain Richard Barnhouse, sailed his ship, Samuel, over and settled in Virginia.  He brought passengers and slaves in exchange for land.  He had a slave himself.  After he died, his widow, Anne Barnhouse, granted the slave his freedom.  That part reminds me of how after my father died my mother made big cash donations to her favorite charities.  My father was not into charity or parting with cash.

My mother’s side of the family came over from France, through Canada.  The French Canadians began moving to North America in the mid-18^th century and continued emigrating up through 1930.  Our family settled in New York where they built and worked in factories, no slaves involved, only hard-working French people.

Grandpa Barnhouse moved to California in the early 20^th century to be an actor in Hollywood.  He met my grandmother, also from an English family, fell madly in love, started a family and settled on a successful sales career.  My father was one of their five children, raised in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles.  When he was young, he spent his spare time swimming with his sisters or selling persimmons from their backyard at a little stand he made.

My mother was basically an only child, although she had three much-older stepsiblings, raised in Niagara Falls.  She remembers countless hours curled up reading, either at night under the covers with a flashlight or in the summers, up in the attic with old comic books she found.  She also recalls spying on her brother through the floorboards when he was entertaining dates in the basement.

We have a genealogy book from the Barnhouse side of the family and a few of my aunts belong to Daughters of the Revolution, both help keep the history alive.  I have a handwritten family tree from my maternal grandmother, also French Canadian like my grandfather, whom she met in New York.  Everything I learned about the LaFrenieres is word of mouth.

I am doing my best to paint the family’s historical picture for my sons.  Every time we revisit the past, a fact is corrected or a child born out of wedlock pops up.  The details don’t really matter but it sure is interesting to discover the English side has something in common with the French—like that one of my great grandmothers was a badass liberal, just like my mom.