Justin Sisson of Mt. Shasta, California, appears on this page: <http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0890876746&id=juAaDhdXR7wC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA62&dq=Sisson&sig=AWGwGVvz6hgcGs8WZMoM8BFMpVo> If necessary, paste half of the URL into your browser, and then the other half. There must be no space between the halves. David Arne Sisson

Please can you stop these emails coming into my inbox as they are all American and I have no contact there. Sue I want to cancel --------------------------------- All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine

gburesh wrote: > I do not agree with this assessment. My profession is contracting. If you > had a separate agreement with the caterer and you did not cancel that > agreement within the time specified in the contract, you are probably > liable. However, if this catering contract was made through the hotel/motel > and not a separate agreement, then you should not be obligated. > > Gayle Buresh > I'm very grateful for this discussion. Thanks. David

Dear John, Thanks very much for your good thinking. I'm printing it out to ponder. David JSisson242@aol.com wrote: > Darne: Obviously I am not a lawyer, but in my estimation when the original > contract was broken with the first motel, that automatically broke all > sub-contracts that might have ensued. To my way of thinking, the first motel said > they would accept and honor the contract you made, and anything that was > subordinate to that agreement, was by nature a part of it. So when they broke the > contract by saying they could not live up to its agreements, they also broke > any subsidiary contracts. The burden is on them, not on you. I do not know > what your correspondence was with them at the time when they said they could not > support our reunion, but it should give you some clues as to who was > responsible for breaking the contract in the first place. > > Probably doesn't help but this is my view and I think you should stand fast. > Let them make their next move. > > John > > > ============================== > View and search Historical Newspapers. Read about your ancestors, find > marriage announcements and more. Learn more: > http://www.ancestry.com/s13969/rd.ashx > > >

I do not agree with this assessment. My profession is contracting. If you had a separate agreement with the caterer and you did not cancel that agreement within the time specified in the contract, you are probably liable. However, if this catering contract was made through the hotel/motel and not a separate agreement, then you should not be obligated. Gayle Buresh -----Original Message----- From: JSisson242@aol.com [mailto:JSisson242@aol.com] Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 5:49 PM To: SISSON-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [SISSON-L] Re: SISSON-D Digest V06 #48 Darne: Obviously I am not a lawyer, but in my estimation when the original contract was broken with the first motel, that automatically broke all sub-contracts that might have ensued. To my way of thinking, the first motel said they would accept and honor the contract you made, and anything that was subordinate to that agreement, was by nature a part of it. So when they broke the contract by saying they could not live up to its agreements, they also broke any subsidiary contracts. The burden is on them, not on you. I do not know what your correspondence was with them at the time when they said they could not support our reunion, but it should give you some clues as to who was responsible for breaking the contract in the first place. Probably doesn't help but this is my view and I think you should stand fast. Let them make their next move. John ============================== View and search Historical Newspapers. Read about your ancestors, find marriage announcements and more. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13969/rd.ashx

Darne: Obviously I am not a lawyer, but in my estimation when the original contract was broken with the first motel, that automatically broke all sub-contracts that might have ensued. To my way of thinking, the first motel said they would accept and honor the contract you made, and anything that was subordinate to that agreement, was by nature a part of it. So when they broke the contract by saying they could not live up to its agreements, they also broke any subsidiary contracts. The burden is on them, not on you. I do not know what your correspondence was with them at the time when they said they could not support our reunion, but it should give you some clues as to who was responsible for breaking the contract in the first place. Probably doesn't help but this is my view and I think you should stand fast. Let them make their next move. John

Hello Cousins and Friends, The Sisson Gathering was a big success, in my "humble opinion." I enjoyed it tremendously. And I think lots of other people did too. The only problem is - Well, we're having a some difference of opinion with the caterer who would have prepared meals for us if we'd been able to use the first hotel. So here's what we need - a pro bono lawyer. If you are - or know of - a lawyer who could do a little advising, please let me know. We need someone with a legal "nose" to read some papers and tell us whether we're heading in the right direction. If you know of ANY lawyer who'd be willing to give us a half-hour or so, without charge, or at a reduced rate, please let me know. Thanks, David Arne Sisson

_Click here: guinness attempt_ (http://www.westunionfest.org/guinness.htm) Here is the website I forgot to include in my e-mail of the 10th Sorry Myra Sisson Argabrite

Now I see. Sorry Myra. I should read all my mail before I answer any of it. I hope someone has more time than I do. Compiling a huge family tree is time consuming and frustration, I'll bet. David Arne Sisson Larry Beach wrote: > oops no web link in the below email. > Try this: http://www.westunionfest.org/guinness.htm > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: <Bb442@aol.com> > To: <SISSON-L@rootsweb.com> > Sent: Monday, July 10, 2006 8:43 PM > Subject: [SISSON-L] Check out guinness attempt > > > Click here: guinness attempt > > Did you see this in Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter? We should put ours > up > against it. We might just win. > Myra Sisson Argabrite > > > ============================== > New! Family Tree Maker 2005. Build your tree and search for your > ancestors at the same time. Share your tree with family and friends. > Learn more: > http://landing.ancestry.com/familytreemaker/2005/tour.aspx?sourceid=14599&targetid=5429 > > > > ============================== > Search the US Census Collection. Over 140 million records added in the > last 12 months. Largest online collection in the world. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13965/rd.ashx > > >

I read Eastman's newsletter every week, but I don't remember seeing this article. Please tell us more about what he said. What Guinness record? David Arne Sisson Bb442@aol.com wrote: > Click here: guinness attempt > > Did you see this in Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter? We should put ours up > against it. We might just win. > Myra Sisson Argabrite > > > ============================== > New! Family Tree Maker 2005. Build your tree and search for your ancestors at the same time. Share your tree with family and friends. Learn more: http://landing.ancestry.com/familytreemaker/2005/tour.aspx?sourceid=14599&targetid=5429 > > >

oops no web link in the below email. Try this: http://www.westunionfest.org/guinness.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: <Bb442@aol.com> To: <SISSON-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, July 10, 2006 8:43 PM Subject: [SISSON-L] Check out guinness attempt Click here: guinness attempt Did you see this in Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter? We should put ours up against it. We might just win. Myra Sisson Argabrite ============================== New! Family Tree Maker 2005. Build your tree and search for your ancestors at the same time. Share your tree with family and friends. Learn more: http://landing.ancestry.com/familytreemaker/2005/tour.aspx?sourceid=14599&targetid=5429

Click here: guinness attempt Did you see this in Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter? We should put ours up against it. We might just win. Myra Sisson Argabrite

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Tuesday/National/20060704074402/Article/index_html This link tells of "Sir Norman Frank *Sisson* who was hoping against hope for the "best birthday present ever" — permanent residence in Malaysia." David Arne Sisson who gets messages about ALL Sissons who make the newspapers from "Google Alerts." Google that phrase and sign of for alerts for any/all your family names. It's great!

Hi Everyone, This article appeared in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, two days ago, July 2. My son Andy helped me find it online. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060701/ap_on_sc/brotherhood_of_man;_ylt=Aqnr_llb7tDoRmEEltfmyCGs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM- Enjoy! David Arne Sisson Roots of human family tree are shallow By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer/Sat Jul 1, 5:17 PM ET/ Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die. Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today. That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ. "It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book "Mapping Human History" traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors — who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence. But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived. With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant. Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants. That revelation is "especially startling," statistician Jotun Hein of England's Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature. "Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled. It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots. How can this be? It's simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors. It's nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you've got a million ancestors. By the 13th you've got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion. But wait. How could anybody — much less everybody — alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the 9th century? The answer is, they didn't. Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago whose daughter was your mother's 36th great-grandmother, and whose son was your father's 36th great-grandfather. That would put him on two branches on your family tree, one on your mother's side and one on your father's. In fact, most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million people on Earth back then. Simple division — a trillion divided by 200 million — shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times on the family tree of every single individual living today. But things are never average. Many of the people who were alive in the year 800 never had children; they don't appear on anybody's family tree. Meanwhile, more prolific members of society would show up many more than 5,000 times on a lot of people's trees. Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree. But don't stop there; keep going back. As the number of potential ancestors dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who never had children or whose lines eventually died out. And it wasn't all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too. It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right. "No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu," Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature. How can they be so sure? Seven years ago one of Olson's colleagues, a Yale University statistician named Joseph Chang, started thinking about how to estimate when the last common ancestor of everybody on Earth today lived. In a paper published by the journal "Advances in Applied Probability," Chang showed that there is a mathematical relationship between the size of a population and the number of generations back to a common ancestor. Plugging the planet's current population into his equation, he came up with just over 32 generations, or about 900 years. Chang knew that answer was wrong because it relied on some common, but inaccurate, assumptions that population geneticists often use to simplify difficult mathematical problems. For example, his analysis pretended that Earth's population has always been what it is today. It also assumed that individuals choose their mates randomly. And each generation had to reproduce all at once. Chang's calculations essentially treated the world like one big meet market where any given guy was equally likely to pair up with any woman, whether she lived in the next village or halfway around the world. Chang was fully aware of the inaccuracy — people have to select their partners from the pool of individuals they have actually met, unless they are entering into an arranged marriage. But even then, they are much more likely to mate with partners who live nearby. And that means that geography can't be ignored if you are going to determine the relatedness of the world's population. A few years later Chang was contacted by Olson, who had started thinking about the world's interrelatedness while writing his book. They started corresponding by e-mail, and soon included in their deliberations Douglas Rohde, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist and computer expert who now works for Google. The researchers knew they would have to account for geography to get a better picture of how the family tree converges as it reaches deeper into the past. They decided to build a massive computer simulation that would essentially re-enact the history of humanity as people were born, moved from one place to another, reproduced and died. Rohde created a program that put an initial population on a map of the world at some date in the past, ranging from 7,000 to 20,000 years ago. Then the program allowed those initial inhabitants to go about their business. He allowed them to expand in number according to accepted estimates of past population growth, but had to cap the expansion at 55 million people due to computing limitations. Although unrealistic in some respects — 55 million is a lot less than the 6.5 billion people who actually live on Earth today — he found through trial and error that the limitation did not significantly change the outcome with regard to common ancestry. The model also had to allow for migration based on what historians, anthropologists and archaeologists know about how frequently past populations moved both within and between continents. Rohde, Chang and Olson chose a range of migration rates, from a low level where almost nobody left their native home to a much higher one where up to 20 percent of the population reproduced in a town other than the one where they were born, and one person in 400 moved to a foreign country. Allowing very little migration, Rohde's simulation produced a date of about 5,000 B.C. for humanity's most recent common ancestor. Assuming a higher, but still realistic, migration rate produced a shockingly recent date of around 1 A.D. Some people even suspect that the most recent common ancestor could have lived later than that. "A number of people have written to me making the argument that the simulations were too conservative," Rohde said. Migration is the key. When a people have offspring far from their birthplaces, they essentially introduce their entire family lines into their adopted populations, giving their immediate offspring and all who come after them a set of ancestors from far away. People tend to think of preindustrial societies as places where this sort of thing rarely happened, where virtually everyone lived and died within a few miles of the place where they were born. But history is full of examples that belie that notion. Take Alexander the Great, who conquered every country between Greece and northern India, siring two sons along the way by Persian mothers. Consider Prince Abd Al-Rahman, son of a Syrian father and a Berber mother, who escaped Damascus after the overthrow of his family's dynasty and started a new one in Spain. The Vikings, the Mongols, and the Huns all traveled thousands of miles to burn, pillage and — most pertinent to genealogical considerations — rape more settled populations. More peaceful people moved around as well. During the Middle Ages, the Gypsies traveled in stages from northern India to Europe. In the New World, the Navaho moved from western Canada to their current home in the American Southwest. People from East Asia fanned out into the South Pacific Islands, and Eskimos frequently traveled back and forth across the Bering Sea from Siberia to Alaska. "These genealogical networks, as they start spreading out they really have the ability to get virtually everywhere," Olson said. Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers between groups, history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages, illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. Some historical times and places were especially active melting pots — medieval Spain, ancient Rome and the Egypt of the pharaohs, for example. "And the thing is, you only need one," said Mark Humphrys, an amateur anthropologist and professor of computer science at Dublin City University. One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of forbears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So everyone who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal home — every sailor blown off course, every young man who set off to seek his fortune, every woman who left home with a trader from a foreign land — as long as they had children, they helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all share.

I received the following message from the Origins Network about 24 hours of free access: The Origins Network is offering free access to both British and Irish Origins on the 4th July to celebrate US Independence Day. Free access will begin at 00.00GMT and will run until 08.00GMT on the 5th July 2006. In order to access, simply go to www.originsnetwork.com and click on the link to sign up or login. Cathy

This is a transcription of Darrell A. Norris’ paper delivered at the 2006 Sisson Gathering. Horizontal lines indicate original page divisions. Many sections of the text were illustrated by overhead transparencies and slides. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE SPREAD OF NEW ENGLAND CULTURAL TRAITS: CONTEXTS FOR THE SISSON DIASPORA Darrell A. Norris* Annual Meeting, Sisson Family Reunion Rochester, NY, Saturday, June 24, 2006 * Professor of Geography SUNY Geneseo Geneseo, NY 14454 Email: Norris@geneseo.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DARRELL NORRIS is a Professor of Geography at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, where he has taught since 1981. Born in England, Darrell was educated at Cambridge University, and emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he earned graduate degrees at McGill University, Montreal, and McMaster University in Hamilton. Darrell’s research and teaching background has focused on the North American cultural landscape, population mobility, consumer behavior, and popular culture. His current research is exploring the evolving geography of the Web, especially Web-based “mail-order” brides. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I am not a genealogist. The background and credentials I bring to this remarkable confluence of Sissons are tangential at best – a professional career characterized by a fascination with culture, particularly material culture, and several research projects which centrally engaged aspects of human migration as a core theme in processes as varied as the vicissitudes of nineteenth century retail business, early transportation and tourism, the formation of the pioneer farmscape, and the social fabric of nineteenth century cities. My speech this evening will therefore try to engage a saga central to the Sisson experience for close to four centuries, that is to say the spread of aspects of the New England cultural realm in the still evolving American landscape. Part of that saga, obviously, is the migration of New Englanders, the Sissons included, from a seventeenth century southern New England hearth. Less well-known but certainly worth exploring is, to borrow the phrase coined by the great Penn State geographer Peirce Lewis, the ‘cultural spoor’ of New Englanders, the many traces of their material and non-material cultural landscape that have shaped and continue to color the American scene. California excepted, for example, to speak, albeit somewhat lazily, of ‘Blue’ states is to articulate just one element of a New England tradition of community, commonwealth, and social responsibility that came to color those states touched most by the diaspora of New Englanders – New York, the eastern and upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Genealogy, as you are probably aware, is a less popular pursuit in England than it is in the United States, most notable New England. Like many English-born, I know little of my roots beyond my English-born grandparents, who were fisher-folk in Brixham, Devon. (Brixham, incidentally, was the penultimate English port-of-call of the Mayflower, and Mayflower II was built there is 1971, 350 years after its namesake’s trans-Atlantic voyage. My mother’s parents were Galician Jews and we know nothing of them except my East London grandfather’s failure to anticipate the future of internal combustion. He just kept on repairing bicycles. English diffidence toward genealogy has I think, several underlying causes. When genealogy and heraldry were nearly synonymous, all but one or two percent of the English population were effectively denied significant roots by dint of their subordinate class status. Moreover, when roots were patently millennial and lost in the mists of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Celtic or other distant forebears in non-literate unrecorded societies, the quest for family lineage was bound to be frustrated and generally speculative at best. Sleuthing medieval Sissons ------------------------------------------------------------------------ guarantees few needles and many haystacks. And finally, as Peter Laslett and others have shown, English society even before the industrial revolution was remarkable peripatetic, often substituting geographical movement for upward social mobility. And the mass movement to cities in the first century of the Industrial Revolution before 1850 accentuated this fact of social life in much of the British Isles. The Brixham Norrises, incidentally, were an exception to this rule; they were resolutely Devon folk, rarely straying beyond the bounds of their regional accept and way of life. They were the rule to which the likes of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were very much the exception. My own grandfather ventured beyond the West County fisheries just once, hired as a second mate on the ship that retrieved Lord Byron’s remains from Greece. English diffidence, as you know and reflect, is not shared by New Englanders and their descendants. Perhaps that has to do with the role of family and, especially, village communities in southern New England’s agrarian landscape before the factory system emerged on the cusp of the nineteenth century. Perhaps too it reflects the sheer extent of record-keeping and family narratives in what , with the possible exception of Iceland and Sweden, was the world’s most literate society in the eighteenth century. Primers, diaries, family Bibles, sewing samplers and other cultural elements all attest to the emphasis placed on education, literacy, and – by extension – and engagement with family roots and branches. But perhaps the paramount factor was a shared and fairly egalitarian experience – stepping ashore in a new world some time during the seventeenth century, with relatively little and certainly not very diverse immigration thereafter. This experience framed what geographers term the New England cultural hearth, a landscape which, through growing emigration would come to color the landscape of the late colonial era and the westward expansion of the United States. Wilbur Zelinsky, also a Penn State geographer, is the most accessible commentator on the New England diaspora. It is to elements of that spread that we now turn our attention. PLACE-NAMING The first New Englanders left an English landscape full of place-names, most of them dating from the great age of settlement and woodland clearing between the end of the Roman rule and the Norman conquest, that is between the sixth and eleventh centuries. With few exceptions these place names combined personal possessives and descriptive common nouns. The ‘ing’ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ denoted ‘people,’ ‘ton’ meant ‘village,’ and ‘ham’ meant ‘farmstead,’ all in Anglo-Saxon. (There were of course Danish terms too.) Later, ‘leigh’ and ‘stead’ both connoted ‘clearing,’ while ‘ford’ and ‘burgh’ or ‘borough’ are self-explanatory. New Englanders articulated and gave meaning to their new landscape by borrowing and fixing the names of their English town, village and port origins in southern New England’s _tabula rasa_. And, given the regional concentrations by English origin this led to a parallel regionalism of the new toponymy, exemplified for instance by replica etymologies drawn from eastern and southwestern England, the two leading source areas of the emigrants. In England I grew up in Plymouth and nearby Plympton; the Massachusetts Plymouth also boasts a nearby Plympton. When New Englanders spearheaded western expansion, they carried place-naming as a key element of their cultural baggage, often across several generations of step-by-step movement. The case of Andover is a very good example of this ingrained habit, tracing New Englanders and their descendants across 250 years of westward expansion. Taken as a whole, we can trace this diaspora right across the mid-Atlantic states and the mid-West. And when settlers broke with established practice, as indeed happened quite often in western New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, the ‘new’ names simply joined the arsenal of those with specific New England roots. Hence Geneseo New York spawned Geneseos in Michigan and Illinois. And the key break with migratory rootedness had its origins in New York as well, when a late eighteenth century surveyor inspired perhaps by Jeffersonian classicism ascribed classically inspired names to a range of towns near Syracuse. Thereafter New England place-naming habits were interspersed with toponymic echoes of ancient Greece, Rome, and occasionally Egypt. As well, the personal possessive element enjoyed a marked revival in the nineteenth century, especially in the naming of small milling communities. SPEECH Accent and vocabulary both lie outside my areas of research. Suffice to say then that New England dialects and patterns of usage enjoyed much less generational carryover than was typical of place-naming. New Englanders enjoyed an absolute majority of the population in very few regions of trans-Appalachian settlement, while the fusion of disparate settler origins combined with a degree of rural isolation both contributed to a complex regional mosaic of pronunciation and usage. Speech patterns framed the formation of a Midwestern national ------------------------------------------------------------------------ hearth at the confluence of New England, Pennsylvania, and Southern migratory streams. The dominance of this new hearth and the aural national acceptance of its accents would be echoed by a small legion of television news anchors from the Midwest. More locally, even in a region of significant New England population origins in central and western New York, the Boston ‘frappe’ and Providence ‘cabinet’ never came to describe a milk shake, and the ‘grinder’ (and Pennsylvania ‘hoagie’ too) never identified a submarine sandwich. DEATH AND BURIAL While gravestones lie very much within the orbit of interest of genealogists, it is I think striking and a little disappointing to note that interest generally begins and ends with whatever vital information the gravestone provides. New Englanders’ habit of placing slate (or in the Connecticut Valley sandstone) memorials _outdoors_ for _ordinary_ folk coincided with the very first instances of this practices in British churchyards, where memorials had hitherto been place _inside_ churches for only a select few of the deceased. In other words, the New England gravestone was more cultural innovation than cultural baggage. Beginning with the work of Demos, Deetz, and Dethlefson, all in the 1970s, much has been learned about New England gravestones as a key element of the folk culture which evolved slowly from the early seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Let me try to provide a synopsis. First, the stones were overwhelmingly simple headboard forms, usually accompanied by footstones. Second, decorative motifs were common, beginning with austere skulls befitting Puritan attitudes toward the transitory nature of things earthly. By the eighteenth century the ominous skull had been replaced by more hopeful symbols, notably spirit-faces and winged angels. By the time of the Revolution it was socially acceptable, at least for ministers and other leading figures, to incorporate a portrait of the deceased. Admiration had replaced admonition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gravestone practices were very much an element of New Englanders’ cultural baggage a they moved west. An early example is Mendham, New Jersey, where we see the trappings of gravestone art from the church’s foundation in the 1730s to a set of changes which characterized most of the eastern United States around 1800. The simple headboard gave way to its classicized, often Palladian, form. Traditional motifs were replaced by classical urns, weeping willows, and pedestals. Local sandstone yielded to easily worked limestone, and itinerant carvers such as Uzal Ward were made obsolete by the advent of marble works. While this ------------------------------------------------------------------------ element of the New England diaspora does not become muted by the early nineteenth century, one encounters many legacies of New England practice well into the century in areas settled by New Englanders. Upstate New York is a case in point, and the classicized headboard is the most common manifestation of the two-century evolution of the New England memorial. The more sedentary members of the audience may wish to explore this further by accessing the ‘virtual cemetery’ on-line. Get there easily by googling the two words ‘virtual cemetery’. It is a remarkable extensive national record of gravestones from all over the United States. STRUCTURES The New England house experienced a similar transition as an element of folk culture. Its roots were the simple one-room cottage with (unlike its Tidewater counterpart) an interior chimney breast to retain heat. Most of you will be familiar with the Cape Cod folk house, and, while Capes were a regional variant, most late colonial New England rural homes were also relatively small story-and-a-half clapboard houses, lacking only the plunging eaves characteristic of the Cape and its many revival expressions from the early twentieth century and – especially – the 1950s (viz. Levittown). The more substantial New England folk houses evolved gradually from the one-roomed cottage – the Garrison home, one-room deep with two full stories, the Saltbox with its distinctive roof line accommodating a long rear kitchen, and the New England Large home, with four rooms over four rooms incorporating, like all the region’s folk structures, a substantial central chimney. None of these forms, however, are much in evidence in areas extensively settled by New Englanders after the Revolution. There are two reasons for this. First, substantial homes shed the central chimney to yield a central entrance, bilaterally symmetric, and distinctly Georgian front façade. This transition was well underway _in_ New England before the great diaspora. Second, most homes were simple 1 ½ story houses which would be near-universally swept away and replaced by Greek Revival and, later, Italianate rural homes between _circa_ 1820 and the Civil War. Indeed, these simple 1 ½ story homes were replaced in New England as well. Hence our common misconceptions about the look and scale of colonial homes, misconceptions reinforced by the look and scale of their twentieth century revivals as well as by the surviving and generally substantial (but nonetheless unrepresentative) homes in the present-day New England landscape. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Barns became a commonplace feature of the New England landscape soon after annual harvests warranted capacious winter storage. The English tradition was the enclosed _barnyard_, flanked by a handful of functional spaces, including the barn itself. The New England variant of this form was the _connected barn_, a winter-sensitive practice which did not spread west with the diaspora of New Englanders. The standard colonial form came to be the so-called ‘English’ three-bay barn, with a central threshing floor and flanking grain or hay storage on both sides. This form was unsuited to wintering cattle, and when livestock numbers proliferated in the nineteenth century the _raised_ three-bay barn emerged, an exercise in gravitational adaption, with top-stored feed and bottom-expelled manure and urea from the cattle pens. The barn was generally built on a slope and routinely ramped to provide threshing floor access. The raised three-bay barn certainly did spread west wherever mixed farming was practiced. It was New England’s principal contribution to America’s new Midwestern farm landscape. Ohio’s Connecticut Reserve is a case in point. FENCES In a wonderful essay, J.K. Galbraith explored the bizarre economics of “farming an abandoned farm.” His point was that generations of naïve urbanites has infused the moribund New England farmscape with fresh capital and local employment, always doomed to failure, and always likely to yield stones as the only ‘crop’ of note. Stones there were a-plenty, and Colonial New Englanders adapted to this challenge by consigning field stones to bounding stone fences, often little more than piled rubble. The New England diaspora quickly turned its back on this practice. American fences in the wooded East were almost always simple ‘snake’ (aka worm, zig-zag, or Virginia rail fences) or, as farming prospered and fence wood became scarce, post-and-rail fences. In effect, nineteenth century farmers were ‘stonewalled’ by the effort needed to build the miles of stone walls that had characterized the New England farmscape. Cultural tradition has its limits. CONCLUSION While it is true to say that New England ancestry is an important strand in the saga of the Sissons, it is also clear that, as generations passed, they reflected the geographical and historical shifts which successively shed a wide variety of seventeenth and eighteenth century cultural ------------------------------------------------------------------------ norms. They ‘left’ England not only English, but regionally so. They were _not_ West-Countymen and doubtless saw their Devon, Dorset or Somerset brethren as a decidedly different breed. Later, they were English in the sense of _not_ being Dutch (a wide range of idioms attest to this colonial stigma). Later still they were New Englanders and _not_ English, and had evolved a distinct folk-cultural matrix which was springboard and baggage for their diaspora. This baggage certainly shaped the landscapes of their new west, but 1800 was in so many ways a watershed marked by the assault of ‘new’ popular culture and incipient industrialization on a very wide range of cultural norms. And so, as westward flow proceeded, the New England Sissons _became_ increasingly _American_, or at least northerners and Yankees and _not_ Southerners. By 1850, it would have become difficult to _see_ their New England background, and even to _hear_ it. It is a noble and challenging endeavor to trace a family across a dozen or more generations. The Sisson diaspora is a subset of the infinitely fascinating saga that has yielded a nation of close to three hundred million and landscapes of enduring fascination and very deep roots. Thank you for your interest, and may your genealogical quests prosper.

Hello Friends and Cousins, This link will take you to a page on the Human Genome project. http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/chromosome/ In the upper right-hand corner you can click on a link to order a free copy of a poster illustrating the chromosomes. This is the first of a series of messages about the recent Sisson Gathering. We had a GREAT time! David Arne Sisson

Forwarded. Please respond directly to bios@historicpa.net. This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/RFIBAIB/366 Message Board Post: Hon. A. Elverton Sisson bio http://www.historicpa.net/bios/2a/a-elverton-sisson-hon.html Search thousands of Pennsylvania Biographies at http://www.historicpa/net/bios

Forwarded. Please respond directly to bertie2k@yahoo.com. This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/RFIBAIB/365 Message Board Post: Am looking for family members. My G-grandmother, Maude was born in Gilmer, GA., died in McAlester, OK. Married Thomas Taylor Cooley. Her dad, David Crockett Sisson, born in GA., died in OK. Her grandfather, B.Richard Sisson, born in N.C., and her G-grandfather, David Sisson, born in S.C. Any info would be appreciated. I have family info on Maude's family, will share.

I thought others who use ProQuest's HeritageQuest databases would like to know that the company has decided to no longer allow home access online to their info via genealogical societies and similar organizations. There will only be two ways in which to access Heritage Quest: 1. On-site at a library that offers Heritage Quest access 2. At home, on-line, if you have access to a library that offers the service to patrons. The Eastman newsletter has more info and can be accessed by going to: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2006/06/proquest_termin.html