UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2004

Departments

Features

The Wildest Place in Boston

Manhattan's Hottest Property

Setting the Record Straight

Feature

A Rich Inheritance
Deerfield descendants reconnect with family history

–Faye Wolfe




	Michael Abbate ’91 works on “The Street” in Deerfield, most recently spearheading the Deerfield Descendants project. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

KNOWN AS "THE STREET" TO Wall Street traders, it’s where, during his UMass Amherst years, Michael Abbate ’95 thought his education would take him. Instead, he works on “The Street”—as the Historic Deerfield map identifies it—that forms the spine of that institution’s campus, among a grand array of 18th- and 19th-century houses. Hired in 2002 as membership coordinator, Abbate has spent a lot of time lately assembling a database of Deerfield descendants. Thus far numbering 1,100 people, hailing from every state but Montana, every Canadian province including the Northwest Territories, and as far away as England and New Zealand, Abbate expects the database will be twice as big by the end of the year. To gather the listings, he used information submitted to an online survey www.deerfielddescendants.com), from genealogy and family association Web sites, and newspaper ads.

Literally from across the map, the descendants are just as diverse in their knowledge of their ancestry. “Some have known for years, often in detail, about their lineage,” says Abbate. “Others have just found out about it.” They run the gamut from “hard-core geneaologists who haunt libraries and pore over probate documents to people curious to know their family stories and what life was like for their ancestors.”

Maida Riggs ’36 counts Taylors, Catlins and several other English families who settled in Deerfield among her ancestors. A professor emerita of UMass Amherst, Riggs taught women’s physical education before shifting to teacher preparation; she was a faculty member for 28 years in all. An adventurous spirit has taken her around the globe: to Europe, with the Red Cross during World War II; after the war as a bicycling tour leader; on a trek across Nepal, at age 62, to Russia, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Uzbekistan. After retiring, this self-described compulsive traveler embarked on another kind of journey to explore her roots. “I began to realize,” she says, “how rich an inheritance it was.”

A historian without portfolio, as she also calls herself, Riggs traveled back in time to research that inheritance. She transcribed letters by her pioneer great-grandmother, published as A Small Bit of Bread and Butter (see UMass Amherst magazine, fall 1996), crossed the Atlantic to Lincolnshire, England, to see her forebears’ home and, of course, uncovered the Deerfield connection.

Deerfield descendants like Riggs will explore their connections onsite this summer. During three weekend programs, participants can attend lectures and workshops, visit Deerfield’s Dickinson Library, take house and walking tours, and observe open-hearth cooking, basket-making, joinery, and other Colonial crafts. At the tented Deerfield Descendant Marketplace, librarians will field genealogy questions and family associations will offer background and published materials on various Deerfield families.

This “mingle spot for the weekend,” as Abbate calls the marketplace, is essential because, he says, these descendants tend to be “very, very passionate about the connection—you get them talking, and hours later they’ll still be talking” about the subject. He points out, “A lot of villages were attacked. The Deerfield raid was not a unique event. Deerfield captured the imagination, stuck in memory—you go anywhere and mention Deerfield, and people know about it. There’s a lot to explore; the more you find, the more interesting it becomes.”

[top of page]

Setting the Record Straight

Setting the Record Straight: more images

A Rich Inheritance

Inheritance: more images