Help Dr. Larry Kutchen Share Ancestral Stories

I'm Dr. Larry F. Kutchen (PH.D. , University of California, Berkeley), teacher and award-winning writer on Early American Literature and History. I’m now launching a YouTube channel, with an accompanying Blog, then a Substack, titled "Minnesota and Brush," to tell a series of stories about my ancestors—crossings of Americans, each one filmed at the site of a former home, of a daring or desperate or even forced migration, of an immigrant community huddling close and moving en masse with as much fear of becoming “strangers in a strange land” as fortitude in fulfilling original dreams of a better life they could not endure forgetting; or breaking up and its members wandering lost, cut off, closed, or finding the strength to open to improvisation and reinvention and move more freely toward fortune, or away from misfortunes they would try to forget. My channel will begin with the prototypical story of my paternal grandfather, an American-born son of immigrants from Vrbosko, Croatia, who settled in Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and opened a boarding house in the 1890s. There, a family’s precious-won new life ended when his mother died five unbearable days after catching fire as she cleaned and refilled the oil lamps for every room, and grief began to consume his father, and time stopped for five children scattered to separate orphanages or other (caring or cruel) families. Running with trauma, repeatedly running away from St Paul’s Orphan Asylum, then from a family who wanted only to exploit another child laborer, he would light out on his own, like Huck Finn, 14 years old, soon making his way to Detroit. Here, by street smarts, a gift of gab that could get him jobs for which he had no qualifications, and money he made, possibly, from Bootlegging during Prohibition, he became a successful business owner with the main chance painfully close. He could never quite take that chance. Something—perhaps his remembering a guardian spirit too wounded to watch over him on ever more open roads—would hold him back. A wound traversed him right there.

So my first video, “Wild Buildings,” taking off from his story, will be filmed at the site of his last home, near the intersection of Minnesota and Brush streets in Detroit, a home and neighborhood I can still recall in vivid detail. A paradoxically ancient new ruin, of compressed time and intersecting and fatally crashing migrations only vaguely recalled by those who moved on, or forgotten with those who were lost there, the space is a paradigm of the Moter City. From the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the neighborhood had changed from Jewish to Italian- and Polish-Catholic then African American, crowded with homes, vibrant with life, loud, feverish, then suddenly ghostly. It will be the haunting of that last migration, bitterly described as “Up South” by many of its exiles, that I’ll want to follow as I present a series of videos on the 1943 Detroit Riots, originally inspired by a photograph taken by my maternal aunt, then a seventeen-year- old Rosie-Riveter from Boyne Falls, of overturned cars on Woodward Avenue. Boyne Falls, in western upper Michigan, in turn, will be the focus of videos tracking the migrations and recounting the resilient lives of my maternal grandparents, from Krakow and Hludno, Poland and Ukraine, to Detroit, and from there to the farm they built alongside fellow immigrants moving into an area recently vacated by the people, largely Irish immigrants, who had been drawn there during its Lumber Boom years. To the Irish, the land reminded them of the mythical Boyne Valley of Ireland; to the Poles and Ukrainians, it brought back images of the countryside they knew, and may have wished they never had to leave.

As an adopted child, visiting grandparents in such contrasting areas as Detroit and Boyne Falls, I perhaps had a keener sense of the transience of place, of roots that can be pulled up, of branches that can be grafted on, cut off—a jazzy or melancholic spirit of sudden change with which Michigan, formerly part of the Old Northwest or “Middle Ground,” is rich. Having recently discovered that so many of my “natural” ancestors were among the earliest settlers of Michigan, pioneers like the wildly restless Joel Carrington and his son Mark Carrington from Oswego, New York, who became an early Lumber King, a founder of Port Austin, and author of a popular Almanac, I look forward to working backwards from that old westward orientation. Tracing the Carringtons’ westward migration back to Milford, Connecticut, I will recount the heroism of Dr. Elias Carrington who helped care for, and save many of, the American soldiers sick with smallpox who practically were dumped into the Milford Harbor by a British ship conveying war prisoners from New York City. Moving further back, to 1651 in Wethersfield, Connecticut, I will examine the trials of John Carrington and his wife, Joann, immigrants from England, who were condemned as witches and hanged, forty years before the famous Salem Trials. A second filming at Wethersfield, on its founding in 1634 and on the Pequot raid on the new settlement in April, 1637, will be the first in a series about the Pequot War, in which 5 of my ancestors, from both maternal and paternal lines, were involved: founder “adventurers” John Oldham and Robert Rose, Jonathan Brewster (son of Mayflower passenger William Brewster), William Cornwell, and the minister Roger Williams. Two of these men, Rose and Cornwell, took part in the horrible massacre of 400-500 Pequots at Mystic, which will be the subject of several videos. Finally, I will visit Block Island, Rhode Island, where the Virginia trader Oldham in 1636 was killed by a party of Manisses people, which quickly became a pretext (put forth in bad faith) for the English to wage genocidal war against the powerful Pequots. Moving north to Massachusetts, and forward in time, I’ll talk about the raid on Lancaster in 1675 during King Phillip’s War, then devote a series of videos to the story of my ancestor, Samuel Putnam, taken captive in the French and Native attack on Deerfield during Queen Anne’s War in 1704. Losing his entire family in one of the fires started by the raiders, then surviving the long march with other captives up to French Montreal in the bleak midwinter, at age 17, he would be forcibly baptized and converted to Catholicism, renamed, and indentured to a shoemaker. Redeemed a few years later, he threw off his captive name and identity and returned to New England, resettled in Connecticut, married, raised a large family, and lived well into his 80s. His story resounds on several levels with that of my paternal grandfather.

Other prospective videos may include trips to Ontario to explore the Loyalist exodus there after the America Revolution (focusing on Henry Dell, a soldier with the New Jersey Volunteers, “Skinner’s Greens,” who fought for the British at Yorktown); to Plymouth to talk about the banishment of John “Mad Jack” Oldham (the same one later killed at Block Island) for causing dissension in the Pilgrim colony; to Bristol, Rhode Island, as another descendant to confront the legacy of the slave-trading DeWolf Family; and to Jamestown, Virginia, to honor the little-known Polish settlers who came in 1608; to consider the costs of the fortunes of Cape Merchant Abraham Peirsey who, with Governor Yeardley, purchased the first Africans to land in Virginia in 1619; and the quarrels of his son in law Captain Richard Stephens, who in 1624 killed George Harrison (!) in the first duel recorded in Colonial America.

I will want to encourage viewers' participation, their thoughts on my stories, their reflections on their own ancestral stories, to share them, to strengthen memories of those lives, in the awareness that, as John Quincy Adams reminded us, "Who We Are, is Who We Were."

I'm seeking Only enough funds to help defray equipment and travel costs for the first few months--just enough to get this project up and running.