Ancestral home

“ Most of the houses that are shown in this book are private homes which have been opened by the owners to allow pictured representations of correct ancestral furnishing. Houses such as these possess the greatest charm—ancestral homes that have descended from generation to generation in the same family since their founding. ”

“ I hold it no honor to be praised in my own village, nor disgrace to be decried in my native State. Gain brings me no joy, loss no sorrow. I dwell in my home as if it were a mere caravanserai, and regard my native district as though it were one of the barbarian kingdoms. ”

“ We may say in all truthfulness that there never was a time when the home wielded a greater influence than during the colonial period of American history. For the home was then indeed the center and heart of social life. ”

“ The primitive settlers needed every foot of the land which they laboriously subdued, for some productive use; they had neither time nor soil to spare for the culture of the beautiful; and their descendants have inherited the ancestral disposition to utilize everything, and the ancestral want of taste for the merely charming in nature. Yet there are gratifying exceptions to the general rule, and sometimes a housewife may be met who takes pride and pleasure in her flower-beds. ”

“ The primitive Anglo-American home was only a step removed from the wigwams of the aboriginal savages, in size, shape and general accommodations. Even our English ancestors, from whom we derived some of our domestic notions, were not accustomed to anything magnificent in the way of dwellings. ”

“ Patriotism has two roots, the love of clan and the love of home. In migratory tribes the former alone counts; in settled communities diversities of origin are often forgotten. But the love of home, as we know it, is a gentler and more spiritual bond than clanship. The word home is associated with all that makes life beautiful and sacred, with tender memories of joy and sorrow, and especially with the first eager outlook of the young mind upon a wonderful world. ”

“ A genuine civilisation following Christianity had come to many of these once degraded tribes, and now comfortable homes and large and happy family circles are to be found where not a generation ago all was dark and degraded, and the sweet word “home” was utterly unknown.
The conversion of some of these Indians was very remarkable, and the recital of how they had come out of the darkness into the light was most helpful to him. ”

“ I come to see the wonders of his lodge, and learn the many secrets hid from man, so that returning to my home below, I may be able so to teach the tribes, that many things of which they do not dream, may be revealed, and made as plain as day. ”

“ He is trained and moulded by “home surroundings.” Is not this the history of the frontiersman or homesteader everywhere at all times? The home and family attachments and instincts are deeply rooted because very ancient and entirely natural. ”

“ The life of an Indian when at home in his village is a life of indolence and amusement. To the woman is consigned the labors of the household and the field; she arranges the lodge; brings wood for the fire ”

“ It implies that their long continued sojourn in foreign lands, where—under this assumption—thousands of generations must have been bred and have spent all their lives, was not sufficient to naturalize them, so to speak, in other words to supplant the instinctive love of the primary ancient home. ”

“ Coming into their heritage, which is the accumulated knowledge and experience of their ancestors, before they have acquired a direct and profound grasp of life, they seem to enter the world full-fledged, while it is only that ancestral heritage that works through the impressions of the youthful brain and gives them the color of age. ”

“ The children obtain situations in the families of the wealthy colonists, still remaining in connection with the mother-school which sent them out; and their letters to the teachers and their friends, about the country and the people of that new world to which they have removed, diffuse the utmost pleasure and excite the deepest interest in the old home. ”

“ In fact, the history of North America has been perhaps more profoundly influenced by man's inheritance from his past homes than by the physical features of his present home. ”

“ The good soil would soon be taken up, and in the days of a primitive mode of culture third-rate land would be valueless. Then the house-father would be forced by circumstances to make provision, ere his death, for the sons sharing the ancestral domain between them. ”

“ There was, indeed, a connecting link between the two states of being we have described, afforded by the old hereditary nobility of the land, many members of which still lingered by the ancestral hall, as yet unallured from the calm delights of rural life, and the dignified satisfaction of dwelling amongst their own people, even by all the amusements or luxuries of the capital. ”

“ Scarcely a home throughout the land but possessed one of these family heirlooms, on whose fly-leaf were recorded the births and deaths of the family sometimes for several successive generations, as it was no uncommon occurrence for occupiers of houses to be the descendants of people of the same name who had lived in them for hundreds of years, and that fact accounted for traditions being handed down from one generation to another. ”

“ What right have we to an homestead in the red man's country? Let us return to the land of our fathers, and leave this soil untarnished by the footprint of him who hath a white skin! What right have the hosts of foreign emigrants, who are flocking to our shores, to an homestead among ourselves? ”

“ Indeed, our ancestors walked by themselves, the long way, which led them from being nomads, wild hunters, and gatherers, until they slowly started to develop knowledge about the world, life and nature, which would allow them to not only to ensure their existence and physical survival, but perhaps, and most importantly, to reach the transcendence of their existence, both, as individuals, and as a people. ”

“ The great temple of ancestral worship had been poverty-stricken till it had recognised the signs of the times and ceased to prohibit with its ban the secret but long-established traffic in lineage throughout the island and archipelago. The ever-progressive extravagance and impoverishment of old families had led to its necessary consequence, an ancestry exchange, where for a consideration a new favourite of fortune could acquire an ancestry with its good name and titles and its resultant social position and prestige. ”

“ In a newly-formed village, settled by Indians just emerging from the superstitions and long-rooted habits of their forefathers, persons accustomed from infancy to all the refinements of Christian and civilized life can hardly imagine how great the influence, and how valuable the example, of such a family. ”

“ The more imposing houses afford shelter both to the head of a family and the family saint—for every well-to-do Indian affords himself a saint, whether in the form of a framed print or a sculptured effigy made in Europe or imitated in the country by the clever native carvers in orange-wood. ”

“ Nowadays the world is perpetually on the move, but in the old days people who possessed a country house passed nine months out of the twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association; with marriage and children, and pure enjoyment and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. ”

“ There are certain usages and customs of the Indian tribes generally which tend to explain their plan of life — their large households, their houses, and their house architecture. They deserve a careful consideration and even further investigation beyond the bounds of our present knowledge. The influence of American civilization has very generally broken up their old plan of life, and introduced a new one more analogous to our own. ”

“ The descendants of the men who were foremost in every land are now content to sit on the same farm from generation to generation, caring for nothing, and having no ambition beyond raising a larger family than their neighbour. ”

“ A VISIT TO A NATIVE HOME THEIR home was not as far away as I had expected. But then, an Indian’s “home” is easily made, consisting of some upright poles, roughly thatched with long marsh grass. Beneath this they place their belongings and they sleep in hammocks at night. ”

“ And now, when from the long distance of a hundred years or more, we look back upon the hardships and misfortunes endured by one family of the early colonists, we feel assured that pen and tongue can never make fully known to us or our posterity the extent of the misery and suffering of most of the early colonial settlers.11
We know enough, however, to admire the heroism of our ancestors and their firm attachment to the mother land. Our hearts should warm with gratitude for what they have done for our happiness. ”

“ Every household has its particular gods and protectors—the ancestors thus sublimated, and the master of the family, the prospective god. The condition beyond the grave in no way depends on conduct during life, it is determined by the descendants. ”

“ The father and the whole family dwell together in one house in great numbers; in some we saw twenty-five or thirty persons. Their food is pulse, as with the other tribes, which is here better than elsewhere, and more carefully cultivated ”

“ Since the features of the parent tribe are handed down from one generation to another, there is nothing more natural than that we should retain the historical features of our ancestors, viz., the stamp of gravity which the events of their time impressed upon their faces. ”

“ Can you fancy a family of natives, living, some centuries ago, in a wattled hut in a wilderness of Cumberland, visited every winter’s night by wolves, every spring season with agues, crying out in dismay at the proceedings of a rich neighbour to clear the ground? ”

“ In riding through those portions of our states that were the early settled colonies, it is pleasant to note where any old houses are still standing, or where the sites of early colonial houses are known, the good taste usually shown by the colonists in the places chosen to build their houses. ”

“ Here we have presented the picture of a little colony of one or two thousand people, of mixed nationality, sequestered from all the world by thousands of miles; poor as to money and goods, toilsome, ill-dressed, weather-beaten, yet full of spirit, patriotism and courage, with time to cultivate literature. The had, at least, this advantage—they brought their culture with them. But how about their immediate descendants? Do they come up to the standard of their progenitors? Talent seldom descends in a direct line from father to son ”

“ The people of the early colonial settlements had a private and interior life, as much as we have now, and the people of all ages and countries have had. It is common to regard them in no other light than as a severe, sombre, and pleasure-abhorring generation. ”

“ If we assume the family as the primitive fact which, by its increase, produced the clan, and afterwards, more complex aggregates, such as tribes, connected with each other by the memory of a common ancestor and at last subject to the authority of a patriarch-king, the social development is simply an expansion of the natural family. ”

“ There may, for example, be several ancestral temples, several burial-grounds, many different patches of sacrificial land; though if the immigrants came from a village in the vicinity, and have left there the main body of their clan, it sometimes happens that they will still associate themselves with the parent-village rather than with that in which they live, and will therefore refrain from establishing new centres of ancestral worship.
The units of the village community are not individuals but families. ”

“ If the opportunity had been wisely improved, a rational knowledge of the experience of our own ancestors, while in the same status, might have been gained through a study of these progressive conditions. ”

“ These reside in the interior of the country, some of the tribes even construct their rude dwellings in the trees, and wherever land culture is by them adopted it is of the most rude and primitive description. As a rule, their life is nomadic. ”

“ These “well disposed ones” are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri. ”

“ Even the descendant of the aboriginal possessors of America had been made to abandon the habits and opinions of his progenitors, to become a wanderer on that element which had laved the shores of his native land for ages, without exciting a wish to penetrate its mysteries in the bosoms of his simple-minded ancestry. ”

“ We see that our ancestors were no savages, but agricultural nomads, that they laboured, made roads, possessed the art of weaving and sewing; they built towns, kept domestic animals, lived under a kingly government, and counted at least up to one hundred. We learn this not only from the words father, mother, son, daughter, heaven, earth, but also from house, town, king, dog, cow, hatchet, and many others, which are found to be the same in the German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit. ”

“ In the old time every Wood and Grove, Field and Meadow, Hill and Cave, Sea and River, was tenanted by tribes and communities of the great Fairy Family, and at least one of its members was a resident in every House and Homestead where the kindly virtues of charity and hospitality were practised and cherished. ”