Earlier this week, when my mom and dad were still in town, we spent a day in the little tiny town of Rochester, Massachusetts. My mother, the genealogy maniac, has shifted her focus from my dad’s mother’s line in Holland to her own father’s line in New England. She hasn’t been working very long on this line, but already she’s found an ancestor or two of ours who came over on the Mayflower.

Though stories are hard to come by when researching the 1600s, mom has come up with a few. It turns out most of our ancestors from this time period had settled in Salem. But they weren’t as Puritan as the Puritans in Salem wanted them to be. In a display of the kind of religious understanding and tolerance that Salem, Massachusetts, is famous for, my ancestors were forced to move to Rhode Island in pursuit of religious freedom. One particular ancestor, so the story goes, moved from Salem specifically because he refused to participate in the witch hysteria of 1692 as a judge. He seems to have known that if he stuck around after refusing to condemn innocent people to death, that he could be next on the gallows. Given that the witch hysteria only lasted a few months, from about May to September 1692, I wonder how quickly he came to this decision and acted upon it. I wonder if I could pick up and move my family on such short notice. I suppose I could, if my life depended on it.

The ancestor we focused on this week, though, was Peter Crapo. As a young French boy about 10 years old around 1700, he was shipwrecked on Buzzard’s Bay on the south coast of Cape Cod. One version of the story says that he was the only survivor of the wreck, and that he came to shore and set up a life for himself in Rochester. Another version claims that his older brother Nicholas was also on the ship and also survived; Nicholas then sold Peter as an indentured servant to get enough money to send himself back to France. Whichever version is true, I am the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of a survivor.

Peter’s house in Rochester is still standing, and we visited it. In fact, we knocked on the door and the kind gentleman who has been living in it for nearly 50 years gave us a very thorough tour. We were all amazed by the size and modernity of the house, and we were assured by a man who knows his house well that most of its features were indeed built in the early 1700s. Peter made his living selling the timber behind his house (we hiked through the woods), and it seems he was well-off for an eighteenth-century immigrant.

We spent the remainder of the day searching for and searching through cemeteries. We found the grave of Peter’s son, Nicholas (if his brother Nicholas had betrayed him, would he have named a son after him?) and his wife, Allice. Mom was thrilled because her database had no information for Allice other than her name, but the gravestone gave us a death date and age at death.

Later, as the setting sun was making it hard to read the headstones, I found the grave of the Rev. Thomas West and his wife Elizabeth in an ancient, neglected graveyard that was choked with knee-high thorny weeds. Before coming out to visit, Mom had been drawn toward a Sarah West, who married Peter Crapo’s grandson Peter and is my direct ancestor (my sixth-great grandmother). Sarah’s information was cluttered, though, as various records had different people listed as her parents. Clearing up Sarah’s ancestry was a priority for my mom. One source listed a Rev. Thomas and Elizabeth West as Sarah’s parents, but Mom had discounted the likelihood that they were her true parents, because according to the information she had, they lived on Cape Cod, and it was unlikely that their daughter would have met and married a man from Rochester. But when we found their graves in Rochester, Mom couldn’t stop talking about the magnitude of the breakthrough. These are almost definitely Sarah’s parents, she said, and therefore clear up the genealogy immensely.

I’ve eaten in a tavern where George Washington frequently ate. I’ve walked through halls where generations of English royalty have walked. But there’s a different and quite more special feeling walking through the home of my eighth-great grandfather, and coming face-to-face with the graves of two of my seventh-great grandfathers.