Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 1

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

At KCI, waiting for the first flight.

It’s 9 p.m. EDT on the first day of our family-history pilgrimage. We’re spending what looks to be about six hours at the Atlanta airport, and I’m praying that the current 90-minute flight delay is all that it becomes. The flight to Edinburgh was supposed to leave at 10:30 p.m.; now, we’re scheduled for midnight. On the bright side, the late hour offers a good chance of sleeping on the plane.

Preparing for this trip has been my project following the Holy Land pilgrimage. Once the journal for that experience was finished and posted, I turned to the binders of family history that my mother compiled over the decades. I built a family tree on Ancestry.com populated with my mother’s data, information I found in Spicer Genealogy (1911) and its supplement (1923), and the connections Ancestry’s databases provide; and I started looking for kernels of stories among the immigrant ancestors across my family and Ann’s.

I thought I’d surely find at least one ancestor’s story – the one we’d stumbled across in 2008, when Ann and I took Kathryn and Dan to Britain. Walking around the cathedral close in Salisbury, we looked up to see a plaque honoring three Protestant martyrs burned at the stake in 1556, during the reign of Bloody Mary, one of whom was John Spicer. I’ve assumed he and I are related because the part of the Spicer family I know about came from Exeter, just 90 miles away. Unfortunately, it turns out Ancestry and I couldn’t find a direct link between the martyr John Spicer and the Spicers who made their way to Connecticut most likely in the 1640s. But I’m still assuming there’s at least some connection. After all, even in England, there aren’t that many Spicers.

But in preparing for this trip, I found storylines of faith among other direct ancestors from other Christian backgrounds. In Wales, Ann and I will visit the village where Owens family members (from Ann’s side) were imprisoned for being Quakers at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and who became part of the Welsh Quaker migration to the American colonial lands granted to William Penn. In Warwickshire, we’ll visit the villages of the Readings (ancestors on my mother’s side), Church of England members evangelized and converted by the Mormons; they joined thousands on the great pilgrim journey across the sea and to the new Zion in Utah. In Suffolk, we’ll visit the villages of the Brundages, who were part of the British Puritan exodus from 1620 to 1649, arriving only 15 years after the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Also in Suffolk, we’ll visit the site where, it turns out, a second Spicer was burned at the stake for being a Protestant in the 1550s – in Beccles, the spot marked by a plaque on the local Baptist church.

So, we’ll go to these places – and the villages of other ancestors whose stories I don’t know so well – and we’ll see what God does with the experience. That’s why this is a family-history pilgrimage, after all, not just a chance to be tourists and see the sights (though we’ll do some of that, too). For me, at least, what sets a pilgrimage apart is the wonderful both/and of intentionality and openness. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy researching who came from these villages, gleaning what I could about them, and planning a careful itinerary. But the truth is, once we land and pick up the rental car, I really don’t know what awaits us. And, I think, if you go into an experience like this with hope, prayer, and confidence that God will, indeed, show up – then you’ll find yourself walking the pilgrim’s way.