Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 8

Tuesday, June 13, 2023, 5:35 p.m.

We’ve stopped at a McDonald’s in Wales (now, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d write) to charge up the car again as we make our way to Dolgellau (doll-GETH-leh), our stop for the next two nights. We left Glasgow about 9:15 this morning, and we’ve been heading south ever since. Other than hitting traffic on a motorway near Manchester, the drive has been smooth. Just long.

Some of the length has to do with stopping to charge the EV. I’m being more conservative than necessary, recharging twice today before now, whenever the “tank” reached about 60 percent. But in the vast countryside between Glasgow and Wales, I didn’t want to push my luck in finding charging stations that would take my card. Topping off that 40 percent takes about half an hour. It’s a good exercise in patience on a long journey.

Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Bury St. Mary's.

Along the way to Dolgellau, we took a slight detour to Bury St. Mary’s, once a village and now a suburb of Manchester. My ancestor who left there for the colonies was James Spencer, a relation on my mother’s side, who was born in Bury in 1730 and baptized at the local church, St. Mary’s. We stopped at the church for some photos and to look for family headstones (the church itself was closed today, unfortunately). We found some Spencers, though none from my Ancestry.com tree. They may well be part of the family, but I can’t prove it.

And now, the charge is complete, so we’re on the road again….

Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 7

 Monday, June 12, 2023, evening

The People's Palace, a museum of Glasgow's social history. 

Today, we were fully tourists but with a social-history mindset, at least for the morning. We visited the People’s Palace, a small museum of the lives and experience of typical Glaswegians. In the 1800s, Glasgow was rivaling Manchester and Edinburgh to be considered Britain’s second city, with a population of 1 million … and all the associated costs of rapid population growth in the industrial age. As in Edinburgh, people lived on top of each other; and Glasgow became known as the city of tenements. If you’ve read much about immigrants on New York’s lower east side, you know something about tenement conditions; and the harsh realities of tenement life in Glasgow were longer-lasting, with displays in the museum depicting harsh conditions here just 30 or 40 years ago. One display described nine to 12 people living in a 3- by 5-foot space in the late 1800s. Picture that. It takes overcrowding to a whole new level.

Life in the Glasgow tenements.

In the category of family history, that image helps me appreciate what motivated the emigrants who made their ways from Scotland’s cities to the United States, Canada, or Australia. Alexander Gibson – my forebear who came to the U.S. with his wife, Ann, in 1851 – was a grocer in Glasgow, so they likely weren’t living at the bottom rungs of poverty. Still, being a grocer in that day probably meant having a pushcart and standing out in the Scottish rain, hoping you could eke out a living between what you had to pay the farmers and what the tenement-dwellers could afford to pay you. Even though the Church of England wasn’t shoving Anglicanism down Scottish throats in the mid-1850s, the economic pressures led the “huddled masses” of Scotland, and so many other places, to endure what must have been unbelievably hard journeys in those crowded ships – as well as whatever it took for people like Alexander and Ann to get from the East Coast to places like Perry County, Illinois. Of course, this immigrant story wasn’t horrifying and unjust, like the stories of people stolen from their homes, brought here in chains, and enslaved. And we who descend from European immigrants have to acknowledge the reality that the land where our forebears settled was stolen from the people who were there first. Still, at the level of individuals risking everything they had to build a better life, I have tremendous respect for my ancestors’ courage and hope – as well as grief for others enslaved and dispossessed.

Another emigrant narrative we learned at the People’s Palace was about “transportation” – people convicted of crimes and sentenced to removal to British colonies, especially Georgia and Australia. I’d known about that, but there was a twist on the practice in Glasgow. Apparently, as the immigrant population in Australia increased, the proportion of men was very high. So, many of the women in Glasgow prisons, typically serving time for crimes such as theft, indebtedness, and prostitution, were resentenced and shipped off to Australia to even out the gender balance.

Glasgow's outstanding Burrell Collection.

In the afternoon, we went to see the Burrell Collection, a world-class museum of art and antiquities in a lovely park setting just south of Glasgow. As it happened, among those visiting with us that day were judges from a national British museum competition; the Burrell is a finalist for this annual honor. The collection belonged to Sir William Burrell, a Victorian/Georgian shipbuilder, shipping magnate, and investor who competed with the likes of William Randolph Hearst to acquire other nations’ stolen treasurers at auction. It’s worth pausing to name the immorality of the acquisition process. But – or, and – it leaves the people of Glasgow today with an astonishing collection of medieval European stained glass, sculpture, painting, and textiles, as well as treasures from Asia and the ancient Near East. When you think of cities that house the world’s great museums, Glasgow probably isn’t the first to come to mind. But this city of tenements has a true gem in its backyard.

Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 6

Monday, June 12, 8 a.m.

A local artist's Passion set in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park.

Sunday was a great day. We headed out of Edinburgh early-ish so we could get to Glasgow in time for worship at the Scottish Episcopal Cathedral there. The Rev. Ryan Zavacky had e-introduced us to the provost, the Very Rev. Kelvin Holdsworth, with whom we got to chat before and after the service. The building is Victorian Gothic, with beautiful stained glass from that time, as well as murals from the 1990s by a local artist and parishioner, Gwyneth Leech. They depict not so much Biblical scenes, in the sense we’d usually think of that, but Biblical imagery in more modern, even contextual, expression. My favorite is a large three-panel mural depicting Jesus’ betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection set in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park. The piece must be especially striking for the locals, seeing the Passion in their backyard; but even for a visitor, it’s a good reminder that the Passion wasn’t a churchy event but the lived experience of God (and God’s people) in the world as we inhabit it. 

Glasgow Episcopal Cathedral.

Worship at the cathedral was equally moving – outstanding choral music, which had been featured on the BBC earlier that morning; an excellent sermon from the diocesan canon for mission, the Rev. Audrey O’Brien Stewart; and a remarkably welcoming congregation filling most of the pews.

Then we went to a gastropub across the street, the Loveable Rogue, for Sunday roast. I think I now know what’s served at the banquet of the kingdom of heaven … especially the roast potatoes.

The Govan Stones, a repurposed church building. 

In the afternoon, we visited the Govan Stones, a historical site intersecting with my family’s history. It’s the building and yard of Govan Old Church, which closed as a Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) parish in 2007 when it was merged with a nearby congregation. Govan Old has the longest-surviving churchyard in Scotland. Christian burials have been taking place there since about the year 500; and in the 800s, Viking invaders created a ceremonial burial ground and worship site next to the existing Christian burials. Viking sarcophagi have been found, as well as Christian headstones from across 1,500 years, and examples are displayed in the old church building.

The Gibson marker at Govan Old Church, 
the oldest surviving churchyard in Scotland.

Among the burials are three graves with names from my mother’s side of my family – two Gibsons and one McFarlane. One has no marker remaining; one has a stone whose inscriptions are almost completely worn away; and one has a fairly clear inscription of the names of James Gibson and his wife, Elizabeth Smith Gibson, who died in 1869 and 1886, respectively, as well as their daughter Janet, who died relatively young in 1887. This family isn’t directly in my Gibson line but lived and died in the same community (Govan, now a neighborhood in Glasgow) as Alexander Gibson and Ann McFarlane Gibson, my ancestors. Alexander and Ann were married at Govan Old Church in 1834 and emigrated to the United States in 1851. Alexander was a grocer in Glasgow before he and Ann emigrated, eventually making their way to Perry County, Illinois, where he was living at the time of his citizenship in 1866. The James Gibson buried in the churchyard may well have been Alexander’s cousin, given the common location and timeframe, as well as the fact that Alexander’s father also was named James.

Just my speed of botanical classification.

From Govan Old Church, we ended the afternoon at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, a lovely way to join hundreds of locals for a few hours in the Scottish sunshine. It’s more a park-like setting than formal gardens, but the plantings were beautiful. The gardens feature Victorian-era glasshouses, too, with a great orchid collection (as well as desert and tropical plants). Of course, Ann got more out of it than I did, but it was absolutely time well-spent.

Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 5

Sunday, June 11, 7:30 a.m.

A palace peacock,
indignant at interlopers.

Ann at Scone Palace.

Yesterday’s visiting was wonderful, all around – in terms of tourism and family pilgrimage. We took the hour drive to Perth to visit Scone Palace, the grounds of which were the site of the coronations of the ancient kings of Scotland. Fifteen hundred years ago, this was the capital of the Picts, an ancient people in what’s now eastern Scotland. It was also the location of the Stone of Destiny, what we Yanks know as the Stone of Scone, in the time when the Picts and other Celtic peoples were united under a common king. That stone has been used in British coronations for centuries, most recently under the seat of King Charles III. In the Middle Ages, Scone Abbey was founded, and Scottish coronations took place there until the Protestant Reformation. Sadly, John Knox and his followers destroyed the Abbey much as they destroyed yesterday’s site, Holyrood Abbey. 

Abbey remnants in the garden. 

Today, nothing of Scone Abbey is left but a stray sarcophagus and some stones, strewed in the (absolutely beautiful) gardens. In the early 1800s, the Earl of Mansfield, whose family had received the estate in payment for foiling an attempt on the life of King James VI in 1600, began rebuilding the medieval house as a Gothic-inspired palace. Though it no longer housed royalty, Queen Victoria came to stay in the 1840s. On the day we visited, we were joined by hundreds of local people inhabiting the grounds for something called Potfest, which (even in these libertine days) is actually a festival of local potters.

A giant rhododendron.

The gardens were also worth the trip, especially for Ann, who knows what she’s looking at. For me, beautiful was enough; but I was also amazed at the sizes of plants we know back home. What for us is a shrub maybe as tall as your shoulders (a rhododendron, for example) here towers five times your size. It’s like walking through the royal gardens in the Land That Time Forgot.

Also on the grounds is a gate and a cemetery for Old Scone, marking where the village used to be. Old cemeteries are interesting anyway, but my family members the McLagans came from Perthshire, and some lived and died in Old Scone itself. Ambling through the cemetery, I came across a headstone from a branch of the family I hadn’t traced. My immigrant ancestors were Alexander and Elizabeth McLagan, as well as their son John and his wife, Mary Brown McLagan. Of course, their headstones wouldn’t be in Scone, but I did come across a headstone for George and Jane McLagan, as well as their daughter Jane, who died at 17, and daughter Margaret, who lived to be 77. George died in 1863, close to the time when the older McLagan immigrants died (Elizabeth in 1851 and Alexander in 1853). I don’t have any information about Alexander’s parents, but my guess is that he and George may have been brothers or cousins in the very small town of Old Scone. I’ll take that hopeful connection, especially given how cool his gravestone is.

The front of the
McLagan headstone.

The inscription side of the
McLagan headstone.

I don’t know a lot about the McLagans’ emigration story. Alexander was an innkeeper in Old Scone, and one immigration record shows them in Ontario, Canada, as early as 1834; but other Scottish records show them in Perthshire then and years later. In any event, Alexander and Elizabeth both died in St. Louis in the early 1850s. Their son John and his wife, Mary, came soon after the senior McLagans, arriving in Canada most likely between 1861 and 1871. John was a Presbyterian, so I doubt his emigration was about religious struggle in Scotland. He was also a farm laborer, the records say. So, most likely they crossed the pond, like so many other immigrants then and now, just seeking a better life. I’m grateful for that, given how poor a farmer I’d likely be.

Arrow slit in the Old Scone village wall.

It was a perfect day both for outdoor wandering and the drive between Edinburgh and Perth (crossing the Firth of Forth, which is fun to say). Back in Edinburgh, we had dinner at an Indian restaurant up the street from the hotel and shared a meal with another American couple seated next to us. As always seems to happen somewhere along a trip like this, the small-world connections were fun: They live in Sacramento, CA, where my cousin lives; the wife is a parishioner at the Episcopal cathedral there; and their son is looking at a real-estate deal in Kansas City.

This morning, we’ll leave Edinburgh and drive to Glasgow in time for worship at the cathedral of the Scottish Episcopal Church there. Former St. Andrew’s member the Rev. Ryan Zavacky e-introduced us to the cathedral’s dean, so we can have another one of those small-world moments shaking the dean’s hand after church.

Family-History Pilgrimage: Day 4 (covering Days 2-3)

Saturday, June 10, 8:30 a.m.

Among the road signs to expect in Britain. 

Our first day in Scotland (Thursday) offered several lowlights and one highlight. First, a word to the wise: Choose anything other than Hertz for car rentals in Edinburgh. Not only did we wait in line for an hour for a reserved car, but the car we “reserved” was not available. We were offered a manual transmission, which I haven’t driven in years; and relearning that skill while remembering how to drive on the wrong side of the road, sleep-deprived, seemed imprudent. The other option was an electric vehicle. In theory, that sounds great. But practically, as an unprepared foreigner, using the charging infrastructure in Scotland will drive you insane. Plus, a full charge lasts for only 270 miles, and our trip involves driving from Scotland to Wales and then back and forth across the breadth of southern England. I know, it will be OK; but the unnecessary frustration is … frustrating.

The brighter note was dinner Thursday night – outstanding fish and chips at a pub around the corner from the hotel. I can vouch for Stowford Press Cider, too. I’ll probably have to try again, just to be sure.

Then on Friday, once I was able to charge the car and tamped down that anxiety, the day improved greatly. We’re in Edinburgh because some of my ancestors on my mother’s side (McLagan and Key) left for America from this area. And later, we’ll drive through villages, some now city neighborhoods, from whence they came. But yesterday, we saw sights.

The Scottish Parliament, facing down Holyroodhouse Palace. 

The gate to Holyrood Abbey.

First, we went to Holyroodhouse Palace, one of two royal abodes in Edinburgh, along with Edinburgh Castle. Holyroodhouse treads a very fine line in historical and royal interpretation, given the complicated Anglo-Scottish history. Many Scots still would say the English are occupiers of their ancient realm; and probably not coincidentally, the modern Scottish Parliament building sits literally across the street from Holyroodhouse, an ever-present reminder to the royals of Scots nationalism. In 1603, with the death of Queen Elizabeth I, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England, too. Thereafter, his house of Stuart received decidedly mixed reviews, depending on your national point of view. From the English perspective, the Stuarts precipitated the constitutional crisis that resulted in the ascendency of Parliament over the divine right of kings, the English Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, the Restoration of Charles II, and finally the bloodless dumping of James II and replacement with William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. So, the current royal house has to walk a tightrope of interpretation at Holyroodhouse, honoring Scottish national identity in this ancient palace while the faces of executed and deposed tyrannical ancestors stare down at them from the walls. (You can tell where the Windsor nose comes from.) All that said, Holyroodhouse does an amazingly fair and honest job of dealing with it. And, of course, the place itself is as glorious as the second revolution that cast the Stuarts aside. The palace was built alongside Holyrood Abbey, begun in the 12th century and still breathtaking, even as ruins left by Protestant soldiers and vandals. History, in all its complexity, seeps from the stones.

Shelving in a wine merchant's stall
at Edinburgh Underground Vaults.

Yesterday afternoon, we walked on stones telling very different stories – the Edinburgh Underground Vaults. After the city grew in the 1700s, it needed a bridge to connect the ancient volcanic hilltop with new settlements to its north and south. One of those bridges was designed with a distinctly modern mindset: mixed commercial use. Alongside, above, and below the span of the bridge, they built chambers for businesses on multiple stories. It was a great idea but a bit ahead of its time, given the complete darkness in the vaults other than candlelight, the leaking rainwater (and sewage) dripping into the stalls below the bridge, and the underground economy, literally and figuratively, that grew up in the unused spaces once the respectable cobblers and bookbinders had had enough of the wet, stinky darkness. The nearly forgotten spaces were cleared out starting in the 1980s, and the site is a great tourists’ journey through an almost unimaginable version of city living.

A familiar name among the Scotch display.

Then we ended yesterday with a lovely indulgence: the Scotch Whisky Experience. I’m not really a Scotch drinker, but the varieties of the nation’s drink were fascinating to learn about and sample. And the meal afterward was a delight: venison, salmon, and chicken-wrapped haggis, which was surprisingly wonderful. (These days, vegan haggis is everywhere, and I’m telling myself that’s what the chicken was wrapping.)

The Ukranian consulate in Edinburgh, across from our hotel.

And finally, a note related to current events on their way to becoming history: Directly across the street from tiny our hotel is the Ukrainian consulate, with a street sign reading, “Volodymyr Zelenskyy Street.” The defiance seems right, especially here in Scotland.

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.

Holy Land Pilgrimage: Day 11

Thursday, May 11, 2023

After visiting three of the holiest sites on earth, I’m not sure the next day ever had much hope of meeting that high bar. In a sense, our visits today bore that out. And, in a sense, they didn’t. God was powerfully present today, too, just in different kinds of stones – “living stones” of the living church (1 Peter 2:5).

With our faith story paused yesterday at the crucifixion and resurrection, today we drove to a possible site of Biblical Emmaus to take up the story’s next chapter. In Luke’s Gospel, it was on the road to Emmaus that Jesus came walking alongside two of his followers on Easter Day, both of them caught in hopelessness and grief. As far as they knew, Good Friday was the end of the story, and that “reality” kept them from knowing who was walking beside them. As they talked, Jesus brought them hope again, explaining how suffering wasn’t a sign of failure but a sign of messiahship. At dinner that evening, Jesus took the bread on the table, and broke it, and gave it to his traveling companions. Suddenly they understood who’d been walking alongside them – and just as suddenly, he vanished. But he’d been there with them, so hope was alive.

Faces erased from the frescoes at Church of the Resurrection. 

We marked this story by visiting a church, of course – the Church of the Resurrection in Abu Ghosh, one of only three Crusader churches not badly damaged or destroyed when the Muslims reclaimed their land. This church is also noteworthy for its partial frescoes. They’re unfinished because the church was built just before the Crusaders’ defeat, and the Christians had to leave before the paint was dry (or at least before the works were complete). The Muslims turned it into a mosque and chose not to finish the paint job. In fact, they erased some of it – people’s faces, which Islam doesn’t allow to be represented in worship spaces.

Gathering for worship overlooking the hills where Emmaus
may have been.

We then visited the nearby Church of Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant, a name begging explanation. The church is near Kiriath Jearim, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept for 20 years before the Temple’s time. Our group lived our new covenant of eternal life not by visiting the church (which was closed for repairs) but by being church, sharing Eucharist on the grounds overlooking the hills where Emmaus may have been. We’ve seen so many churches, and that’s fine by me, as something of a church wonk. But our gathering as church there in the garden did what Jesus promised it would do: It brought him present among us and present as us. Yes, he’s really there in the bread and wine, and he’s just as present in the gathering of regular folks doing their best to follow him. Our pilgrim group has become “church” over these 10 days; and as the Body of Christ in this particular place and moment, Jesus was there among us.

Jaffa's big fish, looking very self-satisfied.

Then we drove to Jaffa, the ancient port city next to which Tel Aviv was built, to connect with more stories of resurrected life. It was from Jaffa that Jonah sailed away trying to escape God's call, only to be thrown overboard, coughed up by a fish on the third day, and returned to prophetic duty. It was in Jaffa that Peter brought a woman named Tabitha back from death. And it was there, in the home of Simon the Tanner, where Peter received a vision that changed everything about who this new Jesus movement would be for. God told Peter not to observe the dietary restrictions he had known from birth as a faithful Jew – in fact, God said, Peter must not declare “unclean” what God had made to be clean. For Peter, it must have blown his mind, as if someone told us today that we should love people who hate us, and not retaliate when people hurt us, and give our property away (oh, wait…). Minds are still blown, 2,000 years later.

Today, Jaffa is a great spot for a seaside getaway. 

Today, Jaffa is a cool artists’ colony on the sea, and the visit wasn’t stunning from a typical pilgrimage perspective. But riding back to Jerusalem on the bus with these people from many different places who’ve truly grown to care for one another, I realized the second gift I’ve been receiving on this pilgrimage. Building on yesterday’s gift of “enough,” today I saw the gift of community.

I came here assuming that I’d be the odd man out, that everyone else in the group would share a common church and common history (which turned out not to be true at all). And I knew I had a different agenda anyway, not just wanting to meet God in the Holy Land but wanting to learn how to lead pilgrimages myself. So, as I said, I’d planned to stay a couple of extra days on my own to continue my experience and scout additional locations. But yesterday, I decided to go home early, with the rest of the group. Why? Well, a presenting situation was the heightened conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. I didn’t want to be stuck here on my own if rockets hit Ben Gurion airport. But I also knew I was ready to leave, that I’d received that gift of “enough” through what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown here.

The pilgrims.

But today, I saw, too, that I’m not sure I could have continued a pilgrimage after the rest of this group left. God’s Holy Land, geographically and spiritually, is meant to be shared; all three Abrahamic faiths teach us how badly we need one another. A Christian certainly can travel alone and learn about a wonderful place. But, just as you can’t be a Christian by yourself, I don’t think you can be a Christian pilgrim by yourself – or, at least, I don’t think I can be. So, I give thanks for my fellow pilgrims over these 11 days, especially our guide Ranya, our driver Nael, our musician Joey McGee, and our leaders Fr. Bill and Sandy Miller. Without this company of strangers now become friends, I would have missed what God had wanted me to see about my walk of faith all along.