Reply #5: One last one, because it is succinct

[TayTay]

My family asked me to research our history in this area. One part of my family background is all Yankee, going back to arrival in 1629 in Salem. In the early to mid 1860's it became the custom of most MA towns to commission histories for their Bicentennials. These writings come from the personal recollections of town inhabitants. They are "history" but unverified history. (The accounts of the various towns on what happened in Shays Rebellion are a study in the famous saying that "winners write history." ) These old books are amazing reads and give insight into the MA character that you just can't get out of a traditional history book.

This is a history of the town of http://www.archive.org/details/historyoftownofh00nour">Harvard, MA, where several of my antecedents lived. IT is another "aha" moment for those of us who live here. It was ever so. When I am asked why NE is so strangely conservative and liberal, I think about desciptions like this. (Remember, these are the people who raised Revolution against the British. When you read between the lines it gives tremendous insight into the why of that Revolution.)

The builders of Harvard were given to marrying. They
married early, and. Providence permitting, they married
often. The widower had no conscientious scruples about
consoling himself with his deceased wife's sister. The re-
corded dates of quick following events often suggest the
thought that "the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish
forth the marriage tables." Old bachelors there were none,
save Stephen Atherton the mea-compos, and of old maids the
rarity proved them victims of a stress of circumstances.

The colonists who brought to New England their heritage
of Saxon virtues and energies, did not leave behind them all
the ancestral vices or passions. Though a simple-hearted
folk, leading lives of loving domesticity, these grandsires of
ours and their good-wives, it must be confessed, lacked refine-
ment. They would have ill suited their environment had they
not been of stronger individuality, ruder tastes, more callous
natures, and every way of coarser fibre than their descendants
in the fifth generation. They unblushingly "called a spade a
spade." When hot with irritation they used a very vulgar
vernacular. Gross lapses from moral rectitude were regularly
made the subject of oral confession in the presence of the
congregated church, and duly recorded by the pastor. More-
over, we are told that the self-accusations of the low-voiced,
stammering sinners always won a rapt attention such as no
pulpit eloquence could gain. This unsavory charge obtains
force when we read in the ministers' records, that so late as
1798, "the pastor then submitted to the consideration of the
brethren the propriety of abolishing the custom of making
confession for the sin of fornication in particidar,'' and that
the proposition stirred up a "warm debate," but effected no
change in the musty by-laws.

What does this stuff have to do with this group? Good question. Who supports Scott Brown and why? Why is Ma so hard for women to compete in? What is the character of these folks, where did it come from and how is it manipulated in politics? Some of the answers are for news of today. Some are rooted in the generations that went before us. This is the briefest of reference back to those who went before. (And these stories are typical. Some of it is New England peculiarities, some are not especially so. But the descendants do have some of these traits and they do affect thought patterns in the various MA groupings.)