more research on the genealogical situation has put me deep in the late sixteen hundreds, when there were these leveretts kicking around the boston area: roxbury, woburn, medford, scituate, those kinds of places. they were all villages back then; roxbury was actually the suburbs, not yet swallowed up by boston, not yet become "the inner city." on the contrary, it was where the landed folks ended up.

so we have this guy hudson who had a second wife and disappeared off into the gloaming. he was never made a "freeman" in any church, as he wouldn't proclaim that he was saved, and as a result was somewhat locked out of society. he was supposedly an "attorney" but died without assets, without accomplishments really. where did he disappear to? probably roxbury or perhaps medford, as his wife, after his death, died in roxbury. but the question really is, did he have kids? do we know who all his kids were?

leverett genealogists say there was one that fell through the cracks, and he was our ancestor. that's why one of his grandkids walked out of roxbury and up into maine at the age of six, saying he was directly descended from the governor if his father's father's father was hudson then yes, hudson was descended from the governor. but this guy was pretty well hidden. there's no evidence that he existed, that i can find. the kid came out of maine, yes. the kid had started in roxbury, yes. everyone was in roxbury. the place was hopping with leveretts.

there was a daughter, and she, too, disappeared off into the gloaming. you're talking 1670, 1680, 1690 here. if she had a son, out of wedlock, that son, too, would be a leverett, right? and related directly to the governor, right? perhaps this was something leverett genealogists didn't want to face.

lots of research on the era, on colonial massachusetts as it developed in the sixteen hundreds. it's wild stuff. those puritans had street brawls over such things as religion. my guess is that this young leverett fellow was hiding to save his life.

on the other hand, it appears that his son got swept off into the revolution, before his son and the grandson joseph who walked to maine; it's an honorable chain one way or the other. i'd like to write the book so it genuinely honors the line whether it came through an out-of-wedlock birth or what. the two things about the modern day that have changed are that we're a little more accepting of out-of-wedlock births, i hope, and, there's an explosion of personal information that people have put up on the web, in sites like ancestry-dot-com, where everyone can share them. other things: old birth records from suffolk, early new england marriage records, these haven't changed much. the people who dug for them a hundred years ago, and didn't find these guys, turned up most of what there was, in town and elsewhere, leaving me to expect less from ship records, birth records, suffolk records etc. mind you, i don't mind wading through old lists from the sixteen hundreds. it's just that if i can find anything new, and special, and enlightening, it probably won't be there.

it will more likely be in the small things, that have already been found, where we are left to put two and two together, and surmise why the leverett clan survived the late sixteen hundreds, and even came out of it with a young boy, who lived through the revolution, and had a grandson who walked up to maine to become a pioneer.

it's a story of drama, intrigue, and treachery. yet it shouldn't surprise anyone. boston even today is a lively place, all kinds of things going on. and puritan as hell. in that sense, nothing has changed at all.