i like to say, if you go up twelve generations, over four thousand people are your direct ancestors, and go into who you are today. now it so happens that for simplicity sake we tend to go up through the men, because they have all the same last name, and therefore i have been exploring twelve generations of leveretts going all the way up or as far as i can though there are several holes in the line, in the witchcraft trials and in the revolution.

but it so happens that at every woman they marry, there is a whole bunch of tree going straight up into those four thousand. for example, when my dad married my mom, she contributed a couple thousand right there, assuming we are willing to go up twelve generations and notice them all, her parents, their parents, their parents, etc. etc.

i have an inherent interest in all four thousand, too, regardless of their names, and now that i have done the leveretts going through the seventeen hundreds, i'm a little better prepared to understand what some of these other families went through in that era. families of nine, eleven, thirteen were quite common. these were trees that got very wide very fast.

i had a relative about five generations back who was into this as well and, frustrated that the leveretts themselves were somewhat murky, looked into the wives' side and traced some of the ancestors going up from there. for example, one leverett stumbled into needham, mass., and married a local woman, lydia fuller, and i knew her father, captain fuller, or perhaps it was lieutenant fuller, had served in the revolutionary war. he was from needham, and was in the lexington alarm guard, so was one of the first to answer the call. but his mother was named sarah eaton, and the eaton fuller alliance provides its own interesting story, the story of powder house rock.

powder house rock is a tiny little place in dedham, mass., that is a little off the beaten path but very interesting. it is interesting partly because it starts with a slab of rock that overlooks the charles river, a little west of boston. on this rock is built a sturdy little house which was to be used for gunpowder around the time of the revolution. this little house was apparently built by captain fuller, and is the oldest standing building in dedham.

now what is interesting to me is that the land it is on was owned by the eatons for many generations. the eatons were a family in dedham which had many generations of johns, but around this time, something happened to the oldest one, who was john, and the land ended up in the hands of william. Well, not exactly. There was one john who helped build a footbridge over the charles, but his son John was mentally ill. nobody knew that john's wife's name; she was alice; she was generally considered competent, but that john, well, he couldn't handle his own affairs, apparently. and his oldest son john is the one who we lose track of. he had another son william, and william eaton married mary starr, and their daughter sarah eaton married robert fuller right before the revolution.

in any case, this rock had been owned by the eatons, and came to be owned by the fullers, who probably had lived there, and at some point coming up into the revolution one captain fuller, who could be robert, or could be his son william, i'm still not sure, built this little powder house.

and the remarkable thing is, the powder house still stands. it's kind of tucked away. the city has expanded way around it. it's just a little brick building on a big old rock. overlooking the charles.

someday, i'm going to go visit.