I grew up in the White Mountains of Western Maine, in a mill town where I knew nothing of the rich ancestry, heritage, nor history of my family and hometown. It’s hard to mourn what you never knew, and so I went to college knowing practically nothing of the place and people of where I was raised.
After college, my husband and I bought a small place in Central Maine. The date of the deed claimed that the house was built in 1920, but the saw marks on the wood in the basement led me to believe that the building was older. I put the idea of researching the house in the back of my mind – and life got busy. Kids, chickens, gardens, fox attacks, and all sorts of adventures kept me from finding the time to dig back into the history of our house.
It wasn’t until we went to expand one of the gardens that I thought about it again – the number of bricks that the tiller was kicking up had me scratching me head. I began tracing back the deed to the house. As the list of names and dates grew longer, I started thinking about the genealogy of place, the people who have called a building home and the history it has seen, and also began researching the names of the people who had lived here before us. It didn’t take long to piece together rough sketches of the stories of these people, but perhaps more importantly, it didn’t take long to realize that my intuition was right: the date on our deed was wrong. To make a long story short, our house was built for a spinster when her father died and sits in the middle of an old brickyard.
No wonder we harvest more bricks than potatoes.
In retelling my adventures in hunting down my home’s history to others, a thought occurred to me: I knew more about my house’s genealogy than I did my own.
It was time to get to work tracing my own roots. I knew my paternal family was French. I knew my maternal grandfather’s family was from Nova Scotia. I knew my maternal grandmother – a Wing before marriage – was a descendant of a family that had their own nation-wide family reunions. What I didn’t know was….well….a lot. Who were the Vaughns in Nova Scotia? Where did my father’s side come from? Why did any of them end up where they did?
These were the normal questions that anyone searching for their family comes across. The answers have led to me dig deep into Acadia’s deportation, Loyalist land allotments, the history of the Rumford paper mill, Francophone harassment in Maine, heartbreaking stories of death, and inspiring tales of beating the odds. Each answer brough more questions. Genealogical research is a never-ending search.
You would think researching my own family history would be enough to fill my appetite, but as a life-long and avid lover of history, it only made me hungrier. What better way to feed that appetite than to turn a passion into a career?
Thus I present Bramble and Brush Maine Genealogical Services, offering research-for-hire for both family genealogy and the genealogy of place.
Tasha Raymond is a graduate of the University of Maine with a BS in Secondary Education and a MAIS in Maine Studies. She is a current member of the Maine Genealogical Society, the National Genealogical Society, the Maine Old Cemetery Association, and a member of her town’s Cemetery Committee.