East Coast Road Trip: Connecticut Day One
This is the first time I’ve been home in the late Spring/early summer in four years. I had nearly forgotten how lush and beautiful my home town of Coventry can be this time of year. Many of the farmlands have been bought up and replaced by ugly developments resulting in a thinning of the thick woods that border most of the back roads in my home town, but there is still enough to make me long for the foolish and dangerous days of racing through the twisting blind turns to get to a friend’s house or find a secluded make out spot. Sadly, my sure thing make out spot has been replaced by a paved road leading to McMansions. I feel for the high schoolers who long for seclusion and a place to get so caught up in fever that you don’t even notice the lights of the squad car shining through your hatchback window until it is too late and you are snapped out of it by the loud tapping of a hard metal flashlight.
Shortly after I moved away from Connecticut my home town was graced with it’s first two chains; Dunkin’ Donuts and CVS. The Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t too much of a blight as the store front is rustic and fits in with the general character of the historic town. The CVS, just a football field length from a cemetery that features headstones from the early 1800s, to me is a blight, but I can accept it. What bothers me is this new battle being waged by Walgreens. The company wants to build a store nearly across the street from the CVS in a lot currently occupied by an old farm house. When I was growing up finding a Walgreens in Connecticut was a rarity, now, if you go to somewhere like Manchester or Vernon there seems to be one Walgreens for every mile.
The company started in Illinois, so it isn’t surprising that living in Wisconsin the only pharmacy option seems to be Walgreens. I have come to loathe the chain. When I go into a Walgreens the stores always feel dirty and poorly laid out. For some reason CVS, while pretty much the same thing, typically feels cleaner and easier to navigate.
Besides contemplating the corporate pharmacy wars and the negative impact they are having on the town that Capt. Nathan Hale also called home, I spent most of Wednesday in cemeteries and town halls. I’ve been researching my family tree and the few times I make it back east I try to spend at least a portion of the time interviewing family members and visiting long dead relatives. This trip revealed a rather odd family story.
My great grandmother was born in 1897 to George and Victoria Goodspeed. Her name was Irene and she also had a twin sister named Inez. On Feb. 12, 1918 Inez would marry John Crockett, Jr. (side note: I’ve traced the Crockett line back to the same Irish town where Davy Crockett’s great-great-grandfather set hailed from, but have yet to connect myself to the frontiersman directly). Almost one year to the day later, Inez died. I haven’t been able to confirm that this was during child birth, but the records for the cemetery plot have Inez listed as being buried with “Baby” Crockett who was born in 1919 and died in 1919. John would later go on to marry my Great Grandmother Irene (yes, the twin of his dead wife). John would himself pass away in 1932 widowing my great grandmother and leaving her with two daughters and a son.
The whole reason I started this ancestry project was to try and find out what happened to my grandmother’s sister, Arlene Crockett. Grandma says one day Arlene just left and they never heard from her again. My Grandma was born in 1923 and Arlene was born in 1926, so every time I revisit this genealogy stuff I get a little more desperate, because I’d like to find out what happened to Arlene before my Grandma passes on. It has been a tough row to hoe, because the census has been the most helpful document for putting pieces together, but the census records are only released every 70 years. That means I won’t be able to obsess over 1940 until 2010.
With that, I need to prep for North Carolina.
