You, too, can sit in this chair

“Saying you’re doing genealogical research,” the woman at the information desk in the Library of Congress suggested, giving me instructions on where to get the reader card (at the James Madison building, about a block away from the Thomas Jefferson building). Really, my goal had been to merely sit in the spectacular main reading room (which is now in a state of construction), in a chair with an eagle carved on the back and use the Internet.

But it clearly would have been a wasted opportunity to not do any research at one of the world’s greatest libraries, so I decided to actually use the free databases there to look up my forebears.

Of my eight great-grandparents, six were born in Europe, in Austria-Hungary, Germany or France. Researching their roots prior to their arrival in the U.S. is beyond my current capabilities. But the family of my maternal grandfather, John Powell, turns out to have been in the United States for a long time. Since before we were a nation.

Here’s some of what I learned in my online searches at the LOC:

My great-great grandfather, Granville Powell, fought in the F Company of the 88th Indiana Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. He joined in August 1862, but got the measles in 1863 and was on medical leave for eight months, missing the battle of Chickamauga, Ga., where his regiment suffered 11 casualties.

His father, Aaron Powell, also fought with Company F of the Indiana 130th Infantry Regiment in the Civil War, joining up in 1864 at the age of 42. He was an illiterate farmer, according to the 1850 Census.

Aaron’s Powell’s grandfather, William Powell, also an illiterate farmer, was born in Prince Edward, Virginia, and died in North Carolina. He fought in the Revolutionary War as a private for nine months. I am fortunate enough to know this because in 1832, after Congress passed a law granting pensions to veterans of the Revolution, William Powell walked into a courthouse in Wilkes County, North Carolina, and told the story of his Revolutionary war service to a court clerk with beautiful handwriting. Powell had two witnesses to back him up, he signed the clerk’s affidavit with his X, and five months later was granted a pension of $30 a year. His second wife, Rachel, was granted the pension upon his death. She lived to be 96!

The affidavit he signed makes his service sound pretty mundane:

“The company to which the deponent belonged did not join nor was attached to any particular regiment but was marched from place to place in order to be in readiness to cooperate with other companies in a similar situation to protect the low country from invasion by the British which at that time was apprehended” –

He served three three-month tours, marching from Halifax, N.C., to Tarborough, to Fayetteville, to Peacock’s Bridge on Great Contentnea Creek. In his final tour of duty in 1781, his company marched from Kingston, N.C., to Wilmington, Del., “where they were stationed until they heard of the capture of Lord Cornwallis in the latter part of October – and after the rejoicings on that occasion had subsided, they were discharged and returned home.”

William Powell went on to have two wives and nine children, his last child born when he was 54.

I was astounded to learn I have a Revolutionary War ancestor. I haven’t joined the DAR or anything, but knowing this makes me far more interested in the Revolution and the colonial period, which heretofore had seemed antique and remote. Now I think about how William’s experience of the war was limited to the area around his North Carolina home, restricted by how far his company could march. Three generations later, trains would carry Civil War soldiers to battlefields hundreds of miles from home.

There’s a lot more I’d like to know about the Powells. I don’t know anything about William Powell’s father. I don’t know what caused William’s sons Mason and Warren to leave North Carolina for Indiana around 1840. I don’t know if there are any slaveowners in the family tree. I don’t know if the North Carolina Powells also fought in the Civil War. But I look forward to searching for answers.

Click on the photo for more pictures

As I leave the District permanently after two years, just ahead of the killer hurricane / Irene (also my beloved grandmother), here’s my must-see list for time-pressed travelers:

• Walk the Mall. The Capitol is spectacular from all angles. Get the public tour to gaze up at the dome from the inside, where you can see George Washington being assumed into heaven. See if you can’t find a little room in your heart to be hopeful for democracy.
• Visit Eastern Market on the weekend, for the maximum display of fresh produce and artists. My favorites:
  –Crepes at the Market, a one- (sometimes two-) man crepe factory. Choose sweet or savory, make your own change. Kind of messy to eat, but generous and delicious.
  –In a Pickle, the homemade pickle stand. Only the kosher pickles have vinegar. Get there in the morning if you want to buy the wasabi pickles.
  –The cheesemonger. My husband calls the male half of this couple “the grumpy cheese man.” This very popular stand has its rules — cash only, hold your hand flat to get a sample slice — but no visible queue system (just crowd in!). Try their any of their excellent imported cheeses. They also have locally made butter, goat cheese and mozzarella.
  –The Pennsylvania produce stand, across from Marvelous Market. He has great potatoes, tiny Brussels sprouts, extra-sharp Amish-made cheddar cheese, homemade yogurt and fresh eggs.
  –The specialized butchers. If you don’t see it in their cases, ask. They probably have the beef bones or duck leg quarters you’re looking for in the freezer.

• Get a couple of cupcakes. Skip the overexposed Georgetown Cupcakes, though, they don’t need your business. In Georgetown, Baked and Wired on Thomas Jefferson is awesome, and Capitol Hill Cupcakes, a tiny new store in Capitol Hill at 18th Street and D NE, is very unassuming but has outstanding cupcakes.
• Take a ride on a red, rented Capital Bikeshare bike. A ride of 45 minutes or less is free!
• Visit your favorite Smithsonian Museum. They’re free, and the best museums in the country. My new favorites are the Portrait Gallery (especially the Presidential portraits) and the Museum of Natural History.

The Washington Monument reflected in the Vietnam Memorial.

But here we are on March 21, and the District is rife with daffodils and blooming magnolia trees. Here are my other observed signs of spring:

• Sandals and flip-flops appear on shoppers
• College kids in Georgetown are accompanied by their indulgent parents
• Crowds return to the Civil War battlefields (at least that’s what the ranger at Antietam told us)
• Sunglasses booth emerges at the flea market
• Clouds of cyclists flock Rock Creek Parkway
• Washington Capitals fans crowd the Metro
• Mr. Pennsylvania returns to Eastern Market, with his apples, fresh greens and Amish yogurt
• The rescued greyhounds at Lincoln Park no longer wear sweaters

It’s all very welcome, and hasn’t arrived a minute too soon. Even though we avoided heavy snow this year, it feels like a long winter. It may have been more of a spiritual winter than a physical one, but it felt long nonetheless. It’s hard to believe that in a couple of months we’ll be complaining about the heat. But we will. In the meantime, vive le printemps!

More spring photos

Early spring at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson is, of course, a towering Founding Father. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, Virginia’s statute of religious freedom and founded the University of Virginia (the three accomplishments he wanted listed on his tombstone). He doubled the size of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. He read in seven languages. He was Secretary of State, Vice President, and our third president. He wrote 19,000 letters, and made copies of them using a “polygraph” machine. He designed his own lovely home and estate, with technological innovations to drain water off a flat roofs, to store river ice through the summer, and to have an abundance of natural light. He collected one of the best libraries in America and sold 6,487 volumes to the Library of Congress.

But since 1998, when you think of Thomas Jefferson, you think first of his great secret: that he fathered one child, more likely six children, with Sally Hemings, who was enslaved to him. DNA tests in 1998 confirmed that Eston Hemings was fathered by a Jefferson, and not the Jefferson that relatives had long believed was responsible. Add to that the curious omission of the father of Sally Heming’s children from the farm records of Monticello. Jefferson recorded everything about the farm: daily temperature and barometric pressure for 40 years, the weekly food and seasonal clothing allotments granted to every slave, the fathers of all the other children born to all of his slaves. As a friend said, it’s like the 18 minutes missing from the Watergate tapes. And the Thomas Jefferson Foundation believes Jefferson was the father of at least one, and probably all, of Sally Hemings’ children, we were told by two tour guides.

One way we have tried to wrap our modern sensibilities around this is to picture theirs as an early American interracial love story. The facts, however, are difficult to fit into this fantasy:

• Sally Hemings was 30 years younger than Jefferson. Hemings family history says she was pregnant with Jefferson’s child when she was 16 and they returned from Paris, where he was U.S. ambassador and she was caring for his daughter.
• Their last child, Eston Hemings, was born when Jefferson was 65.
• Jefferson did not free Sally in his will. He freed only five men: her brother John, a skilled joiner and cabinetmaker, to be freed a year after Jefferson’s death; her sons Eston and Madison Hemings, who were to work as apprentices to their uncle John for a year and then be granted their freedom; his butler and personal servant, Burwell Colbert, Sally Hemings’ nephew; and blacksmith Joe Fossett, also her nephew.
• About 200 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold in estate sales auctions after his death.

So here we have a picture of a middle-aged man taking advantage, it can only be said, of a teen-aged servant girl.

I picked up a book at the Monticello gift shop, “Jefferson’s Secrets,” by Andrew Burstein (Basic Books, 2005), which imagines Jefferson at the end of his life. Two chapters explored the Hemings relationship, and what responsibilities Jefferson may or may not have felt he owed to Sally Hemings and their children. It concludes, “It is only the imaginations of modern champions of interracial harmony that attribute to Jefferson a progressive ideology and, in turn, his acceptance of Sally Hemings as a putative social equal.”

So there you go: Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, scholar, bibliophile, brilliant man, but a conflicted slaveholder constricted by 19th century moralities and economies.

A well-behaved crowd of hipsters and oldsters

Really, if you saw it on TV, you saw and heard far more than I did. More than once, the crowd around us chanted, “Louder! Louder!” We heard snippets of Ozzie Osbourne, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Kid Rock and Tony Bennett. We heard most of Jon Stewart’s impassioned soliloquy. (”We work together every damn day” got big applause.)

We arrived late — surprise — with a visiting college student in tow. We walked from our house on Capitol Hill, so avoided the huge lines at the Metro. Here’s an amazing picture of people waiting in line to buy a farecard at the Shady Grove terminus. By 12:30, you couldn’t get anywhere near the stage in front of the Capitol and were routed back to 12th St. NW to get into the Mall. Once we made it to the Mall, we moved back east toward the Capitol, herded into the rectangles where the grass was being restored. Sorry about that, little grass. Then it was all about peering over the heads of the thousands of people and signs in front of us.

As a concert & comedy live show, it was frustrating. But as a scene unto itself, it was hugely entertaining. Some of the signs we saw:

• Free the House Elves
• Why Aren’t We Using the Metric System?
• Eat Pray Vote
• Seniors for Legal Pot
• Tolerance or Death
• Were Wolf for Congress
• Any One Up for Scrabble Later?
• I’m Just Here for the Chicks (held by a young woman)
• Hoosiers for Sanity
• This Is a Sign
• By a little girl in a fancy dress: I’m Taking Back My Tea Party

Now I’m going to go to YouTube and try to see what I missed.

1. Gunfire. It was only the one time, outside three floors below us, and no one was hurt, but still.
2. Traffic. Yesterday it took me 40 minutes to drive from Capitol Hill across the Potomac. I should have walked.
3. Sirens from the fire station down the street in the middle of the night
4. The outrageous housing prices
5. The dearth of credible baseball teams
6. So many people trying to do the same things I’m doing at the same time I’m doing them. Like trying to park at Theodore Roosevelt Island.
7. So many 95-degree days
8. Taxation without representation! I can’t even complain to my Congressman about the government. Or, I could, but she doesn’t have a vote anyway, so it seems kind of pointless.
9. How every conversation everywhere in town is about politics
10. So few people know how to drive here.

Fossils from the National Museum of Natural History

Now that I’ve been living in DC for nine months, long enough to gestate a baby, should one be so inclined, here are 10 things I love about living here.

1. Watching the fireworks from Friday night Nats games from our rooftop deck. Too bad the Nats are in the basement. I know it’s a recession and all, but is .500 baseball really too much to ask? Excellent fireworks, though.
2. Hearing Reveille, Taps and other bugle calls from the Marine Barracks seven blocks away from the rooftop deck. This is the oldest active Marine post in the U.S., whose location Thomas Jefferson helped select.
3. Eastern Market, especially the truck farmers on weekends, Southern Maryland Seafood, Canales Delicatessen, with its rotisserie chicken and jalapeno sauce, the homemade pasta place, and the Market Lunch counter, despite its onerous seating policies.
4. Walking to the Capitol and the Mall. The Capitol is 18 blocks away, and the Mall is deceptively long, so if it’s more than 90 degrees, we the Metro. But it’s pretty awesome to walk and avoid the Metro and car traffic. Plus, there are often interesting protesters.
5. The Shenandoah National Park, less than two hours away. We went there a couple of weeks ago to celebrate our anniversary and stayed at the Skyline Lodge. While the temperatures in DC were in the high 90s, they were in the 70s at the Park. The views are spectacular and the hikes are challenging. Have a moonshine cocktail or a cigar as you watch the sunset in the valley.
6. Biking on the Rock Creek Parkway. The DC portion of the Parkway is closed to cars on weekends, but the Maryland part is also accommodating to bicycles. Unlike biking in the city, you can get pedal as fast as your legs will take you. Serious cyclists are all over the route, traveling in packs with their garish jerseys.
7. Architecture, specifically the old brick townhouses in Capitol Hill, and their lovely gardens.
8. Diversity of its people: The population of the District of Columbia is quite diverse: 54% black, 40% white, 9% Latino, 3% Asian, 2% multiracial.
9. The license plates: Taxation Without Representation: Yeah! What do we have to do here to get a voting member of Congress?
10. The national museums. The the National Museum of Natural History has the best fossils and dinosaur bones in the world. If you have spent any time hunting for fossils like Petoskey stones, you will be amazed at the clarity and size of its collection. Of course, they have the best dinosaur fossils in the world, too, but I was hugely impressed by the invertebrate Cretaceous fossils. The National Air and Space Museum is great, too, with an iMax theater and space flight simulation. You might want to avoid it on weekends, though, if wandering hordes of children frighten you.

There are many other cool things about DC that I haven’t experienced yet, like the Eastern Shore, the Kennedy Center, the Spy Museum, and Ben’s Chili Bowl. You DC friends, tell me what I’m missing. What do you love about DC?

Next: 10 Things I Hate About DC…