Conclusion

I hope the reader has found certain aspects of the history of the Neal and Habicht families and their more or less common characteristics as remarkable as I have. I would like to comment on some of these.

My family includes a healthy mix of national groups in our makeup. My mother's side is close to being half German and half Dutch, which is no real surprise. The real surprise is the fact that my father's side has so many different elements in it. Yes, there are some Scotch-Irish and English and Irish and Welsh in my father's families, as everyone had assumed all along, but there are not so many of these as we had previously thought. The Dutch component on my father's side is very substantial, indeed, as I suppose the name Vanderpool should have told us. (In this context, we should also take note of the key role that the Netherlands – particularly the city of Amsterdam – played as a kind of fulcrum in launching many of the families on my father's side into the New World. There are, in addition, considerably more Germans and Swiss among my father's antecedents than any of us realized. The biggest revelation, though, has been the discovery of French, Belgian, and Norwegian (perhaps even some Spanish?) blood in my father's veins. My ancestry thus is typically "American" in having such a rich mixture of national groups, though by today's standards this mixture is actually rather modest.

Although most of the people I have been able to identify have (not surprisingly, perhaps) made their living as farmers, there have been some noteworthy exceptions. One is the persistent vein of ministers of the gospel that runs through the Neal family, generation after generation: from William Stark to my own grandfather, religious activism has been a calling.¹ In addition, several of the men seen here have been sawyers and millers. In this connection it is interesting that the Vanderpools were associated with various aspects of woodworking: they sawed the wood, they manufactured gun stocks, and they made cabinets. Some of the early residents of New York City and Albany evidently made their living by trading. Otherwise, we find two weavers, a teamster (at least on one census), a physician, a wheelwright, and perhaps a miner.² Among the Habicht family members we know about, there was a laborer and a train conductor. But for the most part these ancestors, on both sides, made their living from the soil.

I also find it remarkable that so many of the ancestors we have met here were religious nonconformists and dissenters who sometimes suffered outright persecution. They were Mennonites or Amish in Switzerland, Huguenots in France, Lutherans in Dutch New Netherland, Baptists in New England, and (possibly) Quakers in Virginia. These people were constantly at odds with the prevailing religious way of thinking. Freedom of conscience and religious practice was imperative to them – so important, in fact, that they sometimes had to flee for their own safety. There is truth to the American notion that many of our ancestors came to this country in order to worship and think as they pleased, although of course economic security and advancement were also factors. In a similar way freethinkers and dissenters were drawn to the ever-advancing American frontier, where they could do and think as they wished without interference.

It is humbling to realize that we owe our existence in this land to those who pulled up stakes and left where they were to seek sanctuary across the seas or mountains. We take freedom of conscience and religion for granted, but we owe that privilege at least in part to the courage and conviction of our own ancestors.

Let us also tip our hat, in fact, to all of my ancestors who were among the first to move beyond the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio Valley and Indiana. This move took courage and faith as well. The period from the American Revolution through the end of the 18th century was a critical turning point in our country's history. The Indians were driven further and further back, often with great bloodshed. (More people were killed on the frontier than during battles between 1774 and 1781.) Even after the Indians were driven westward there continued to be the occasional raid. The evolution of the West into new and equal states in the Union and not as a separate territory, a part of Canada, or a new western empire affiliated with France or Spain – the very destiny of this area hung in the balance. There was no certainty that the United States would become a single political entity coast to coast.

Those migrating – whether across the ocean or westward into the wilderness – faced not only a long and difficult (sometimes dangerous) journey but some arduous challenges once they arrived. These included never-ending and exhausting toil, uncertain title to their land, a rudimentary government that could not guarantee basic protection against peril, unimagined and deadly threats to their health, and immense distances from everything familiar – relatives they might never see again, sources of essential goods, places to market their crops. Some observers believe that it was this period at the close of the 18th century that saw the emergence of the first real American: the self-reliant and independent thinking individual who developed the traits we consider peculiarly American. And many of my ancestors were there.

On the other hand, the process of leaving behind a settled community and establishing a new one helped to produce the kind of values that we admire today: self-sufficiency, independence, and individualism. These people survived through their own skills and actions. As one scholar pointed out, those who were satisfied with life, or had the prospect of being satisfied where they were, were left behind by those who viewed a new start in a new land – what we call the frontier – as the way to achieve their goals of material success along with freedom.

I take pride that so many of my ancestors were among those who did leave the old behind and who tested themselves against the strenuous and unrelenting challenge of creating a new life in a wilderness. Surely one byproduct for them was a powerful sense of individualism and self-actualization (to use a modern phrase) that affected many aspects of their lives, from their religion to their attitudes about authority. Did this sense of individualism and self-actualization become ingrained, get passed along to later generations, become second nature? Who is to say that a predisposition for a similar viewpoint has not come down through the generations to us?

It is striking to me that, on my father's side, every single family had arrived in America no later than the American Revolution began in 1775 – often several generations before then, in fact. (On my mother's side, both families arrived virtually at the same time during the 1880s – well before the massive "new immigration" that followed over the next four decades.) What is perhaps even more striking is the fact that, as if attracted by some mysterious force that made them restless in other areas, these families seemed drawn to Indiana – almost all of them by way of Kentucky, almost all of them within a decade or two of one another – but then never moved on from that state. (The major exception, the Rickabaughs, probably arrived in Indiana from Ohio and remained in Indiana for perhaps two decades before heading off to Iowa and perhaps beyond.) There is no telling how many short, rapid moves these people made before reaching Indiana, and in some cases continued to make even after they had arrived in the Hoosier State, but with some minor exceptions (Starks and Chastains strayed into Illinois, and Samuel Green Vanderpool made a half-hearted attempt to move to Kansas) they stopped migrating once they reached Indiana.³

Although Indiana was their common destination, they came from or lived in a number of different states before they reached – and planted themselves – there. Of the states we know about, we can cite Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware (probably), Virginia (including the portion that became West Virginia), North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Maine, and possibly Washington. My sister and I, together with our own children, have now added to this list California, Texas, Utah, and Florida. This is more than half of the states in the Union. On the other hand, only Aaron Stark and Daniel Blevins can clearly be regarded as New Englanders; the progenitors of all the other families, so far as we know, came originally from the Mid-Atlantic states or those of the Upper South, and nearly all of them passed through Virginia (as more than half of all those who went west did).

The study of my own connections with past generations gives me, at least, a healthy sense of continuity and tradition. I think ahead to future generations who, I hope, will look back on us perhaps in the same light. At least I will be able to turn over to them some sense of where they, too, came from and how they link up with all these past generations. This makes the my efforts worthwhile.

Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed my sentiments well when he said (I paraphrase) that each of us is a bus in which all of our ancestors are riding. As I have built and run this family history bus, stopping every now and then to pick up – sometimes to discharge – passengers and regularly hauling the vehicle into the shop for repair and repainting, I have become pleasantly acquainted (albeit at long distance) with many members of these past generations. It has been fun figuring out how they all fit together and trying to unravel the puzzles. I hope you have enjoyed it too.

A few hundred years from now, no one will know that most of us were here. At the most, our names may appear on a line in a genealogical chart one of our weird descendants will be obsessed with keeping.

rev. 4/5/06

Notes

¹In fact, most of the ministers described in this history practiced their calling in the time before ministers were paid regular salaries. One suspects that they were also farmers unless they had trades we are unaware of.

²See Appendix I for this topic. Return to text

³As an aside, it is interesting to note that Indiana was for decades – from 1890 through at least 1940 – the center of population of the United States. In 1930 that point was less than three miles from Linton, where my grandfather had lived earlier in the 20th century. In 1940, when I was born, it had moved to a point in Sullivan County close to where so many of my ancestors are buried in the Neal-Paxton Cemetery. In a sense, then my families in Indiana were "middle America" not only in geography and values but statistically as well. Return to text

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