From a letter responding to an invitation to the Dickinson Family Reunion of 1883
"...your letter encouraged me to secretly clamber up the Adams' genealogical tree, and I had no sooner got out on the big limb of my great grandfather, than I found grafted thereon, in the reign of George II, a Dickinson scion, one Sarah, daughter of Deacon Ebenezer Dickinson, of Amherst.
Good wife Sarah ought to have insisted on having one of her children, at least, dubbed with the maternal cognomen. But blood will tell in the long run. The Adams boys married Dickinson girls right and left, and in due time, one begat a son, my father, whom they called Nathaniel Dickinson Adams, after that Nathaniel Dickinson [Jr.], [familiarly known as "'Squire Nat," delegate from Amherst to the first Continental Congress, and, I suppose, after that still more famous Nathaniel Dickinson [1601-1676], who led his tribe up from Wethersfield into Hadley, in 1659, drove out the Wampanoags, and occupied the land. [He was one of the founders of Hadley. p. 51, Historic Homes of Amherst by Alice Morehouse Walker]
[About the Wampanoag people.]
I had got thus far, when in came my youngest brother, who calls himself a historian, prates about original research, pores over old church and town records, and dotes on moss-grown gravestones. He says that our great grandsire had two wives--not that he was a Mormon--but that his first wife, the aforesaid Sarah Dickinson, died, and was succeeded by one Grace Ward, who wrote poems and bore children of goodly number, from one of whom we are descended. So that, my brother says, there isn't a drop of Dickinson blood in a single corpuscle of my body.
But, I refuse to believe this. It is only a way historians have of tilting well-settled historical facts, as when they try to prove that the Pilgrims never landed on Plymouth Rock, nor on the twenty-second of December. But, until it is shown on what they did land, I shall stick to it that I am a Dickinson, not only by name but by nature.
Well, this whole subject of ancestry and posterity is a queer thing, and when you go into it there is no there is no telling where you will come out.
(Action: to be continued, more to type from page 142, dry humor)
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