In New England, where I live now, every town has a handful of families living on land where their ancestors have lived for generations. Their attachment to that land is encoded in the sweat and blood of family, and they can't imagine living anywhere else.
My family was not like that.
They could have been. My father's ancestors were in Massachusetts in the 17th century. Philip Hunt, my gggggf, was the third generation to be born in Amesbury. If he'd just stayed there, maybe my family would be one of those clans rooted to the land. But he was the sixth of twelve children and he had eight aunts and uncles and untold cousins. I'm just guessing here, but I can imagine there wasn't much to inherit and maybe no one in town he wasn't already related to. Whatever the motivation, he started wandering around Massachusetts and eventually landed in Sanbornton, New Hampshire as one of the first settlers of the town.
Land settled by Philip Hunt in Sanbornton, NH in 1764
Philip started a new tradition. His son and then his grandson also left behind their childhood homes to help settle what was then wilderness. Humphrey served in the Revolutionary Army in the campaign to exterminate the Iroquois tribes in upstate New York. (Hey, I never claimed to have a pristine genetic inheritance.) He apparently liked what he saw of the land there, because in 1805 he moved his family to a hillside overlooking Cayuga Lake in what is now the town of Union Springs.
Paradise Hill Road
Humphrey also had a baseball team in the house. (See this post to get a sense of the conditions the family lived in.) In 1837 his son, Henry Dearborn Hunt, traveled with a group of men from Mount Morris, NY to Michigan, where they founded a new town, which they called Mount Morris, displaying either a complete lack of imagination or a lingering attachment to home. Henry's descendants stayed in central Michigan for a while, though they drifted around a bit. I don't have a photo of the land Henry settled. I do have this photo of the house in Gaines, MI my grandparents (Henry's grandson) bought in 1921, when my father was six.
Cecil and Maude Hunt moved into this house and reared eight children here. It came with an eighth of a section of land (80 acres). It's still a farm.
Sometime in the late 1930s Cecil and Maude picked up and moved to Cayuga County in New York, back to the area his grandfather had left 100 years earlier. They bought the farm in Martville where I grew up. My brother still owns that farm - making a bid to break the family tradition of roaming.
As you can see, I've spent a fair bit of time tracking down the places where my ancestors lived. And even though my family no longer has any interest in these lands, I am struck by how moved I am standing on the same ground where they built their homes and reared their families. Wanderlust and attachment to the land are contradictory but equally strong themes in the American psyche - I'm startled to find both in my own life and family history.
So it will come as no surprise that next year when I go to Australia I plan to find this spot and take a selfie:
Hallam Road in Lower Mt. Walker, Queensland bisects the cattle station owned by Peter Dudley Hallam, my mother's gggf, who was transported to Australia for stealing a pair of boots.