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New Jersey: A Sentence of Survival | Episode 116 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Imagine diving into your family tree to discover that your ancestors left you a secret message more than 300 years ago.
• 0:08
  Crista Cowan: Not in a diary or a hidden letter, but encoded into the literal names of their children.
• 0:15
  Crista Cowan: A sentence of survival written in code.
• 0:19
  Crista Cowan: One couple crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times, survived public excommunication, and stared down a corrupt government, all to write a hidden prayer that would ultimately be answered in New Jersey.
• 0:34
  Crista Cowan: If you are stuck on a family tree brick wall right now, this story is for you.
• 0:40
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:48
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:52
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 1:12
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea, the stories that live in us.
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: If you've been with me for a while, you know about Carrie, our Carrie.
• 1:24
  Crista Cowan: That's what my pajamas and pedigrees community call her.
• 1:27
  Crista Cowan: They have followed along with her story and my continued discoveries about her and her family since way back in episode one of this podcast.
• 1:36
  Crista Cowan: Carrie Inman, my two times great-grandmother, was the brick wall in my family tree that I thought I would never get past.
• 1:45
  Crista Cowan: A little girl orphaned so young and raised by her paternal grandparents in Medina County, Ohio.
• 1:52
  Crista Cowan: For decades, Carrie was the dead end, the place where my family story just stopped.
• 1:59
  Crista Cowan: And then I found her.
• 2:02
  Crista Cowan: When I finally broke through that wall, and if you're a genealogist, you know that feeling, that moment when the puzzle piece that you've been holding for years just suddenly clicks into place.
• 2:17
  Crista Cowan: When I broke through that brick wall, I didn't just find another generation.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: I found a whole new world, a whole new branch of my family tree to discover and explore and play in.
• 2:31
  Crista Cowan: From Carrie's mom's side of my family tree, I connected with Alice Young, the Connecticut witch, whose story I shared in episode 114 just a couple weeks ago.
• 2:42
  Crista Cowan: From her dad's side, I learned about the grandparents who raised her, Isaac Inman and Sally Ann Marsh.
• 2:49
  Crista Cowan: They raised Carrie in the same small town where Isaac's own mother lived, a woman named Elizabeth Lippincott.
• 2:59
  Crista Cowan: Carrie's great-grandmother Elizabeth was born in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey.
• 3:05
  Crista Cowan: She and her husband were both raised Quaker.
• 3:09
  Crista Cowan: And here's the thing about Quakers: they keep records, extraordinary records.
• 3:18
  Crista Cowan: Every birth, every marriage, every death, every action taken by their congregations, all preserved in what they call meeting minutes, going back centuries.
• 3:31
  Crista Cowan: Those records become a trail.
• 3:34
  Crista Cowan: And I followed that trail from Elizabeth in Ohio back to New Jersey through generations of lip and cots in Little Egg Harbor and Shrewsbury Township until one day I found myself reading about a man born in Devonshire, England, around 1615.
• 3:54
  Crista Cowan: A man who, with his wife, crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times in search of something most of us take for granted.
• 4:02
  Crista Cowan: And this couple wrote the story of their family's suffering and hope in the most interesting way imaginable.
• 4:11
  Crista Cowan: They wrote it in the names of their children.
• 4:15
  Crista Cowan: Their names were Richard Lippincott and Abigail Goody.
• 4:20
  Crista Cowan: And they are my 10 times great-grandparents.
• 4:24
  Crista Cowan: And this is their story.
• 4:27
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so picture this.
• 4:29
  Crista Cowan: It's 1639.
• 4:31
  Crista Cowan: The Massachusetts Bay Colony is barely a decade old.
• 4:35
  Crista Cowan: Boston isn't even a city yet, it's just a cluster of wooden houses and muddy paths on a peninsula surrounded by water, because that's what a peninsula is.
• 4:45
  Crista Cowan: There are less than 20,000 people in the whole colony, scattered in small communities throughout.
• 4:52
  Crista Cowan: And in those towns and villages, everyone knows everyone.
• 4:58
  Crista Cowan: And the church, it's not just where you worship on Sunday.
• 5:02
  Crista Cowan: It is the government, the social network, the courtroom.
• 5:07
  Crista Cowan: It is the moral authority of those communities all rolled into one.
• 5:12
  Crista Cowan: Into this world steps a young man from Devonshire, England, Richard Lippincott.
• 5:17
  Crista Cowan: He's about 25 years old, and he comes from a family with deep, deep English roots.
• 5:25
  Crista Cowan: The Lippincott name can be traced all the way back to the Doomsday book in 1080, tied to a family estate called Lovecote near Highhampton.
• 5:36
  Crista Cowan: This isn't just some peasant looking for opportunity.
• 5:41
  Crista Cowan: This is an aristocrat who left everything behind: land, name, status, and crossed an ocean.
• 5:49
  Crista Cowan: Why?
• 5:50
  Crista Cowan: Likely the same reason thousands of others did.
• 5:53
  Crista Cowan: Religious freedom.
• 5:55
  Crista Cowan: The chance to worship God according to his own conscience, without the Church of England telling him how and what to believe.
• 6:05
  Crista Cowan: On May 10th, 1640, Richard married a young woman named Abigail Goody in Roxbury.
• 6:12
  Crista Cowan: That's a small village just south of Boston at the time.
• 6:16
  Crista Cowan: Abigail was 18 years old and she had been born in Northumberland, England, which is about as far from Devonshire as you can get and still actually be in England.
• 6:26
  Crista Cowan: She's from the north, he's from the deep southwest.
• 6:30
  Crista Cowan: How they found each other in colonial Massachusetts is a story I would love to know, but the records don't tell us that story.
• 6:40
  Crista Cowan: What they do tell us is that together, Richard and Abigail joined the Puritan community in nearby Dorchester and they began building a life.
• 6:51
  Crista Cowan: Their first child was born in 1641, a son.
• 6:55
  Crista Cowan: And this is where the story starts to become something more than just a genealogical record because of what they named him.
• 7:05
  Crista Cowan: They named him Remembrance.
• 7:09
  Crista Cowan: I think we've gotten so used to names like Brittany and Tyler and Caitlin that we've forgotten how much weight a name used to carry.
• 7:21
  Crista Cowan: In the 1600s, especially among Puritans and other deeply religious communities, a name was a declaration.
• 7:29
  Crista Cowan: It was a statement of faith.
• 7:31
  Crista Cowan: It was a prayer pressed into the identity of a child.
• 7:35
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance.
• 7:37
  Crista Cowan: Remember, don't forget.
• 7:39
  Crista Cowan: But don't forget what?
• 7:42
  Crista Cowan: Maybe the liberty they found after crossing the ocean, maybe the mercies God had shown them, maybe the life they left behind.
• 7:52
  Crista Cowan: The historical record suggests all of those things.
• 7:55
  Crista Cowan: But whatever the specific meaning, the impulse was, for centuries before baby naming became a sport or an act of trying to instill uniqueness in a child, it was a way for parents to make a declaration to the child and to their community.
• 8:12
  Crista Cowan: These new parents looked at this baby boy and said, This child will carry our story.
• 8:18
  Crista Cowan: Does that sound familiar?
• 8:21
  Crista Cowan: Because every time you hang a family tree chart on your wall, or every time you share a story at Sunday dinner, or every time you name a baby after a grandmother, you're doing the exact same thing that Richard and Abigail did in 1641.
• 8:37
  Crista Cowan: You're saying, remember.
• 8:40
  Crista Cowan: Now, life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony wasn't exactly what Richard had imagined it would be.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: Richard and Abigail moved from Dorchester into Boston around 1644.
• 8:55
  Crista Cowan: Their second son, John, was born there.
• 8:57
  Crista Cowan: And John, while a perfectly ordinary name, actually has meaning.
• 9:01
  Crista Cowan: It means God is gracious.
• 9:04
  Crista Cowan: Next was a daughter, Abigail, named for her mother, born in 1646.
• 9:09
  Crista Cowan: But she died young.
• 9:11
  Crista Cowan: The historical record gives us that fact in a single line.
• 9:15
  Crista Cowan: Born 17th of 11th month, 1646, died in infancy.
• 9:20
  Crista Cowan: That's all we get.
• 9:22
  Crista Cowan: But behind that line is a mother who buried a baby girl who bore her own name.
• 9:28
  Crista Cowan: And every genealogist knows that behind the dates and names on our charts, there are moments like these.
• 9:34
  Crista Cowan: Moments of grief that the records I don't think ever fully capture.
• 9:39
  Crista Cowan: So Richard and Abigail are in Boston.
• 9:43
  Crista Cowan: They've lost a child, they're raising two young sons, and something is happening inside of Richard.
• 9:51
  Crista Cowan: His faith is shifting.
• 9:54
  Crista Cowan: And here's where I need to give you a little bit of context because what happened next doesn't make any sense unless you understand what the Puritan church actually was in colonial Boston at the time.
• 10:06
  Crista Cowan: The Puritans left England because they believed the Church of England was corrupt.
• 10:12
  Crista Cowan: Too much ritual, too much hierarchy, not enough of a direct relationship with God.
• 10:20
  Crista Cowan: And they came to Massachusetts to build what they called a city upon a hill, a pure Christian community.
• 10:29
  Crista Cowan: And they succeeded in building a theocracy.
• 10:34
  Crista Cowan: The church and the government were essentially the same thing.
• 10:39
  Crista Cowan: And if you weren't a member of the church in good standing, you couldn't vote, you couldn't hold office, and your social standing was in serious jeopardy.
• 10:50
  Crista Cowan: The church controlled not just your spiritual life, but your civic life.
• 10:56
  Crista Cowan: He was drawn to ideas about a direct individual relationship with God, what would eventually become the foundation of the Society of Friends, the Quakers.
• 11:44
  Crista Cowan: Though by this point, George Fox hadn't even published his first writings yet.
• 11:48
  Crista Cowan: Richard was arriving at these ideas all on his own.
• 11:52
  Crista Cowan: And the church in Massachusetts noticed.
• 11:57
  Crista Cowan: In 1651, a note appears in the record of the first church of Boston, and I want to share this with you as close to the original language as I can, because the words matter.
• 12:07
  Crista Cowan: Here's the quote: Richard Lippincott, a member of the Church of Dorchester, being recommended from fence by letters to us and falling in a withdrawing from communion with the church, was admonished.
• 12:24
  Crista Cowan: He stopped showing up.
• 12:27
  Crista Cowan: He pulled away from communion, which in that world didn't just mean he was skipping church on Sundays.
• 12:33
  Crista Cowan: It was a public act of defiance.
• 12:36
  Crista Cowan: The church in Dorchester had already flagged him and sent a warning letter to the church in Boston that they were watching him.
• 12:45
  Crista Cowan: They admonished him.
• 12:47
  Crista Cowan: Essentially, they gave him a formal warning to get back in line.
• 12:52
  Crista Cowan: And he didn't.
• 12:55
  Crista Cowan: Less than three months later, there's another entry.
• 12:58
  Crista Cowan: And this one, they demanded that Richard explain himself, stand up before the congregation, and give a reason for his withdrawal.
• 13:07
  Crista Cowan: And his response?
• 13:09
  Crista Cowan: He wanted a commission to speak.
• 13:13
  Crista Cowan: I thought about that line.
• 13:16
  Crista Cowan: What did he mean?
• 13:18
  Crista Cowan: The historical record gives us two possible interpretations.
• 13:24
  Crista Cowan: Maybe he meant, I don't have the authority to say what I really think in this forum.
• 13:31
  Crista Cowan: Or maybe he meant, I have nothing I'm required to say to you.
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: Either way, he refused to explain himself.
• 13:41
  Crista Cowan: He refused to bend.
• 13:43
  Crista Cowan: And so the church excommunicated him.
• 13:47
  Crista Cowan: Now, excommunication in 1651 in Boston wasn't just a spiritual matter.
• 13:55
  Crista Cowan: It wasn't like being asked to leave the book club.
• 13:58
  Crista Cowan: This was a public shaming.
• 14:01
  Crista Cowan: This was social and economic exile.
• 14:04
  Crista Cowan: You are no longer one of us.
• 14:07
  Crista Cowan: In a colony of a few thousand people, where the church is the community, being excommunicated meant being cast out of everything, your social network, your civil standing, your identity, and that irony.
• 14:24
  Crista Cowan: Richard left an aristocratic life in Devonshire, England, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and gave up his family estate and his position and his homeland, all for religious freedom.
• 14:38
  Crista Cowan: And the people who welcomed him, the people who had done the exact same thing, fled England for the exact same reason.
• 14:46
  Crista Cowan: They threw him out for following his conscience.
• 14:50
  Crista Cowan: The very thing they claimed to value most was the thing they punished him for exercising.
• 14:57
  Crista Cowan: I also think about Abigail at this point.
• 15:01
  Crista Cowan: She's in her late 20s.
• 15:04
  Crista Cowan: She's buried a daughter.
• 15:05
  Crista Cowan: She has two sons.
• 15:07
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance is about 10.
• 15:09
  Crista Cowan: John's about seven.
• 15:11
  Crista Cowan: Her husband has just been publicly expelled from the church that structures their entire world.
• 15:17
  Crista Cowan: Everything they built in this colony, their reputation, their relationships, their standing, possibly their business and any financial prospects, all gone.
• 15:29
  Crista Cowan: And Abigail didn't ask for this.
• 15:32
  Crista Cowan: Now, we don't know whether she agreed with Richard's theological evolution or whether she thought he was crazy or stubborn.
• 15:43
  Crista Cowan: We don't know if she was angry or afraid or both.
• 15:47
  Crista Cowan: What we do know is what she did.
• 15:50
  Crista Cowan: And what she did was pack up her family and they went home, like home, home, back across the ocean, back to England with two young boys, some shattered dreams, and a faith that was still taking shape.
• 16:06
  Crista Cowan: So picture this family on a ship going back.
• 16:11
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance, who is old enough to understand that something has gone terribly wrong, and John, who is still young enough to know that his parents are scared, but not old enough to quite understand why.
• 16:25
  Crista Cowan: Richard has just had his entire identity in the New World stripped away.
• 16:30
  Crista Cowan: And Abigail, well, she's managing all of it.
• 16:35
  Crista Cowan: The children, the uncertainty, her own grief and fear, and possibly a husband who is questioning everything except that one conviction that got them into this mess in the first place.
• 16:49
  Crista Cowan: It would have taken six to eight weeks, six to eight weeks of open ocean with a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old, six to eight weeks to sit with that question about what now, what next.
• 17:03
  Crista Cowan: They land in England and they settle in Plymouth, which is in Devonshire, near Richard's ancestral home.
• 17:10
  Crista Cowan: And that choice feels important.
• 17:12
  Crista Cowan: They didn't go to Northumberland, where Abigail's people were, they went to Richard's territory, back to the place where the Lippincott name still meant something.
• 17:24
  Crista Cowan: Maybe it was practical, maybe it was pride.
• 17:28
  Crista Cowan: Maybe Abigail insisted that they go where they had the strongest roots and prospects because she was done taking chances.
• 17:38
  Crista Cowan: We don't know.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: But they went to Plymouth.
• 17:41
  Crista Cowan: And in 1653, their third son is born, and they name him Restore.
• 17:49
  Crista Cowan: These names are becoming like a journal almost.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: Every child is a chapter.
• 17:55
  Crista Cowan: And if you're tracking the story through the names alone, here's what you'd read so far from Remember to Restore.
• 18:02
  Crista Cowan: Words that tell you everything about what this family has been through.
• 18:07
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance.
• 18:09
  Crista Cowan: Remember what we came from.
• 18:12
  Crista Cowan: John, God is gracious, and now restore.
• 18:16
  Crista Cowan: We've been brought back.
• 18:18
  Crista Cowan: We've been returned to where we belong.
• 18:22
  Crista Cowan: At this point, I need to introduce you to some people who are about to change Richard and Abigail's lives.
• 18:29
  Crista Cowan: Because somewhere in these early years, back in England, they find the Quakers, or maybe the Quakers find them.
• 18:39
  Crista Cowan: Not sure.
• 18:41
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so the Society of Friends.
• 18:43
  Crista Cowan: You've probably heard the word Quaker before.
• 18:46
  Crista Cowan: Maybe you associate it with oatmeal or the state of Pennsylvania.
• 18:50
  Crista Cowan: But in the 1650s, the Quakers were brand new and they were pretty radical.
• 18:57
  Crista Cowan: Here's what they believed in the simplest terms I can give you.
• 19:01
  Crista Cowan: Every person has direct access to God.
• 19:06
  Crista Cowan: You don't need a priest, you don't need a bishop, you don't need a church hierarchy telling you what God thinks.
• 19:14
  Crista Cowan: There is an inner light, the presence of God inside every human being.
• 19:20
  Crista Cowan: And if you get quiet enough, you can hear it.
• 19:25
  Crista Cowan: That might not sound revolutionary to you right now, or maybe it does, I don't know.
• 19:31
  Crista Cowan: But in the 1650s, that idea was dangerous.
• 19:36
  Crista Cowan: Because if every person can hear God directly, then what do you need the church for?
• 19:42
  Crista Cowan: And if you don't need the church, then the church has no power.
• 19:45
  Crista Cowan: And if the church has no power, well, in a world where church and state were deeply intertwined, you have just threatened the entire social order.
• 19:57
  Crista Cowan: Quakers also refused to swear oaths, any oaths, because Jesus said, swear not at all, which sounds like a small thing, until you realize that oaths were the foundation of the legal system, of military service, of allegiance to the crown.
• 20:15
  Crista Cowan: Refusing to swear an oath was essentially saying, your entire system of authority does not apply to me.
• 20:22
  Crista Cowan: They also believed in the radical equality of all people: men, women, rich, poor, everyone was equal before God.
• 20:33
  Crista Cowan: Women could speak in Quaker meetings.
• 20:36
  Crista Cowan: In the 1650s, women could preach.
• 20:39
  Crista Cowan: Let that sink in for a minute.
• 20:41
  Crista Cowan: So this is who the Lippincots are aligning themselves with.
• 20:46
  Crista Cowan: This movement, so new that its founder, George Fox, has only been preaching for about a decade.
• 20:53
  Crista Cowan: A movement that is attracting exactly the kind of people who believe that faith is personal, that conscience matters more than conformity, and that no institution has the right to stand between a person and God.
• 21:09
  Crista Cowan: Of course, Richard found them, or they found him.
• 21:14
  Crista Cowan: He'd been moving in this direction since before he left Boston, maybe since before the Quakers even existed as an organized movement.
• 21:22
  Crista Cowan: The ideas that got him excommunicated in Massachusetts were the same ideas the Quakers were building an entire faith around.
• 21:34
  Crista Cowan: For the first time in years, Richard was not alone in his beliefs.
• 21:40
  Crista Cowan: He had a community.
• 21:41
  Crista Cowan: He had people who understood.
• 21:44
  Crista Cowan: But here's the thing about finding your people in 1650s England it could get you killed.
• 21:52
  Crista Cowan: And it didn't take long.
• 21:55
  Crista Cowan: In May of 1655, two Quaker preachers, Thomas Salt House and Miles Hallhead, they arrived in Plymouth.
• 22:03
  Crista Cowan: They'd been traveling through the region, visiting friends and sharing their faith.
• 22:10
  Crista Cowan: They stayed at the home of a man named Arthur Cotton, and then that same evening, they went to Stonehouse, to the house of one Lippincott.
• 22:22
  Crista Cowan: That's what the record says.
• 22:23
  Crista Cowan: Richard's house.
• 22:25
  Crista Cowan: Now, hosting traveling Quaker preachers might sound harmless to you and me, but in 1655 England, under Oliver Cromwell's protectorate, it was an act of defiance.
• 22:38
  Crista Cowan: The authorities were terrified of the Quakers.
• 22:41
  Crista Cowan: These were people who wouldn't swear loyalty oaths, who wouldn't take off their hats to magistrates, who let women speak in their meetings, who insisted that every person, every single person had direct access to God without needing the permission of any institution.
• 23:01
  Crista Cowan: The government saw them as a threat to the social order.
• 23:05
  Crista Cowan: And they were right.
• 23:07
  Crista Cowan: The Quakers were a threat to the social order.
• 23:11
  Crista Cowan: That was kind of the whole point.
• 23:13
  Crista Cowan: Thomas Salthouse and Miles Hallhead were arrested.
• 23:19
  Crista Cowan: The charges were absurd, disturbing the peace, violating a proclamation against disrupting ministers, and this is my favorite one, violating an ordinance against duels, challenges, and all provocations thereto.
• 23:36
  Crista Cowan: Duels.
• 23:38
  Crista Cowan: These were pacifist Quaker preachers, and the authorities couldn't even find a law that applied to what they'd actually done.
• 23:47
  Crista Cowan: So they just threw everything they had at the wall to see what stuck.
• 23:52
  Crista Cowan: Thomas and Miles were thrown into the jail at Exeter Castle.
• 23:56
  Crista Cowan: Richard signed his name to a certificate defending them.
• 24:01
  Crista Cowan: A group of friends put together a written testimony that every single charge levied against those men was false, that Salthouse and Hall had never disturbed the peace, that they had never disrupted any church service, and that they had certainly never challenged anyone to a duel.
• 24:20
  Crista Cowan: They'd simply attended a private Quaker meeting.
• 24:24
  Crista Cowan: Richard's name appears on that document.
• 24:27
  Crista Cowan: And by signing, he had drawn a target on his own back.
• 24:32
  Crista Cowan: Within a few months, Richard found himself in the same jail.
• 24:39
  Crista Cowan: Now, we're going to do a little story within a story because there's this woman that Richard was imprisoned with.
• 24:47
  Crista Cowan: She spoke, and the mayor himself admitted that what she said was very good and true.
• 25:31
  Crista Cowan: And then he had her arrested anyway.
• 25:35
  Crista Cowan: On the fourth of the next month, at four o'clock in the morning, a constable and a sergeant broke down the door to Margaret Kellum's house, then broke down the door to her bedroom.
• 25:47
  Crista Cowan: They refused to show a warrant.
• 25:49
  Crista Cowan: They dragged her out into the street.
• 25:51
  Crista Cowan: They tied a rope around her body, threw her onto the back of the horse, bound her arms behind her, tied her feet under the horse's belly, and carried her like that for 10 miles to Exeter.
• 26:04
  Crista Cowan: A tender woman of good education and considerable fortune, dragged behind a horse like a criminal, for saying things that the mayor himself admitted were true.
• 26:17
  Crista Cowan: Margaret ended up in the jail at Exeter Castle, and so did Richard, and so did a man named Thomas Hooton.
• 26:26
  Crista Cowan: The charge?
• 26:27
  Crista Cowan: Margaret Kellum was indicted because in a conversation about scripture, she said, and I'm paraphrasing this only slightly, that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and that the scriptures are a declaration of the mind of God.
• 26:45
  Crista Cowan: That's it.
• 26:46
  Crista Cowan: That was the crime.
• 26:49
  Crista Cowan: And the judge, a man named Justice Vowell, when a friend asked that the law be allowed to take its proper course with Margaret, the judge's response was essentially, What would you have them hanged outright?
• 27:05
  Crista Cowan: And by them, he met Margaret Richard and Thomas Hooton hanged for saying that Christ is the word and that scripture declares the mind of God.
• 27:16
  Crista Cowan: A judge, a man who called himself a Christian, suggesting that people should hang for testifying about Jesus Christ.
• 27:27
  Crista Cowan: Now, I'm a Christian woman, and when I read that in the record, it boggles my mind and breaks my heart a little bit.
• 27:37
  Crista Cowan: The cruelty and the hypocrisy and the absolute inversion of everything faith is supposed to be about.
• 27:45
  Crista Cowan: These officials professed Christ with their words and persecuted his followers with their power.
• 27:53
  Crista Cowan: Richard sat in that cell for we don't know how long exactly.
• 27:59
  Crista Cowan: The record suggests it was at least several months.
• 28:02
  Crista Cowan: And then on the 13th of February, 1656, the Sheriff of Devonshire, Colonel John Coplestone, issued a warrant that said, quote, these are to will and require you on site thereof to set at liberty Richard Lippincott, Thomas Hooton, and Margaret Kellum.
• 28:21
  Crista Cowan: Set at liberty.
• 28:23
  Crista Cowan: Three people who never should have been imprisoned in the first place.
• 28:28
  Crista Cowan: Now, here's the part of the story where there are no records, but that I believe with everything in me.
• 28:36
  Crista Cowan: While Richard was in that jail cell in Exeter, Abigail was at home in Stonehouse with their children.
• 28:45
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance is about 14 at this point.
• 28:48
  Crista Cowan: John's about 11.
• 28:49
  Crista Cowan: Little Restore is barely two years old.
• 28:52
  Crista Cowan: And we know from the historical records of what happened in Plymouth during this time period that the Quaker women kept meeting for worship, even while their husbands and fathers and brothers were in prisons.
• 29:10
  Crista Cowan: Even knowing what had happened to Margaret Kellum, they kept gathering.
• 29:17
  Crista Cowan: They kept worshiping.
• 29:19
  Crista Cowan: I believe Abigail was one of those women.
• 29:23
  Crista Cowan: She knows that Margaret Kellum was dragged from her bed at four o'clock in the morning and tied to a horse.
• 29:31
  Crista Cowan: She knows her own husband is sitting in a jail cell in Exeter for the crime of believing what she now believes.
• 29:37
  Crista Cowan: She has a toddler and two older boys at home, and every week she walks to meeting anyway.
• 29:44
  Crista Cowan: Stubborn, reckless, maybe, or maybe she is a woman who has decided that there are things worth risking everything for.
• 29:55
  Crista Cowan: That her faith, her conscience, and her community of fellow believers are not negotiable, not for comfort, not for safety, not even for her children's security.
• 30:07
  Crista Cowan: I think about Abigail a lot because the records are full of Richard, his excommunication, his petitions, his imprisonment, his name on certificates and documents.
• 30:21
  Crista Cowan: But behind every one of those records, there's Abigail holding the family together, keeping the children fed and safe, making impossible calculations, the ones that mothers make when the world is falling apart around them.
• 30:38
  Crista Cowan: She is the reason this family survived, and she is the reason their faith persisted.
• 30:46
  Crista Cowan: I'm sure of it.
• 30:48
  Crista Cowan: Now, Richard is released from prison.
• 30:52
  Crista Cowan: He comes home to Abigail and the boys in Stonehouse, and sometime around this period, the exact date's a little fuzzy, another son is born.
• 31:04
  Crista Cowan: They name him Freedom.
• 31:07
  Crista Cowan: Freedom after prison, after being locked in a cell for saying what he believed about Christ and Scripture, after months of separation from his wife and his boys.
• 31:20
  Crista Cowan: Richard and Abigail hold this new baby and they name him Freedom.
• 31:26
  Crista Cowan: Are you keeping track?
• 31:28
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance, John, restore, freedom.
• 31:32
  Crista Cowan: Remember, God is gracious.
• 31:36
  Crista Cowan: We've been brought back, and now we are free.
• 31:41
  Crista Cowan: Two years later in 1657, a daughter is born.
• 31:45
  Crista Cowan: They name her Increase.
• 31:47
  Crista Cowan: And in 1660, another son, Jacob.
• 31:52
  Crista Cowan: Now, Increase is a beautiful name.
• 31:55
  Crista Cowan: The family is growing, their faith community is growing, their life in England is expanding.
• 32:02
  Crista Cowan: Increase.
• 32:03
  Crista Cowan: But Jacob, that's a different kind of a name.
• 32:07
  Crista Cowan: It's the first biblical name that they have chosen since John.
• 32:11
  Crista Cowan: And if you know the story of Jacob from the book of Genesis in the Bible, you know that Jacob is the man who wrestled with God all night long and refused to let go until God blessed him.
• 32:25
  Crista Cowan: He walked away from that encounter with a limp and a new name, Israel.
• 32:33
  Crista Cowan: But he got his blessing.
• 32:35
  Crista Cowan: I don't think it's an accident that Richard and Abigail named a son Jacob at this point in their life.
• 32:43
  Crista Cowan: This is a family that had been wrestling with churches, with governments, even with their own faith, and they have refused to let go.
• 32:52
  Crista Cowan: But that brief peace in England didn't last.
• 32:57
  Crista Cowan: Toward the end of 1660, the persecution of the Quakers intensified across the whole of England and Wales.
• 33:03
  Crista Cowan: Friends were being fined for not attending the established church.
• 33:07
  Crista Cowan: They were being whipped, put in stocks.
• 33:10
  Crista Cowan: And then this new tactic emerged.
• 33:13
  Crista Cowan: Authorities began pulling Quakers from their meetings and demanding that they swear oaths of allegiance and supremacy, loyalty oaths to the crown.
• 33:24
  Crista Cowan: Now remember when I told you about Quakers and oaths, they wouldn't swear.
• 33:31
  Crista Cowan: Not because they were disloyal, not because they had anything to hide, but because Jesus said, swear not at all.
• 33:39
  Crista Cowan: And they took that literally.
• 33:42
  Crista Cowan: They believed every oath, every single one, was forbidden by Christ's own words.
• 33:49
  Crista Cowan: They would affirm, they would promise, but they would not swear.
• 33:55
  Crista Cowan: And the authorities knew that.
• 33:58
  Crista Cowan: That's what makes it so sinister.
• 34:01
  Crista Cowan: They weren't asking Quakers to swear oaths of allegiance to the crown because they genuinely questioned their loyalty.
• 34:09
  Crista Cowan: They were using oaths as a trap.
• 34:12
  Crista Cowan: Swear, and you violate your conscience.
• 34:16
  Crista Cowan: Refuse, and we have legal grounds to throw you in prison again.
• 34:21
  Crista Cowan: On the 20th of January, 1661, Richard was taken from a Quaker meeting in Plymouth by the mayor and sent, again, to the high jail at Exeter.
• 34:32
  Crista Cowan: Again, same jail, different year, same persecution.
• 34:39
  Crista Cowan: Over the course of about two months, roughly 70 Quakers were arrested and crammed into the prisons at Exeter.
• 34:48
  Crista Cowan: Every Quaker man in Plymouth who was known to the authorities was locked up.
• 34:54
  Crista Cowan: Every single one of them.
• 34:55
  Crista Cowan: Which meant that the women were on their own again.
• 35:00
  Crista Cowan: And so here's what the women of the Plymouth Quaker community did this time.
• 35:06
  Crista Cowan: They kept meeting for worship every week, as if nothing had changed, as if their husbands and fathers and brothers weren't sitting in jail cells for doing exactly what they were doing.
• 35:18
  Crista Cowan: The mayor noticed, of course he did.
• 35:22
  Crista Cowan: So he summoned all the women and demanded to know why they were meeting in defiance of the king's command.
• 35:30
  Crista Cowan: And their answer, I wish I could have been there to hear it personally.
• 35:37
  Crista Cowan: Their answer was this we do so, not in contempt of authority, but in discharge of our duty to God, in whose fear we met to wait upon and worship him in spirit and in truth.
• 35:51
  Crista Cowan: And if in so doing we have broken the law, we are ready to show our submission by patient suffering.
• 36:00
  Crista Cowan: We're not defying you.
• 36:02
  Crista Cowan: We're obeying God.
• 36:04
  Crista Cowan: And if that means prison, we'll go willingly.
• 36:08
  Crista Cowan: So the mayor tried another approach.
• 36:11
  Crista Cowan: He asked them essentially to post bail for each other to guarantee each other's good behavior.
• 36:18
  Crista Cowan: And this time the women responded, we're not guilty of any bad behavior.
• 36:24
  Crista Cowan: The whole town knows how we live.
• 36:26
  Crista Cowan: Their courage, their calm, unflinching, deeply rooted courage so impressed the mayor that he let them go.
• 36:37
  Crista Cowan: I mean, he warned them that if they were brought before him again, he would send them to prison, but he let them go.
• 36:44
  Crista Cowan: I believe Abigail was in that room.
• 36:49
  Crista Cowan: I believe she was one of the women who looked at the mayor of Plymouth right in the eye and said, We're not afraid.
• 36:58
  Crista Cowan: We're not afraid of your prison.
• 37:00
  Crista Cowan: We answer to God.
• 37:02
  Crista Cowan: But after everything she went through and watching what she did in that moment, I don't know, staring down the mayor of Plymouth while he's threatening to throw you in prison, and then what happens to your children?
• 37:25
  Crista Cowan: She expressed her faith in a really, really powerful way that I find very admirable.
• 37:32
  Crista Cowan: Eventually, Richard was released from prison again.
• 37:35
  Crista Cowan: They've now been in England for about a decade, and things are only getting worse.
• 37:40
  Crista Cowan: So Richard and Abigail have a decision to make.
• 37:44
  Crista Cowan: They have six living children.
• 37:46
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance is now in his early 20s.
• 37:48
  Crista Cowan: Little Jacob is a toddler.
• 37:50
  Crista Cowan: And this family, um, do they make the decision altogether?
• 37:56
  Crista Cowan: I don't know.
• 37:57
  Crista Cowan: Do they stay?
• 37:58
  Crista Cowan: Do they keep their heads down as much as Quakers ever kept their heads down, which historically speaking, was not much?
• 38:05
  Crista Cowan: Do they keep attending meetings?
• 38:07
  Crista Cowan: Do they keep risking arrests?
• 38:09
  Crista Cowan: Do they keep trusting that God would preserve them?
• 38:12
  Crista Cowan: Or do they cross the ocean again?
• 38:16
  Crista Cowan: I just think about what that means.
• 38:18
  Crista Cowan: I mean, especially for Abigail.
• 38:20
  Crista Cowan: She's already made this crossing twice.
• 38:23
  Crista Cowan: Once as a bright-eyed teenager full of hope, once as a young mother fleeing excommunication with two small children.
• 38:32
  Crista Cowan: And now, now she's in her 40s with six children, and a husband who has proven repeatedly that he will not compromise his conscience, no matter what it costs their family.
• 38:45
  Crista Cowan: And she says, yes.
• 38:48
  Crista Cowan: Again, she agrees to get on another ship, a third Atlantic crossing with children ranging from toddler to young adult.
• 38:57
  Crista Cowan: I don't know what that conversation between Richard and Abigail sounded like, but I know this.
• 39:05
  Crista Cowan: By 1663, Abigail Lippincott was not a woman who was simply following her husband.
• 39:11
  Crista Cowan: She had spent a decade proving her own courage, attending meetings while he was in prison, standing with the women of Plymouth before the mayor, raising children in the middle of persecution without a husband around often.
• 39:27
  Crista Cowan: If she got on that ship, I think it's because she believed it was the right thing to do, not because Richard told her to.
• 39:36
  Crista Cowan: Preserved, kept safe, protected through everything.
• 40:29
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance, John, restore.
• 40:32
  Crista Cowan: Freedom, increase, Jacob, preserved.
• 40:36
  Crista Cowan: Remember, God is gracious.
• 40:38
  Crista Cowan: We were restored, we found freedom, we increased, we have wrestled with God, and through it all, we were preserved.
• 40:48
  Crista Cowan: It reads like a prayer.
• 40:51
  Crista Cowan: Through time, various descendants of the Lippincots have noted this.
• 40:56
  Crista Cowan: There's also been people that have noted that if you set aside John, I don't know why you would, but that the remaining names form an almost complete sentence of gratitude, and that the addition of one more son at the end named Israel would have completed it.
• 41:14
  Crista Cowan: It reads like this: remember, restore freedom, increase Jacob, and preserve Israel.
• 41:22
  Crista Cowan: One writer commented that this was doubtless accidental, having never been premeditated by their parents, but I'm not so sure about that.
• 41:32
  Crista Cowan: I think Richard and Abigail knew exactly what they were doing.
• 41:37
  Crista Cowan: Maybe not from the beginning.
• 41:39
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance was probably just a single act of gratitude from new parents in a new land.
• 41:46
  Crista Cowan: But by the time you're naming your fifth son preserved after two ocean crossings and two imprisonments, you know what story you're telling.
• 41:56
  Crista Cowan: You know what you're writing in the names of your children.
• 42:00
  Crista Cowan: And that I think is one of the most beautiful things I have ever found in a family tree.
• 42:08
  Crista Cowan: So the Lippincots are in Rhode Island.
• 42:12
  Crista Cowan: They're safe.
• 42:13
  Crista Cowan: They can worship freely for the first time in their lives together.
• 42:18
  Crista Cowan: No one is going to knock on their door at four in the morning.
• 42:22
  Crista Cowan: No one is going to drag them before a magistrate for attending a meeting.
• 42:28
  Crista Cowan: No one is going to demand that they swear an oath that they can't swear.
• 42:34
  Crista Cowan: They could have stayed there.
• 42:37
  Crista Cowan: But Richard Lippincott wasn't just looking for a place to hide.
• 42:42
  Crista Cowan: And in 1664, he found it.
• 42:49
  Crista Cowan: Here's what happened.
• 42:51
  Crista Cowan: The English had just taken control of the territory that had been the Dutch colony of New Netherlands.
• 42:57
  Crista Cowan: New land grants were opening up, and a group of Quaker investors, friends from Long Island, who shared Richard's vision of a community built on the principles of religious liberty, secured a patent for land along the Shrewsbury River in East New Jersey, about 25 miles south of Manhattan, right along the Atlantic coast.
• 43:21
  Crista Cowan: The local Lenape people knew the area as Navasink.
• 43:25
  Crista Cowan: And Richard didn't just join this venture, he became the largest shareholder.
• 43:32
  Crista Cowan: And the language of that patent makes my heart smile for Richard and Abigail, knowing everything that they had been through.
• 43:40
  Crista Cowan: The terms guaranteed, and I'm quoting, free liberty of conscience without any molestation or disturbance whatsoever in their way of worship.
• 43:54
  Crista Cowan: Free liberty of conscience without any molestation or disturbance.
• 43:59
  Crista Cowan: Whatsoever.
• 44:01
  Crista Cowan: This was the first land grant in New Jersey that explicitly protected religious practice.
• 44:09
  Crista Cowan: In Boston, Richard's conscience had been punished with excommunication.
• 44:14
  Crista Cowan: In England, his conscience had been punished with prison.
• 44:19
  Crista Cowan: In Rhode Island, his conscience was tolerated.
• 44:23
  Crista Cowan: But in New Jersey, in this patch of land along the Shrewsbury River, his conscience was protected, written into the founding document.
• 44:34
  Crista Cowan: It was guaranteed.
• 44:36
  Crista Cowan: This wasn't just a place to live.
• 44:38
  Crista Cowan: This was the thing that he had been crossing oceans for.
• 44:42
  Crista Cowan: And Richard didn't just move there, he built it.
• 44:47
  Crista Cowan: He served as a deputy of the patentees.
• 44:50
  Crista Cowan: He served as town overseer of Shrewsbury Township in 1669 and again in 1670.
• 44:58
  Crista Cowan: He wasn't a refugee anymore.
• 45:00
  Crista Cowan: He wasn't a prisoner.
• 45:01
  Crista Cowan: He wasn't an exile.
• 45:02
  Crista Cowan: He was a founder.
• 45:04
  Crista Cowan: The family settled on Passequiniqua Creek.
• 45:07
  Crista Cowan: I've been practicing that.
• 45:09
  Crista Cowan: It's a branch of the South Shrewsbury River.
• 45:12
  Crista Cowan: And here's the detail that when I first read it, there may have been a shout of joy.
• 45:17
  Crista Cowan: Before the first Quaker meeting house was built in Shrewsbury.
• 45:24
  Crista Cowan: Do you know where the friends held their meetings?
• 45:27
  Crista Cowan: For worship every week, it was in Richard and Abigail's home, their living room, their house.
• 45:35
  Crista Cowan: The man who had been excommunicated from the Puritan church in Boston, expelled, publicly shamed, cast out, was now hosting the church.
• 45:47
  Crista Cowan: His home was the meeting house for years.
• 45:50
  Crista Cowan: His table was where the community gathered.
• 45:53
  Crista Cowan: His roof was the shelter under which friends could worship in spirit and in truth without molestation or disturbance.
• 46:01
  Crista Cowan: If that's not one of the most beautiful stories of redemption, I don't know what is.
• 46:07
  Crista Cowan: And then in 1672, it gets even better.
• 46:13
  Crista Cowan: George Fox came to visit.
• 46:16
  Crista Cowan: The founder of the Society of Friends, the man whose teachings had given shape and language to everything Richard had been groping toward since the 1640s.
• 46:28
  Crista Cowan: The inner light, the direct relationship with God, the refusal to bow to any earthly authority in matters of conscience.
• 46:36
  Crista Cowan: George Fox himself traveled to Shrewsbury.
• 46:40
  Crista Cowan: And when the first official Quaker meeting for worship was established there in 1672, he visited the home of Richard Liquencott and Abigail Goody and worshiped there.
• 46:53
  Crista Cowan: That's the arc of this life.
• 46:56
  Crista Cowan: From exile to host, from outcast to founder, from a man who wanted a commission to speak to a man in whose home the truth could be spoken freely.
• 47:07
  Crista Cowan: And New Jersey made that possible.
• 47:11
  Crista Cowan: New Jersey, this specific colony with this specific patent, with this specific guarantee of liberty of conscience, was the place where everything Richard and Abigail had been searching for finally became real.
• 47:28
  Crista Cowan: It wasn't just where they lived.
• 47:31
  Crista Cowan: It was the answer to the prayer that they had been writing in their children's names for 20 years.
• 47:38
  Crista Cowan: Richard lived out the rest of his life there.
• 47:42
  Crista Cowan: 18 years in Shrewsbury, New Jersey.
• 47:45
  Crista Cowan: He divided land among his sons, including a thousand acres along the Cohansee River that he had secured from John Fenwick, parceled out to his five boys.
• 47:55
  Crista Cowan: Freedom got first choice of the lots.
• 47:58
  Crista Cowan: I like to think that Richard smiled at that.
• 48:01
  Crista Cowan: Freedom, choosing first, even though he wasn't the oldest.
• 48:05
  Crista Cowan: On November 25th, 1683, Richard Lippincott died.
• 48:10
  Crista Cowan: He was in his late 60s, and his will, written just two days before his death, begins with words that tell you he was clear-eyed and at peace, being in his right, perfect sense and memory.
• 48:24
  Crista Cowan: He left the bulk of his estate to Abigail, his loving wife, with the advice of friends.
• 48:30
  Crista Cowan: And Abigail, she lived another 14 years until 1697.
• 48:36
  Crista Cowan: She left behind, in the words of the historical record, a considerable estate.
• 48:42
  Crista Cowan: I've thought a lot about what a considerable estate means for a woman in the 17th century who outlived her husband for that many years.
• 48:52
  Crista Cowan: It means she didn't just survive after Richard.
• 48:56
  Crista Cowan: She managed, she built, she grew what they had.
• 49:00
  Crista Cowan: For 14 years, Abigail Lippincott, who at 18 years old from Northumberland, England, married a man from Devonshire in a tiny colony in Massachusetts.
• 49:12
  Crista Cowan: She ran the family's affairs, she maintained the homestead, and she remained a pillar of the Shrewsbury, New Jersey Quaker community.
• 49:21
  Crista Cowan: She was 80 years old when she died.
• 49:24
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes I just repeat things to myself to fully grasp the meaning because it's easy to skip past things.
• 49:33
  Crista Cowan: Abigail Goody Lippincott crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times, buried a daughter, stood firm while her husband was imprisoned, raised seven children through persecution and upheaval, helped found a community, hosted a faith in her living room, and outlived her husband by 14 years.
• 49:54
  Crista Cowan: And the historical record only gives her a handful of lines.
• 50:00
  Crista Cowan: That's why we do this.
• 50:03
  Crista Cowan: That's why we dig.
• 50:04
  Crista Cowan: Because the records will never tell us enough about the Abigails.
• 50:09
  Crista Cowan: But if we look closely, if we read between the lines, if we pay attention to what the documents imply rather than just what they say, she's there.
• 50:21
  Crista Cowan: She was always there.
• 50:23
  Crista Cowan: And their story lived on in remembrance.
• 50:27
  Crista Cowan: Richard and Abigail's firstborn, the one whose names started the prayer, the child who was old enough to remember all of what his parents went through, because he went through it all with them.
• 50:41
  Crista Cowan: The excommunication and the ocean crossings and the years of uncertainty and persecution and his father's imprisonments and his mother's quiet defiance, all of it.
• 50:52
  Crista Cowan: By the time the family settled in Shrewsbury, remembrance was in his early 20s.
• 51:00
  Crista Cowan: He became a farmer and a landowner and a leader among the friends, a pillar of the community that his parents had helped to found.
• 51:09
  Crista Cowan: And he was almost certainly in the room where it happened, his parents' home, when George Fox visited in 1672.
• 51:18
  Crista Cowan: Imagine being Remembrance in that moment, 31 years old, standing in the house while your father hosts the very faith that nearly destroyed your family.
• 51:29
  Crista Cowan: Watching the founder of that faith walk through the door.
• 51:33
  Crista Cowan: What does that feel like when your name is Remembrance?
• 51:38
  Crista Cowan: Remembrance died in 1723 at about 82 years old, and his descendants, through a generation of men named Joseph and Samuel, and Joseph and Samuel, still in New Jersey, still Quaker, still keeping those meticulous records, eventually produced a woman named Elizabeth Lippincott.
• 52:00
  Crista Cowan: Elizabeth married a man named John Stafford Inman, both raised Quaker, both rooted in New Jersey.
• 52:08
  Crista Cowan: And after their fifth child was born, they did something that feels familiar.
• 52:14
  Crista Cowan: They moved.
• 52:15
  Crista Cowan: They questioned their faith and they made different choices about who they believed God was and what their relationship to him meant for their family.
• 52:26
  Crista Cowan: Elizabeth and John left New Jersey for New York and eventually settled in Medina County, Ohio.
• 52:32
  Crista Cowan: And there, when Elizabeth was about 82 years old, her great-granddaughter was born.
• 52:39
  Crista Cowan: R.
• 52:40
  Crista Cowan: Carey.
• 52:41
  Crista Cowan: You know, when I first found Richard and Abigail's story, I was deep in the research, like full genealogist mode, verifying sources, cross-referencing Quaker meeting minutes, checking published genealogies and family histories against original records.
• 52:58
  Crista Cowan: And I was so focused on the work of filling in the tree that I almost missed the story.
• 53:05
  Crista Cowan: It was the names that stopped me.
• 53:08
  Crista Cowan: I was doing the data entry, entering the children, entering the birth dates, entering the locations.
• 53:13
  Crista Cowan: And I typed remembrance and then restore and then freedom.
• 53:20
  Crista Cowan: Sure, they're unusual names for our time and place, but not really for theirs.
• 53:24
  Crista Cowan: But together, I knew they meant something more.
• 53:28
  Crista Cowan: I felt like I was reading a love letter from my 10 times great-grandparents, a letter they wrote across two decades of life, across two continents, across an ocean.
• 53:41
  Crista Cowan: A letter that said, we suffered, we endured, we were restored, we found freedom, and we were preserved all by the hand of God.
• 53:51
  Crista Cowan: And if I hadn't broken through the brick wall that was Carrie Inman, I never would have found Elizabeth Lippincott, and I never would have followed the Quaker Records trail back through Little Leg Harbor to Shrewsbury.
• 54:06
  Crista Cowan: I never would have found Richard and Abigail.
• 54:09
  Crista Cowan: I never would have read the names.
• 54:12
  Crista Cowan: I am a descendant of remembrance.
• 54:16
  Crista Cowan: Not restore, not freedom, not preserved, remembrance.
• 54:20
  Crista Cowan: The one whose name means don't forget.
• 54:23
  Crista Cowan: The one who was old enough to carry the whole story.
• 54:27
  Crista Cowan: The one whose name was the first word of the prayer.
• 54:30
  Crista Cowan: And I wonder sometimes if this is what I was supposed to do with my life.
• 54:38
  Crista Cowan: No, I don't.
• 54:39
  Crista Cowan: I know it is.
• 54:40
  Crista Cowan: Not just the genealogy, the part where I help you find names and dates and records, but the other part.
• 54:45
  Crista Cowan: The part where we turn those names and dates into stories.
• 54:50
  Crista Cowan: The part where we make sure the Abigails don't disappear from the record.
• 54:55
  Crista Cowan: The part where we hang a chart on the wall and point to a name and say, Let me tell you about her.
• 55:02
  Crista Cowan: Richard and Abigail wrote their story in the names of the children because that was the tool they had: a birth record, a name, a single word pressed into the identity of that baby carrying the weight of everything that they had survived.
• 55:18
  Crista Cowan: You have different tools.
• 55:21
  Crista Cowan: You have ancestry, you have DNA matches, you have census records and passenger lists and Quaker meeting minutes and newspapers and yes, even charts you can hang on your wall.
• 55:36
  Crista Cowan: But it's the same work.
• 55:39
  Crista Cowan: It's the work of remembrance.
• 55:42
  Crista Cowan: You don't need a finished tree.
• 55:44
  Crista Cowan: You just need to start telling the story.
• 55:48
  Crista Cowan: One name, one record, one conversation at Sunday dinner.
• 55:53
  Crista Cowan: And if you're currently fighting your own brick wall, just like I did with Carrie for all those years, go back and listen to episode one, where I tell you the story of exactly how I tore down that wall and found her.
• 56:06
  Crista Cowan: And if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment below with the most unusual or meaningful name or series of names you found in your own family tree.
• 56:17
  Crista Cowan: And until next time, remember.
• 56:20
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.