Connecting

This weekend Geof and I have had a lovely get-away.  The kids are just up the road with grandparents, no doubt having a fantastic time.  And we are just down the road, playing tourist in a town where we've always been anything but tourists.  Lots of walking and relaxing and a little shopping.  Perfect.

Today we spent a very bright and sunny day on Jamestowne Island.  Thought it would be fun ot check it out after so many years have passed since we were last there (I'm thinking it had been since our first date, about 16 years ago!!!).  We're walking through the small museum, reading about the settlement, and, aha!  A whole section about William and Joan Pierce!  Very cool.  Then another small write-up about Joan and her lovliness and hard-working nature and the fact that she grew acres of figs (my mom and I also grow figs!).  Then a write-up about the adventures of Pierce's ship in Bermuda.  Anyway, all very interesting and made me feel a teensy bit connected.

Then we toured the settlement site and New Town site, and another aha!  There was the Pierce property, complete with signage and information about the family.  Here's the view of the river from the Pierce property:

We continued on and toured the church, the archaeological dig site of the recently found Fort and the Archaeum (museum of artifacts from the Fort). Here are some views of the church (reconstructed on the foundation of the 4th church at Jamestowne, the first stone church structure) and the Fort:

One portion of the Fort was marked with many of these crosses, indicating burial sites for many of the men who had arrived in the first wave of settlers to come to Virginia and perished in the late summer/fall of 1607.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to provide a correction to the previous post about Joan Pierce and her 2-year-old traveling companion, Edith (and somehow it has just worked out that the correction occurs way down in the post.  I could run a newspaper after all!  Kudos to you for reading way down).  We found a book in the Archaeum gift shop that was a novel based on the life of Joan Pierce and her older daughter, Jane, who accompanied her to Jamestown and survived the "Starving Time." (Jane was the daughter who later married John Rolfe).  There was no mention in the book of little Edith Pierce (my family's descendent from Joan).  We came back to the hotel and did some more research.  Turns out I need a family fact-checker to go with the family genealogist.  Joan may not have been accompanied by a 2-year-old on her voyage to Jamestown.  She was accompanied by Jane and left a second older daughter, Cecily, home in England, perhaps to care for a younger sister, Edith (though we can't be sure of that yet).  Or, perhaps Edith's birth date was wrong and she was born in Jamestowne after Joan and William had settled here.  After our afternoon of research, the details are a little fuzzy, but it does seem that there was an Edith in the family.  But my awe of Joan still stands, whether she kept an elementary-aged girl alive during the first awful winter while wondering if Cecily and her 2-year-old were faring well across the Atlantic, or whether she gave birth to Edith later on.

Here I am in a really old tree on the Pierce home site.  Yes, I am wearing gigantic green beaded earrings.  I figured I could try something way out there since I wouldn't be seeing anyone I knew.  And now I am back to my trusty yoga pants, Life is Good t-shirt and little gold hoops and feeling much more like myself. :)  I think that if I had lived on this property and if I had had these earrings, I would have traded them to the Powhatan for cornmeal.  Yep.