IN2GENEALOGY
your ancestors were travelers FULL OF ANXIETY, HOPES, DREAMS & FEARS BY CAROLINE POINTER
"Are we there yet?" This is a common question made often by children everywhere on their way to a particular destination. However, it's not one that's usually welcome by parents after the Wirst Wifteen times, especially when moving their household across the country to a new home. For some, the move is long and tedious on the highways. The stresses of moving ‐‐ including anxiety of living in a new place, wondering if you forgot anything, moving from what you know to something you don't know, and praying that the new job, the reason for moving, works out ‐‐ are magniWied by your children's incessant questions. Like you, your ancestors were travelers full of anxiety, hopes, dreams, and fears when they moved their households across the country. However, they, unlike you, didn't have the luxury of highways and convenience stores with bathrooms. They were traveling under tough conditions. Some, even, having to create the path or trail. As Seymour Dunbar indicates in his book, A History of Travel in America, "The pioneer, no matter of what date or locality, was always a traveller [sic] before he was a producer or shipper of goods, and the common experience of the people, gained on their journeys, was...the basis on which future permanent routes and methods of travel were planned and created." In addition to the rural pathways, their mode of transportation was primitive. For example, William R. Polk describes in his book The Birth of a Nation, "To trek from New York to Philadelphia in the middle of the eighteenth century, the traveler began on a Hudson River
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