Month: October 2009

A Poem: Something to Think About

If you could see your ancesters,

All standing in a row,

Would you be proud of them, or not,

Or don’t you really know?

Some strange discoveries are made

In climbing Family Trees

And some of them, you know, do not

Particularly please.

If you could see your ancesters

All standing in a row

There might be some of them perhaps,

You wouldn’t care to know.

But there’s another question, which

Requires a different view:

If you could meet your ancesters

Would they be proud of you?

…Anonymous.   Taken from Marian Arlene Pearl’s “Genealogy of John Pearl and His Descendants in America”

The Brown-Pearl Hall at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In the November/December 2009 issue of their magazine “Preview”, the Museum of Fine Arts has a short article and photograph on page 16 announcing the reinstallation of “Brown-Pearl Hall” which was the main living space from the old Pearl Family Homestead in West Boxford, MA, built in about 1704 (a few years before Timothy Pearl moved to Hampton, CT).  The museum acquired the room in 1925.

The hall will be one of nine galleries in the MFA’s new “American Wing” period rooms .  The article says that the “Brown-Pearl Hall will replicate the cooking, dining and sleeping space of an Essex County family of the period.” 

It was discovered during renstallation that the room, when on display in its original location in the nuseum (from 1928-2003) had been assembled backwards, and notes that “when the wing opens in [late fall] 2010, visitors will see for the first time Brown-Pearl Hall as it was originally constructed 300 years ago.'”

A search of the MFA website turned up the following photographs of the hall, apparently taken at various points in time during the 75 years prior to its dissassembly in 2003 (in preparation for the construction of the new wing):

http://www.mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=38237