 | ||
| A map of eastern NC in the colonial era |
Most of my almost
entirely English ancestry must have had at least some wanderlust in their
spirits, or else they might never have agreed to make the long and arduous
journey across the Atlantic to find a new life in a what they all viewed as a
new world. But for much of my direct for-bearers that wanderlust was all but
spent by the time they landed on the southeast coast of Virginia in the early
1600s. It would take them another two centuries to make their way just two
hundred miles south. Their route was mostly down the barrier islands that lined
the North Carolina Coast to Cape Lookout, a nexus point where the outer banks
turn from a north-south direction to one that, at least for a stretch of thirty
miles, follows a route that is almost entirely east-west. Once they settled
near the base of the lighthouse, the first one having been completed in 1812,
most of them never moved again – unless of course you
consider it movement to build a small home on another patch of acreage within
easy walking distance of the shacks or huts they had grown-up in.
 |
| Sibsey in Yorksire County, England - home of the Harkers |
But at least one of
my forefathers followed a different course when he arrived in Massachusetts Bay
as part of the first great wave of settlers in Puritan New England. Anthony
Harker had been born in 1606 in the town of Sibsey in Yorkshire in the
northeastern corner of England. But by the time he was thirty years old he was
married and living in Boston, where he his wife, Mary would raise a family of
two sons and four daughters. Their third child and second son, John Ebenezer, remained in the
Boston area and in 1680 married Patience Folger, whose sister Abiah would
become the mother of the renowned Benjamin Franklin (my first cousin – nine
times removed.) John and Patience were not so fortunate, at least in terms of
historical recognition, but their son Ebenezer, born in Boston in 1689, would
do something to make the family's name enduring if not famous.
That came to be because in 1730, when he was forty-one years
old, he purchased an entire island from George Pollock of nearby Beaufort for £400
and a twenty foot boat. He soon settled there with his wife, a local girl named
Elizabeth Brooks, and their six children. The island had earlier been known as
Craney Island, but from that time on it has been known to residents and
visitors alike as Harkers Island, and with no apostrophe as the concluding “s”
was intended to denote plurality even more than possession. Seven generations
and five surnames later I arrived on the scene on an Island named for my
intrepid great grandfather and less than two miles from where he had built his
large home. And at the same moment, my parents could look from an upstairs
window and get a clear view of the towering lighthouse that overlooked Cape
Lookout and the remains of a village where the greater part of my other
ancestors had made their homes.
