About Me

I was born in 1965, in a city two hours from my adult home in the San Franciso Bay Area. I don't feel ready to post a picture, or provide a physical description of myself, which I notice more women than men doing in their blogs. If it weren't for the disproportionate emphasis on feminine looks I've noted in the cyber-culture, I'd take the plunge.

I have supported myself, variously, cleaning houses and writing software manuals. After a wretched detour through substitute teaching, I trained for a career in book indexing. Then I got work in nonprofit, recruiting and processing tenants for a low-income housing development. The trajectory isn't over yet!

I've written for years, on and off, honing my craft in various workshops. I believe I'm slowly ripening. In Fall '03, I got a bug to launch a paper-based neighborhood news and literary monthly in my neighborhood. When I realized that wasn't going to fly, I turned to the web as an outlet. So here I am.

I am an every-day sort of person, a Jane Average, really, other than being single, in a world where most people my age are married.

"The pure products of America go crazy--"

-William Carlos Williams

I am just about as pure a product of America as they come, in the sense in which I believe Williams meant that description. I am 100% white-bread Yankee, lacking ties to any sustaining ethnic tradition whatsoever.

I was reared in Puritanical, anti-intellectual American culture. I try to keep my head above water.

My mother's Anglo-Saxon kin were well-established in New England by the 1700s. With ancestors who had just emigrated from northern Europe, they joined the Mormon migration westward in the 1840s.

My father's family history is the more enigmatic, and in some regards more troubling of the two. I am still wearing his surname, Armstead, which is a New-World corruption of the Yorkshire-English "Armitstead," "The Place of the Hermit," a reference to a very remote, medieval Yorkshire township. The name of my blog is partly a homage to that history.

The branch of the family that bore my surname evidently traveled westward from New England, in a course that paralleled the Mormon route, through New York, Ohio, and as far West as the Great Plains. His maternal kin came largely from Scotland and England, one branch through Nova Scotia. There are many question marks.

It has been hard to uncover data about suspected racial intermingling, slave ownership, or both, in my paternal line. This is maddening. The Armstead name is unusual in the U.S., except among those of African descent. What is up with that?? Have I been able to reap the benefits of "whiteness" throughout my life, to the expense of other, marginalized branches of the family?

Believe me, my father and his kin have not been much help in unraveling that one. Or in shedding light on the possibility of Roma (Gypsy) ancestry, through my paternal grandfather's apparently very dark-complected "Bohemian" mother.

To be fair, serious genealogical research became possible for large numbers of people only when the internet caught on. But I feel the lack of information about my family has been partly a matter of my kin's desire to "keep the past in the past." There are questions I do not ask my relatives out of fear of causing upset.

What was I saying about an "anti-intellectual culture"? Does this kind of thing sound familiar to anyone else whose "white" family has been on this continent for many generations?