In 1724, my ancestors were kidnapped by Native Americans
and taken to be sold into captivity in Canada. Before being dragged from her home, my sixth great grandmother, Elizabeth Meader Hanson,
watched two of her children be murdered. She was then marched to Canada from Dover. A journey of hundreds of miles,some of which traversed through the unforgiving White Mountains. She was separated from a surviving child along the way. She endured torment, hunger and torture before she was finally reunited with what was left of her family. Years before, in the Cocheco Massacre, lines of my family faired differently. The Otises suffered great tragedies while the Varneys were spared, as they were Quakers and friends to the Native Americans. So many families are connected in our colonial past and mine are the same. As the marital ties weave from home to home so did the terror and sorrow they experienced. No one went wholly untouched by the repeated attacks. These were desperate acts of a people whose population had been decimated by roughly ninety percent since the arrival of European disease. Their way of life was made impossible with whole villages nearly wiped out. I have no lesson to teach here. Life was brutal. Actions forced the movement of a large mass of people onto an already occupied land. Disease spread and cultures clashed. The history gets far darker and dirtier as the nation moves towards Manifest Destiny but in 1724, for the Hanson family, it wasn’t about the sins that would be wrought or the consequences of the past, but instead it was about the very real and present fear in which they lived and the deep sorrows they would carry. So, as I stand on a site erected in remembrance of that tragedy, ready to rush off to try to catch a sunset after I take my picture...I notice the sun is falling directly on the monument. So, I shift my angle and take a picture that reflects the late day glow of an abnormally warm New Hampshire winter day. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to take from the story I’ve been researching or the glow... perhaps just the knowledge that if you look for it, history can become very much alive one late afternoon on the side of the road and that the sunset you’re chasing might be right in front you after all.