People often ask us about the process of finding places to park the trailer. One of the services we use is called Harvest Hosts, an online directory of wineries, farms, and various other agri-tourism businesses that offer space for RV’ers to “dry camp” for a night, meaning there are no water or electric hookups to plug into.
Our first time using the service was at Rose’s Berry Farm in South Glastonbury, located just southeast of Hartford in the middle of Connecticut. We spent our first night nestled near a beautiful field of sunflowers. Those are words I can’t say I’ve ever expected to type out, but it’s true. Here’s photo-evidence to prove it:
After parking our little tin can, we moseyed our way across the street to the berry farm. Unfortunately, we were not there during the weekend when they host brunch on their porch overlooking their crops of berries and flowers, but we were happy to snag some blueberries, raspberries, and tomatoes. Nothing tastes better than fresh, local produce, particularly juicy garden tomatoes. Before dinner, I laid down for a little rest while Tyler walked around and snapped some photos as he typically does.
It felt surreal looking through the window across from our bed at the vibrant sunflowers and the blue sky above them, like something out of Wizard of Oz. It is one of my favorite views of the tour.
Yet, for all of the dream-like views we have had, there are just as many views of a Walmart parking lot, but hey, it makes us appreciate the beautiful sceneries that much more.
This is your warning of an extensive (but interesting!) personal research project I’ve been doing the last several months. Skip ahead if you don’t want to read it!
Before we left on the tour I began ancestry research on my father’s mother’s side of the family. This may be a bit difficult to explain, but my father’s maternal lineage is Clapp… and his paternal lineage is… also Clapp… yes, that sounds a bit incest-y but I’m relieved to tell you it’s NOT. Maternally, the Clapp family is English and on the paternal side of the family, “Clapp” was Dutch and originally spelled “Klap.”
When it comes to my grandmother’s side of the family, not much is known about her mother, my great-grandmother, whose maiden name was Clapp. Being a curious person, I did some research to find out that she was from Connecticut and had tragically lost her parents and a sibling within a couple of years. An orphan by the age of 14, she went to work in a button factory in Massachusetts where she would eventually meet my great-grandfather. I was able to find census records of her living at a boarding house where she lived with several other textile factory laborers, however, I couldn’t find much about her childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, including information about my great-great grandparents.
Dissatisfied with the abrupt wall I reached online, I decided that I would visit the Hartford town hall when in Connecticut.
My desire to do so was further fueled when I came across the plaque for Captain Roger Clapp while walking around Boston, leading me to suspect that I was related to him in some way. Online there was a handy resource on Google Books dedicated to the Clapp family in the colonial era that recorded the lineage of Roger Clapp. With one of his grandsons moving to Connecticut, I felt an even stronger inclination that we could be related, but I couldn’t connect it to my family’s records I discovered online. There was a gap of about one hundred years (1800s) that could potentially be filled with multiple generations (people had babies young back then!).
After emailing the town hall and setting up a time to access their public records, the day I’d been waiting for finally arrived: investigation day!
So there I was, totally oblivious to how or what to do in this room of books filled with yellow-tinted pages, aged from sitting on dusty shelves for years. Probably noticing how lost I looked, a very frazzled man approached me offering to help, except that it wasn’t exactly an offer but more so abruptly telling me what to do. A little put off by his abrasiveness, I decided to look past it and listen to the guy. He was the only person in the room so this was all the help I got. I told him the names I was looking for, the years they were alive, and where I thought they had lived in the area. After pulling out several books dedicated to land records at the time, we set out scanning the pages for “Clapp.”
The whole process was incredibly exciting, even if I was standing in room poorly lit with fluorescent lights and next to a grumpy man that smelled like stale cigarettes. It wasn’t as nice as Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. but I’ll take it! I was pulling my sleeves up and ready to do some digging.
If you’ve never looked through official or family records from the 1800s and early 1900s, they recorded many things by hand, tiny cursive handwriting, specifically.
