Meat on the Bones

For nearly forty years, Barry MacDonald has sought and documented the genealogical bones of his ancestors. In that process, he has often gained insights into many of their personalities and actions. In this volume, MacDonald puts meat on the bones of five of his ancestors whose lives spanned parts of six centuries and two continents, yet remarkably, lived much of those lives no more than 100 miles apart in what is now Massachusetts. Highlighted are: June (Pennell) MacDonald, the author's indomitable mother; Percy Leon Covert, a veteran of the First World War; Samuel Haynes Jenks, a 19th-century newspaper publisher and politician on Nantucket Island; Richard Thayer, a land speculator in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony; and Stephen Hopkins, whose adventures took him to Bermuda in 1609, Jamestown in 1610, and New Plymouth with the Pilgrims in 1620. Their collective stories reveal many of the complex attributes of the human condition: altruism, perseverance, patriotism, ambition, materialism, and the eternal desire to search for what lies just over the horizon.In the final chapter, MacDonald discusses the enigma that surrounds his quest for those who bore his own family name in generations past. He concludes with a review of the genealogy that links his current-day family to the principal families portrayed in the book: Carr, Covert, Heaton, Jenks, MacDonald, Pennell, Thayer, Snow, and Wood. An index of names and places follows.
About the Author: Born and raised in Massachusetts, Barry MacDonald has spent nearly forty years researching a genealogy laden with early New Englanders, many of whose descendants still populate Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. When not engaged in family history, he has lived in a series of countries around the globe where he worked to develop and oversee the implementation of U.S. foreign aid programs as a foreign service officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Now retired, MacDonald has turned his attention to the personalities and deeds - both noble and audacious - of a number of his ancestors, and the social and historical times in which they lived. The result is his first book: Meat on the Bones, Five Lives and an Enigma from a New England Family History. MacDonald has previously published two articles in the quarterly magazine, American Ancestors, of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Based on material presented in more depth in the new book, these articles are entitled: The Will to Endure, the Life of June (Pennell) MacDonald (American Ancestors, Winter 2013, pp 35-38), and Richard Thayer of Braintree, Massachusetts - Town Thief? (American Ancestors, Winter 2015, pp 42-46).