Psychic Roots - Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy - May be Out of this World Assistance, but it I've Witnessed the Benefits

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     It was exactly a year ago, during the first Covid lockdown, that I turned onto the work of actor-historian, genealogist Henry Z. Jones, and his two popular books, Psychic Roots, Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy," and his second volume, More Psychic Roots, published in 1997. I had already read a half dozen books on the paranormal to that point, and Jones first book happened to be the last one of the lot I had picked to get me through the isolation period. Which by the way, we spent divided between the shop and Birch Hollow, about five urban blocks apart.

     After I had read both books, (I had to order the second volume because the first was so darn compelling), and after an message exchange with the author in California, I wrote a feature on Facebook, promoting this most exciting collection of correspondence sent to Henry Jones from hundreds of family historians (genealogists) who shared experiences of finding long lost relatives through the kindness of "those who have already passed." That's right. The spirits of kin folk apparently are quite keen on connecting with the living, and making sure that they have a rightful place in respective family chronologies. I will run this story later on this site, but I wanted to introduce this most intriguing type of intervention, from the grave, and graveside, to those at-wits-end relatives, who are trying to piece together the very complicated and highly detailed records of those who have come and gone before us. The two books are loaded with truly amazing stories about how family historians by happenstance, coincidence, and yes, serendipity, were able to connect with living relatives they never knew they had, who possessed information about where certain ancestors were buried, some in unmarked farm plots, in the most bizarre circumstances and chance-encounters even between active family researchers working on the same branch of family history. How and when does this happen?

     Well, I took the information to heart for a somewhat different reason. Suzanne, of course, being an active family historian herself, can attest to the strange waves of serendipity, and curious happenstance, which occurs frequently in the quagmire of research, coming from places, situations and folk from around the globe, who happen to possess bits and pieces of the chronicle puzzle; so incredible at times, that it leaves the genealogist with chin pressed against chest in awe of what lines just came together that seemed an almost impossible union of information to positively connect. Are you going to turn down this kind of assistance, simply because you don't believe in such things as dutiful spirits trying to get the family tree firmly rooted. The majority of respondents to Henry Jones requests for similar stories of psychic interventions, in matters of genealogical research, offered the same opinion. The help was welcome, but for some, the source wasn't necessarily the handiwork of an earthbound spirit wanting to notch a place on a branch of a family it once belonged. The majority agreed that something unexplained was at work, whether a manifestation of the mind and sensory perception, or a past life wishing to be validated via a spiritual message of the great beyond to the receptors of the living. For me, well, the books and the comments from those who have experienced psychic messages in aid of their research, putting them at the right gravesite at the right time, I found it all quite illuminating because these confessionals, did pertain in part, to what I've been experiencing most of my life, especially in the field of historical research.

     For example, when, in the mid 1990's I began a lengthy jag on two research and writing projects for series in a number of regional publications, I no sooner began work on their development when the coincidence and, yes, serendipity began in earnest. As if the spirits thought I was working on worthwhile projects, that may have in some way involved them at some point in the chronicles of their individual pasts. The first major jag of research was devoted to the mysterious death of Canadian landscape artist, Tom Thomson, who was most likely murdered and dumped into the cold Algonquin water of Canoe Lake, in the early summer of 1917. The accepted story about his demise was that he simply drowned the result of misadventure. Peeing over the side of the canoe and accidentally toppling over, hitting his head on the gunnel on the way into the water. Even though many researchers and critics of the hastily reckoned opinion, drawn from an inadequate coroner's inquest shortly after his body was found, offered well thought out and balanced arguments to contradict the accidental drowning theory, it has been accepted history ever since, that no foul play was involved. The ardent and determined critics of the accidental death opinion, which is a growing number these days, more than a century after his death, believe he was struck down during an argument by the Mowat Lodge proprietor in a nasty fisticuff after a bout of drinking. This isn't as much the point, as what I experienced in serendipity for the next twenty years, and then again in 2017 when I wrote my last published series on Thomson. I have always been on the side of Thomson having been murdered. But this is a story for another day as well.

     I had only just commenced research on Thomson's death, when information sources began opening to me, as if someone somewhere approved of my opening this hugely debated cold case. Even before I had announced my intention to publish a short series of articles, back then, in the Gravenhurst bi-weekly newspaper known as "Muskoka Today," I was inundated with books and magazines containing stories about the artist's work and his tragic end in Algonquin Park. At this state I would only have mentioned this to a few folks, including a friend who operated Desu Books here in Gravenhurst and The Owl's Pen, which still operates in Bracebridge. Just about every week, I was getting offers of old and out of print texts, and vintage magazines from both of these kindly book sellers, who really only knew of my general interest and not entirely what I was planning to work on for the next twenty years. And once I did run a teaser piece that this series was coming soon to Muskoka Today, the biographical resources and archive material on the artist flooded into my possession, and ninety percent of the haul carried the message that Tom Thomson had most likely been murdered. Even though this was whitewashed for decades, by those who did not want to believe that Thomson, one of Canada's greatest artists, and source of inspiration for the eventual creation of the famed Group of Seven artists, could have been a victim of violence almost as if a corruption of the good things he had accomplished in art in only a short time. I often wondered, as the volume of archival material grew, whether it was the serendipitous engineering of Thomson himself, who wanted his death to be vindicated. And I just happened to be the right researcher at the right time, as it was coming closer to the 100th anniversary of his death.

     The serendipity, messages from the grave thing, reared up one afternoon, in rather rigorous fashion, when Suzanne and I took the boys and our dog Kramer, on a short canoe trip from the Portage Store on Canoe Lake, to Hayhurst Point, across from the former hamlet of Mowat, where Thomson had lived during his Algonquin foray, through the years of the Second World War. When we left the beach opposite the store, it was a most beautiful September day, with barely a ripple on the water, except for the wake of our own mirroring canoe. We arrived at the Hayhurst dock in about an hour of slow paddling, as we enjoyed the panorama of the Canoe Lake islands, and after landing, we hauled our picnic lunch up the hillside to where there is a memorial to Thomson's life and times in Algonquin Park. We had been working on the Thomson research for years to that point, but had never actually visited the memorial, which had been constructed and prepared by Group of Seven Artist, and Thomson colleague, J.E.H. MacDonald, and his son Thoreau. When we had finished our lunch, son Andrew went to the brass plaque on the cairn, and began tracing out the letters of the inscription, one at a time, with me joining him halfway through the simultaneous reading of the important message about how passionate the artist had lived in this beautiful place. By the time we had reached the end of the inscription, I did recognize that the wind had picked up, as my hat flew off as did Andrew's, and our picnic items were being blown around like dried leaves, and the view out over the lake was as if we had all of a sudden been invested in one of Thomson's famous paintings showing the wilder side of peaceful places of sanctuary. The whitecaps were pounding against the shore, our own canoe was in danger of washing off the dock, and there were twenty or more capsized canoes already visible in the boiling cauldron, and that was only what we could see from one side of the lookout. There were about twenty more as we found out when we went to secure our canoe. We were trying to figure out how we were going to get back to the Portage Store, as it was getting late in the afternoon, and sunlight was already diminishing over the lakeland.

     We spent two hours trying to get back, paddling as close to the shore as we could for most of the way, and then in the most aggressive yet responsible cross lake paddle we had ever employed, to get back to shore safely. It was as if Thomson's spirit had been aroused on this occasion, by the simple act of tracing out the letters on his memorial cairn. Seem nuts? Well, these were just a few of the strange interventions we had while working on the Thomson series, which by the way, for me as a writer, were the most popular pieces I've written in well more than forty years as a columnist. Thomson was good for me, in this regard, and I hope my opinion that he had been murdered, and the murderer never held to account, in some way pacified the artist's restless spirit.

     At around the same time, my work on the feature series regarding the naming of Bracebridge, Ontario, in August 1864, after the name of a book written by American Author Washington Irving, (being Bracebridge Hall, circa, 1922)  inspired a parallel volume of strange and certainly unanticipated intrusions, all being quite welcome of course as they added much to the story line. I would like to explain some of this most mysterious serendipity, received to my general advantage, in tomorrow's post, as we look at how the other side likes to involve itself in contemporary affairs. Maybe you've experienced similar situations that couldn't be explained without referencing the handiwork of always-budding-in relatives who have left this mortal coil for a more ethereal existence you might say.