When I attended Paul Cardall’s intimate concert in Midvale, Utah on the first day of autumn, he performed compositions from his newest album, Return Home, which has been nominated for two Grammy awards.
In between tunes, Paul talked about the importance of our ancestors, his album’s theme. For him that meant visit to the Shropshire Hills in England and the town of Market Drayton.
Six years ago, while visiting the UK, I did very much the same thing, digging up my mother’s ancestors in Lancashire.
My mother never talked about her father’s side of the family and when she finally did a few years ago she told me her father never talked about his family and that’s why she never knew much and didn’t care because she’d been turned off by her father’s mother, a snob who was not accepting her son’s wartime marriage to an Armenian from Turkey.
Although I had previously researched my father’s family from Poland and also my Armenian grandmother’s heritage (both managed to evade mass killings, the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide, respectively), I had never delved into the Stanleys.
Yet quite an illustrious bunch they were, I finally discovered.
It was over lunch at Via Maestro in Santa Barbara that my mother revealed that her father called his suburban London house Bosworth, a reference to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 at which Henry VII defeated Richard III and assumed the throne as King of England. It was a Stanley, Sir William, who picked up dead Richard’s battered helmet from beneath a bush, plucked from it the crown within and placed it upon Henry’s head, thus, commencing the Tudor reign. In appreciation of his eleventh-hour support, Henry bestowed upon Sir William’s elder brother, Thomas (Lord) Stanley, the dormant title Earl of Derby, which continues to be seated at Knowsley Hall in Lancashire, northern England.
The Stanleys were the deciding force at Bosworth, having waited with their army by the sidelines until it became apparent Henry would be the likely victor (a tactic known as hedging one’s bet) before charging down to help finish the job.
The name was originally Stonely, and derives—as with many surnames—from professions. In this case, stone cutters. (The original Freemasons?)
The Stanleys trace back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 when a few of my ancestors—Adam de Aldithley and his two sons, Lydulph and Adam—accompanied William the Conqueror on his invasion of England, remaining thereafter on land gifted them by the new king.
The lineage descended in various directions to a Governor of Canada/founder of the Stanley Cup to F.O. Stanley, an inventor who founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company and later built The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (where The Shining was filmed).
On a visit to London in November 2017 with my friend, Curt, I ventured up to Lancashire, from which the Stanleys hailed.
Our main destination was Ormskirk, Lancashire, the land of my earliest traceable ancestors. This odd name translates to: English church and Church of Ormr (Norse for serpent or dragon). Ormskirk, says Urban Dictionary, is Where dreams go to die.
Author and dream captain Robert Moss has written: “Our ancestors are looking for us even if we’re not looking for them.”
Coming here to this place I’ve turned the tables.
First we pull into Lathom.
Its rolling fields and narrow lanes are no different than they were five centuries ago when Lathom Park Chapel was founded by Thomas Stanley, the Second Earl of Derby, my great-great-great-grandfather-squared. To find it, we must first visit a pub called Plough Inn, which features us as the unplanned entertainment, judging by the amused and bemused expressions we provoke among locals.
Over half-a-pint of warm bitter, Curt engages a couple of elderly women. One tells him, “Nobody ever comes here except people looking up their ancestors—are you from Canada?” (As mentioned earlier, The Stanley name is big in Canada because Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, was its Governor General.)
The ancient chapel is quiet, closed and locked, and the only welcome from the remains of those buried here for many centuries is the biting cold.
Thereafter, chilled to the very core of our own souls we roll to nearby Omrskirk to search out the Parish of St. Peter and St. Paul, one of only three churches in Britain with both a tower and a steeple and, more important to me, home to the Derby Chapel where my most prominent ancestors—Sir Thomas Stanley, First Earl of Derby and his wife Elizabeth Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII—are interred.
We see this landmark from a distance and aim ourselves toward it, though Curt gets beaten back by the cold and retreats to a bar called Mad Hatter. (When I text someone back home about my presence in Ormskirk, spellcheck changes it Or smirk.)
The parish church is locked so I wander the expansive graveyard, a sanctuary of the dead that ran out of burial plots so long ago that its most recent tenants (from a mere two centuries ago) are buried beneath walkways and floating stairs, their slab inscriptions mostly faded through time and footwear.
I am wearing a coat, hat and scarf but the bone-chilling cold pushes me back to Mad Hatter where a young publican who looks and sounds like a Beatle (Liverpool is 12 miles away) suggests Innkeeper’s Lodge in nearby Aughton.
Cold and bedraggled, we roll there and claim a pair of sparse but homey rooms with radiators for warmth, and settle into the bar downstairs, Sipsmith gin on the rocks, slice of lemon. The inn’s bustling restaurant, Miller and Carter, serves up the hearty northern nourishment needed to summon enough energy for a return to the old parish church where, with cold night air stinging my face, I embrace the darkness and prowl for orbs. My ancestors.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
It always takes a few minutes for word to whip round before orbs begin to manifest themselves one by one, shy at first, trying to understand what I’m up to. They are soon followed by others until there’s a whole gang of them all peering at me, like, Is this guy for real?
To my thinking, these are Stanleys who have come out to observe their far-future descendant, here to observe them—and a new story idea is born:
The protagonist returns to the land and graves of his 500 year-old ancestors, finds a bronze ring in the parish museum and slips it onto his finger, resulting in the appearance of a ghostly distinguished ancestor, which attaches itself to a very shaken protagonist then reappears after he returns home. The protagonist thinks he needs therapy and visits a therapist, in front of whom the spirit manifests itself… causing the therapist to pee her pants.
A couple years ago I completed my mission when I visited Stanley, Idaho in the Sawtooth Mountains, to which I launched from Boise.
It takes but a few minutes to get from urban to rural and soon I’m ascending among tall trees, reaching out to heaven alongside a fast-flowing river.
The Sawtooth Range takes its name from ragged peaks that look like a hacksaw.
Nearby is the town of Stanley, population 63, founded by Captain John Stanley.
It is barren and quiet this day, any day from its look and feel.
If there’s any excitement in town, we’re it, though no one (wherever they are) seems to care and the only thing in motion is the Salmon River running through it.
Nothing like a river to symbolize impermanence.