Genealogical gem
Bill Fowler, director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, recalls a scene some years ago at the reading room of the New England Historic Genealogical Society on Newbury Street. Genealogist Gary Roberts was out on the floor, helping people explore their family trees.
"He came to one person who was looking at her family chart," Fowler says. "Gary pointed his finger at the names on the chart, and as he drew his finger down the family lines, he proclaimed -- Gary never speaks softly -- "Peasant, peasant, peasant."
Despite such observations, Roberts was so popular at genealogical meetings that the cash-strapped society started marketing him for consultations. "People signed up and paid for his advice," says Fowler, a former president of the genealogical outfit. "It was better than selling baseball autographs."
Gary Boyd Roberts stands in the front ranks of Boston's most colorful characters you've never heard of. He is preternaturally judgmental and his opinions carry the kick of sinus-clearing wasabi mustard. (Colonial America he dismisses as "a backwater that deserves the intellectual attention reserved for backwaters.") The number of unexpressed thoughts he has held in his life, one assumes, can be counted on one hand.
If he is a character, he is also, in Fowler's words, "a superb genealogist." The man's expertise is breathtaking, particularly regarding prominent American families and their European forebears. (He identifies four elites in early America: the Livingston and other manorial clans of New York, the Quaker clans of Thomas Lloyd and James Logan of Philadelphia, the Puritans of Boston, and the planter class of Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina.)
Roberts, 60, blew into town 30 years ago from his native Houston via Yale, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He did well in history but, as he tells it, Chicago had a lousy track record at the time placing its graduate students in academic posts, so he took a job as a reference librarian at the society, which Fowler calls "without question, the best in the country." He arrived in 1974 and never left.
Roberts, the owner of a large, pear-shaped body, carries the title of Senior Research Scholar, which effectively gives Gary Roberts license to be Gary Roberts. This means a mix of serious scholarship and forays into the reading room to help the genealogically inclined. (In lieu of a $75 annual membership fee, the public can pay $15 for a day's access to its open stacks, along with help from a genealogist -- a hell of a deal. The genealogical trove at the Boston Public Library, in contrast, is kept in closed stacks.)
A visit with Roberts also comes with a generous topping of kitsch: Princess Diana, he tells me, was one-sixty-fourth New England Yankee. Who knew? Who cares?
Last week, Roberts walked a reporter from La Stampa, one of Italy's major daily newspapers, through the blood connections between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. They are related through five kinships -- Henry Herrick of Salem, John Dwight of Dedham, the parents of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley of Concord, Thomas Richards of Weymouth, and the Sherman family of Dedham, Essex, England.
As a result, Bush and Kerry are anywhere from tenth cousins once removed to twelfth cousins twice removed among the five lines. (Can't you just see the pair playing Frisbee at a family picnic?) This is not earth-shattering, notes Roberts, as most people of New England ancestry are eighth to twelfth cousins to most other people of the same ilk.
The links are forged through Kerry's mother, who was a Forbes of Winthrop, Cabot, Bowdoin, Pickering, and Dudley descent. A true Brahmin. While the term is a generic one to describe Boston's old families, Roberts distinguishes between the Puritan arrivals and those who became prominent in the China Trade.
The earliest ones, with names like Dudley, Winthrop and Appleton, preceded those named Perkins, Forbes, and Cabot, who settled in Salem in the late 18th century. "They're late," he snaps about these arrivistes. "They were usurping the preceding group, marrying into their families."
Roberts defines snobbery as "a celebration of one's former self." So is he a snob? Not a chance, he maintains. "Who wants to lunch at the Union Club?" he asks dismissively. "In Texas, we still believe in pizzazz and style and money. Here, people are embarrassed by it."
If the Brahmins are an open book, the Irish are a detective story. "The great problem with Irish genealogy is exactly where in Ireland people came from," says Roberts. "American records usually just say, `Ireland.' To get much more, you had to have someone Irish doing a census or carving stone in a cemetery."
The opposite was true with Italian immigrants, who always cited the village or city they came from when asked. Italy wasn't a country until 1870, after all, so Italians never thought in national terms.
At the end of the day, Roberts maintains that his genealogical pursuits are about family values. "Not the Republican, vulgar, right-wing ones," he says, "but family values at their best: permanent legacies embodying 300-400 years of struggle and evolution."
Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com
