by Rev. Robert Lewis
As I write this, the shortest month of the year is almost over – only 10 ½ hours to go as I start this article – and what a long month it has seemed to be. Around these parts (Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley) we’ve set new snowfall records for the month and for the winter. One day it was said that there was snow on the ground in all 50 states. Some were saying 49 states, leaving Hawaii unscathed, but one radio commentator reminded listeners that there are high mountains in Hawaii and snow on the summit of those mountains. It’s been a winter to remember – or forget. Winter here got me thinking about what New England winters must have been like for John and Jane Clough and their contemporaries and for several generations of their descendants. Many of us, I’m sure, have heard from ancestors we have known about the rough winters of their early years and how easy by comparison we have it today. In fact, now that I’m an ancestor, I’ve been known to talk about storms I remember from earlier in life. If the scenes described in John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snowbound” were the rule rather than the exception, it had to be a rough deal. There’s the line in which his father says, “Boys, a path!” The path turned out to be more like a tunnel. From snowstorms in the winter, we can move on to other hardships they endured. Think what it must have taken for our ancestors just to make it through a day. Easy it was not in any season of the year. Each season presented its particular challenges. From thinking about the hardships our ancestors endured, we can move on to consider why the earliest settlers on these shores came here and endured such hardships. There were, of course, a mixture of motives. Some came for religious reasons; others, with a purely secular agenda. Some were seeking freedom from something; others, freedom for something. Whatever they were seeking, they came and made the best of it and left a lasting legacy for us. Through the work we do in the John Clough Genealogical Society, we seek to honor John and Jane Clough and our other ancestors not only for the winters they suffered through but also for the life they have made it possible for us to enjoy in what for them was a new and in many ways an inhospitable land. They came here perhaps little knowing the details of what life here would be like and probably never dreaming that we would be honoring them nearly 400 years later. Yet here we are, doing so. As the descendants of some of the early settlers around here say, “Mach’s gut” (“Make it good”).