|
|
|
In with the Old
Mark being from Wayne and Delaware being Delaware, it seemed we'd probably not have occasion to work together again. Yet a pleasant surprise: About 18 months after our brief encounter, I came to MLT. Ere long, Mark discovered the fact and blitzed me with a stack of great story ideas, most having to do with historic subjects. For various reasons, the stories didn't fit MLT's needs at the time, so we reluctantly had to turn them down, but they hovered in the back of my mind as the stuff of a great monthly section. Since January, you've read many of those stories as Retrospect. One of the things I admire most about Mark's writing is his ability to related history to current events. "I like to find a parallel, if possible," he says. "If not, it's just a 'So what?' For example, I love genealogy, but my brother doesn't give a damn about it. Most people feel the same way about history. They see it as not touching their lives. But historical stories produced the way the world is today." In recent articles, Mark has explored such topics as how Suburban Square, upon turning 75, returned to the vision of its founders, how trash dug up during home improvement projects often turns out to be archaeological treasure, how guilt by association in the 18th century became a prototype for McCarthyism, and how the art of book illustration relates to our sound-bite media. Many of the ideas, in some way, grew out of Mark's genealogical work. "My grandmother left us a Bible with a family tree that was 200 years old," Mark says. "I thought, 'Gee, I wonder if we could fill in the other pieces,' then I got interested in what they did, then I got interested in the times." In his own family, Mark has found relations who settled Jamestown with John Smith, Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower, and Quakers who were very much a part of young Philadelphia and William Penn's Great Experiment in religious tolerance. That's quite a pedigree. "Yet these people wouldn't have liked each other very much at all," Mark says. For example, his ancestor Roger Clapp, as captain of the Castle in Boston Harbor during the 1650s, was part of the colony's political and social elite, a group who made Quakerism, practiced by so many of Mark's mother's ancestors, a hanging crime. "These Puritans were like a Boston Taliban," Mark says. "They were fundamentalists who didn't want anyone spreading any funny ideas." (I love those contemporary connections.) Ultimately, Mark says, genealogy isn't all that important. "What you find is that you're related to everybody. These are everybody's stories," he says. But the other thing he's found is that genealogy makes history personal. "There's a connection. In school, you learn history from the top down. Through genealogy, you learn it from the bottom up, and what you see is often very different from what you'd learned. It makes life more interesting." Speaking of interesting (and funny ideas), check out this month's Retrospect, in which Mark explores how a group of local folks claimed a religious basis for the practice of free love. The contemporary parallel? You'll just have to read on. Enjoy. Mark Nardone Main Line Today / September 2003
 Mark
E. Dixon
757 Upper Gulph Road
Wayne, PA 19087-2022
USA
610-971-0649
dixon_mark@verizon.net
|
Writer Mark Dixon and I met, by phone, in the spring of
2000. I was working at a sister publication in Delaware where he called to
pitch a story about how his genealogical research had led him to ancestors who
had lived on what was to become a famous du Pont estate. It was a great
idea, and Mark filed a great story that was full of practical advice on how to
trace a family tree, all cleverly woven into a compelling narrative that had
most elements of a classic adventure tale. (See