MYSTERIOUS WAYS

by Isabel Morse Maresh

Belmont, Waldo County, Maine, USA

mareshme@fairpoint.net

Written in 2000

I had read online of Family Bibles, family records, etc. that people come across in various places and would like to relate one of the many "miraculous" things that have happened in my research since starting in 1978.

In 1988, I was compiling a book to be published of the descendants of Peter and Miriam [?Haskell] HEAL, probably originally of Gloucester, Mass., and later of the Sagadahoc County section of the State of Maine. Five brothers, sons of Peter Heal, 2d, had settled in the fledgling town of Lincolnville, Waldo County, Maine USA. Many of the descendants had stayed in the Town of Lincolnville, where they had settled, but many others moved to distant places in the State of Maine and across the country.

I was at a yard sale, conducted by a woman, now deceased, who frequented estate auctions, buying leftovers that no one else seemed to want, which she sold in her continuous sale. Much could have been classified as junk, but to researchers what is termed "junk" can sometimes be a ‘gold mine‘ of information.

At the yard sale, I picked up a small black photo album, and opened to a snapshot with the caption, "The HEAL Family." I casually asked the price, not wanting to appear too anxious. It was a few minutes before she answered me. She then said, "I have more of them." It was then that she brought out eight scrapbooks and six small black photo albums, all with photos of various branches of the HEAL family. I paid a good price for them. I then worked them into the book, A GENEALOGICAL WORKBOOK OF THE DESCENDANTS OF PETER HEAL, which I was working on.

The collection of scrapbooks and albums was by a woman whose ancestors had come from Georgetown and Lincolnville, Maine. Her ancestors had migrated to Lagrange, Penobscot County, Maine. She had moved back to neighboring Camden, Maine. She had no children of her own, but had collected photos, many of which she had taken with her own camera in the early twentieth century. She clipped newspaper articles relating to her own relatives, and of those who bore the same surname as well.

I will never know how all of this Heal memorabilia had ended up at an estate auction.

I will be eternally grateful to this woman whom I had never met.

What are the odds that I would find those items at a yard sale? I am a firm believer that nothing happens by accident, but that the God of heaven, directed the course of the collection of memorabilia to me, all those years ago. The strangest part of the whole tale is that I never did identify the photo of "The Heal Family."