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The long chain of ancestors speak through us who are here and now. Harrowings has its primary mission in being the publishing arm of the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC but it is still more than that and this post is a plea to help support the work. Without you, we are not us! Every cent spent is a vote for the world we are co-creating. With those thoughts in mind, I’m making this appeal for your support.

Certainly free subscribers are important. I would like to be your employee, however, and that is just what becoming a paid subscriber enables. It makes you, who are willing to extend some support my employers and I will work to be worthy of trust by being a prolific writer - generating ever more content both that feeds into the mission of collecting, preserving, and protecting the creative works of my late father and my own writings, podcasts, and other creative outputs.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, it is said, and if we are to see further, we need to ensure that the foundations on which we stand are solid. Of course, there is nothing constant but change, however, we can reinforce, over and over again, the basic structures upon which our society has been built.

Going back into history is something my family has been engaged in over the course of several generations. The most extensive work of which I am aware is the labor of my grandmother, an amateur geneologist, who applied a great deal of rigor to investigating her roots which stretched back far enough that she was accepted as a Magna Carta Dame. This means that she could trace her lineage back to some of those Barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in the thirteenth century. Now, if one gets back that far - because we have two parents, four grandparents, and so on, we are all descended from more people than existed by the time one gets back that far - were it not for intermarriage.

This notwithstanding, it is interesting to know one’s roots. My own patrilineal line goes back with confidence only to the Revolutionary War when a young man named Jones Gill served in the Charles City County militia and, as fate would have it, found himself serving under “Mad Anthony” Wayne at the Battle of Yorktown. He moved his family eventually to Amherst County where he lived at Indian Creek. His son, Curtis Gill, established a pretty extensive farmstead and the last I checked, his house still stood close to the graveyard which my father and other descendents rededicated in the last decade. My father and I placed a stone there with a stantion from the Sons of the American Revolution there in October 2015.

As for the generations after Curtis, these two photographs - one made in 1933 and the other in 1978 show all 5 generations:

William Samuel Gill, on the left, was born in 1851 and was the son of Curtis Gill and grandson of Jones. He lived until 1943. My father, the babe in Arms on the right and behind his father in the later photograph, had a life very nearly as long - passing away on April 7, 2024.

My great-grandfather, standing next to his father, ran the hardware store on Main Street in Orange, Virginia. He was a Mason, and helped start the first radio station in Orange as well as having a Sunday School named after him at Trinity United Methodist Church. I’m not sure it is still in operation or not.

My father was nothing if not continually engaged in his passions - not just history, but also philately, and in the image above, he is reading a philatelic catalog while Catzandra —who adopted me back in 2005 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC — sits on the arm of his recliner. My father was also a semi-professional photographer and amateur mycologist when he was able to get out and about.

This image that he captured from the deck of his house on the western slope of Tobacco Row Mountain in Amherst County, which he built in 1994 and sold a little over a quarter century later, is one example of his art. It was observed at his funeral that he had an excellent eye.

So, this writing too has ended up focusing on him and less on me and the interests into which he led me and which he enabled through his dedicated career as a research historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation over the course of more than 54 years, so that will wait for another post.

For now, I’ll close with a note of gratitude to all of you who have read so far and a reminder that amplification is most appreciated. Take a moment to click:

This will let others know that the publication exists. The power of the network cannot be underestimated! We are all in this together. Amor fati.