Some remarks on Talcott Parsons’s family

Abstract

It is no doubt very well known that Talcott Parsons was of New England ances try. It may be less well known how pure this ancestry was. His father, my grandfa ther Edward Smith Parsons (1863-1943), had a strong interest in genealogy and did quite a bit of work (evidently some of it with the help of other family mem bers)2 tracing his ancestry and that of his wife, Mary Augusta Ingersoll Parsons (1863-1944). He verified that every line of the ancestry of both could be traced back into seventeenth-century New England. Several ancestors apparently came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in its earliest years, and it appears that one came on the Mayflower. Grandfather wrote out handwritten copies of the genealogy for his chil dren. The one he gave to my father is now in my possession, but some years ago we gave a copy of it to the Harvard University Archives, so that some of you may have seen it. In this paper I will say something about the earlier history of the family up to Grandfather's generation, mentioning some individuals who might interest you. Then I will say something about my grandfather's life and his world as I perceive it. The aspects of it that have struck me most forcefully have not only vanished; they were beginning to vanish in the last years of his life, and I will mention some intra-family events that were part of that process. What I find most striking about my grandfather is the strength of his New England identification, even though neither he nor his wife was born or reared there. This seems to have been shared by others in his milieu and by other family members in the nineteenth and early twen tieth centuries. There was evidently for a long time a self-conscious New England diaspora to which Edward and Mary Augusta Parsons belonged. Although the phe nomenon seems to be recognized by historians, it has not been systematically stud ied, and my own efforts to obtain relevant readings have been largely frustrated, in spite of helpful responses to inquiries with Harvard historians.3