Tying up a different strand of my American ancestry, and taking advantage of a few days in Washington DC, I spent last Sunday exploring distant parts of Maryland which I have never been to before. I got to the car rental office bright and early, only to find that it did not open until 9; and when I came back at 9, I was at the back of a long queue, and did not manage to get on the road until 10. It was a sweltering hot day with the exception of a rainstorm in Annapolis.

Loch Raven

My first stop was the reservoir of Loch Raven north of Baltimore. My interest had been sparked by this advertisement in the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser for 18 December 1807.

Mrs Catherine Belt (1764-1830) was my 4x great-grandmother, my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother. The advertisement was placed by her son Richard Grafton Belt (1784-1865), who seems to have left an ambiguous genetic legacy. Richard Key Heath was clearly a close family friend, because his sister married Richard Grafton Belt’s brother six years later, in 1813, and his niece married Richard Grafton Belt himself in 1831. Catherine Belt, nee Dulany, has many descendants, and her great-granddaughter, also named Catherine Dulany Belt (1851-1923) broke the news of my great-grandmother’s death to my grandmother in 1905.

I put some effort into trying to find the location of the older Catherine Belt’s Epping estate, and worked out that a) it was one of three estates carved out for the three daughters of Walter Dulany, Rebecca, Catherine and Mary, after they managed to partially reverse the confiscation of his lands for being on the wrong side of the War of Independence; and b) Epping is now mostly under the Loch Raven reservoir, north of Baltimore. This brought me into correspondence with Ann Blouse of the Historical Society of Baltimore County, and she shared with me her research on what had happened to the lands. Most thrilling for me, she is certain that Catherine ended up buried on the land owned by her sister Mary Dulany Fitzhugh. And she and the current land-owners kindly consented for me to visit the estate on Sunday.

Our rendezvous was a bit late because of the aforementioned issues with the rental car, but we co-ordinated successfully in the end, and fought through undergrowth to find the family burying ground behind the site of the Fitzhugh House (replaced in the 1920s by a much more modern building).

Catherine Dulany is not named on any of the surviving stones, but her sister Mary is; and I’d like to believe Ann Blouse’s theory that the family found a last resting place for her with her relatives.

It was a sweltering hot day, but I felt very glad to find fellow enthusiasts.

The cousins

I was intrigued to learn that there is still a portrait of the older Catherine Belt in existence.

It turns out that it is still in the possession of her descendants, and I had some good-natured correspondence with several of my fifth cousins, who like me are her 4x great-grandchildren. One of them, L, came to meet me after my trip to the burying ground and we went for lunch at MacDonald’s. I must say that (as sometimes happens in these cases) I felt an instant shock of recognition on seeing her, as if my father’s and grandmother’s features had been melded and changed, but were still recognisable. We stupidly failed to take a photograph together, but L later sent me a shot of herself with three of her siblings (she is front left). Judge for yourself; but I do feel that there is a family look to the cousins, and perhaps also a detectable resemblance to Catherine Belt, two centuries ago.

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum

Since I was in Baltimore I thought I would try and visit the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. It was open, but you have to book in advance and it was all booked up. So much for that. On a day when I was not doing anything much else, I would have looked into walking around Fort McHenry, but did not really have time.

St Anne’s Church, Annapolis

Catherine Belt’s grandfather, therefore my 6x great grandfather was Daniel Dulany the Elder (1685-1753), who was born near Castletown in Co Laois, emigrated to Maryland as a teenager, and made his way up from being an indentured youth to become a prominent lawyer and politician. He married three times, but is buried with his second wife, Rebecca Smith (1696-1737), in Annapolis, in the grounds of St Anne’s Church (which has been demolished and rebuilt twice since then).

I hit Annapolis in the middle of a torrential rain storm, and parked for a few minutes across the road from a mural celebrating Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Marshall was from Baltimore, but I am not aware of any local connections of RBG.

Once the rain was definitely over, I circled the church several times and eventually realised that the largest of the monuments outside it was the one I was looking for. (A kind passer-by helped the photography.)

There must have been many more monuments in the churchyard at one point. But I was glad that Rebecca and Daniel have been given a place of honour.

I took a brief walk around Annapolis after – a pleasant seaside town. Another of Walter Dulany’s properties is now the U.S. Naval Academy.

Christ Church, Chaptico

Compared to Connecticut, very few of my ancestors’ graves can be identified in Maryland, and in fact Daniel and Rebecca are the only ones whose name is on their tombstone. But following a different line, I had identified the resting place of Philip Key (1697-1764) and his wife Susanna Barton Gardner (1705-1742), way off to the south in Chaptico, a small town on the Potomac estuary. They were my 7x great grandparents. Philip migrated from England, and Susanna was the daughter of immigrants. They were closely involved with funding and building Christ Church, whose bell tower is twentieth century, but the rest is as Philip and Susanna would have known it when it was finished in 1736.

Philip specified in his will that he wanted Susanna’s coffin to be laid on top of his own in the Key vault, which is at the back of the church. Reputedly, six generations of Keys rest there. There is no inscription, just a coat of arms.

The church, the graveyard and the Key vault were horribly desecrated by British troops in July 1814, during the inaccurately named War of 1812. In August, the British briefly occupied Washington and burned the White House. In September, Philip Key’s great-grandson, watching the attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore, wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”. I wonder if he was also aware of the violence that had been done to his dead relatives, 120 km to the south?

Charging the electric car

As was the case in December, my rental car was an electric vehicle, and was only 20% charged when I picked it up. By the time I got to Baltimore it was almost depleted, and I had to find a place to charge it before my unsuccessful attempt to visit the Edgar Allan Poe museum. It would have taken half an hour to fully charge and I would have been fine for the rest of the day; but I was in a hurry, and inevitably found that I needed another top-up on the way from Annapolis to Chaptico. (And I found a charging station in Upper Marlboro.) It is a somewhat different rhythm of driving than I am used to, but one can adapt, and at least the car had a fully informative display telling me how much battery charge I could expect to have remaining at my next destination, and where I could charge it en route.