Searching for a father he never knew, Thomas Bushnell digs deep,
Finding a family history of mediaeval battles and revolutionary inventions



BERNE — Thomas Bushnell began his search for family history so he could know his father.
"He died when I was 12. I was really shy and hardly ever spoke. He was always working — at his job or on his farm," recalled Bushnell who is 50 now.
A number of years ago, two of his brothers — Bushnell is one of 17 siblings — were clearing their homes, and each had "stuff from the farmhouse where our Dad grew up."
Bushnell recalled, "I said, ‘Don’t throw it out. I’ll take it.’ I sat up all night, getting to know my Dad."
Then, four years ago, on his father’s birthday, Oct. 2, Bushnell went through the papers again. "My Dad didn’t throw nothing out," he marveled. "He never talked about his childhood."
Bushnell pieced together his father’s life from saved photographs and news clips. Bushnell’s father was an only child. His father’s father, Elbridge, died at age 26 of measles. "He had just married the month before, in 1900," said Bushnell.

Elbridge Bushnell’s pregnant wife moved from Guilderland Center, where they were married, to the farm they had purchased in East Berne. Bushnell’s father worked the farm his whole life. The old farmstead had no electricity.

Bushnell’s father and his mother, Margaret Grace Picardi, lived a mile away in South Berne, where they raised their children. Margaret Bushnell still lives there today. In addition to working the farm, Bushnell’s father, beginning with World War II, also worked at the Army depot in Guilderland Center.

"You keep digging"

Bushnell’s search for family didn’t stop with his father.
"Certain things stay in your mind and you want to know the answers, so you keep digging," he said.

Bushnell has now filled six loose-leaf binders with family pictures and lore. There are letters as recent as a 1921 query from the East Berne farm as to who is going to the Altamont Fair. And there are solemn tintype portraits, dating back to the Civil War era.
"No one smiled when the camera was new," said Bushnell.

He’s discovered he had relatives who migrated west on the Oregon Trail, and that there’s a city in Florida named for a relative who helped with starting a railroad there.
"I didn’t think I’d find a lot of rich and famous people," he said. "I thought they’d be poor — farmers and maybe some outlaws."

Instead, he’s uncovered lineage that goes back to an English knight in mediaeval times.
"He was killed in the battle of Ivory in France. The king found him still holding his flag, straight up," even in death, said Bushnell. The king is said to have remarked on the dead knight’s loyalty.
The Bushnell coat of arms depicts a knight’s head over a shield, with this motto beneath: "Mes droits on la mort," meaning, "Right unto death."

Bushnell’s family tree includes a number of prominent Americans as well. His first ancestors to come to the New World were the sons of Francis Bushnell, who was born in England in 1580 and died in Guilford, Conn. in 1646.
"The first Bushnells came over in 1635 on the ship Saint John," related Bushnell. "Five sons came over together. Their father sent them to find land. They purchased land from the Indians." Meanwhile, back in England, Francis Bushnell’s wife, said Bushnell, "died in childbirth, so he came over with two daughters."
Some of the stories collected in Bushnell’s binders are sad. Under the heading "Fourth Generation" of Bushnells in America is the story of Lucy Bushnell’s mother: "She was Elizabeth Hanley from Liverpool, England. When 16 years of age she was brought from school and bidden to marry an old man whom her parents had elected for her husband. She ran away and persuaded a sea captain to take her to America.
"It was Capt. Williams of Essex, who on arriving, sold her at auction in Essex. She was bound out in order to pay the charges of her passage, and was bought by Mr. Joshua Bushnell, who after two years married her. When her first child was born, she wrote to her parents, who had supposed that she had been drowned, and a brother came across the sea to see her."

One of Bushnell’s relatives was a governor of Ohio. Asa Smith Bushnell, born in 1834, served as the 40th governor of Ohio, from 1896, succeeding President William McKinley, to 1900.

He was a businessman who left his work during the Civil War to raise a company of volunteers, of which he became captain.

During his tenure as governor, laws were passed limiting child labor and improving working conditions for women.
"He was a man of soldierly and handsome bearing," says a contemporary account, "courteous in his manner, with sparkling eyes and quick movement."

Quixotic inventor

Another of Bushnell’s relatives built the first submarine — in 1775.

Drawings of the American Turtle, as its inventor, Captain David Bushnell, dubbed it, look rather like a large wooden egg with a propeller. A single man sat inside to operate the propeller and a screw, projecting from the top of the Turtle, which was meant to attach a clock-detonated explosive to the hull of an enemy ship.
"Today, you’d call it a torpedo," said Bushnell.

Two United States Navy ships were later named after David Bushnell — one in 1915 and the second in 1946.

David Bushnell was born in Saybrook, Conn. in about 1742. He graduated from Yale in 1775, and managed to explode gunpowder underwater.

He intended to use his American Turtle to break the British naval blockade at New York harbor during the Revolutionary War, according to an account from the U.S. Navy.

David Bushnell’s brother, Ezra, had practiced piloting the Turtle but, on the eve of the submarine’s first combat mission, he died.

Ezra Lee of Old Lyme, Conn., took his place and piloted the Turtle in New York harbor to the rudder of the English man-of-war, the Eagle. He hit metal rather than wood with the screw meant to attach the bomb to the Eagle’s hull.

As Lee propelled the Turtle away after a second try had failed, he was seen and chased. The bomb was released into the water.
An odd footnote in Bushnell’s binder is provided from a lecture by John H. Lienhard, one of a series "about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them."
Lienhard refers to David Bushnell’s saga as "a curious Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde story." He relates how "gentle Dr. Bush" died at the age of 82 in 1824 in Warrenton, Ga. A very private man, Dr. Bush had practiced medicine and taught both science and religion at the local Warrenton Academy.

His executors were surprised when they discovered wooden pieces of a submarine prototype and papers revealing Dr. Bush was really Captain David Bushnell, once a member of the Continental Army’s Corps of Engineers.
"Bushnell began as a bookish Connecticut farmer. When he was 29," related Lienhard, "his father died. So he sold the farm and went to Yale. For four years, he studied science, and he built his man-powered sub.
"He called his boat the Turtle because he’d made it from two hollowed-out wooden slabs. They looked like huge turtle shells...."

After Ezra Lee’s failed attempt at bombing the Eagle, Bushnell tried to smuggle the Turtle away from the British on a sloop, says Lienhard. An English frigate sank the sloop.
"Bushnell had used up his fortune by now," says Lienhard. "He finished the Revolution designing mines. Then he went to France to sell his submarine design. He also failed at that. By 1795, thoroughly disillusioned, Bushnell came back to America, to Georgia, as Dr. Bush. He gave the rest of his life over to teaching and healing."

"So once was I"

In middle age, Thomas Bushnell, too, has made a change. The Berne-Knox-Westerlo High School graduate who works as a janitor for the State Dormitory Authority is recently divorced. He has returned to his roots.

He is living on the land his father spent his lifetime farming. The old East Berne farmhouse burned down in the 1980s. Bushnell is living in a trailer with no electricity and without modern conveniences, like a refrigerator or a telephone.

But he’s not complaining. He loves it there. He appreciates the beauty, with a view stretching to the Catskill Mountains.
"When I die, I’m going to be cremated and have the ashes spread on the farm," he said.

He’ll also have a gravestone there. He’s well aware of the links that such a marker can provide, between the past and generations yet unborn.

Bushnell and his 16-year-old daughter, Allison, enjoy scouring local cemeteries to find the gravestones of their ancestors. They carefully clean the stones and photograph them.
"She’s interested in the past, like me," he said. "We find interesting things."

Bushnell points to a picture he recently took of Joshua Bushnell’s grave. He died on July 18, 1847 at the age of 77.
"They didn’t put the birth dates on the old stones, just the dates they died," he said.

The letters on Joshua Bushnell’s gravestone are hard to make out; they are so worn with time. But Bushnell has learned the inscription by heart.
He recites: "O, stop and see as you pass by: As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, soon you must be. So prepare for death and follow me."