On a beautiful summer’s day, I went over to my brother’s house in Upton to gather for my father’s 80th birthday. It was a very nice day and we went out for ice cream with the family at a local ice cream stand. My nephew, who’s six, really enjoyed it. Now, I got to Upton fairly frequently for family events, and as we were all there and already in the car, I said that it might be nice for us all to go and see the place where my father’s mother was born in the village of Whitinsville, which is not far from there in the town of Northbridge. It was also another opportunity to check off one more town on my list.
I had been to Northbridge before, at another time, and found the address of the house where my grandmother was born and lived as a young girl. Her family had moved to Maynard, Massachusetts (my home town) from Newfoundland around 1890, and her two brother’s were born there, but they moved to Whitinsville just before my grandmother was born, and then moved back to Maynard where she met and married my grandfather.
Whitinsville is the biggest of the many villages of Northbridge, and it’s where most of the town offices are. It’s not on a main route (you have to take the Main Street off Route 146 to get there), so it’s not really on the way to anywhere in particular. The mill there used to be very large and supplied spindles to other mills. It’s another one of the places that used to be quite prosperous when the mills where in full swing, but now is looking to reinvent itself. It’s in the Blackstone Valley National Historic Corridor, and you can see many sites from the start of the Industrial Revolution in the area.
So, have you ever visited where your family came from?
