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               HOW WE CAME TO BELMAR

     I use the pronoun "we" because it looks better so.
Actually, however, this bit of family history is, of
course, designed to explain how I, myself, came to be
born in Belmar and is by way of introduction to the
many volumes of my diary which follow.  What, in these
first two, I have tried to do is to trace the Disbrows
from Cambridgeshire and the Sterners from ancient Swabia,
until the two families were united in Belmar.
     And so, through this and the diaries, you may travel
from Europe to the 17th and 18th Century wilderness of
New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, and from there
over into New Jersey, whence you will be carried back
again to New England, then far south to that other very
different land of the Argentine pampa, and finally
back once more to Europe, to the rain-swept, shell-torn
muddy soil of Northern France in the First Great War.
     But, while I have done this for my own amusement,
there is also the hope that at least one of you may find
it interesting and from it get something for yourselves.
It takes no deep intelligence to realize that, only yes-
terday, today was the future and that, by tomorrow, it
too will have become the past - and yet so few seem able
to visualize this timelessness of history, to feel that
they themselves are a part of it, and that all the long
procession of their forebears were real people who had
the same hopes and fears and motives for doing things,
both good and evil, as have you who read this.
     You can see from the fragments of his letters in
the Appendix to Vol. II [THE STERNERS] that Uncle Henry
Sterner had that feel for the living reality of the past.  He must
have written much more along this line.  He was able to

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               HOW WE CAME TO BELMAR

reach back, if only gropingly, to our frontier period.
He laments his stupidity as a boy in not getting this
information in more detail from the old people he knew.
I was equally stupid.  He assumed that I was not interest-
ed and I never knew, till long after his death, that he
was.  There were probably others who could have given me
invaluable information but even if they had written it
down, as I am attempting to do in this superficial way,
their descendants probably burned it as trash like Sarah
Pope's letters.  Perhaps the same fate will befall this
stuff - although it is a bit bulky and has some interest-
ing pictures in it.
     Of the Canfields, Taylors, Tolmies, and Gregories,
I know of so little that I can only, in another appendix,
give you some loose tags, clues which you can, years
hence, follow up if you care to.
     In compiling this chronicle of the Disbrows, two
things caught my interest particularly.
     One is the curious fact that, for over three cent-
uries, theirs is a record of mediocrity.  Not one, with
the possible exception of Nicholas (and I do not know
for certain that it was from his loins they sprang), did
anything truly noteworthy, good or bad.  The same thing
applies to the Sterners, as you will see.
     The other, and this I like, is that the Disbrows
had the itching foot, the hunger to see and be a part
of new and different places from those they had known.
Some of them must have felt what Sir Richard Grenville
meant when he wrote -


          To passe the seas some think a toile,
              Some think it strange abrod to roame,
          Some think it grefe to leave their soil,
              Their parents, kyne-folk & their whome.
          Think so who list, I mind them nott;
              I must abrod to trie my lott.


     At least the first three Disbrows did and, when the
Lane blood was added, it reappears again.  So, in a sense,

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               HOW WE CAME TO BELMAR

the story of the Disbrows becomes the story of the found-
ing of the little towns - Newtowne (Cambridge), Hartford,
Hempstead, Mamaroneck, Matawan, Belmar.
     As to my own diaries, they may be of interest to
someone some day.  If any of you find you can write, here
is the material for a picture of one tiny facet of an in-
teresting period in our civilization.  But I am none too
hopeful.
                                                  J.W.S

Ocean Grove
July
1956

                        3

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