As many of you know, the topic of my remarks tonight is Sex in the Delano Family. From all accounts, there's been quite a lot of it.

But, I gotta tell you, I'm having some second thoughts. Seeing some faces I know in this crowd, I'm wondering what I can possibly tell you that you don't already know.

My research on this topic has, in recent weeks, taken me from Duxbury, Massachusetts to Plymouth, to North Carolina. But I must give special credit to Robert B. Delano and Martha Delano -- who are, let me tell you, real experts on the subject.

The research has not been easy. A few weeks ago, Robert and Martha and I stopped in Wilmington, Delaware to meet Kathleen Wells Worth. Kathleen is the granddaughter of Virginia Frances Delano, a daughter of Capt. George Delano, who married a man named Benjamin Snow Gill in 1864. They moved to Delaware and their family had little or no contact with their Northern Neck relations until we tracked Kathleen down and went to see her on our way back from Duxbury. Kathleen is a wonderful woman, nearly eighty.

She told us a wonderful story about Virginia Frances Delano, one of the youngest of Capt. George Delano's daughters. I asked her who Benjamin Snow Gill was. She said that he was a Union soldier whom Virginia Frances Delano, then around 20, found wounded on the edge of a field near the Delano home "Pleasant View". The Delanos took him in, nursed him, and, when the Yankees came looking for him, hid him between two feather mattresses.

Virginia Frances Delano must have been hiding in those mattresses with him, because they were married at Ebenezer in 1864 and then went to Delaware.

But, when I asked Kathleen Wells Worth her if she had any thoughts she'd like to share on the sex life of the family, she said, "Lord, it's been so long, I don't think I remember."

Yes, the research has been difficult. And the topic has been, shall we say, controversial. Some cousins whom I greatly respect have suggested -- actually, they have flat out said -- "you're not going to talk about that, are you?" Some things, they said, are better left in the closet. we don't hang out our dirty linen for all the world to see.

Well, tonight, it's not all the world. It's just us family. And I'm going to tell you some things that, I guarantee you, your mother never told you. Not because she didn't want to. Chances are, she never knew because her mother never told her. The sins and the secrets of a family not often passed through the family legends.

So why talk about it? They say, when you're about to die, that your whole life rushes past. But I somehow doubt that in those final breaths we'll remember much about our amorous moments, those times in our lives when we couldn't wait to fall into the arms of the person we loved.

The passion that put the gleam in our eye, and the gleams in our ancestors' eyes is fleeting. Yet, those powerful, evanescent, almost accidental, biological attractions -- and the commitment we all decide to make to our lovers and the children who result -- are what ultimately shape our lives and genealogy.

It's impossible to look at a genealogical record and not think about sex. Consider Capt. George Delano, the ancestor from whom nearly everyone in this room is descended. Capt. George Delano had 19 children by two wives. His last child Susan Hannah was born a month before he died. Capt. George was, if nothing else, virile. Thank God he was, or we might still be awaiting our next reincarnation.

He married young. He was born in Duxbury in 1784. His father was Cornelius, a blacksmith. George's family was about the last of the Delanos to live on the original land holdings of Philippe de Lannoy.

George married young; he was only 17 or so when he married Lydia Burgess. She was only 17 herself.

Depending on the dates you believe, George and Lydia's first child, a son named George, was born almost exactly nine months after this teenage marriage, or three months before, take your pick. Like most teenage marriages, theirs apparently got off to a fast, unexpected start.

But, unlike many other teenage marriages, it lasted. George and Lydia's family grew. Like many members of the Delano family, George went to sea.

We know from some rare shipping records we just found in Massachusetts that George became the captain and part owner of schooners involved in coastal trading and cod fishing.

In fact, we know more about what his boats looked like than what he looked like. On each of your nametags is a reproduction of a sailplan of a two-masted schooner built in Massachusetts in 1838. Those schooners were the Mack trucks of their day.

Capt. George Delano made his trips south in the winter. In the summer, they used the same schooners for cod fishing on the Grand Banks, the rich fishing grounds off the Massachusetts coast.

When Capt. George got home from his voyages, his wife Lydia got pregnant. They had nine children. Their children were born every couple of years -1803, 1805, 1807, 1809, 1812, 1814, and 1819. George and Lydia's last child was named Henry Chandler, who was born June 24, 1822.

There's an old tombstone beside the First Parish Church in Duxbury that interests me greatly. Some of the carving on that stone is now illegible. But the important stuff is easily read. It says Lydia Burgess, wife of George Delano, Died Aug. 1, 1831 in the 47th year of her age. That tombstone is the crux of a family mystery.

Because in August, 1831, when Lydia Burgess Delano died in Duxbury, Mass., Capt. George Delano had been in Virginia at least eight years. By August 1831, four children had been born to Capt. George by his second wife Nancy Alderson.

Let's leave Lydia's skeleton in the family closet for a few minutes and jump ahead 100 years to the old Clerk's Office in Warsaw in the 1920s, where laboured E. Carter Delano, assistant clerk of the court, who spent most of his working life copying out by hand the deeds and wills in the volumes that line the walls of the court house.

We owe Carter almost as many thanks as George for all of us being here today. Carter was our family's genealogist extraordinaire, who tracked the descendants of Capt. George and Nancy Delano and wrote them down.

Now some 10,000 of his genealogical notes are housed in the library of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. The Virginia Historical Society is also where we're going to send all those blue pages of family information that you returned with your reunion reservations.

It was Carter's enormously valuable work in the 1920s that enabled the reunion committee to send out nearly 500 invitations to this reunion to descendants of Capt. George Delano. Carter's work enabled us to track systematically many if not most of the descendants of Capt. George's Virginia children.

But, Carter, I'm afraid, was less than honest about the sex life of his great grandfather Capt. George Delano. Carter said that George married Nancy in Leronardtown, Maryland on Jan. 1, 1823 after Lydia died in Massachusetts.

From what I've been able to piece together, I think it's true that George, when he was about 39 or 40, fell madly in love with Nancy.

(Funny, we don't know much about Nancy. The Alderson family had been in Westmoreland and Richmond counties since the 17th century. We don't know where her homeplace was. [For a long time, Carter thought Capt. George Delano's wife was Nancy Davis. Then he changed his mind.])

We don't know much about Nancy. I've never seen her signature. But I have seen her picture. She had blue eyes. She wasn't beautiful, but George sure liked the way she looked. Loved her so much that he was willing to turn his back on his beloved Massachusetts, his family, and the people he'd known all his life. George loved Nancy so much that he was willing to forsake his important connections and his position of some standing in Duxbury and never go back.

I think it's true that George married Nancy about 1823 in the sense that they established a household that endured until George's death in 1848. Their union resulted ma family that endures to this moment.

They were certainly married in the sense that George provided for his and Nancy's children, and saw that they learned to read and write quite well. He also taught them many skills about farming, boats, machinery, carpentry, and blacksmithing. No doubt about it, George and Nancy were very much married and good parents to their children.

And, really, we don't need a record of a marriage to know that one occurred. The real records of George and Nancy's marriage are the births of their children from whom we are all descended.

Capt. George made no secret of his Massachusetts heritage. His children all knew about it. Capt. George came to Virginia with his father's Bible (on display here today) and gave his Virginia children Massachusetts's names.

His first child born in Virginia was named Joseph Peterson, after George's mother's family of Petersons in Duxbury. His first daughter born in Virginia was named Sarah after his mother Sarah Peterson. He named my great grandfather Pelham Chandler Delano after his favorite nephew in Massachusetts.

You all have a copy of a letter that Joseph Peterson wrote when he was an old man to Joel Delano who was then compiling the House of Delano genealogy. I can't emphasize the importance of this letter-- it's the Delano family story in a nutshell. Joe understood his heritage this way:

"My father followed the sea for many years, made many trips to Liverpool and West Indies Islands, then came to this country trading. Had a place of merchandise on his vessel and had done so for several winters and then married my mother out here in the year 1823...He used to correspond with his children and Pelham Chandler as long as he lived" - - Pelham Chandler, his nephew.

This hardly sounds like the actions of a man who had utterly deserted his family.

(Another curious thing about the circumstances of George's move from Massachusetts was that his brother Darius came here, too. Darius was 12 years older than George. In a deed in Duxbury, he was described as a laborer. But, in 1827, when Darius was about 55, he married in Westmoreland County, Virginia, a Betsy Howe and they had a couple of daughters before Darius died in 1831.)

But if there's an official record of George and Nancy's marriage, I can't find it. The Maryland State Archives can't find it. It's not in the Westmoreland County records. I've never seen mention of their marriage in a Bible. It's not in the Bible George brought with him.

Similarly, we've been able to find no records in Massachusetts that would indicate that George and Lydia's marriage was ever legally dissolved.

Until I do see an official, contemporaneous record, I'm forced to believe that George and Nancy were never legally married because Lydia was alive and well and the mother of eight of George Delano's children, the youngest of which was probably still at her breast when Nancy put the gleam in George's eye in Virginia.

In short, I think Carter made up that business about George and Nancy marrying January 1, 1823 in Leonardtown, MD.

I think he made it up because he thought it would embarrass the family. He also left blank the date of Lydia's death; he knew it would stand out like a red flag in the record. In short, Carter was trying to cover Capt. George Delano's traces.

I never knew Carter. But I've heard stories about him. He kept his room so messy that relatives would scold their children by saying YOUR ROOM LOOKS JUST LIKE CARTER DELANOS. He was musical. His mother insisted he take music lessons from Mr. Kennedy. And when Carter grew up, he liked boys just as much as Mr. Kennedy had liked Carter. Carter liked to pat little boys. Carter was, by all accounts, homosexual.

Can you imagine anything much lonelier than to be a poor, intelligent, talented homosexual in Warsaw, Virginia in 1925? Yet Carter was accepted, even respected by most of his family. His genealogical expertise made him a welcome guest. He could talk for hours and hours while he happily ate. He could glory when his sixth cousin was elected four times to be president of the United States. To sully the Delano name was unthinkable. It would be unthinkable to smudge such a family reputation with the possibility of adultery, bigamy, or homosexuality.

See? By covering George's genealogical tracks, Carter was somehow covering his own.

I sure wish a record of a marriage of George and Nancy would turn up somewhere. In some library in Boston, or Chicago, or a little town in the Midwest. Maybe in your attic or in that old bundle of letters you know about. I hope all of you will go rushing to your nearest neighborhood archives in pursuit of this question.

I'd be glad to see the evidence that George divorced Lydia and married Nancy. It would blow everything I've just said out of the water, but at least I'd know what happened.

I've been wondering about it for a long time. Ten years ago I wrote Dorothy Wentworth in Duxbury. Mrs. Wentworth was the Duxbury Town Historian and author of a couple of fine books about Duxbury and the Alden family. We're all Aldens, too, you know. In fact, we've got at least nine Mayflower ancestors.

I wrote to Dorothy Wentworth and told her about George and his marriages and the dates and she wrote back and said,

"I would not label George's exodus as unsavory. unless he failed to provide for the Duxbury family. If he left Lydia in possession of a going farm with George Jr. old enough to run it to the advantage of all, he could not be considered to have left them destitute. In the days of no divorce, perhaps his departure was by agreement. Think kindly of your ancestors as long as you can. The Delanoes have few skeletons in their family closets."

Aren't you all relieved?

Well, Mrs. Wentworth was not the expert on SEX IN THE DELANO FAMILY that I am. I'm going to tell you another juicy story. Absolutely scandalous. Shocking. And it happened to William P. Delano, George and Nancy's fourth child, born 1831.

William, aged 23, married Virginia Pearson, a Northumberland County girl, in 1854. The marriage lasted six months. William had "discovered habits of too much intimacy" between his wife Virginia and one Richard Oldham. In fact, William was convinced that Nancy actually committed adultery with him.

In January 1855, Virginia went back to live with her mother, and eventually up the river to Alexandria. In 1856, when William sued for divorce, he charged that Virginia was "leading a life of prostitution and is the inmate of some house of ill-fame."

William further denied being the father of Virginia's child, born eleven months after she went to her mother's. William swore "he had no intercourse whatever with her... for some months prior to her departure." Her baby, William said, was Richard Oldham's.

Well, in those days, you had to prove adultery to be granted a divorce, so the court appointed a commission to look into it and they took depositions from various witnesses at Benedict Walker's store at Oldhams and later in Alexandria.

Polly Self, a young helper in the Delano house, said "Virginia was very fond of men and made a great deal of all men that came to the house more so than was becoming a married woman...I have seen a man in her room when she was in bed...I can't recollect who, they were there so much...she was not very particular...they were there at any time...night or day when Mr. Delano was away."

Polly went on to say, "One night Richard Oldham was there. He and Mrs. Delano were in one room and I was in the adjoining one. They had the windows blinded up and the door locked. Mr. Delano came home between 9 and 10 o'clock. When he knocked at one door, Oldham made his escape through the other."

The commissioners then went to Alexandria to take depositions of persons acquainted with Virginia there.

Elizabeth Ann Mothershead, with whom Virginia had lived in Alexandria, testified that Virginia had nearly driven to suicide. Mrs. Mothershead's house had the reputation of being a house of private assignation, another man testified.

Charles Neal testified that he knew Virginia, that at Mrs. Mothershead's house, he had "seen young men kiss her, play and romp with her. I have also kissed her myself." Virginia, he said, had said "she would never bind herself to one man in particular but would go with whom she pleased."

All of the witnesses agreed that Virginia's conduct was not that of a virtuous, married woman. Virginia declined the commission's invitation to give her side of the story.

The divorce was granted in 1857 and Virginia was ordered by the court never to marry again, which was a constitutional power of the Virginia courts in those days.

As scandalous as it reads today, one can only imagine the sensation this divorce created among the Delano family in the 1850s.

How did Carter handle all this scandal? He said that William and Virginia "separated soon after (their marriage), no children." Carter had to know about the court record of this divorce, but I believe his sense of duty to the family reputation prevented him from disclosing it.

As I think about all this, I wonder why William bothered with the divorce. It was an expensive legal proceeding. Virginia had left him and left the Northern Neck. William, too, was of a mind to leave the Northern Neck and head west.

My family intuition -- remnants of Nancy and George's chromosomes -- makes me think that something or somebody persuaded William to go to all that expense and embarrassment to get this divorce.

And who else but his mother Nancy would have known the full weight of the burden of the secret that William would have carried had he not divorced Virginia. Who else but Nancy could have persuaded him to go ahead, get the divorce, set the record straight, clean the slate, and start afresh.

I think the reason William got that divorce when he didn't really have to was because Nancy persuaded him that it was the right thing to do.

William remarried in 1858 in Leonardtown, Maryland. The record exists. He married the daughter of a prominent Methodist minister and they moved to Missouri for a fresh clean away from the shadow of scandal. They had 13 children. Virginia Pearson, incidentally, also remarried; after the Civil War she shows up in the Northumberland records as the wife of a man in Baltimore.

So what are we to make of all this?

First, I think our peek through the keyhole of the ancestral bedroom must remind us that hot, passionate blood flowed in the veins of our ancestors, just like us. They were real people whose lives, just like ours, were full of romance and sex and children.

The story isn't perfect. It leaves a lot of loose ends that make for fascinating research.

The story also reminds us that the loose ends, the gaps, the fabrications ultimately raise more questions than the facts they are designed to cover. It doesn't pay to be dishonest about the family record, or to be dishonest about your the record of your own life, either.

I find in all of this a strong message of acceptance and tolerance. As Mrs. Wentworth said, think kindly of your ancestors as long as you can. They were real people who made mistakes and dealt with them as best they could and went on with their lives. In many cases, we are the beneficiaries of their mistakes. We are the result.

And, isn't acceptance and tolerance what the notion of family is all about? We can accept our family history for what it is, just as we accept the members of our family for what they are. Sinners, saints, rich, poor, gay, and straight -- I'm glad that we have all those kinds of people in the Delano family. Even Republicans.

And, remember, too, that we all come from a long line of lovers. Cherish those memories and those moments. Keep on loving each other. Love, after all, is what made us who we are today.

Thank you very much.