When Did Your Family Arrive in America, Brookline?

By Kathy Bisbee, Founder, Public VR Lab and Executive Director at Brookline Interactive Group

When my family arrived in America, there were no laws that made them legal or illegal, documented or undocumented. They came for religious freedom, for economic opportunities, and to build a new life. British and Irish on my paternal side (Bisbee/Howland), some members arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower, others came in 1634 on the Hercules, and settled in the Plymouth Colony before settling in western Maine by buckboard around the time of the American Revolution.

[photo: The Bisbee’s century-old family farm in Sumner, Maine in the 1920’s.]

My mother’s maternal family (Flager) arrived much later in 1870s from the disputed French-German border, while her paternal side (Hart) arrived in New Amsterdam early on and as a civil servant fought for religious freedom in what is now Queens, NYC. My five times great grandfather, John Hart, of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and hosted George Washington’s troops during the Revolutionary War. His descendant, my grandfather, Sheffey Bayard Hart, struck out Babe Ruth in Richmond, VA in 1934.

(Admittedly, that last fact has absolutely nothing to do with ancestry but according to family pride must be shared, especially in a baseball town like Boston!)

I am not alone in sharing these kinds of family immigration stories. Every family has them - significant adventures, scrapes with fame, small but impactful moments that defined their Americanism, the stories of how, where and why their descendents ended up today. Some of these stories are yet-to-be-explored, others well known and passed down from one generation to the next. Ask your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, your parents, and you will hear stories about how your family arrived on the shores of our great nation. Native American families and communities have migration to the continent stories, and pass them down from one generation to the next.

Somehow immigration has recently (once again) become politicized and new lines are being drawn. This isn’t new. Throughout our history, we’ve passed partisan laws, made exceptions for famous and wealthy immigrants, and passed racist and classist public policies that intentionally kept out new immigrants, often determined by the color of their skin, by their country of origin, by their wealth or lack thereof, or by their vocation.

Perhaps we forget that we have a shared history as Americans - all coming from an another land, a different culture, speaking different languages, and coming here seeking a new life, freedom, and economic opportunities offered here in the United States of America. All Americans are immigrants and migrants.

With that in mind, our community media arts center in Brookline invites you to participate in our community storytelling project. Brookline and greater Boston residents - come share your or your family’s immigration or migration story.

We’ll guide you through sharing your story on camera, have you bring in some photographs if you have them, and edit your story to a succinct piece. You can share these with your family and friends, via our community cable channels, and online. We’ll also include them in our national Arrival VR project, the first immersive VR (virtual reality) experience exploring the diversity of the American diaspora.

You can sign up here to share your stories at our next session on September 13th, 2018, and/or read more about the project here.

As part of our national project, local stories will be collected from Boston’s immigrant families who arrived from 1620 to present-day America, and migration stories prior to 1620. At Boston’s Hubweek this October, we’ll launch the first phase of the project and will offer residents another opportunity to share their stories right there at Hubweek in our mobile mini-studio.

This project aims to encourage family storytelling, curiosity about Brookline and Boston immigrant stories and history, and to engage participants in sharing their own immigration stories with the community at large.

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About Arrival VR
Led by Brookline Interactive Group, and its project the Public VR Lab, Arrival VR is a nationwide collaborative curating immigration stories of Americans from pre-1620 through 2018 in a visual XR timeline. The project has fifteen partners across the United States, and will be shared online, in virtual reality, at film festivals and at arts and cultural organizations nationwide with a curriculum for engaging community dialogue about immigration. The project ponders a shared experience and visual timeline of the commonalities and complexities of American immigration throughout history using XR as a platform for a field-building strategy for emerging media.

About Kathy Bisbee
Kathy Bisbee is the executive director of Brookline Interactive Group (BIG), a community media arts center in Brookline, MA, and the co-founder/director of the Public VR Lab, where she and her team are building an empowered Community XR/VR movement that values accessibility, digital inclusion, and diversity in the XR field.

Kathy is an award-winning, multidisciplinary storyteller, producing documentary content in the U.S. and Latin America, creating VR content for the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), and partnering with the STAT news team at the Boston Globe. She joined the MIT Open Documentary Lab as a fellow recently to focus on her artistic vision on building a field for emerging, civic and public media through projects like Arrival VR, a national collaborative XR project examining the American diaspora through migration and immigration.

About the Public VR Lab
The Public VR Lab is growing a field for Community XR that promotes accessibility, digital inclusion, and diversity. The Lab is disrupting traditional media communications in community-based civic media, journalism and arts, cultural and educational organizations by providing XR Toolkits, equipment, training, cohorts, artists residencies, fellowships and content in the public interest. The Lab is a project of Brookline Interactive Group, a next generation public access community media arts center. www.publicvrlab.com