A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

DR
70
cuLTure
Today’s dabneys get a fresh look
at the family history
Fred Dabney leafs through the pages where line after line and chapter after chapter run
on in Portuguese. Although his ancestors spent eight decades in the Azores, the 65-year-old
American can’t make out the words, but he does recognize the most important word
on the cover: Dabney. Cradling the book as if it were a baby, he smiles and says,
“What a marvelous thing this book is! We hope it gets translated into english.”
By mArinA ALmeidA
Fred and Kate dabney holding the portuguese edition of the Dabney Family Annals. They are anxiously
awaiting publication of the english version, which is slated for launching in the us in 2012.
It’s March and Fred and his wife Kate are
in the Azores Room at the New Bedford
Whaling Museum at an event to launch the
Portuguese anthology of the Dabney Family
Annals. Dominating the room is an enormous
model of the Lagoda, the world’s
largest model of a whaling ship. All around
are accounts of life at sea and the whaling
industry, which for decades joined both
sides of the Atlantic. Showcases contain
objects that bear witness to the bonds that
connected America to Portugal in the past.
Fred is the distant nephew of Charles
William Dabney, the second of three consuls
who represented American interests in Faial
from 1806 to 1892. Neatly placed on the
showcases’ shelves are bits and pieces of
his family’s history and the history of the
Azores, a wave from the past that swept
across the Atlantic.
The anthology collected by this American
family was put out by Tinta da China publishers
with FLAD funding the research. This
latest edition is an abridged version of the
three-volume collection of documents compiled
by Roxana Dabney. The long-deceased
cousin of Fred’s set about putting together
the huge collection of sundry correspondence
in 1892 after the family had returned
to the US. By the time she was done, she
had 1,797 pages that filled three volumes.
Fred recognizes that it’s a lot of information
to digest, but he is more than willing to
reconnect with a past that time constraints
and the pressures of modern life have kept
at a distance. “We have a copy of the original
Annals at home,” he says “but I’ve had
a hard time persuading my daughters to
read it; there’s too much to read! It’s interesting
but hard to read. I’m really looking
forward to the abridged version,” he says,
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011