In search of the most primordial source of the ol' Cavilrest ancestral rage, I have been dabbling in genealogy. Dear Reader, there are a lot of ways to spell Cavilrest!
You might think it strange that a person, who earns his living patiently and carefully reading clients' documents all out of context on a screen in a document review sweatshop surrounded all day by babbling and braying jackasses and occasionally given instruction or secondhand-mania (or some combination) by crazy people, would kick back at night and unwind by patiently and carefully reading [some archiving or archived institution]'s documents more or less out of context on a screen in his home, and find it relaxing and rewarding. And you'd probably be right; I cannot explain it, although it is quiet, here.
The genealogy of the Cavilrests and Shorbeddes has been a passing interest of mine for some time, and I have dabbled before, though tending to avoid the commercial genealogy emporia and also avoiding the fantastic and fantastically-accessible research and resources of the Church of the Latter Day Saints so as at least to not be complicit in giving up everything I know about my family to the end-times soul-colonization program.
Nowadays, though, in light of the massive collections of all transmitted information by certain intelligence organizations (themselves well populated with LDS adherents, who, as a class are just right for responsible top secret positions, for their well known clean living, worldliness, and respect for authority), which will be subjected to various automated and personalized interrogations, perhaps minimized, and then stored in a mammoth facility in Utah (not to mention Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all the rest of the big-data collection and collation points) for whoever gains access to use to whatever ends they choose, continuing to not take advantage of the LDS genealogy resources would be just like that proverb about the door of that barn from which the horses have already departed.
I have found a lot of stuff - the richest and most consistent vein, so far, being the Quebec Catholic Parish Registers where Cavilrest is spelled sixty-seven different ways, cross-referenced with this map of the parishes - but have not gotten to the root of the ancestral rage. It stands to reason that those who packed up and left their wherever-they-were-from and sailed two or three months blindly across the north Atlantic, took the land they found on the other side by force and trickery from the people who inhabited it, cleared the forests and then farmed for subsistence for generations north of the forty-fifth parallel, likely started out with some rage to have undertaken such arduous trials in the first place. But I bet the not-really-subsistence farming didn't help, nor the fact that, however far away one may go, before long other people are going to show up there and subject one to their opinions.
My efforts have not attained the initial immigrant generations of the northern farming folk, though patient reading of the indices and registers of the Parishes has made some great strides toward definitive linkages with some of the already-established family genealogies of the region. Some of the Shorbedde progenitors can be found in the Ellis Island rolls, perhaps fleeing the poverty of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century - and just in time! (Their parish records - those I've found, in the old country - are in Latin). Other Shorbeddes can be linked to the lines published in a nineteenth-century (and now public-domain) genealogy of the Shorbedde line all the way back to George PraiseYeGod Shorbedde the first, himself. Yes, of the Braintree Shorbeddes.
Records within the United States, and among non-Catholics, seem to be far more haphazard than for Catholics in Quebec, or else sequestered behind that organization's damn paywall. Same result. So, to a significant degree, the QC parish record research is the low hanging fruit among the vast bulk of other not-yet-discovered ancestors.
Anyway, that's my status update. Carry on.