“You don’t have to have a big, fancy family tree, just some really nice stories,” Becky Baxter Clark of Deerfield recently told me. “Those are the ones that the kids remember.”

Becky herself has a lot of family stories. She recently shared some of them with me while talking about a Christmas Eve tradition in her family, her great-aunt Betty Baxter’s scalloped oysters.

Much of Becky’s family is from the community of West Dennis on Cape Cod. One story that she recalls hearing frequently from Betty Baxter involves the fate of Betty’s grandfather (Becky’s great-grandfather), George H. Baxter, who lived in West Dennis.

He was a merchant sea captain. In 1877 he took his bride Rebecca on the maiden voyage of his new ship, the Allie Burnham. They had an extended trip, visiting England and Argentina among other places.

Becky has a large set of China (including a lovely platter) that belonged to her great-grandmother, which Becky uses each Christmas. She thinks the dishes may have been purchased on that honeymoon trip.

In 1886, George Baxter and the entire crew of the Allie Burnham were on their way back from China and stopped in the Caribbean to load up on spices. Sadly, on the final leg of their journey, from Cuba to Philadelphia, they were lost in the Sargasso Sea. The Bermuda Triangle had claimed them.

“Betty told me her grandmother thought there was a whirlpool in the Sargasso Sea, and they got lost in it,” Becky recalled. “[The family] had been waiting for him, and he never showed.” The captain was 42 when he died.

She quoted from a Philadelphia newspaper’s article about the loss of the ship and its captain: “Captain Baxter was a promising young man. Great possibilities. And the sorrow for whose untimely fate is a shadow that must long abide.”

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Becky doesn’t have a lot of additional information about the great-grandmother after whom she was named. One detail she does know struck home with her. According to family lore, Rebecca was quite tall. When she gardened, she bent at the waist to tend to plants instead of kneeling.

“I realized that’s what I do,” Becky said.

Another family story involved her great-aunt Esther Crowell, who was married to another sea captain, Luther Crowell. While the two were traveling with their family on his ship in the late 1800s, Luther became ill and died.

The crew members wanted to wrap his body and bury him at sea. They believed having a dead body on board was unlucky.

Esther, who was extremely strong-minded, had other ideas. She somehow managed to preserve his body (Becky used the word brining!) and put it in a box so it could go home to be buried.

“The crew was not on board with this, literally,” explained Becky. “They had to lock Esther and her kids in the captain’s stateroom to protect them.”

Esther remained strong-minded until the day she died … and beyond, according to Becky. In the 1980s, Luther and Esther’s stately home on the Cape was being turned into condos.

Becky’s father visited the house to see it one last time. He was told by the workmen there, “We hear noises, and we see a little lady, small in stature.”

“Dad said, ‘Oh, that’s Aunt Esther,’” laughed Becky. “She did not like her house being turned into condos. She sounds like she was a real fireball!”

Returning to the story of her lost great-grandfather, George Baxter, Becky told me that coincidentally she had read in an old newspaper article that another seafaring great-grandfather, Capt. Samuel Thacher, was the last surviving person to talk to George Baxter.

The two chatted in the Virgin Islands before George and the Allie Burnham sailed off toward their fate.

“And 20 years later, Samuel’s daughter married George’s son,” Becky informed me.

For many years, Becky’s family recalled their seafaring past on Christmas Eve when Aunt Betty made her scalloped oysters. These days, Becky admitted, the family tends to eat Chinese food that evening.

Nevertheless, she hopes to make the dish again soon, perhaps with oysters raised by her niece Julia and nephew-in-law Ryan, who run Signature Oyster Farm in Katama Bay on Martha’s Vineyard.

Becky is proud to have family members who do this work.

“They purify the bay because the oysters purify the water. It’s a good way for everybody to take care of the water,” she observed.

Although she is happy in Deerfield, she is pleased that she has relatives who continue to live and work near the sea.

“When I go to the Cape, the ocean, I know there’s salt water still in my veins. I just can feel it, that affinity,” she said with a smile.

Here is Betty Baxter’s oyster recipe, from a recipe card cherished by Becky Baxter Clark. Having made the oysters myself, I recommend using cream, not milk or evaporated milk — and definitely using butter rather than margarine. This is a special holiday recipe that deserves the finest ingredients.

Ingredients:

1½ cups cracker crumbs (saltines)

½ cup melted butter or margarine

1 pint oysters with their liquor

2 tablespoons evaporated milk or milk or cream

Pepper to taste (Betty notes that you don’t need to add salt; the crackers have enough of that.)

Instructions:

Mix the cracker crumbs and the butter together. In a shallow dish (Betty used a rectangular dish; I prefer a round one) place a thin layer of the buttered crumbs. Cover with half of the oysters, half of their liquor and half of the cream. Grind a little pepper over the top.

Repeat this process and finish the dish with a final layer of buttered cracker crumbs. “Never make more than two layers of oysters as they won’t cook properly,” wrote Betty.

She added, “Sometimes I add more melted butter over [the top] and sprinkle with paprika for color.”

Bake at 450 degrees (425 if your oven is temperamental) until the dish is brown and bubbly, about 20 to 30 minutes.

Serves four.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.