Is it ever the right time to bring up your notable third cousin, seven times removed? Yawn. That darned ancestry.com!

With the current national climate, it seems a good time to tell these stories.

We just passed the 250th anniversary of the first and only bloodless armed resistance of the American Revolution. One you’ve likely never heard of: Leslie’s Retreat.

And my cousin was involved.

John Felt was a militia captain living north of Boston, in Salem. By way of connection — my beloved mother, Connie Jean Felt, was born generations (seven) after him, in another Salem, near the Missouri Ozarks. That’s a whole other story.

See, the king of England had sent 250 soldiers to remove cannons from the townspeople of North Salem, Mass. Like most across the state, the town was responding collectively to England’s crackdown after the infamous Tea Party. The Intolerable Acts revoked our self-governance and forced us to house British soldiers in our homes. Even Belchertown geared up by forming a militia and sending a man to Rhode Island to obtain gunpowder.

On Feb. 26, 1775, a Sunday no less, John Felt was among the Salem militia, merchants and their minister who gathered at the drawbridge, which they raised after the church sermon.

The Redcoats urged their leader, Lt. Col. Leslie, to fire on the crowd. At which moment, our beloved cousin appeared.

He was about 50 years old at the time, “tall, muscular and well-made.” Charles Endicott’s 1856 book, “Account of Leslie’s retreat at the North bridge in Salem,” secured the event’s place in history. Endicott called Felt the “hero of the British repulse.”

That’s because Felt shouted a threat “for all to hear”:

“If you do fire, you will all be dead men!”

(See last month’s Smithsonian magazine, “Was This Little-Known Standoff Between British Soldiers and Colonists the Real Start of the American Revolution?”)

You have to love what is passed down to posterity. Historicipswich.net says the dialogue went something like this:

Col Leslie: I am determined to pass over this bridge before I return to Boston. Even if I remain here until next autumn.

Cousin Felt: Nobody would care for that.

Leslie: By God, I will not be defeated.

Cousin (I imagine delivered with some mirth): You must acknowledge that you have been already baffled.

A discussion ensued. Words about who owned the bridge, the road, etc. The town negotiated. They listened to each other. They compromised — like I did as a kid growing up in middle America in the 1970s. Their foe would be able to save face.

The townspeople then lowered the drawbridge. Imagine — creaking wood, chains lengthening, the slam on the dirt road.

Then, Leslie’s gang crossed, went a little ways and did an about face to march toward their boat.

Wait. Another voice. Not cousin’s. A young nurse named Sarah Tarrant leaned out of an open window. We are all so human.

“Go home and tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand,” she yelled. “And broken the peace of our Sabbath.”

That didn’t go over well. A soldier pointed his musket.

“What?” she continued. “Do you think we were born in the woods to be frightened by owls?”

This sounds like something my mother would have said.

“Fire if you have the courage, but I doubt it.”

It was over after that. But only for a little while.

Seven and a half weeks later, April 19, at another bridge 25 miles to the west … the shot heard “round the world.” The Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The detail I most love is when the Redcoats’ band — fifes, drums, bugles and bagpipes — played their folk song as the soldiers marched into the distance. Defeat. And, of course, music!

You can’t make this stuff up. The tune was played again, at the surrender of Yorktown.

I was born in Kansas City and spent the early years of my career in Washington, D.C. So when I moved our young family here two decades ago, I liked to tell my new friends, and family back in the Midwest, that I had “New England roots.”

After all, a Felt grandfather fought at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. It was his son, the abolitionist Peter Felt, who brought the family West by wagon and steamboat. A few years ago, I took my father to see the home of our ancestor Ebenezer Fletcher, who wrote a memoir about being a 16-year-old fifer captured during the Revolution.

But I also told the rest of the story to those willing to listen, about moving to Massachusetts in late 2004. That I was here to obtain that coveted element of American civil life, an advanced liberal education.

And more important: that my wife, born in Dorchester, had beloved living relatives a short drive over in Rhode Island.

Michael Carolan lives in Dwight, a village of Belchertown, with his wife and cat. His children, raised in the area, live in Brooklyn, N.Y.