Genealogy Story - Deep American Roots

I've been doing genealogy on our family tree for a couple of years now.  And there is always something new to discover.  The purpose of this blog post is not to try to recap all my findings - the information on that can be found in the trees that I maintain in ancestry.com.  Rather, I just want to focus on how long our family ancestors have been in this country (or in the colonies that preceded it).

If you go back about 10 generations, with two parents in one generation, four grandparents in the next generation, etc, you will have about 1000 ancestors in that last generation.  I've exploded our family tree quite a bit and I, like a great many US Americans, can trace my roots to one of the many people who came over on the Mayflower.  In fact, in doing that, I found that my wife and I are 10th cousins as we both have one of the same ancestors from among that small group of Pilgrims.  This blog is not about that, but simply about tracing family names.  I'm going to look at four family names: my father's (and mine), my mother's maiden name, my wife's father, and my wife's mother.  In each of these four cases, there is a long line of people stretching back to the early days of the settlers in this continent.

Russell - This was actually the family line that was the hardest to trace back, because I had to do a lot of original research.  There were no Russell's before me that had traced a lot of the family tree.  In particular, getting through the "1850 wall" was difficult (before 1850, the US census records only contained the name of the head of household with little tick marks for family members categorized by gender and age range).  But I was ultimately successful.  The original Russell in that family line came to the Boston area in 1640.  I have also traced his relatives back to the year 1230.

Pierpont (my mother's maiden name) - the Pierpont line has been well known for many years.  The name goes back to the year 980 in the area of Normandy, France.  They went to England in 1066 as part of the Norman conquest of England.  The first Pierpont came to this country in 1640, the same year as the first Russell.

VanDeCar (my wife's maiden name) - I had to do a lot of research on this line as well.  The name is Dutch and the first appearance in this country was sometime before 1650 in the area just south of what is now Albany, NY.  At the time this was part of the "New Netherland" settlement.  While this area only remained under Dutch control until the early 1670's when it was taken over by the British, the families who settled in this area, including the Van Der Karre family, remained.

Wright (my wife's mother's maiden name) - Because Wright was such a common name, I have not yet been able to complete my research.  I have traced it back to a man who was born in Connecticut in 1787, but I have not established the particulars of his parents.  So this is likely to be the most recent immigrant in the four family lines.  I'm not even sure at this point if it pre-dates the American Revolution as the other family lines do.

Russell is English, Pierpont was originally French but was English for nearly 600 years, VanDeCar was Dutch, and Wright was also English, so all our family lines have western European roots.  While I have not yet done any DNA research, I suspect it would have only small traces of anything else.