My Wife’s Family Tree

About a year ago I embarked on a project to try and take all the legs of my family tree back to their immigrant roots (*1). My ancestral lines are nearly all in New England (CT and MA) and I was able to document 1084 ancestors who were part of the Great Migration coming between 1620 and 1650. I had 78 ancestors who came to this country at other times or from other countries. And I hit 37 “brick walls” where I was not able to follow a particular line any farther.

With the enforced stay at home because of the Corona Virus, I thought this would be a good chance to see if I could make the same effort (many many hours over several days) and do the same with my wife’s family tree. I had done much of it a few years ago, so this was primarily an effort at going back the last few generations from where I had stopped.

Overall Results

My wife is from the upper part of Michigan (Charlevoix) just below the Mackinaw Bridge, and most of her immediate ancestors are from the same area. Let me give a quick summary before I get into the details. She has 504 great migration ancestors in her family tree (about half of the number in mine). In addition, I found 62 other immigrants and 67 brick walls.

The primary reason for the lower numbers is that there are a couple of lines in her family tree from fairly recent immigrations. Her maternal grandmother, Cassie Cincush, comes from a couple of immigrant families in the last part of the 1800s who came to the US from Germany/Prussia. That eliminates a full 25% of any chance of going back the dozen or so generations necessary to get back to the early 1600s. In addition, on her father’s side, she has a great-great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Swaney, whose family was from Ireland in the 1800s and a great-grandfather, William Duba, who is of French-Canadian stock. Those three individuals are the primary reason for the numbers being so much lower than mine.

On the other hand, her maternal grandfather, Frank Wright, even though he was from Michigan, was from a long line of English ancestors going back to the same places as my ancestors in CT and MA. His ancestral lines are the primary reason for much of the overlap in our family trees as I’ll detail below. Her father’s family name, VanDeCar, goes back to the Dutch settlements in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1600s. But that family married into many other families over the years – some of which are part of the extensive number of brick walls I have noted, but others of which are also from the same English stock from New England.

Interesting Findings

I had previously documented a connection that I found between my wife and I and how we were 10^th cousins (*2) through our descent from Thomas Rogers who came to this country on the Mayflower. But as I completed her family tree and carefully checking for any individuals who I already had in my ancestry tree, I kept finding additional common ancestors. In the end, I found a total of 37 common sets of grandparents between us. There were 14 at the 11^th cousin level, 15 at the 10^th cousin level, 7 at the 9^th cousin level, and one at the 8^th cousin level. How amazing that there is so much in common in our family trees – especially between a fellow from CT and his wife from MI.

I was also able to document the first instance of a marriage between first cousins in our family tree (actually first cousin once removed, as the fellow married the first cousin of his mother). I’d found a couple of second cousin marriages before, but this was the first one at that level of relationship. There are many states that now prohibit this type of marriage because of the possibility of genetic problems in any offspring, but such laws did not exist back in the 1700s.

Conclusions

Although doing this type of research is very time consuming, there is a great feeling of relief when you finally reach a stopping point. (Of course one is never really “done” as I’d still like to do some in-depth analysis of all the “brick walls” to see if I can eliminate some of them, and I’d like to see how much support I can get for all those Great Migration ancestors and when they arrived and on what ship.)

But finding so many connections between my wife and I has been nothing short of amazing. Just one more reason for me to love her so much!

Notes:

*1 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2019/04/great-migration-ancestors.html

*2 - https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2015/02/marrying-my-cousin.html