This year is the 400th anniversary of the landing
of the Mayflower in Plymouth, MA. For those of us who can trace our ancestral
lines back to that period, including the arrival of people in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony and other parts of New England over the ensuing 30 years or so, the
intervening 400 years gives a lot of time for the many branches of our family
tree to intertwine with the branches of other such individuals. Thus, finding connections
with others is quite common. But because of the 10+ generations of research that
is needed, trying to find a specific connection can involve a lot of work.
[Mayflower]
Over the past several years, I have been able to document
several of the connections in my immediate family. Some of them are via common
Mayflower connections, but others are in the New Haven Colony where many of my
early ancestors made their homes.
·
My wife and I are 10th cousins (*1)
as we share an ancestor (Rogers) who came on the Mayflower
·
My parents were 9th cousins (*2) as
they shared an ancestor (Beecher) who was one of the early settlers of New
Haven, CT
·
My mother’s parents were 7th cousins
(*3) as they shared an ancestor (Sperry) who was one of the early settlers of
New Haven, CT
·
My wife’s parents were 10th cousins,
once removed (*4), as they shared an ancestor (Fuller) who came on the Mayflower
The task of finding a connection when one or both of the
individuals is not from New England is a bit more complicated, as first one has
to find a connection back to New England and then begin looking for a common
ancestor there. Nonetheless, I did stumble across one such connection with our
daughter-in-law who was from Indiana as I noticed that her grandfather’s middle
name (which is often a family name) was the same as my great-grandmother’s
maiden name. Note that in proving this, I also had to disprove a family “legend”
about an adoption of an Indian maiden (*6).
·
My son and daughter-in-law are 8th
cousins, twice removed (*5), as they share an ancestor (Merrill) who was one of
the early settlers of New Haven, CT
However, there was one missing piece needed to complete this
set of connections. Was it possible to find a connection between our daughter
and son-in-law, Matthew? This was going to be more difficult as his family
lines are nearly all Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e. German) which are from eastern PA
where we now live. But I was determined to find one if it was there.
On Matthew’s mother’s side of the family, ALL the surnames
are German and represent individuals who came to PA in the early 1700s. Since
there are no German names in my or my wife’s family, there were no connections
to be found.
On his father’s side, I encountered a few individuals with
English surnames (Matthew’s paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Bradley),
but following them back, they were mostly from Virginia. So, no luck there
either. But as I continued my investigation, his grandmother had one distant
ancestor whose last name was Burr, and she was originally from eastern MA in
the early 1800s. Had I found the elusive connection?
The good news was that since I was now looking back from 1800
there were only 5-6 generations to be explored (or about 50 branches to expand).
So, this was a much small project than trying to explore 10-12 generations in
Matthew’s full ancestral tree.
On most of the branches I either ran into a brick wall, or I
did not find any family names that were in either my or my wife’s family tree.
However, I did find that one of Matthew’s great*11 grandfathers is John Alden,
so that gave him connections to the Mayflower – just not to any connections
that I or my wife has.
But as I continued tracing down Matthew’s other ancestral
lines, I finally found a connection to a family, Hayward, who came to the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Moreover, this family was already in my
family tree as an ancestor of my wife. This, I finally completed the last piece
of our family connections to each other.
·
Our daughter and son-in-law are 11th
cousins, twice removed, as they share a common ancestor (Hayward) in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
I normally wouldn’t both with this type of time-consuming
investigation. But with the “stay safe, stay at home” orders in Pennsylvania
now approaching two months, I have time on my hands that I wouldn’t under more
typical circumstances.
Notes:
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