Disclaimer

From time-to-time I post things that list a number of individuals who are my distant cousins. Some recent examples are people from my church, classmates of mine from high school, etc. This may cause people to wonder – is there something so special about me that all these people are my cousins? The answer is “no”. Rather, it’s a combination of two things. First, I had the fortune of being born in New England (CT) into a family where both of my parents had long roots in New England. And second, I have spent many, many hours researching all lines of my ancestral tree back at least as far as when my ancestors came to this country.

All of my ancestors were immigrants to this country. And most of them came to this country during the Great Migration (GM), the period of time during which roughly 20,000 people came to New England from the British Isles (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales). This is usually noted as beginning in 1630 when the Winthrop Fleet sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ending when the scale of migration stopped in 1641 due to the English Civil War (see reference). But just as some scholars extend this earlier by 10 years so as to include the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth, I also have chosen to extend it by 10 years later through the 1640s to pick up the stragglers who got delayed by the unavailability of ships during that civil war.

If I trim my family tree so that all the branches end at an immigrant, here are some current statistics that demonstrate this:

·       1147 – GM ancestor (i.e., nearly 6% of the total number of people who came here in that period are my direct ancestors)

·       51 – Immigrants from British Isles but not until 1650 or later

·       4 – Immigrants from other places (one from Switzerland, one from the Netherlands, 2 Ashkenazi Jews from England (but Germany/Poland before that))

·       32 – Brick walls (truncated lines where immigrant roots not yet determined), I believe that all of these will also eventually be traceable back to the British Isles except one who is from the Netherlands

Because my ancestral lines are so overwhelmingly British, and because they are so broad within the GM individuals (and there were so many marriages between descendants of these individuals), if I can find in someone else’s family tree a line that goes back to colonial New England, I can be nearly certain that I will be able to find a “cousin connection”.

The 300+ years from the birth of those who participated in the GM until my birth in 1948 is about enough time for 11(+/-) generations, so they tend to be my great*8 grandparents to my great*10 grandparents. This means that individuals who are about my age would be somewhere between my 9^th to 11^th cousins. If the person is born in an earlier generation, then the “removed” would note the difference in generations, e.g., someone in my great-grandparent’s generation could be my 8^th cousin, 3x removed as his/her great*7 grandparent would be the same person as my great*10 grandparent.

There are also times when I’m doing my research that I find a surname that also occurs in my family tree that is from the same part of England. In those cases, I will follow back my ancestral line a few generations to see if the intersection with someone else’s ancestral line is back in England before 1630. In those cases, my connection to the other person might be as something like a 13^th cousin (or its equivalent with a few “removed”s added in).

Thus, while it’s fun to find genealogical connections to people, for me it’s not all that rare.