THE TOTAL POINTLESSNESS OF GENEALOGY

How far back does your family tree go? Usually people with an English ancestry, with a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, can get back to around the 1600s, or late 1500s. This was when the parishes started recording baptisms, burials, marriages and the like. However if one of your ancestors was nobility you can often go back much further. If you were a noble it was because you were born one. It was in your blood it was your pedigree. Your privileges depended on a well recorded line of descent. Each aristocratic family had one. It was vitally important for them that they had a record of this.

If you are lucky enough to find someone of noble birth lurking somewhere in your family tree you can often find a recorded trail of descent that goes back 1000 years. There were books of pedigrees that were published such as Burkes Peerage in the UK or the Almanach De Gotha in continental Europe that can be a great source of information about this.

Almanach De Gotha

My Great Great Grandmother was Caroline Davenport (1846-1921) who was born, and died in Davenport, New York. The town she lived in was thought to have been named after Thomas Davenport (1615-1685) who was Caroline’s Great Great Great Great Grandfather. Thomas Davenport arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1635. Thomas was born in 1618 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England. His grandfather was William V Davenport (1561-1640) Lord of Bramall Hall. The Davenports lived in Bramall Hall for 500 years. They have a well-documented pedigree that goes back to Orme de Davenport who was thought to have been born in Normandy in 1086.

BRAMALL HALL

All people named Davenport in the English speaking world all go back to Orme who was part of the Norman conquest of England and was thought to be a cousin of William the Conqueror. The Davenport family owned numerous manor houses in the Cheshire area.

 

 DAVENPORT COAT OF ARMS

You might feel disappointed that you don’t have an ancestor that you know of who lived as far back as Orme de Davenport but you shouldn’t. Because if you have English ancestry I can tell you with absolute certainty that he is your ancestor too. Yes, Orme de Davenport is your ancestor as well as he is mine. In fact it’s been estimated that 86% of the people who lived in England at the time of the Norman Conquests in 1066 are your ancestors if you have English ancestry. The 14% who aren’t are people who didn’t have children.

In fact just about everyone who lived in England in 1066 (1.11 million people) are ancestors to all current residents of England. For anyone with an English ancestry that means you.

He's one of your ancestors

Not only is Orme de Davenport your ancestor once he is your ancestor multiple times. If you read my last blog post you will know that if you go back 30 generations you have a trillion ancestors, which is more people than have ever lived, so ancestors will appear in your tree multiple times. We are all cousins with each other many times over.

A page from the Domesday Book c1086

86% of the people in this book are your ancestors

 

Does this sound incredible? It did to me but this is a mathematical certainty. I’ll tell you why.

If a family tree was binary, that is the number of ancestors doubles every generation you go back, then when you go back 30 generations you would have 1,073,741,824 ancestors, which is impossible. Because cousins marry that number is much less. So how much less? If we were all Egyptian pharaohs and we married our sisters, as they did, after 30 generation going backwards we would have two ancestors. If every generation going back first cousins married then after 30 generations we would have 60 ancestors. We know that both of these scenarios are impossible. If every generation going back were 2^nd cousins marrying then 30 generations back we would have 4,356,616 ancestors. That is still more ancestors than there were people in England back then. For 3^rd and 4^th cousins there is a smaller increase than the 2^nd cousins marrying scenario, but still much too many.

The only way that you will find enough ancestors to fill every spot in your family tree is if everyone who lived back then was your ancestor. That's right everyone. For people with an English ancestry the point at which this happens is around the 1300s. If you have partial English ancestry you might just have to go back a little further, but not much further.

A disagreement between a group of your ancestors

aka The Battle of Hastings 1066

You might ask things like what if my ancestors only stayed in a little village for generations isolated from everyone else. I know from my family tree that this did happen but not for a thousand years and no village is totally isolated from every other village anyway. There were often sudden mass movements of people as well for various reasons.

Looking at it this way genealogy really is a pointless occupation. If you are looking to see if you have an ancestor like Orme de Davenport you don’t really have to. He is your ancestor. Everyone who lived back then was your ancestor. There is no need to find a line of descent at all. I’m personally going to cancel my subscription to Ancestry.com immediately. What’s the point? Why do I write this blog at all. I could be watching re runs of ‘I Love Lucy’.

Lucille Désirée Ball (1911-1989)

no relation

For European family trees you will never get much further than the 1000s. No one has yet gotten past the European ‘Dark Ages’ but there is a family tree that does go back further. It goes back to 1675 BC. This is a family tree that is still actively being worked on and living descendants added to. It is none other than the family tree of Kong Qiu 孔丘who is known to us in the west as Confucius.

 

If you are interested in pointlessness this one the most pointless of them all. The Confucius family tree has about 2 million known and registered descendants and goes back 77 generations to reach Confucius (551-479 BC). It starts way before Confucius with an ancestor who lived in 1675 BC named Zhao Ming. This ancestor lived before the Romans and the Ancient Greeks. He lived in the Bronze Age. There are people alive today who can trace an ancestry back to him.

Confucius (551- 479BC)

The Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee meets regularly to update this tree which records male ancestors only. To make it really pointless, in 2007, the Committee decided that women should be included too. This is pointless not because women don’t deserve to be included but because if you include them then it will inevitably include every living Chinese person. It’s a mathematical certainty. How pointless is that?

KISSING COUSINS

 

No cousin is an Island, intire of itselfe; every cousin is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy cousins or of thine owne were; any cousins death diminishes me, because I am involved in Cousinkinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thy cousin.                            

 (by William Donne , John’s cousin)

All of us have two parents. They in turn also have two parents. Our grandparents have two parents as our great grandparents did before them. If we look at our family trees   going back in time we have 4 grandparents we have 8 great grandparents we have 16 great great grandparents, 32 great great great grandparents etc. When we go back 40 or 50 generations we have, roughly, one trillion ancestors…… But how is this possible? That is more people than have ever lived. Where do we find the trillion ancestors we need to fill the spots in our family tree? This can only be done if they are filled by family members who are already in our tree. This can only happen through cousin marriage.

Cousins have been marrying each other for ever. In fact if you go far back enough we are all cousins so it’s impossible to avoid marrying a cousin even if you wanted to. My parents both share a Mayflower ancestor. They are 9^th cousins once removed. They might also be 12^th cousins, 7^th cousins twice removed and 20^th cousins 5 times removed as well only these connections just haven’t been made. This is true for all of us. We are all cousins with each other many times over.

Because of cousin marriage family trees are not really like trees at all. If our family tree was a living tree it would be a confused mess. Some leaves would have two branches. Branches would connect then disconnect again. It wouldn’t be structurally sound. It would collapse immediately. The term ‘Pedigree collapse’, coined by Robert C. Gunderson has been used to describe this phenomenon. Family trees are more accurately described as Directed Acyclic Graphs or DAGs. It’s a diagram that goes in one direction, parents have children, and as you cannot be your own ancestor, it is not a cycle, it is acyclic. You will find your family tree, like mine, is full of DAGs.

It’s been theorised that every human being is at most 50^th cousin distant from everyone else. We are all incredibly inbred. There is no way we can marry anyone who is not already a family member. You might ask, Is this a problem? At what point is this incestuous? At what point do our offspring start growing pointy heads and extra fingers? How close a cousin can we marry?

Adeline Lovina Webster (1872-1957)

 

George A Hinckley (1862-1947) was my grandfather’s uncle. He married Julia Goodrich in 1887 who died shortly after while giving birth to their first child Mabel in 1888 Two years later in 1890 he married Adeline Lovina Webster (1872-1957) who was his mother’s brother’s daughter, she was his first cousin. It was not illegal to marry your first cousin in Vermont at that time. However if they had lived in nearby New Hampshire it would have been. So why is it illegal in some places but not others?

We in Western countries have no problem with second cousins getting married but we generally are averse to first cousin marriage.  This comes from thinkers of the late 1800s who thought that that first cousin marriage was, “a remnant of a more primitive stage of human social organization”, and non consanguine (cousin) marriage would "increase the vigor of the stock". Dr Samuel Merrifield Bemiss of the American Medical Association wrote in an influential report in the late 1800s "that multiplication of the same blood by in-and-in marrying does incontestably lead in the aggregate to the physical and mental depravation of the offspring".

Cousin Marriage banned in 'red' states

Modern statistics show that first cousin marriages do increase birth defects but only by a tiny 1.7% to 2.8%. They had no accurate statistics of this in the 1800s.

The ideas circulating in the 1800s were taken much more seriously in the US than they ever were in Europe. This probably had more to do with the fact that many European royal families were the result of cousin marriages while in the US it was seen as a problem of the uneducated masses. In 2010 there were 30 US states that still banned most or all marriage between first cousins. While in Europe there were only ever three countries that at one time had a ban and there are none now. It has never been banned in England or Australia.

Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma

Attitudes vary throughout the world and laws are continuously changing on cousin marriage. In the Middle East it has always been common practice to marry your first cousin. The Ancient Roman’s banned it then unbanned it and then banned it again. Hinduism bans cousin marriage within the first 6 degrees if the cousins have the same surname (agnatic kinship). It is illegal now in China but hasn’t always been. Some indigenous cultures make a distinction between marriage with first cousins from your father’s siblings and your mother’s siblings (parallel and cross cousins) one being permitted and the other not. Attitudes vary throughout the world.

Table of Consanguinity c.1300

So how did you know who you could marry? The European nobility would look at a Table of Consanguinity. This would identify the degree of cousin relationship between two people using their most recent common ancestor as a reference point. However, if you were a European commoner, your guidance about who to marry came from a Table of Kindred and Affinity that had exactly the same information as a Table of Consanguinity only it was telling you who you couldn’t marry instead of who you could.

Table of Kindred and Affinity (partial)

My grandfather’s aunt Adeline Lovina Webster was born in Plymouth, Vermont which is next to Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Plymouth Notch’s most famous son was none other than Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) who was the 30^th president of the United States, a man famous for his laconic New England wit and belief in ‘small government’. His birthplace has been preserved as an historic museum.

Plymouth Vermont

 

President Coolidge was not a talker. There is a story that a woman sitting next to the president at a White House function told him that someone had made a bet with her that she couldn’t get him to speak three words or more. She told the president that she thought she could and had accepted the wager. Calvin’s response was ‘You lose.’

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

Interestingly Adeline Lovina Webster’s mother was Lucy Jane Coolidge who was also born in Plymouth Vermont. Lucy was Calvin’s 4^th cousin. So Calvin Coolidge was the 4^th cousin of my 1^st Great Great Aunt. He is in my family tree. But does it really matter. If you look into your own family tree you will find him there too. He is your cousin as much as he is mine. After all we are all cousins. Aren’t we?

 

 

   A 'selfie' by a distant cousin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HUGUENOT ASTRONAUTS

The Protestant Reformation gave Europeans tough choices. The decision was whether to follow the doctrine of the established church or not. If not, you risked being charged with heresy. If you followed the wrong doctrine then there was God to answer to. It was a choice between your King and your immortal soul, a choice between being executed as a heretic in this life or an eternity in the fires of Hell in the next.

It’s been estimated that around 30% of people with British ancestry have at least one Huguenot hiding in their family tree. This is true for many Australians. People are often not aware of this because Huguenot surnames were often anglicised. Your own surname could be an anglicised French name and you might not realise it.

Warren Buffett is of Huguenot descent

(he pronounces his name buffet at home)

 

Although the Huguenot exodus was well over by 1788 when the first fleet arrived, there were many settlers that came to Australia with Huguenot ancestry.  Jacob Bellet, a Huguenot silk weaver, was on the First Fleet, there was a Capt Edward Riou in charge of HMS Guardian in the Second Fleet, the wife of Lt Governor Sir John Franklin of Tasmania was the daughter of Huguenots.  Cazneaux, La Trobe, Chauvel, Cazaly the list of famous Australians with Huguenot names is a long one.

 

For most people the search for a Huguenot ancestor can be quite hard. You might have to look at a list of anglicised Huguenot names or look for an ancestor with a Huguenot occupation. It can be a long and involved search. There are many Societies devoted to this that can help you. In Australia there is an Australian Huguenot Society.   http://www.huguenotsaustralia.org.au/

The origins of the word 'Huguenot' have been lost but it was thought to have originally been a derogatory term used to describe French Protestants. Although they were a small percentage of the French population they were influential. At one time it was estimated that half the French nobility were Huguenot. King Louis XIV saw this as a big problem. In 1681 he billeted soldiers in the homes of Huguenots to force them to convert to Catholicism. The ‘Dragonnades’ terrorised and abused their host families. A satirical French cartoon of the time called them ‘Nouveau Missionaires’

New Missionaries

There is a great website on the history of the Huguenots. It is called the Musee virtuel de protestantisme. The English translations can be a bit funny but it’s still well worth a look.

http://www.museeprotestant.org/?Lget=EN

Huguenots had already been leaving France for many years but in 1685 King Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau. Protestant clergy were banished, their Churches were to be destroyed, the laity were to be forcibly converted to Catholicism and they were forbidden from leaving the country. To Louis surprise 200,000 Huguenot laity left the country anyway. They dispersed to all points of the world. 50,000 went to England, 10,000 to Ireland they went everywhere. The French word refugee entered the English language at this time. 

Huguenot Cross

This was a disaster for France as Huguenots tended to be skilled and very well educated. They had occupations like silk weavers, clock makers, silver smiths, furniture makers and workers in the textile industries. Some were professional men such as doctors. This caused a huge le exode des cerveaux (brain drain) which damaged France’s economy for many years. In today’s terms it would be like if Star Trek was banned and all the IT guys decided to leave the country. A very serious problem.

Finding a Huguenot ancestry in my own family tree was easy. This is not typical. My grandmother’s mother was Harriet La Grange (1878-1965) who was born and lived in upstate New York near Albany. We have always known that her surname was of Huguenot origin. All the Albany La Granges were thought to have descended from an Omie De La Grange (c.1624-1731) who probably arrived in the area in 1656.

Harriet La Grange (1878-1965)

There was a La Grange who arrived in America even earlier than Omie La Grange. His name was Captain François Léger de La Grange and he arrived in Florida in 1564. I have not found evidence that he is in my family tree yet but he is part of an interesting Huguenot story.

In 1562 the French Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519-72) decided to found a colony in the New World. France was eager to establish a presence there and Gaspard wanted to find a safe haven for his fellow Huguenots. He must have foreseen trouble brewing for French Protestants as shortly after this decision the French Wars of Religion began. An American colony would be good for France and good for Huguenots too.

French Florida

Gaspard enlisted his close subordinate Captain Jean Ribault (1520–1565) to lead this expedition. In 1562 Ribault, with three ships and 150 Huguenot colonists, sailed across the Atlantic and established a new colony on Parris Island in present day South Carolina he called this colony Charlesfort. Two years later another expedition led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière (c. 1529–1574) sailed over and founded the French colony of Fort Caroline near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. The Charlesfort settlers decided to bail out after a year but the Fort Caroline colonists stayed on.

Fort Caroline

The Spanish were none too happy about having the French moving into their territory. It wasn’t that they were French so much as they were Protestants. They quickly established a colony they named St Augustine in September 1565 located about 60 Km south of Fort Caroline. Ribault hearing of this sent his ships over to force the Spanish out but a storm hit him just when he was ready to attack. He was forced back and most of his ships were wrecked off Cape Canaveral. Most of the crewmen of Ribault's ships managed to scramble ashore. Captain de La Grange was one of the survivors.

The Spanish, lead by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, marched overland to Fort Caroline and massacred everyone there except the women and children. Menendez then hunted down Captain Ribault, Captain La Grange and his surviving crewmen.  After they surrendered he massacred them too. A sign was supposedly left at Fort Caroline that said ‘They were not massacred because they were French but because they were Heretics.”

 Jean Ribault (1520-1565)

The French were shocked and offended by this event. I can imagine King Louis XIV when hearing of this saying something like: “Those Spanish pigs! (pronounced peeegs) How dare they massacre our heretics! We are Frenchmen! We can massacre them ourselves!”

Gallic pride was restored in 1568 when Captain Dominique de Gourgues arrived at the now Spanish occupied Fort Caroline, then renamed San Matteo, and massacred every Spaniard there. Touché.

 

William Benjamin "Bill" Lenoir (1939 – 2010)

An astronaut with Huguenot ancestry.

DO YOU HAVE MORMON ANCESTORS?

'Lion of the Lord' Brigham Young (1801-1877)

 

A few months ago (Feb 2014) there was a press release that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be given free subscriptions to the Ancestry.com, FindMyPast and the MyHeritage websites in the near future. This is the result of a deal where these commercial websites will be able to use LDS Church’s records on their sites. Mormons will get free access to them from home.
 

I hear people often ask: do the Mormons own Ancestry.com? The answer is no. It was originally started by two students of Brigham Young University in 1984. It currently has its headquarters is in Provo, Utah, a city with a 98% Mormon population which is home to the Mormon Missionary Training Centre, Brigham Young University and the Osmond brothers. But it is, after a few changes of ownership, now a publicly listed NASDAQ company owned by a number of companies and equity firms. None of which are specifically Mormon. The Mormons do own FamilySearch.org which is a free non-profit website.

 

I thought I would do some research to see if I had any Mormon ancestors. Not knowing how to approach this I thought my ancestors from Utah would be a good place to start. Abigail Armstrong Lees was born in Ogden, Utah in 1857. She was my Great Great Grandmother. Her parents emigrated from Britain in the 1850’s. When they arrived they decided to head westward, to what was one of the frontiers of settlement back then. They ended up in Ogden, Utah not far from Salt Lake City. Her father Samuel was a locksmith.

                                                           Abigail Armstrong Lees (1857-1894)

Abigail married Pierre McDonald Bleecker in 1881 in Ogden. He was an Episcopalian (Anglican) minister and had come to Utah as a missionary from Scarsdale, New York. I assume he was there to convert ‘Indians’ not Mormons. Abigail’s sister Fannie also married an Episcopalian minister named William F Bulkley. A friend of Pierre’s no doubt. Another sister, Lucy, married Pierre’s brother Charles. Most of the other Lees siblings never married or had few children. Abigail and Rev Pierre after 6 years moved back east to New Jersey. He preferred the weather over there. In 1894 Abigail died while in childbirth having only one surviving child, my Great Grandmother.

 

None of the Lees family seemed to be Mormons then. But I should ask are they Mormons now? The reason that Mormons have always had such an interest in collecting and preserving genealogical records is because they believe they can convert their ancestors to Mormonism. This they do through a process called Baptism for the Dead.

The prophet Joseph Smith in August 1840 first introduced this practice in a funeral sermon for one of his followers quoting Corinthians 15:29 "Else what shall they do which are baptised for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptised for the dead?" This is the only biblical passage that says this and there has been a lot of debate as to what St Paul meant by it. Nevertheless it is thought that this was a practice of some persecuted early Christian groups who were afraid they, or their family members, might be killed before they were baptised. The Mormons, at the time Joseph Smith jr, made this Church doctrine were also being severely persecuted and must have had similar fears.

Joseph Smith jr (1805-1844)

Founder of The Church of the Latter Day Saints

I was really looking in the wrong place to see if I have any Mormon ancestors. I thought about it and remembered once meeting a distant relative (5^th cousin) of mine who was a Mormon. This was in the 1980s. If he was baptising his ancestors then he was baptising a lot of mine as well! If I had other living cousins who were Mormon then a lot more of my ancestors are Mormons. I then realized that all of my ancestors could be Mormons and I would have no idea of it.

I looked at the Mormon website, Alonzo A Hinckley was an Apostle of the LDS Church. Most of the Hinckley's in the US come from Samuel Hinckley (1589-1662) a Massachusetts puritan. It's also my mother's maiden name. He is a distant cousin of mine, no doubt.

Alonzo A Hinckley (1870-1936) Twelfth Apostle of the LDS Church

I wonder how this all works?  if you were a Mormon who was really bad at genealogy would you end up baptizing other people’s ancestors? I often see on Ancestry.com a lot of bodgie family trees that people have uploaded.  They are the ones with 150 year old ancestors or ancestors getting married when they were 9 years old etc etc. Is this a problem? Also if you only had fragmentary information about an ancestor eg all you knew was that her name was Mary or his first initial was J is that enough for a baptism? If you have no information about an ancestor you know they must have had a mother and a father. Can you baptise them? If you did accidently baptise someone else’s ancestors what would happen then? Is that a problem? If not, why not just baptise every dead person who ever existed?

 

Looking on the Wikipedia website about Baptism for the Dead it names a few people that have been baptised posthumously including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, All of the US presidents, Genghis Khan, Pope John Paul II and Gautama Buddha, (Liberace isn’t mentioned). What is going on here? I always imagined that Hitler and Stalin were rotting somewhere in the pits of fiery Hell. Who was the bright person who thought this was a good idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead

I imagine now all these baptised ancestors must be up in Mormon heaven sitting at a large table having a lovely dinner with Brigham Young and his wives (all 55 of them). They would all be chewing on their steaks, except for Hitler of course who would be having something vegetarian. They would be wistfully reminiscing about their lives. Hitler would be explaining how his last days in Berlin were not spent organizing a flight to South America but was spent packaging and posting a copy of Das Buch Mormon to his distant relatives in New York.

Adolf Hitler (1898-1945) not my ancestor

This practice has seriously upset some religious groups including the Catholic Church (who are still coming to terms with their last Pope becoming a Mormon) but mostly from Jewish groups. Holocaust survivors find this incredibly insensitive and have asked the LDS Church to remove Holocaust names from their genealogical databases. In 1995 responding to pressure 300,000 names were removed. However in 2012 a news story revealed that Anne Frank had been posthumously baptised. This was for the ninth time.

Baptism has always been a fundamental practice for almost all denominations of the Christian Church. It has a symbolic spiritual meaning for individuals but it is also an initiation rite for the Church. As adults we can choose to follow the doctrine of a church or we can leave and find another Church if we don’t like it. Not every Church member has that choice. Babies and young children don’t. Nor do the dead. 

By baptising ‘dead ancestors’ what you are really doing is taking away choice from the living. Why follow the doctrine of any Church when you’re going to end up in Mormon heaven someday anyway. 

The Book of Morman (musical) 

 

 

NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane O'Brien, STL, Censor Librorum   JULY, 2014

 

 

IMPRIMATUR: In accord with 1983 CIC 942
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead

ANCESTORS AND CREATION MYTHS

 

Countries, like people, have creation stories. They are what we choose to believe are our origins. For us as individuals we have personal stories that we create.  They might be part of a family story that we were told and have amended to fit our lives. They give us meaning and an identity. If you think you don’t have a story, well, that’s a story too. There is always a story whether we are aware of it or not. Countries have stories that their inhabitants collectively create. But what is a country? It only really exists in the collective heads of its inhabitants. As do its creation stories.

People in the United States have all heard the story of the Mayflower and the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’. It is one of the primary creation myths of that country. A ship carrying 102 English Puritans fleeing from religious persecution sailed from Plymouth, England in 1620 and landed in what is now the state of Massachusetts.

 They were pious hard working people looking for religious freedom and a better life. Their survival of the first winter they experienced in North America is still celebrated every year in November on Thanksgiving Day.

There are many Americans who can count an ancestor who was a passenger on that ship. I have read estimates that there are between 20 and 30 million living Americans who can do that. This is all the more amazing when you think there were only 102 Pilgrims on the Mayflower and only 48 of them had children.

One of the Mayflower passengers was Stephen Hopkins (1581-1644) who was my G G G G G G G G G Grandfather. Stephen Hopkins was a bit different from the other Puritans fathers in that he wasn’t a puritan and he wasn’t particularly religious at all. He was a shopkeeper and clerk and was looking for a better life. Historians now believe he had been to North America before.

In 1607 three ships chartered by the Virginia Company sailed up Chesapeake Bay, landed in present day Virginia and founded the first permanent English colony in North America. This was 13 years before the Mayflower. Stephen Hopkins, it is now believed, arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1610 on the ship Sea Venture having left his wife and children behind in England.

 The Jamestown Virginia settlement was completely different from the Massachusetts settlement. It was started by a chartered company who sent out colonists to make money for them. The colonists themselves were there to get rich. They weren’t interested in farming, they wanted to find gold or some other precious commodity. As a result the early years of the colony were marked by fights with the ‘Indians’, fights between themselves and starvation. Excavations have found human teeth marks on some of the colonist’s bones.

There was no Thanksgiving Day in Jamestown, at least not in the early years, It would be more appropriate to have a Cannibalism Day or Greed Day. Not a great creation story for a nation.

Stephen Hopkins arrived in 1610 and returned to England in 1614 when he received news that his wife had died. He remarried and returned to the new world on the Mayflower with his new wife, one of his sons two daughters and a servant. Stephen would have been an invaluable companion for the Pilgrims as he had experience of America and its native people. He would have thought he was going back to Virginia as this was the Pilgrims intention. Once the Mayflower had arrived in Massachusetts circumstances prevented it going further. I wonder what we would be eating on Thanksgiving Day if they had made it to Virginia.

Stephen Hopkins initial journey to Virginia in 1609 was an interesting one. The ship he was on (‘Sea Venture’) was sunk in a storm and he ended up a castaway on the island of Bermuda along with 150 other passengers and crew. An account of this shipwreck was written by William Strachey, True Reportory of the Wrack, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, and is thought to be one of the primary sources that William Shakespeare used when writing his play ‘The Tempest’ which was first presented in November 1610.

There is a character in ‘The Tempest’ who is said to be based on Stephen Hopkins. As I understand it, this is because the play is about a quarrelsome group of castaways and Stephen was the most quarrelsome of them all. In fact he was such a complainer that at one point he was charged with mutiny and narrowly avoided being executed. I don’t know how much of his character would have been used in Shakespeare’s play other than this.

 The survivors on Bermuda eventually managed to put aside their differences enough to build a couple of ships and set sail for Jamestown, Virginia in May 1610.

Interestingly, on Stephen Hopkins return journey to North America on the Mayflower he came with his second wife Elizabeth, his son Giles Hopkins and with a servant Edward Doty (abt 1599-1655). Edward Doty is also an ancestor of mine although on my father’s side of my tree. I also have 3 other ancestors who were on the Mayflower and one of them appears twice in my tree (my parents are cousins). If you count the other 7 children of the 6 ancestors I have who were on the Mayflower, there hasn’t been another such large group of people from my family tree on one boat ever. (unless you count a trip we did with Uncle Joe to Monhegan Island in the summer of 1972). But this is true for a lot of Americans.

Stephen Hopkins owned a tavern in Plymouth and often was in conflict with the Pilgrim elders. He let “men drink in his house upon the Lords day” and was fined “for suffering servants and others to sit drinking in his house” (contrary to Court orders) and “for selling wine, beere, strong waters, and nutmeggs at excessiue rates”, among other things. He died in 1644.

The Jamestown settlement, after shipping back to England a load of iron pyrite (Fools Gold), was only saved economically by a settler named John Rolfe who tried planting some tobacco seeds he had found on the island of Bermuda. This started Virginia’s most profitable agricultural industry.  We’re all still living with the consequences of that. 

So which story do we choose for our origins, a story of rapacious wastrels who are trying to increase their material wealth or a story of people looking for toleration and spiritual freedom? In a sense they are both stories of people looking for a better life. They are both part of our human story. In a sense they are both stories that we can find within our individual selves.

As adults we see through the gilded stories we were told as children and understand the gritty/ dirty reality of life and human motivation. We think it ‘realistic’ but aren’t we just creating another story? A story more detailed perhaps, more ‘realistic’ but nonetheless just another story. Could we also say this is just as true of our personal life story?

Which creation myth have you chosen?