#20 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: Observations on Charts of New England Ancestry (Genealogical "Pie Slices," Cousin Intermarriage)
Gary Boyd Roberts
Published Date : July 24, 1987
For my twentieth column,
and in continuation of last week’s discussion, I shall comment today on some
patterns encountered in examining ancestor charts covering completely New
England forebears. A first division is always into areas – or slices of a pie if
the whole pie is one’s entire Yankee heritage – of ancestry concentrated in a
certain town, or set of surrounding towns, or even an entire colony. I might
note immediately that New Hampshire and Rhode Island families tend to be
isolated – most New Hampshire men and Rhode Islanders do not intermarry with
other New Englanders, or do so only after moving west, at least to western Mass.
or NY. Early Maine ancestry tends also to be regional – but most residents of
Maine by 1800 are migrant families from southern New England, especially
Massachusetts, not descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Maine. Many early
Massachusetts settlers moved to Connecticut and there is much genealogical
interaction between Connecticut proper and the early Connecticut Valley towns of
Springfield, Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield, Deerfield, etc. There is some
intermarriage between residents of Stonington or Preston, Conn. and Westerly,
R.I. but otherwise Connecticut and Rhode Island families remain largely separate
from each other. Intermarriages between early Maine and New Hampshire families
are largely covered in The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New
Hampshire, by Libby, Noyes and Davis. This last surveys all residents and
all documents in two colonies for roughly a century, 1630-1730, and notes many
connections of these two colonies to Essex County, Mass.
Most Americans
whose Yankee ancestors went west (again even to western Massachusetts or New
York) have several groups of ancestors (again, pie slices) from separate
colonies, counties or towns in New England. A Connecticut family in the Western
Reserve in Ohio will marry into another Connecticut family from a different area
of the colony; Connecticut migrants to New York will marry Rhode Island migrants
there; and N.H. migrants elsewhere in the Midwest will marry Vermonters whose
origins lie in Connecticut or another area of New Hampshire. In the far west
distinctions between types of Yankees are even less. In Brahmin Boston, Salem
Higginsons or Cabots marry Newburyport Jacksons or Lowells; Ipswich Appletons
and Saltonstalls are added to the mix; Winslows, Howlands, Bradfords and other
Mayflower descendants move north (or south to New Bedford, New York City,
etc.); and Salem Crowninshields, Derbys, Endicotts and Peabodys of the China
trade will appear, as will Coffins and Starbucks of Nantucket and the whaling
industry, among "fortune founding" ancestors of Boston social registerites. New
York or midwestern tycoons include (Jay) Goulds from Fairfield County,
Connecticut; Rockefellers from Cleveland and the Averys of Groton,, Connecticut;
Stillmans of Citibank from Wethersfield, Connecticut; Tiffanys, from Attleboro,
Massachusetts, with Woodstock, Conn. ancestry; Vanderbilts who marry descendants
of Flaggs of New Haven and Wards of Newport; C. H. McCormick of International
Harvester, whose wife had considerable ancestry in Stonington, Conn.; Marshall
Fields from western Massachusetts; and (flour) Pillsburys of Minneapolis, with
much Essex County, Massachusetts ancestry.
The second major pattern on
charts of Yankee ancestry, a circumstance often noted by members, is
considerable cousin intermarriage. Cousins marry in the same town, in nearby
towns, or even when migrating west with kinsmen. All of us should expect to lose
a sizable chunk of our ancestry to duplication. This phenomenon, sometimes
called "collapsing ancestry," is of course well known in both the Germanic
Protestant and Catholic royal families of Europe. It is also obvious on islands.
Fletcher Christian, of an gentry family in Cumberland, of the Bounty and
later of Pitcairn Island, was a descendant of Edward I, King of England. Since
there were only nine British sailors who with their Tahitian wives and servants
founded Pitcairn, virtually the entire island several generations later could
claim not only exactly half British and half Polynesian ancestry, but also royal
descent. With only eleven founding families on Nantucket, most 19th
century whalers from that island had a half dozen or more Coffin, Starbuck,
Folger, Macy, Bunker, Gardner, Hussey, Swain, or Worth descents. Founders of
many mainland towns also appear several times in the ancestry of many local
natives who move west after the Revolution. The same Cape Cod families are often
several times in the ancestry of early migrants to Nova Scotia; many
Mayflower descendants can claim several of the twenty-three families on
that ship who left progeny (and often there are several Howland and Warren
descents especially); and Kay Mayhew of the Dukes County Historical Society
tells me that her husband has 32 Mayhew lines.
The reason for such
intricate kinship, according to demographers (and I especially remember an
article to this effect in the Genealogists’ Magazine), is that before the
Industrial Revolution of the 1840s an estimated 40% of all marriages in New
England towns, English parishes, many European communities and the Virginia
Tidewater especially, were between first, second and third cousins. Basically
when people lived in villages or on farms associated with parish churches, they
often married cousins. Children of first cousins might marry second or third
cousins; in the next generation some marriages might occur to outsiders or
recent migrants; but in the next generation second or third cousins would
intermarry again. Over time this intermarriage produces enormously intricate
kinship. And of course if thirty or so founding families produce several
thousand descendants in 5-7 generations, and in-migration is only moderate, at
some point one can marry only cousins, although perhaps more distant than
first, second or third. Thus each section of one’s ancestry that is associated
with a particular region is likely to contain several or more cousin
intermarriages. This pattern is to be expected, and no genetic deficiencies need
result.
A third observation about the ancestor charts of many members
and friends will be the subject of my next column. This observation is the fact
that most middle-class Americans of some Yankee ancestry – probably 100 million
or more contemporary Americans – have a half dozen or more "fun" ancestors.
These are immigrants of royal descent (100-plus to new England), passengers on
the Mayflower (23 families), ancestors of the late Princess of Wales (and
of Princes William and Harry –about 25 New England immigrant couples or their
near kinsmen), or ancestors of two, three, four or five American presidents to
date (110-plus 17th century New England couples.) Thus not only are
we very probably descended from residents of several New England areas, and not
only are we descended from numerous sets of cousins; we are also often descended
from kings, even more often related to the current British royal family, and can
almost always claim various presidents and probably over 500 notable Americans
as 8th-12th cousins. I have written on these topics
elsewhere – notably in my Princess of Wales, presidential, royal descent, and
"Notable Kin" volumes – but some further remarks will I hope interest many
readers.