After my mother died, I found a photograph from 1937 in her
garage, where it had lay undiscovered for 39 years. Pictured is my
dad Teddy at 5 years old, posing with his mother, Eunice Katherine
Weydell
– my namesake. She died when I was close to Teddy’s age in the
photo, so I never really knew her.
After my mother died, I found a photograph from 1937 in her garage, where it had lay undiscovered for 39 years. Pictured is my dad Teddy at 5 years old, posing with his mother, Eunice Katherine Weydell – my namesake. She died when I was close to Teddy’s age in the photo, so I never really knew her.
To find out more, I traced my grandma Eunice’s family tree back to her great-great-grandmother, Thankful Bangs, born at Cape Cod on July 12, 1776. I discovered she gave birth to 13 children and lived to be 77 years old.
As I searched through the generations before Thankful, I came to a name which seemed to light up when I found it. The moment I saw the name Mercy Prence, I got tingles up and down my spine. Daughter of Patience Brewster and Thomas Prence, Governor of Plymouth, and an immigrant who arrived in 1621. My pulse began to race! Quick – when did the Mayflower come to America? If only I had stayed awake in history class.
I Googled the Mayflower at lightning speed – 1620. There had to be a connection. I continued searching as my heart rate went up. Suddenly, there it was: Patience Brewster, daughter of William Brewster.
I Googled the passenger list for the Mayflower … and held my breath. Yes! He was on the passenger list.
I then Googled William Brewster. He was a Pilgrim, born in 1590 in Scrooby, England, and spiritual guru to the early Pilgrim colony. Brewster’s wife, Mary, also came to America, along with their children – Love, Wrestling, Fear and Patience (my ancestor).
With the Internet providing unprecedented access to records from all over the world, interest in genealogy has become a national obsession and the No. 1 hobby in America. Cello master and virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma explored his roots this week as part of the new PBS series, “Faces of America.” The program is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., America’s preeminent genealogical scholar. Gates revealed to Ma that his paternal genealogy can be traced back 18 generations to the year 1217. Ma’s ancestors kept records of the family tree but had hidden them in a wall during the Communist Revolution, in order to keep them from being destroyed. When Gates presented the records to Ma, he was astounded.
The show reveals that Queen Noor of Jordan has the oldest ancestor ever traced directly back from modern times: Gates found records of her 48th great-grandfather in 436 A.D. I haven’t quite managed to go back as far as Gates did with Noor, but on the New England side, I traced the ancestry of my grandmother Eunice back 15 generations.
For me to go back as far as I did required the help of Web sites such as Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, an indispensable site where you can have someone look up records or photograph tombstones, for example, in any state.
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker met with New England Historic Genealogical Society researchers to look at her family tree for NBC’s new show called “Who Do You Think You Are?” premiering at 8 p.m. March 5. The show will reveal Parker’s connection to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
Moving beyond traditional genealogy, it is now possible to excavate the ancestral record that each of us carries inside us on our 25,000 genes. As I swab my cheek with a Q-Tip and send it off in the mail, I can’t wait to find out what will be revealed by my DNA Admixture test from Family Tree DNA. There’s always been a family legend that we are Native American; I’ll print the results here in this column.
DNA can also tell you whether you shared a common ancestor with a particular person in the last 250 years. It turns out that actress Eva Longoria, for instance, is related to Yo-Yo Ma.
The ethnic breakdown of our individual DNA can be taken farther now than ever before, extending even to our Haplogroups, which takes us back 50,000 years to when humans first began migrating out of eastern Africa to inhabit other parts of the world. Ten generations back, we each have 1,024 ancestors. Twenty generations back, we have more than a million ancestors. The farther back we go, the more ancestors we have in common. We each share ancestral relations with millions of people alive today.
As Gates points out, we too often concentrate on our differences, but we are truly all connected in the tree of human origins. The only thing that separates us is how we think of each other.
