Skeletons In My Closet

My nephew is a genealogy fanatic.  I hesitate to label him an extremist, but he is kind of like my grand-puppy, Abby, a ferocious (yeah, sure) daschund who gets her doggy toy in her mouth, shakes it around furiously and chews on it until she breaks that squeaker.  Dan just loves to research names and lineages back through history.

If Dan is to be believed—and I admit that he is really good at his hobby—we have some pretty well known and famous personages in our family tree.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

One of the factors that got Dan started in genealogy is that my great aunt, whom we always called Grandma because she adopted my mother after Mom's biological mother died in childbirth, was descended from one of the so-called Salem Witches.  Of course, it was later revealed that none of them were witches, but that didn’t prevent them being hanged for the alleged crime.

Grandma McKeever even wrote a short book about the Salem Witch trials. I have a copy of it, and it is pretty scholarly for a book written by a self-taught lady in her late seventies when she penned it.

Dan got the bug several years ago and started asking all kinds of questions of his mother and aunts and uncles.  But in general, Dan did a lot of online research and library work. He has now taken our family line all the way back to the Eleventh Century. In the process he has found some knights and quite a few others whose names you would recognize if you took your world history in school at all seriously.

As an example of the work Dan has accomplished, he informed me last week that my 21st great grandfather was named Ralph deCromwell, who held the title Lord of Tattersall and lived from 1342-1398.  If that name seems vaguely familiar, yes, he was related to Oliver Cromwell who is also found somewhere in the tree, though probably not a direct ancestor of ours.

Some other names you might recognize are General John Hathorn, a Revolutionary War general and related to Judge Hathorn of the Salem Witch Trial fame.  And of course that brings up the name of a famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who added a couple of letters to his surname to escape the stigma of being related to the hanging judge.

Now I cannot swear to the accuracy of all this, but I do know that Dan is a dedicated and very creative researcher, so I tend to believe his results.  Moreover, what comes to mind is that we really are probably all related to one another in some fashion all the way back to Adam and Eve, or at least to Noah if the story of the ark is to be believed. 

In another stunning and convoluted explanation, Dan used a whole bunch of big numbers to arrive at the conclusion that our ancestors at any given time in earth’s history far outnumber the population of the earth at that time.  Which, I suppose, proves my theory that we are really all related, but I don’t have any idea how the difference in race comes into that equation. If that makes you uncomfortable, too bad, Bro’, we all be bruddahs and sistahs unner 'da skin.

So that begs the age-old question, “Why can’t we all just get along, children?”