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?”
