PROBLEMS AND PROMISES OF GENEALOGY

many of our ancestors settled, we would find a modest home – not much more than a cottage today – in which the boy was raised who was to become America’s greatest General, First President, and The Nation’s Richest Man.

The good and bad of tracing a lineage as long as my wife’s, is that we have to build upon what has been delineated by others before us. If their tracings are faulty, fanciful, or forged, we are stuck with them - unless we want to re-evaluate 300 years of documents which, if they still exist, are hidden away in libraries up and down the former colonial coast.

But what if the information reported seems improbable? For example, should we be immediately suspicious if an ancestor xIV

is listed as living to 106? Or should we assume that, like the odd story of our ancestor stepping on a bee’s nest, something apparently so remarkable probably would have staying power? And what do we do if three records agree, and one does not? Should we assume that the conclusion should be decided by majority rules? Is the exception always so exceptional?

Already we can see that some of the findings hinted at in this study push against the general trends as they are taught and interpreted by American History textbooks, but that some of them also confirm what is accepted. This study encompasses “only”

150 founding families. Are we safe in drawing any conclusions at all from any of it?

(And, while we are on the subject, how many families did the history textbook writers trace? Probably none. They got their Problems And Promises of Genealogy

information from other sources; and how many families did THEY trace?)

For example, three Virginia and two Maryland families herein have been traced back to Connecticut - one to Westport, CT, where I am this moment composing this chapter. Two other families are traced to Massachusetts, and one to New Jersey? Is this just a happy coincidence?

If I am to believe what the internet is showing me, some of our ancestors 300 years ago were living not two miles from where The Victorian Age brought in a fashion on both sides of the Atlantic: a rage to connect your family to some royal lineage I sit, in the same town in which, it seems, every other street is named after one of them. Is this impossible? Is it unlikely? Is it somewhere. It hit first in England, as a result of the Romantic Age, and somewhat later it got to America. Nobility, of course, had improbable?

inherited the passion long before: it was their genealogy, after all, and they framed their meticulously kept records and pu them But other tracings of the same surnames show that there were other families with the same name living in Virginia or

on their walls.

Maryland at the same time, even though some of the first names and birth and death dates don’t mesh with those of known descen-When the middle classes emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s they too wanted a piece of it – whether dants. Does proximity trump “established” lines on the Internet? Even those accepted by the DAR? Especially those accepted by it was their or someone else’s.

the DAR?

The citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia were eager to adopt the narrative that so many of its early settlers descended The currents of American history would seem to work against any regular and wide spread transport between the Virginia from the second sons of royalty, who, because of the rules of primogeniture – the bad luck of birth order - were forced to seek and Connecticut colonies. The two were 300 miles apart – hard miles – and they were relatively separate entities. Overland travel their fortune in the New World, where they would try valiantly to carry on the high and noble traditions they had been born to in even between Boston and New York was close to impossible. As late as 1704 it took the diarist Sarah Kemble Knight an entire the old one. After all, Virginia had long been known as the “Home of the Cavaliers,” and the “Mother of Presidents.”

month to ride that distance.

That was the myth, but what was the reality?

On the other hand, taking a boat down the coast was faster and easier, and there were lots of boats. Did the same John Some critics have labeled this Victorian habit of mind complete and unadulterated bullshit. They maintain that convicts, C. Couch of Virginia whose parents were recorded as living in Connecticut in 1750 simply hop a boat from a local Fairfield, indentured servants, half-breed Indians and slaves, were really the sum and substance that made up most of the population of the Connecticut dock and a few days later step onto the shores of Virginia?

Commonwealth. They push the revisionist concept that whatever “nobility” arrived in Virginia did not survive long because of The old Yankee farmers along the Connecticut coast maintained mini-fleets of sailboats that could brought produce down inbred laziness, the reluctance to dirty their high born hands, and their inability or lack of willpower to exert the necessary energy Long Island Sound and to New York – and even farther south to trade for rum in the Bahamas. A round trip took only a few weeks to become effective pioneers.

at most; and the local farm boys yearned for adventure – as youth today do.

This was the take on how silly the Southerners were – so silly that they never had a chance when they attacked us in the North Could a son of Old Connecticut head south on is farmer’s boat, land in a Virginia port, and meet and marry a girl there?

during the Civil War - and it was taught to me by New England school teachers with smirks, snide comments, and references to Why not?

how they would lose the Civil Rights struggle then going on (the Civil War was less than 100 years in the past. The last Rebel Or…why?

soldier had died a few years before)

John C. Couch’s parents are listed as Thomas and Elizabeth. There was a Thomas and Elizabeth in Connecticut – but there Again, my New England school teachers weighed in on it. WE had the Pilgrims – what did the South ever have? Only hillbillies!

also was a Thomas and Elizabeth in Virginia – and even in other places that were a lot closer to Virginia than Connecticut is.

The research here indicates otherwise – and something more. The South did have hillbillies, but many of their families did Am I, as an amateur genealogist, going to declare definitively that common sense should not effect the possibilities herein?

descend from titled ancestors – for whatever good that did for them by the time they got to the mountains. It was the American Is that what a previous genealogist which resulted in this conclusion?

frontier which “leveled” them into the general body politic.

However, an Elizabeth Jessop IS recorded as having been married in Maryland to a Thomas Couch of Connecticut. In fact, Still, it is seems possible that others of our ancestors would have been considered “riff-raff” over in England, and perhaps she returned to live out her days in Connecticut. And she had a son - John C. Couch – who, two reconds say, turned up in Virginia were considered little more than that over here – except for one very important factor: their lives and hands were needed; but the and raised a family there – with time out to fight with Washington at the Crossing of the Delaware.

research here indicates that even those of the minor gentry signed onto indentures, and that the presence of known criminals or Maybe Elizabeth Jessop had relatives in the South, and John C. Couch simply left his Connecticut home to seek out his future emigrants who couldn’t claim any craft or specialized skill was minimal.

with them.

However, even for the ones who succeeded from the first on this continent, all was not what it now may seem to us. For How do we choose?

example, if we were to travel back to the childhood home of George Washington on the banks of the Rappahanock, near where so You might opt for Virginia, because it seems more reasonable.

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