hogglestock

I did a bit of digging around with my (mom’s) DNA data on Ancestry today. There was a DNA link that was new and I hadn’t seen it before. It made a connection to some of our ancestors in colonial Massachusetts. Not a big surprise these days in my research. My mom’s side, once almost completely unknown to us, has yielded ancestors in colonial CT, MA, NH, NJ, NY, and RI. But then I was poking around with the new information and quickly traced those lines much further back. (If you get any of your ancestors back to New England, the records are amazing and you will be amazed how much information is there.)

Turns out my ancestors were in Plymouth Colony…and more specifically…drum roll please…on the Mayflower.

My 10th great grandfather was John Alden a blacksmith and the cooper on the Mayflower, who decided to stay rather than return to Europe. He ended up marrying passenger Priscilla Mullins whose parents and brother all died the first winter in the colony.

But wait, it gets better…so Priscilla, my 10th great grandmother, was the only woman in the colony of marriageable age at the time and was pursued by Miles Standish as well as my grandfather…about which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the probably apocryphal poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.