Actually, it is quite certain that today, anyone who had ancestors in this country before the Revolutionary War can be proven to be related to many others, if not to everyone else who had ancestors in the Colonies at that time. In the case I mention, the original immigrant, Jan Dyckman, arrived here from Holland in the mid-1600's. His son, Jacob, lived and farmed in what is now Westchester Co., NY. During the Revolutionary War, the property was devastated by the battles between the British and the Colonials, but after the War, the homestead was rebuilt by Jacob’s son, William Dyckman. It is today an historic park.
Considering the Tweetings that son John has received, I suspect that many people are unaware of how often they are related to someone just down the road, if you check family trees far enough back. Along with the above interconnections that we have found, there are other connections in our far-back, and not-so-far-back families. For instance, John's mother and my mother are something like 5th cousins, although neither was ever aware of the other until they met through us. Old New England families are interwoven like a lively plaid: my mother-in-law's maternal family is from Massachusetts, and my mother's relatives were spread from Connecticut, to western New York State, to Vermont. But John's mother’s father came from Maryland, via, far back, Pennsylvania, and you may be sure John will, if he ever gets around to looking, find more inter-connections there, too.
Looking at both families, the most recent immigrant we can find is a Peter Barnhart, a Bavarian mercenary soldier who came to this country to fight for the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. Figuring from there, we are a fine jumble of genes, some of them iffy and some of them splendid. Our jumbled ancestry is mostly British and Scots, but every now and then something exotic shows up and broadens our chances for genetic refreshment. We are not so much proud of our ancestors as we are just grateful to them, for being tough enough and stubborn enough to have picked up and moved when they needed or simply wanted to do so. Crossing the Atlantic (or any other ocean) in a tiny little wooden ship must have taken huge amounts of courage, and once here, huge amounts of energy and brain power to keep from starving to death.
John finds all the history and odd bits fascinating. He says that piecing it all together is like doing a big crossword puzzle. I, on the other hand, find it … well, maybe reassuring is my operative word. I love the odd little stories one comes across, and the timelessness of family interactions. Among my treasured things is a stack of letters written by my great grandmother, Lucretia Parsons Bacon Kelsey, who moved with her two young boys from Rochester, NY, to what were then the wilds of Wisconsin, in 1851. They travelled by boat and rail and wagon, and she notes that on the first day of their journey, her second child, Otto, who was then under a year old, "cried the whole way."
I, who have also moved with a 9-month-old in tow, have a good idea what it’' like to travel with a crying baby, albeit not in a public vehicle. Many years ago, our youngest I endured a long drive to get to our new house and meet up with the rest of the family. Alas, Robert had been badly upset by witnessing the only house he'd ever known being stripped of our belongings. During the entire journey — he in his little car seat behind me, and I at the wheel — he produced non-stop sobs. Although I stopped a few times to try to comfort him, as soon as we got back into the car, he went right back to crying. Finally, I just gritted my teeth and told myself that he was bound to fall asleep eventually (he didn't), and if we were to get to our destination before dark, we'd just have to tough it out. By the time we arrived, we were both completely exhausted. The sight of his father stopped his weeping and started mine.
It was a few years later that I inherited that packet of Lucretia's letters. You may imagine the empathy and connection I felt, one overwhelmed young mother to another, a hundred and nineteen years apart.
©2014 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
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