Land of the Pilgrim’s Pride: On Genealogy, Truth, Mistakes, and Legend

Posted by Sappho on November 27th, 2020 filed in Genealogy

I think of Thanksgiving as a general purpose harvest festival of gratitude, and ignore the part of the holiday that’s tied to stories of Pilgrims, Wampanoag, and the First Thanksgiving. True, I remember the Pilgrim Thanksgiving story from grade school, and I’m also aware, from my adult life, that many Native Americans see the story differently. But that story has never had much place in my lived celebrations.

What genealogy sites have to offer on holidays, though, is lineage, and on this Thanksgiving, on this 400 year anniversary of the Mayflower voyage, genealogy sites have a lot of Mayflower information to offer.

Sorting out real and imagined ancestors, though, can be tricky. So let’s look at a few of the ancestors that I may find, depending on which tree I consult, who might have been present at the legendary First Thanksgiving.

Iyannough is a real historical figure:

• sachem of the Mattakeese, a sub-group of the Wampanoag people.
• received the Pilgrims with courtesy.
• assisted William Bradford and his party in finding the son of John Billington, who had wandered away from Plymouth in January 1621.
• died in 1623, when only in his mid-twenties, hiding in a swamp from the colonists, after a surprise attack by the Pilgrims on the Massachusett tribe caused many in the region to be fearful of the colonists.

My descent from Iyannough, though, proved legendary. When I first learned of Mary Little Dove, the supposed granddaughter of Iyannough, wife of Austin Bearse, and ancestor of the Merchant family that moved from Barnstable to Washington County, New York, from which I am descended, I thought the details of her story fanciful, but still possibly a white person’s imagined version of a real Wampanoag ancestor. After looking into the matter, I have concluded that I am not descended from any Mary Little Dove. Here’s why:

• My family’s DNA segments that are identified by 23andMe as Native American triangulate with DNA cousins who come from the Charlesvoix/Saguenay du Lac region of Quebec, not with New England colonial DNA cousins from Massachusetts.
• The Bearse DNA project on FamilyTreeDNA has not, so far, turned up evidence that Mary Bearse was Native American.
• The general consensus on Wikitree is that the critiques of the Mary Little Dove story make the better case, and Mary Little Dove’s profile there is annotated as legendary, with notes not to link her to the actual Bearse family tree.

Richard Warren is also a real historical figure:

• according to his Mayflower record, a merchant from London
• came over initially without his family, who arrived later
• one of the forty-one adult-male signatories to the Mayflower Compact

My descent from Richard Warren is: Lucy Brigham (wife of Jared Beckwith)->Lydia Howe->Lydia Church->Jonathan Church->Isaac Church->Caleb Church->Elizabeth Warren->Richard Warren. Or is it? Some Ancestry trees give the parents of Lydia Church as Jonathan Church and Thankful Bullard. Wikitree says Noah Church and Lydia Barnard. Noah Church is the son of David Church and Mary Howe. Jonathan Church is the son of Isaac Church and Mary Hutchins. Isaac Church is the son of Caleb Church, but David Church’s parents are unknown, and with good reason, as there turn out to be multiple David Church’s in the same colonial time period.

My notes about Lydia Church say, “Not sure about this ancestor: Other family trees on Ancestry.com have her simultaneously married both to Adonijah Howe and to Samuel Morse, both of whom are alive at the time. And I don’t really have any documentation for her beyond these contradictory family trees. May have to remove her and the rest of her family from my tree later, if she doesn’t pan out.”

It appears that our genealogy is not well established enough for us to know whether we are really descended from Mayflower passenger Richard Warren or not, and it would take time to look at the paper trail to judge whose genealogy is correct.

Finally, Giles Hopkins is a real historical figure:

• son of Stephen Hopkins
• arrived on the Mayflower as a teenager
• father Stephen Hopkins was one of the 41 signatories of the Mayflower Compact
• volunteered for service in the 1637 Pequot War but was not called
• buried in Cove Burying Ground, Eastham

Giles Hopkins was the inspiration for this blog post, as I recently received an email identifying him as my Mayflower ancestor. My descent from Giles Hopkins is: Flora Minerva Hawley->Deborah Aurelia Warner->Benjamin Ruggles Warner->Mary Ruggles->Alice Merrick->Nathaniel Merrick->Abigail Hopkins->Giles Hopkins + Catherine Weldon. But does this genealogy hold up? Like the genealogy that connects me to Richard Warren, this tree has a weak link. In this case, it’s the link between Mary Ruggles and Alice Merrick. Different trees disagree on who was the mother of Mary Ruggles. Who’s right? I would need to go through the documentary evidence to know, and might even then find out that it’s unclear.

In some ways, Mayflower descent is the easiest seventeenth genealogy puzzle that you can imagine: Detailed records are preserved, from the moment the Mayflower arrived on our shores, of practically every settler in colonial New England. But even there, it’s possible to be mistaken, due to the existence of multiple people with the same name, and possible wishful thinking among people constructing trees. The case gets harder if you’re looking at, for example, Wampanoag ancestry, and don’t have a lived connection to the Wampanoag to keep family memory alive.

It’s possible that I had at least one ancestor in Plymouth in 1621. It’s also possible that I didn’t. I may never know which is the case. For now, I’m pursuing other ancestral brick walls, so let this post be simply a record of uncertainty.