Heritage

My husband's family, on his mother's side, is English and came to America on the Mayflower. His mother's sister, Dorothy (Aunt Skip to us) recently completed many years of research and writing to record their fascinating history in her book "From the Mayflower to Greenbush."

Because I was so impressed with the identity of some of his distant relatives I thought I'd share the fact that Will and his family are related to John Alden and Priscilla Mullins and that he is a fourteenth cousin to Abraham Lincoln.

I am all the more impressed because my family tree is an enigma, our ancestors were never discussed or named as I was growing up. There were allusions to land barons on my grandfather's side of the family, who lost everything during the great depression and I met, a few times, my Great Aunt Mable, an extraordinary artist who, at a time when women artists were rarely recognized, had her work hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

I don't think it's imperative that we know who all our relatives are, but the gene pool runs deep and it would be interesting to know who's in our own personal soup. And there is the fact of history, the inescapable trail of events peopled by those who came before us.