Ten thousand years ago, somewhere in Northern Europe, a baby was born with a very strange mutation. Its eyes were blue.
What must it have been like to be that kid? Everyone else had brown eyes. Was it shunned and ostracized or was it celebrated? When that baby’s mother looked down at her child and saw what was looking back, what was her reaction? Fear? Wonder?
If I were to venture a guess, I would think that those strange eyes made that person very popular. I would even go so far as to say that they were probably elevated above the rest of their community for their uniqueness. Why would I think that? Because every single person on planet Earth, whose eyes are on the blue-green spectrum can trace their ancestry back to that one individual so they must have bred successfully. And often. That single mutation is now found in eight percent of the world’s population. Over a quarter of all people in the United States have blue or green eyes. That is hardly surprising given that the original influx of European settlers to North America came from the same area where that mutation first appeared. As my eyes are hazel, that one Northern European blue-eyed kid from ten millennia ago is the earliest ancestor that I can confidently identify as being part of my tree.
When I first started climbing through my family’s branches, I thought that my mother’s and father’s families were two different stories. I have come to see that they are the same story. Before 1600, both sides of the family were on the same small cluster of islands that we think of, today, as Great Britain. When England got greedy and started trying to get at the riches of India, its people set off in two directions. One faction went east around Africa and the other tried to get there by going west. Four hundred years later, my family members are now hopelessly scattered across the globe, but back then, we were all within spitting distance of each other.
Having only recently realized just how quickly the numbers of great-grandparents grow with each successive ring, I have no doubt that my parents’ sides share many common ancestors. Going back to Duncan, thirty generations ago, he is one of 536,870,912 of my 27th great-grandparents. In 1000, when he was born, the population of the whole planet wasn’t even that large so there had to be a lot of duplicates. I should be able to trace the path back to Duncan along many different routes. Hundreds. Thousands. Meaning, of course, that we are all inbred to some degree or other.
A thousand years is just a blip in the human timeline. All our ancestors started spreading throughout Europe and Asia about two million years ago. At some point, the original group came to a crossroads. One group said, “We’re going north.” Another group said, “We’re going east.” Yet another group said, “Good luck, we’re staying here.” All those groups and the many more that splintered off started out together in one place as one extended family of strange upright-walking creatures.
Having now taken everything as far back as the emergence of modern humans, I think that I can pull back a bit. I imagine that anybody with even a drop of Northern European ancestry in their DNA could probably trace their way back to Duncan. Where my family story starts to become personal is the early 17th century when both sides, independently, took the leap and boarded those creaky old ships and sailed off into the unknown.
Hic sunt dragones. Here be dragons. That was marked on a pair of globes made in the early 1500s in the areas where no Europeans had ventured before. The unknown. One of the globes is made of the bottom halves of two ostrich eggshells. The map and its markings have been etched onto them. There is a good chance that it was made by Leonardo da Vinci basing the maps on reports that were coming back to Italy by explorers like Amerigo Vespucci. The other globe appears to be a copper cast of the earlier one. That globe, I discovered, is on display at the New York Public Library.
The earliest globe in existence was made in 1492, a decade or so earlier. 1492 was the year before Columbus returned from his voyage. The Americas are missing from it because nobody in Europe knew they were there yet. The Ostrich Egg globe and then the copper casting that followed were made with more information. I wonder if any of my ancestors ever laid eyes on them.
When I was ten, my teacher, Mrs. McSpririt (seriously) gave us each a gold paper star with a red ribbon attached. On them, she’d typed what she thought we’d become. Mine said, “World Explorer.” I’m not sure what I was expecting it to say, but it wasn’t that. When I saw what she’d written, though, it was a sudden moment of clarity. That was it. She’d defined what I wanted to do with my life in two words. Working in theatre was a way for me to be able to explore new worlds both figuratively and literally.
As keen as I am to go almost anywhere, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to explore places that hadn’t been mapped three or four centuries ago. On top of that, deciding to head off into that unknown on a small wooden ship that may or may not make it. That takes a kind of courage, or maybe ignorance, that I just don’t think I have.
I’ve spent the last few days plotting out where in the British Isles all my ancestors originally came from to see if there is a common denominator. As far as I can tell, there isn’t. They are scattered all around Scotland, Ireland, and England.
I did find that my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, James Campbell Ford who was born in 1849, was from the same town in Scotland where my 8th great-grandfather on my father’s side, Godfrey Spruill, Jr. was born in 1650. My 2nd great-grandfather John McElhinny, Jr. on my mother’s side was also born in the same general area of Northern Ireland that my something or other great-grandfather Andrew McAllister on my father’s side was from. In both cases, though, while I am sure they must be both distantly related, they lived two hundred years apart from each other.
Through my grandmother on my father’s side, I am descended from a man named Christopher Atkinson. He was born in Scotforth, England, on the western side near Lancaster in 1656. He was a Quaker. In 1699, a group of Quakers from Lancashire and Yorkshire chartered a ship to take them to the New World. Christopher, who was then about forty-three years old, gathered his wife Margaret and their four children, William, Hannah, Margaret, and Isabel, and set out on board the Britannia.
The ship was designed to hold 140 people but there were at least 200 people on board. The voyage lasted nearly fourteen weeks. Nearly a quarter of the passengers perished during the voyage. In July of 1699, while somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, Christopher died of a fever. They finally docked in Philadelphia in August.
Margaret was given shelter by the Society of Friends who were already helping the widows and orphans of a yellow fever epidemic that was raging throughout the city. Her son William drowned in an accident very soon after they arrived, and her daughter Hannah died in October. She and her remaining daughters, Margaret, and Isabel, moved down to Buck’s County onto an estate owned by Thomas Revell of West Jersey. Thomas Stackhouse, Sr. who was a widower, himself, lived nearby. Eventually, he moved in with her.
In the minutes of the Middletown Monthly Meeting in 1701, this arrangement came under discussion. Stackhouse defended himself, saying, “Whereas there hath been some concern between Margaret Atkinson and I relating to marriage and some reports have passed of my behavior towards her whereby truth might suffer…” The Meeting decided that he could no longer stay there. A few months later, though, it was reported that he was still there. To put the matter to rest, Margaret and Thomas were finally married in March 1702.
Thomas passed away six years later, and Margaret married again. This time to John Frost, a prominent local man. Margaret, herself, then died in 1714. John outlived her by two years and passed away while visiting Margaret and Christopher’s daughter, Isabel in Chester. Isabel is one of my 7th great-grandmothers. Among other things in his will, John Frost left Isabel’s husband his servant man, John Jones.
All my relatives seem to have had different reasons for why they left home. Some had money and standing, and some had nothing. More often than not, they married people they met once they got there. As far as I can see, nobody on my father’s side went to India and nobody on my mother’s side came to America. The exception was my mother’s great-grandfather John McElhinny, Jr. He did come over and settle in Canada but then his son, William, went to India and diverted the line back over there.
Once here, in what would become the United States, my father’s family stayed. My mother’s family, on the other hand, tended to go back and forth between India and England. Some would put their time in on the sub-continent and then retire back to the mother country. Some would stay, but sail home, now and then, to visit the family. By the time that was happening, sailing conditions had improved. Steamships were starting to appear. In 1869, the Suez Canal was opened making it possible to sail to India without having to go all the way around Africa.
In a few weeks I am going to go up to Brockville in Ontario to try and learn a bit more about my great-great-grandfather John McElhinny, Jr. A working-class man, he came over from Ireland during the potato famine in 1847. His history isn’t quite so distant that it’s ungraspable, but it also isn’t so recent that it’s easy to uncover. He is far enough in the past that he came over here on a sailing ship, not a steamer.
I am the product of hundreds of explorers. Cornelius and Catalyntje Van Buren who came to Albany, New York from the Netherlands in about 1630. James Campbell Ford who left Denny, Scotland for India in the 1870’s. Henry O’Sullivan who married Margaret Rogers in India in 1844. Margaret’s father, John who was born in Dundee, Scotland in the late 1700s but died in India.
Francis Hester, Sr. who was born in Oxford, England in 1650 and died in New Kent, Virginia in 1720. His wife Elizabeth Garland who was baptized in St. Michael le-Querne in London in 1654 a decade before it burnt to the ground in the Great Fire and followed him over the ocean. Andrew McAllister who was born in Ulster, Ireland in 1657, and emigrated to the colonies. He married a Virginia girl named Hannah Roberts whose father was born in London.
Sir Henry Thomas Norman, born in Winsford, England, who married his Cornish-born wife, Lady Elizabeth James in Stafford Courthouse, Virginia in 1655. Daniel Malone, born in 1643 in Killucan, Ireland who married Susan Marry Harrison, born in St. Saviour, Leicester, in the Virginia Colony in 1669. Richard Staples and his wife Mary Elizabeth Brasseur, both born in Cambridge, England and both died in Virginia. Thomas Boyd and Barbara Russell, both born in Fife, Scotland who welcomed a son named Robert in 1655 in Northumberland, Virginia. John Bush and Mary Stokes, both born in Trowbridge, Wilshire in the late 1500s, who both died in Virginia.
Captain Thomas Hill, born in Salisbury, Wiltshire (possibly) in 1586 became a Burgess in Jamestown, Virginia. James Dunbar, born in 1730 in Bainbridge, Ireland, died in 1784 in Steel Creek, South Carolina. George Fickling and his wife, Charity, both from Norfolk, England were married in Bermuda in about 1705 and ended their days in Charleston, South Carolina. Mathias Scherp, who was born in Baden, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1685, who died in Peaked Mountain, Augusta, Virginia in 1750.
John Hutton from County Cavan, Ireland who married Sarah Lightfoot from County Carlow, Ireland in 1724. Their son, James Hutton, Sr. was born in 1726 in Chester, Pennsylvania. His son, James, Jr. fought in the American Revolution and my grandmother Eunice would use him to get into The Daughters of the American Revolution Society
All these people, and countless more, left the homes and the towns of their births and struck out for parts unknown. Here be dragons. They went anyway. Countless people failed. My sister and I are a testament to the fact that the people in our tree succeeded. Whether they should have gone is a whole other story, but they did.
Like the kid with the weird blue eyes ten thousand years ago, these peoples’ genes have been passed down. Whatever else they may have done, they all had children. It’s what we are programmed to do – be fruitful and multiply. From them, I got my eyes and, as I’ve come to see, my thirst for travel.
Hic sunt dragones. Bring them on.
I absolutely adore this post!!