Fiction versus Fact - Mon, 30 Nov 2020

In my last post, I discussed a methodology that I could quickly put together an ancestors-only tree for my niece at MyHeritage.

I was able to get back to about 3rd great-grandparents on most of her lines. But it was her mother’s father’s mother’s side that started to get interesting.

My niece’s mother’s father’s mother was Emma Blanche (Smith) Graham (1883-1976). Now you can instantly spot that I’m in for a challenge with a maiden name of Smith. Smith of course is one of the most common surnames there are. So how can I ensure I get the correct John Smith out of two million John Smith’s?

Mayflower?

Following one of Emma’s ancestral lines I assembled at MyHeritage, it led me back through Smiths of Niagara Peninsula (Upper Canada) in the 1800’s to a Wilcox line in the 1700’s that led to Elizabeth Cooke (1641-1715) who was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Hmm. Plymouth was where the Mayflower arrived in 1520.

Her father was Jean John Cooke. One of the Record Hints that MyHeritage gave me was this one from WikiTree:

Jean John Cooke was born in Leiden in The Netherlands. Instantly, I recognized that as the city where the passengers on the Mayflower lived before their voyage in 1520. This year is the 500th anniversary of the Mayflower’s arrival! Might the picture WikiTree has for Jean John Cooke be the Mayflower? Could my niece be one of the 35 million Mayflower descendants?

I visited Leiden in 2014 for the Gaenovium Conference. What a beautiful city! And I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Tamura Jones, who just happens to be an expert with regards to Mayflower descendants. 

I sent off an email to Tamura asking him if this Jean John Cooke might have been on the Mayflower. Tamura confirmed for me that Francis Cooke was on the Mayflower along with his eldest son John who was a boy a the time. His wife Hester and other children came later.

This Jean John Cooke was the son who was on the Mayflower. Eureka! I can say now that it’s a fact that my niece is a Mayflower descendant, right?

Not so fast. Tamura then told me that he could not find the Wilcox line I supplied him in the lists of descendants he had. He said I should check that line.

So I went to our friend Google and came up with this: I2742: Daniel WILCOX (1631 - 2 Jul 1702) (ksu.edu). It’s from an obviously well researched and sourced genealogy of the Needham Family.

It indicates that Daniel Wilcox (1656 – bef 1730) was the son of Daniel Wilcox (1631 – 1702) and NOT Jean John Cooke’s daughter Elizabeth Cooke, but a previous wife, possibly: Susanna Thompson.

So Daniel Wilcox and his full brother Samuel Wilcox, are not descendants of Elizabeth Cooke and thus not descendants of John Cooke or Frances Cooke.

The extensive references at the bottom of the page talk about this and indicate that “there is no evidence that Elizabeth was the mother of his sons Daniel and Samuel”. 

I immediately scratched out the fiction of Elizabeth Cooke being an ancestor and replaced her with the fact of it being possibly Susanna Thompson.

So much for my niece being a Mayflower descendant, at least on that line.

Churchill?

We did get a not-so-small consolation prize out of it though. If you take a look at that Daniel Wilcox link I have above, at the bottom of the page in the references it states:

The Churchill Centre, "Mayflower Ancestry: For and Against"
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=50
"No genealogies have been more carefully prepared, or reach a higher standard than, the Mayflower Society genealogies. There is solid evidence that Daniel Wilcox married a first wife prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Cooke, granddaughter of Francis Cooke. There is no evidence that Elizabeth was the mother of his sons Daniel (Churchill’s ancestor) and Samuel. There is circumstantial evidence that she was not. In genealogy, absence of evidence means absence of conclusions."

Checking out Sir Winston Churchill’s ancestry, he does in-fact connect to Emma (Smith) Graham’s line.

Sir Winston was in fact a 5th cousin of my niece’s great-grandmother, making my niece a 5C3R (5th cousin, 3 times removed) to the British Prime Minister.

Just the Facts

The Needham Family site is a fantastic resource. You can see the numerous references at the bottom of each individual. It would take years to redo that work.

So I decided to go through his site and cross reference the ancestors I had collected and change any information I had to what he had. As I did that, Needham pointed me to another excellent study that was of Benjamin Wilcox by John Blythe Dobson, and I cross referenced and changed my information for my people from that study as well.

Of the 129 ancestors I had found for Emma (Smith) Graham, Needham had information on 84 of them, and Dobson had 32 of them.

I put the information in my spreadsheet so that I could quickly visualize and access the information at Needham and Dobson’s sites:

Notice the people in orange. They were fiction I obtained from other people’s genealogy.

Dobson stated:

"We know of no basis for the recent claim that she was a Sarah Hart or Hort, b 16 Apr 1684 at Dartmouth, daughter of Thoas Hart or Hort and Margaret. Not only is any such person absent from the town’s vital records, but …". Needham states "Some claim she was Sarah Hort, daughter of Thomas Hort. I have seen no definitive proof of this claim."

which negated the Hort name and Sarah’s parents and grandparents.

And Needham only gives Susanna Swift as “Susanna” with a 1612 birth date, not the 1622 that I had. So the Susanna that married Ralph Allen, likely wasn’t Susanna Swift. So scratch her parents. Needham also didn’t give a surname for Rachel Sherman, so I removed that as well.

There could, of course, be later scholarly research that updates what Dobson or Needham have found, but I’d like to see it with extensive references that can be followed before I’ll believe it.

Prime Minister?

Notice the Borden ancestors in the spreadsheet above. Needham pointed me a site with the Descendants of Richard Borden. That site pointed me to information about Sir Robert Borden (1854-1937), who happened to be the 8th Prime Minister of Canada.

So now I can assuredly add this Prime Minister as well to my niece’s cousin list. He would have been her 7C5R (7th cousin, 5 times removed).

Seaver?

One other connection I managed to make. While searching to verify the fiction or fact of a “Thomas Bloomfield” ancestor, I came across Amanuensis Monday - Post #286: 1684 Will of Thomas Bloomfield (1615-1686) of Woodbridge, N.J. by the incredible genealogist Randy Seaver on his Genea-Musings blog.

Randy’s genealogical work is also of the gold standard that I would 100% trust.

Searching his site for more information, I found his page Genea-Musings: Surname Saturday - BLOOMFIELD (England > colonial Massachusetts > New Jersey) and from that page I was able to tell that Thomas Bloomfield was Randy’s 10th great-grandfather.

He’s also my niece’s 10th great-grandfather. So that makes Randy and my niece 11th cousins.

Others?

I’m sure there will be more connections that will come up for my niece. Once a genealogy gets back this far to Colonial America and England, there’s much more to be found.

These first discoveries are exciting for me. My own genealogy by comparison heads back to Romania and Ukraine in the early 1900’s, so I’ve never really got to experience these sorts of family connections the way so many other genealogists do.

And I feel much better knowing that these connections are not fiction, but fact.