Genealogy Jottings

My paternal grandmother Grace Reed (1896-1976) claimed to know nothing of her own family. She did once give me her mother’s name, Laura Riddle (1853-1933). Beyond that, whenever I asked about her heritage, she would simply shake her head and claim ignorance. She had no siblings around who I could ask for more information.

After she died, I began to research her family in earnest. I learned that her maternal grandmother, Olive Hall (Dunbar) Riddle, was born in Barnstable County, Massachusetts in 1823. I was excited to learn that I have New England ancestors.

Two things came to mind. First, I now had the possibility of a Mayflower ancestor. Second, New Englanders are among the most-researched people on earth. Scholars have compiled lists of names of Mayflower descendants.

At the Denver Public Library, I located resources that included these names.

I found out that Grandma’s Dunbar ancestors descended from Robert Dunbar of Hingham, Massachusetts. He arrived in the colonies in 1653, too late for the Mayflower which arrived in 1620. He may have been a deported prisoner, captured during one of the Scottish uprisings.

The women who married into the Dunbar line had surnames like Cole, Garnet, and Hathaway. None of these names appeared on the Mayflower list.

What about the Hall line? Bangs, Bramhall, Burgess, and Snow women married into the Hall family. Again, the Mayflower list included none of these names.

Some of these ancestors are known to have arrived in the new world later, aboard the Anne in 1623. Edward Bangs and Nicholas Snow were among those passengers.

I went no further with my research. I did not look for surnames of the mothers of the women who had married into the Dunbar and Hall families. I put aside my New England project because I lived far away from there, and I had more recent Midwestern families to investigate. Years have gone by.

This week I was poking around in the WikiTree website where my mother’s Finnish cousins have posted so much of that family tree. I wondered whether I should begin adding my father’s line into this database.

I knew that if I went back far enough, someone else may have already done some of it. I began working backwards to see if I could get a match to a known ancestor. Some of my brick wall guys (Caleb Reed of Morris County, NJ and John Davis Riddle of Mendon, MI) were in there. No one has any more information on them than I do.

Then I found Grandma’s Massachusetts grandmother, Olive Hall Dunbar. Most of her family tree is on WikiTree.

Her maternal grandmother, our ancestor, was Lucy Snow (1760-1795), a name familiar to me. She was the first wife of Gershom Hall (1760-1844), one of my Revolutionary War ancestors. I had never done any research on Lucy’s family beyond learning that the Snows did not arrive on the Mayflower.

Yet there on WikiTree, beneath Lucy’s name, was this note:
Her Snow family lineage goes back to immigrant Nicholas Snow, and his wife, Constance (Hopkins) Snow, a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620.

Remember Nicholas? He was on the Anne, not the Mayflower. But his wife, Constance Hopkins, who was also my ancestor, made the Mayflower crossing.

Can it be true? Have I finally learned of a Mayflower ancestor?

Constance Hopkins and her father Stephen Hopkins were indeed passengers on the Mayflower. If the WikiTree contributor is correct that I am descended from Constance Hopkins, I do have a Mayflower family in my lineage. I have not verified Lucy Snow’s ancestry myself, but I do have good documentation for my descendancy from her.

When I did a cursory search to find more about the Hopkins family, I found even more astonishing information. They have a documented English lineage extending to the 1200’s in the county of Hampshire. What a heritage to stumble upon.

One of these days I will need to look at all this more closely. I should post it all into my database and connect us up in WikiTree. At long last, I hope I finally to have identified a Mayflower ancestor.