For some odd reason, I decided to do a little genealogy research last night. Okay, not such an odd reason…I am so tired of listening to Taylor Swift sing off-key that I couldn’t bear to watch the Grammys with the rest of the crew.

At any rate, I grew up knowing about six or seven generations of my family tree: all patrilineal, of course. Last night, as I was poking around on the web, I saw something that made me think “Hey, what about the tail line?” That something was a small notation indicating that my great(3)-grandmother, Florence Carlow, was born in New Brunswick.

Hmmm. This was new information for me. And so off to the New Brunswickian genealogy sites to see what I could find. I read through various census documents until I finally said to myself, “Didn’t these people come from somewhere else?” And finally, in documents listing New Brunswick’s “First Families”, I found that they did…they came from Maine and before that, Massachusetts.

Luckily, amateur American genealogists have posted their family trees online because otherwise I would have been lost. Apparently, that Massachusetts family is rather well-known: the Howlands actually arrived in MA on the Mayflower.

Okay, there were three brothers: John, Arthur, and one more who does not figure in this story (lucky for me as I’ll be damned if I can remember his name!). John Howland arrived in Plymouth on board the Mayflower in 1620. His descendants include notables such as George HW Bush, George Bush, Sarah Palin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. His older brother, Arthur, arrived in Plymouth some time around 1627, maybe on a ship called the Mayflower (apparently, there were several), maybe not. His descendants include ME!

Here’s the trail I followed:

* Florence Carlow, daughter of Horatio Carlow
* Horatio Carlow, son of Elisabeth Turner
* Elisabeth Turner, daughter of Rachael Sylvester
* Rachael Sylvester, daughter of Joshua Sylvester
* Joshua Sylvester, son of Lucretia Joyce
* Lucretia Joyce, daughter of Elizabeth Howland
* Elizabeth Howland, daughter of Arthur Howland

So there you have it…my family arrived on the Mayflower. Can I have my green card now?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:24 pm and is filed under A Propos to Nothing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.