The Overlap of Family & US History

Mark A. Ashwill Articles, Commentary, , , , ,

With US Thanksgiving quickly approaching (23.11.23) and as one of the more eccentric members of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants (GSMD), I thought this might be a good time to share this meme, the kind that people post like to post, again and again, in genealogy Facebook groups. (Full disclosure: Genealogy is one of my hobbies. It complements my lifelong interest in history in the spirit of “What’s past is prologue.” )

Technical note: This formula assumes no overlapping family relationships through nine generations, which is highly unlikely, especially among early European settlers when the gene pool was small. This is known as pedigree collapse, which “describes how reproduction between two individuals who share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be.”

The idea is to be grateful for those who came before us, which I am. Without them, there would be no I. I also think of the myriad advantages my race, gender, social class, and the 18 other circles of privilege afford me simply because I was born. I did nothing to earn them.

A variation of Shakespeare’s quote is etched on Robert Aiken’s monument, Future, outside the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The monument depicts a youthful woman holding a book with blank pages, symbolizing a future yet to be written. CREDIT: U.S. National Archives at College Park Coincidentally, Stephen Hopkins, a paternal 9th great-grandfather who arrived in Jamestown in 1610 and in Plymouth 10 years later has a connection to the Shakespeare play in which this line was uttered.

In addition to struggles, battles, difficulties, sadness, happiness, love stories, and hope, my interior monologue immediately conjured up what my settler-colonizer ancestors did to “the other” in the name of money, religion, and a sense of superiority because of their background. They were privileged before privilege became a thing. This list includes, but is not limited to:

Enslavement of blacks;

Enslavement and murder of Native Americans;

Appropriation of Native American land;

Oppression of working-class people;

other forms of suffering inflicted on “the other” simply because of who they were or were not.

The story of the US and British Colonial America, including the good, the bad, and the ugly – with a disproportionate share of the last two – is the story of my family from the shores of England, Scotland, and other countries to those of what became British Colonial America and the US.

Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882)

Postscript: I discuss some of these issues in a 2022 article From New England to Vietnam: Settler Colonialism in Cross-Cultural Perspective. It’s behind a paywall, but the publisher allowed me to post it on my blog.

Shalom (שלום), MAA

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