An astonishing discovery

Once I learned about my husband's Ruby ancestors, I traced more lines on his mother's side of the family.  One of his great great grandmothers was a woman named Mary Ann Landon (1820-1889).  Tracing her line led to one amazing discovery, followed by a disappointment, followed by an even more amazing discovery.

I traced the family back seven generations from Mary Ann Landon to her father Samuel Landon to his mother Experience Cooke, to her mother Rebecca Edgerton, to her mother Experience Bearse, to her mother Experience Howland, to her father John Joseph Howland, to his father John Howland.

When I learned that  John Howland (1592-1673) and his wife Elizabeth Tilley (1607-1687) were both passengers on the Mayflower, as were Elizabeth's parents, John Tilley (1571-1621) and Joan Hurst (1567-1621), I was dumbfounded and certain the information was wrong.  He couldn't be related to anyone on the Mayflower.  After all, his ancestors were Catholic, as were mine.  And Catholics did not come to this country on the Mayflower.  But I had forgotten that my husband's mother converted to Catholicism and that her ancestors were not Catholic.

Still, I found the possibility hard to believe so I went over my records again, and sure enough, there was a glitch.  One of the names in the line is a controversial figure.  The person in dispute is "Experience Howland" whom the Mayflower Society does not recognize as a verifiable link in the ancestry chain.   

Even though some genealogists believe there is a good case to be made for the existence of Experience Howland, I realized this is not something that could be proven, so I returned to my research to see if anyone else from my husband's family came from the early 1600s.  

I found three more Mayflower passengers and this time, the information was not in dispute. 

Again, the trail started with Mary Ann Landon, only this time it led back through her great grandfather Elisha Cooke, instead of her great grandmother, Rebecca Edgerton.  From Elisha Cooke, the line went to his father William Cooke, to his father Jacob Cooke II, to his father Jacob Cooke I, to Francis Cooke (1584-1663), a passenger on the Mayflower.  His wife, Hester Mahieu (1585-1666), did not accompany him but came later with the children, one of whom was Jacob Cooke I, who later married a woman named Damaris Hopkins. Her parents, it turns out, were also Mayflower passengers, Steven Hopkins (1581-1644) and Elizabeth Fisher (1595-1639).

 

While this discovery astonished me, as no one in the immediate family had any knowledge of a Mayflower connection, I was still skeptical.  I had found a glitch in the first trail.  Perhaps there was a glitch in this one. 

Then I received a message through ancestry.com from a third cousin of my husband, someone he had never met.  The man, who has been doing genealogy research since the mid 1980s, had seen my husband's family tree on ancestry, where he also has one, and he wanted to talk. He had information to give me and wanted to ask some questions about my husband's branch of the family. I learned from him that my discoveries were accurate and that my husband's mother's family is definitely descended from Francis Cooke, Steven Hopkins and Elizabeth Fisher of the Mayflower.

But there was still more to discover-- this time on my side of the family-- and to say that it blew me away would be understating it.