More astonishment

After finding the Mayflower connection in my husband's family, it made me want to push further back in my tree, although I didn't expect to find any ancestors who had traveled on the Mayflower. Like my husband's family, mine was mostly Catholic, and I knew that at least three branches, including my father's Irish ancestors and my mother's German and Belgian ancestors, had all come to this country in the mid 1800s.  Only my paternal grandmother's family, which I knew little about, offered a possible route back to the time of the early American colonies.

The search for these ancestors was quite time consuming.  After all, with each generation, the number of ancestors doubles.  And I had to trace the family back 13 generations to my 11^th great grandparents.  (Just to clarify how many 11^th great grandparents one has – it's over 8000.)  Of course, many of the lines came to a dead end in the 1700 or 1800s, but a couple of lines kept going. 

Eventually I found an ancestor by the name of "William Ring" (1580-1621), my 11^th great grandfather.  He was a passenger on the Speedwell, a ship that accompanied the Mayflower as it departed on its journey across the Atlantic.  Unfortunately, the Speedwell was not seaworthy and had to turn back and William Ring died in Holland the following year. His wife Mary Durrant (1590-1631) eventually came to America with their children, in the year 1629.

One of the children was Andrew Ring (1618-1693) and he married a woman named Deborah Hopkins, another daughter of Stephen Hopkins. Stephen, as you may recall from my previous post, was an ancestor of my husband, and  a passenger on the Mayflower.

Therefore, it turns out that a relative of mine, who but for a leaky boat could have come over with the Mayflower, married a relative of my husband's who did come to America on the Mayflower, nearly 400 years ago.  To be specific, my 10^th great grand uncle married my husband's 8^th great grand aunt. 

Think about that.  Two English families who wanted to escape religious persecution in England made plans to travel on two ships to America.  One family managed to make it across on the most famous sailing ship in our nation's history.  The other had to come later.  These families then became connected through marriage.

Centuries passed and the families continued, branching into many different directions.  Within each family was a small branch that ended up 3000 miles away in the state of California.  And somehow, a young man from one family and a young woman from the other, having no idea their families had ever known each other, met, fell in love, and married.   

Spooky!

But there's more…..