I have just finished researching possible family connections that I might have to American Pilgrims who were passengers on the Mayflower. ...While i have not yet finished making an exhaustive search of every one of these possible connections, I have taken a large sample to research, and I have found that there is a family connection between myself and EVERY SINGLE MAYFLOWER PASSENGER sampled so far! How weird is that? Well, really - not so weird... Considering that the definition of family connection includes connections via marriages, very distant cousins or other relatives, and so forth - not so weird. And considering that 1) there were only about 100 Mayflower passengers in the first place and 2) HALF died in the first few months of arrival, and 3) only 4 women survived the first winter there.... not so weird. Why? Because it seems that the availability of women to remarry after the First Sickness was so limited that any descendants of the surviving Mayflower passengers would all be very much related to each other, and maybe even multiple times through multiple relationship trees, simply due to scarcity of marriage and procreative options. Of course, there were other boats, arriving not long after, with more settlers and women to marry and so forth, adding more variation and complexity to these relationships, but even so
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:34:15 +0000