A Moment's List-Reading and Subsequent Noodling

Commentary at a blog led me to open the Ahnentafel I made once for my kids. It is a strictly numerical list of their ancestors. They will be interested in it, if ever, when they retire. It has just under two hundred people in it, which means there are a lot of gaps, because the earliest person listed is #38924.

That would be Lyonell Chilton, dates unknown, who was the father of one James Chilton (#19462), born ~1556 in Canterbury, and who died aboard the Mayflower. The so-called Pilgrims spent the winter aboard at Cape Cod Bay (i.e. from November 1620 to March 1621), and he died in December.

My first bit of noodling is to wonder if I am truly a Mayflower descendant. I like to say so in the rare event someone gives a shit, but as it happens, James' daughter Isabella came across on a later vessel with her husband Roger Chandler and their infant daughter Sarah (#s 9731, 9730, and 4865 respectively). So a strict accounting of my DNA's path through history would not include it being on that ship, only the progenitor thereof, who died aboard as an old man and without further issue.

My second bit of noodling is to imagine what a time that must have been, anchored on a wild and unknown shore untold miles from the Hudson River they had aimed for, living off game and fish and surviving a harsh Massachussetts winter.

My third is about them being Pilgrims. We call them that because they were crazy enough to cross the Atlantic in search of fertile soil for their religious wackery rather than stay comfortably in Leyden, Holland. Personally, I would have learned Dutch and tried to lose my English accent: There was no shortage of Englishmen conscripted into the Dutch Republic's various wars with England and Spain. Well, Dutchmen too. And it was a nasty dangerous time withal, so maybe to restart in a virgin wilderness an ocean away from kings and their counsels wasn't such a bad idea after all.

I just don't like to call them Pilgrims. The era was churning with Protestant creativity, and whether a person was a Puritan or a Dissenter or a Lutheran or an underground atheist, none of them were Pilgrims. That's a crib from one overly religious chronicler of events, and one of those simplifications history teachers like to throw in to get the interest of bored farm boys. In this case it didn't become common usage until the early 1800s.

Anyway, Sarah Chandler, who was born in Leyden, married a man from Monmouthshire named Solomon Leonard (now there's a fine old Puritan name), and pumped out some children. Seven generations later, in the 1860s, Henry Leonard crossed the Isthmus of Panama in the company of two young men named Michael and Charles De Young. He went on to a life of over-worked poverty in the gold mines of Trinity County, and they went on to found the San Francisco Chronicle. They remained lifelong friends, and he went down to the City to visit them often.

I treasure my memories of his daughter Sarah, my great-grandmother, who in the 1960s looked like Mary See, but in 1899 was a pretty teenage girl who learned to play the trombone and joined young Al Paulsen's Ladies Elpitome Band. (Elpitome is not in the dictionary, but that's how I remember it, and if I remember it right and given my great-grandfather's sense of humor, was probably a deliberate misspelling or an inside joke).

Noodling further, Sarah is my favoritest girl name. Not sure why. A name can be favored for lots of reasons -- associations, historical meanings, euphonious qualities -- and for me Sarah somehow adds up best. If the pregnancy that ended with a D&C at Christmastide of 1993 had instead been valid and become a girl, that would have been her name. That would have been my bid for her name, let's put it that way. And I would still be a high school parent. Whoa.

Any more noodling? Nah, that's enough. Questions?