My annual joke in bad taste about this time of year is that if for Thanksgiving, I am grateful that Dorothy Bradford fell overboard in Plimouth Harbor or I would have never been born. Which is true and horrible. William Bradford's first wife was either so devastated that she had to leave her son John in Amsterdam or drunk from too much cabin meade or maybe just depressed to see where she was about to have to survive that she took a big nose dive off the side of the Mayflower. She survived months on a tiny ship that was not built for the amount of people crammed into its living quarters....originally there was supposed to be two ships...with people dying around her from disease, no privacy, her family left far behind her. And she died before she had a chance to touch the land.
Not too long afterward a widow named Alice Carpenter made the same journey and married Dorothy's husband, producing three more children. Another Welshman Sir Richard Groutte fled the country with his son was also on a ship about that time. An Englishman named Henry Curtis was on another about a decade later, soon settling in Sudbury MA. Another man named Stebbins went on to Deerfield where his grandson's family would come under attack by a group of Native Americans working with the French and be marched to Quebec. Jean DeNoyon, Jacques Bertault, Gilette Banne, Jeanne Franchard and Marin Chauvin would arrive Quebec in the 1600's. The Hobarts, The Jaycoxes, The Sages, The Armstrongs, The Cooks, The Ripleys, The Clarks, The Jewetts, The Robleses (Yay Spain-ish!),The Kemptons, The Haskells, The Marbles, The Cudworths, The Gaineses (Another Canadian ),The Soules, The Lees, The Stoniers (Go Scottland!), The Malones and The Hills (Wahoo Ireland!), The Alexanders, The Hazzards, The Havens, The Wiltsies, The Valleaus (Go Swiss French Heugonotses!), , The Clarks (Give it up for The Quakers!), The Binkleys, The Malones and The Kerwins (Even More Irish), The Garrisons, and on and on. Every person, good intentions or not, slogged across the ocean in an environment limited to rations and minimal sanitation, knowingly risking their lives to make it possible for me to exist.
Considering the amount of Puritans and Pilgrims in the lot, I probably would not be the picture of ideal female descendant. My purity is questionable and I like listening to songs that have dirty words in them. Now I am writing from a heated space not hungry heading for a night's sleep without the worry about dying from a disease or being attacked by men with muskets and/or hand held war weapons. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I die before I wake, I ask you Lord my soul to take. They actually went to bed praying this because it was a necessity. Because they may not live through the night. I owe them. I am thankful for what they gave me. Whether I agree with them or not, I am here. They sacrificed comfort, met the other parts of my genetic code and created yours truly.
Every generation that I have been in this country, every generation that we continue our existence on this planet, is due to the survival to a set of parents, then 4 grandparents, and the eight parents that sired them and so on. Multiplying people each generation. Mine have been in North America for about 13. What are the odds? What are the odds?
So thanks all of you that came for me. And thank you, Dorothy, for not. Because if you hadn't died, Alice Carpenter would never have reproduced with Governor Bradford Pilgrim Man. And I wouldn't have a discount at Plimouth Plantation. It is a crazy world, idn't it?
