Family · the stories
Seven Rivers
the deepest lines behind one family, each told from its source
The VanBenschoten namesake line sits at the center of the set; around it run the deep rivers that fed into it, Dutch, English, Scottish and Devonian, each followed back to the furthest name the record holds, and told as one unbroken descent down to the present. Three of them end at a wall; one arrives by adoption; one is carried for six generations by daughters. All of them are true.
The Mayflower, Adopted
Yorkshire → Plymouth Colony
The deepest line in the tree, running to a 1487 Yorkshire yeoman and Governor Bradford of the Mayflower. It enters the family by a 1908 adoption: heritage, by love.
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Thirteen Generations
Mechelen → the Hudson
The deepest blood line, from a widow of Mechelen, through the secretary of a Dutch colony and the Albany Schuylers, down to now. Carried by daughters for six generations.
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The Cooper of Lyme
Lyme, Connecticut
Back to a barrel-maker who shipped fish to Barbados and rioted over a town line in 1672. The longest New England reach in the tree, surviving today as a middle name.
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The Name Itself
Bunschoten → the Esopus → Saratoga
The namesake line: a Dutch immigrant on the Esopus flats, a Revolutionary lieutenant, twelve children on a Saratoga farm, and a name twice nearly gone that a boy named Reed now carries.
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A Door in Connecticut
Durham, Connecticut
A line that runs clean back to a locked door: "John C. Read," a man with no recorded past, his origin the family's deepest brick wall, left honestly shut.
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From Angus to the Big Sky
Angus, Scotland → Montana
Linen handloom weavers and estate gamekeepers of Angus who crossed to a Montana ranch in the 1890s. The longest crossing in the tree, down to an Air Force grandfather.
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Out of North Devon
Inwardleigh, Devon
A rare Devon name, farm labourers of the parishes west of Dartmoor, carried across the Atlantic by way of Ontario to the shore of the Finger Lakes.
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Seven sources, four countries, one delta, and a single name keeping the record.
seven lines · 1487 → now · told from the source
Each story is drawn from the family's GEDCOM and the primary records behind it; walls are left as walls, and adoptive heritage is named as such.
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