| A teenager is abruptly and
unexpectedly startled from a peaceful sleep in
the middle of the night. Before
dawn, he will leave on an adventure that is
certain to be filled with danger and
life-threatening hazards. Although he has no way
to know, he will not return for four or five
years.
It is 1756, and the location is
New England. Benjamin is only sixteen. Now,
before the sun rises, he finds himself among a
company of men heading off on an expedition. They
are marching off through the wilderness to Canada
in the French and Indian War.
Benjamin is the second child,
and the oldest son, in a large family. Some of
his ancestors came to America more than a century
earlier. Others of his ancestors have lived their
entire lives in New England. A number of his
ancestors have lived into their seventies and
eighties.
But at this moment in time, the
odds of Benjamin living a long life are not very
promising. Even less so, if the crystal ball
could reveal that after surviving his brutal
initiation into manhood, he would go on to be a
soldier in the American Revolution and
participate in the battles of Bunker Hill, Long
Island, White Plains, Trenton, Monmouth, and
others.
But he did beat the odds. Not
only did he survive the expedition and the
Revolutionary War, he lived a long and prosperous
life. He became a successful farmer, married
twice, and fathered thirteen children. All of his
children married. They gave him at least 87
grandchildren, and maybe more.
Before the end of the
nineteenth century, his descendants had spread
into a great number of families. In addition to
being profusely scattered throughout New England,
some were in the Mid-Atlantic states, some in
Mid-West states from Kansas to Wisconsin, and
some had even reached California.
How many little (or large and
dramatic) twists of fate during Benjamin's life
had impacted the lives of all those families?
Five of his children were born
before the Revolutionary War, three were born
during the war, and five were born after. How
many times could part or all of the subsequent
chain of events of the unfolding of family
history been eliminated by an arrow, a musket
ball, disease, accidents, or nature's wrath?
What I wonder is, how many of
his own descendants know that Benjamin even
existed?
By now, his genes could be
shared by many thousands of families, most of
which, because of marriages of so many female
descendants, have surnames very different than
Benjamin's. Some of the ones I have entered in
the database (as of more than a century ago,
1885) are Ames, Avery, Batchelder, Boardman,
Bowers, Chamberlain, Clark, Cotlee, Culver,
Dorchin, Fessenden, Hillyer, Hobart, Hodge,
Howell, Kendrick, Lyon, Martin, Miller, Mower,
Perry, Phillips, Pratt, Raymond, Richards,
Robinson, Ryder, Twitchell, Wadsworth, Waite, and
Willson.
Could Benjamin be one of your
great-great-great-great-grandfathers?
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