Who Are My Tenth Great Grandparents? – 52 Ancestors, # 40

For the theme this time I decided to look for whether I had any tenth great grandparents in my family database.  I was pretty sure I did, thinking of a couple of family lines that I know go back a long way.  So I started with my direct lines and followed each back in the database to see how far they went.

It turns out that there is a wide range of ancestors for me in my database.  On one of my paternal lines – the Hockmans – I don’t have anyone past my great grandmother, Elizabeth Mary Hockman, about whom I have written in the past.  On another paternal line I only go back to 3g-grandparents (William Divers and Elizabeth Hanna), but on the rest of my paternal lines I can go back further, including four lines back to a 10g-grandparent (Nicholas Coffyn, John Hussey, Rev. Stephen Bachilor, and John Folger) and a number of 9greats.  I wasn’t surprised to find this, since I knew that a number of my father’s lines had come to this country in the early groups in the 1600s.

On my maternal side I don’t know ancestors so far back with a couple of exceptions.  I have one 10g-grandparent line (Walter Palmer), one 12g-grandparent line (William Minor), and a couple that go back to 8g or 9g-grandparents.  In some ways, as I think I have noted in this blog before, I know less about my mother’s ancestors than my father’s.

The problem with all of these, of course, is that I have few original and primary resources for the further back ancestors.  In several cases the ancestor was prominent in an area and articles and compiled genealogies have been written.  One of the first sources I had was the compiled genealogy for the Coffin family edited by Louis Coffin and published by the Nantucket Historical Association¹.  This compilation is an amazing work of a number of people, and includes information that came from a variety of places, going back originally to responses from Coffins all over the country after the 1881 reunion on Nantucket.  Unfortunately, although there was every attempt made to provide evidence for information, there was not access to some of the sources that are available today, and so there are no (or very few citations of) direct sources in this work.  The same problems exist for the other sources of hints or statements about any of these lines going back as far as they seem to.  And certainly I have not yet succeeded in providing reasonable evidence for even all of my closer ancestors.

The ancestor I have the “best” evidence for is Stephen Hussey and his father Christopher Hussey and mother Theodate Bachiler.  I wrote about Stephen and his vellum pocketbook not long ago and how the provenance that came with the pocketbook is my best evidence of the family line.  Stephen and his connection to Christopher and Theodate is less well supported by any primary evidence, although I continue to work on finding what is out there.  Christopher’s father being John Hussey is supported by a baptism record, found on ancestry.com, for Surrey.  There was also a transcription of Christopher’s will, with a reference to the original, that supports Stephen being his son.