For the theme this time I decided to look for whether I had any tenth great grandparents in my family database.\u00a0 I was pretty sure I did, thinking of a couple of family lines that I know go back a long way.\u00a0 So I started with my direct lines and followed each back in the database to see how far they went.<\/p>\n
It turns out that there is a wide range of ancestors for me in my database.\u00a0 On one of my paternal lines – the Hockmans – I don\u2019t have anyone past my great grandmother, Elizabeth Mary Hockman, about whom I have written in the past<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t surprised to find this, since I knew that a number of my father\u2019s lines had come to this country in the early groups in the 1600s.<\/p>\n On my maternal side I don\u2019t know ancestors so far back with a couple of exceptions.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In some ways, as I think I have noted in this blog before, I know less about my mother\u2019s ancestors than my father\u2019s.<\/p>\n The problem with all of these, of course, is that I have few original and primary resources for the further back ancestors.\u00a0 In several cases the ancestor was prominent in an area and articles and compiled genealogies have been written.\u00a0 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<\/a><\/sup>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And certainly I have not yet succeeded in providing reasonable evidence for even all of my closer ancestors.<\/p>\n The ancestor I have the “best” evidence for is Stephen Hussey and his father Christopher Hussey and mother Theodate Bachiler.\u00a0 I wrote<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Christopher’s father being John Hussey is supported by a baptism record, found on ancestry.com, for Surrey.\u00a0 There was also a transcription of Christopher’s will, with a reference to the original, that supports Stephen being his son.<\/p>\n For the theme this time I decided to look for whether I had any tenth great grandparents in my family database.\u00a0 I was pretty sure I did, thinking of a couple of family lines that I know go back a …<\/p>\n\n