Re: What this list is - on "insularity"

Thinking it over, John, I tend to agree with you. When I said a few days
ago that there were others out there with many many with numerous
royal/ancient gateways (12-15 or so) I was thinking of the late Walter
Lee Sheppard, FASG. who also had quite along list. But, again
reconsidering, this seems to be most unusual - probably atypical. I
suspect though that the total has is to some large extent correlated to
"degrees- of comprehensiveness" [if you will] of traced ancestry - also,
it must be confessed, some "dumb luck".

John Brandon...

But since you claimed earlier, "I could have listed some gateways ... I
subsequently disproved: Charles Chauncy, Peter Bulkeley, and Grace
(Chetwode) Bulkeley," I wonder if you haven't in fact left a few other
disproved ones in your list, for the sake of nostalgia, as it were? I
mean, technically you could list disproved ancestors (who's going to be
able to check?), but it wouldn't be very honest of you ... would it?

Nathaniel Taylor...

Or the accidents of geography, or intermarriage. My children have
eleven gateways, five from me and six from my wife. My parents have one
and four gateways respectively; my in-laws have three and three. Two
generations further up, eight out of my children's 16
great-great-grandparents (of whom only nine have any colonial ancestry
in the first place) have gateways--one with four, one with three, one
with two, and five with one each. These folks were all living around
1900. The two with four and three gateways shared them: they were
working-class neighbors & cousins who married each other, so their
children had only the same four. The other great-great-grandparents all
had non-duplicated gateways and came from different populations without
any close intersecting ancestry.

So in my case it is twentieth-century migration and social mobility,
with intermarriages of people with distinct ancestral clusters, that
brought about the larger-than-usual collection of known gateway descents
for my children, even though only just over half of their ancestry
(measured at four generations back) had any colonial US components. But
who's to say such consecutive intermarriages of descendants of gateways
weren't also taking place in earlier generations in various populations
(say 19th-century Boston or New York, or the midwest)?

I suspect that most gateways were pretty much randomly distributed among
the early colonial population in terms of social and geographic identity

smyth...

In connection with Richardson's disclosure of the early marriage of William
Hubbard and Judith Knapp, I noticed an interesting point: It means that
three successive generations of Whittingham married women who had royal
descents. Richard-1 married Elizabeth Bulkeley; John1 married Martha
Hubbard; and William2 married Mary Lawrence. Something seems to have been
tilting the odds in a Whittingham marriage.

I have problems with the term that is being used here to generate questions
about numbers: isn't "gateway ancestor" under-determined in this
discussion, when it comes to counting royal lines? Two of my ancestors,
John Lawrence (father of Mary Lawrence Hubbard) and Jane Lawrence Giddings
were born in England and died in New England. Is that two gateway ancestors
or one? If it is one, can that logic be taken a step further: Are the two
Lawrences and Judith Knapp gateways to the same royal descent? And,
assuming, for purposes of argument that Thomas Dudley's grandfather was Sir
Henry Dudley, do two gateways pass through Thomas Dudley? I believe that
answers to my questions will involve a certain amount of stipulation.

Richard Smyth
smyth@nc.rr.com

(most of them were not baronets' sisters, etc.). Even without some
shared consciousness of having some sort of exalted ancestry (which
surely did not exist for most of them) prompting a higher frequency of
intermarriage, still by random chance there must have been enough early
consecutive intermarriages of descendants of distinct gateways to
produce at least *some* people today with lots & lots (say over 30?) of
these known gateways in their ATs.

John Brandon...

Well, possibly some very recent descendants of Robert E. Lee, the
children of whom Gary mentions as having 16 or 18 gateways ancestors of
royal descent.

But I would think Princess Diana's American ancestry would be a more
likely model for the general population: only one remote RD, from Mrs.
Alice Freeman-Thompson-Parke.

I would bet the distribution and intermarriage of their descendants in
the US population would be similar to the pattern generated by
descendants of any randomly selected group of 200 early colonists (or
whatever the current number of known medieval colonial gateways is):
some people would have lots of them in their AT; many people would have
a small number, and some people would have none. Over time, as we know
from Chang's mathematical model, descent from all of them (or all those
whose progeny are not extinct) will be universal in the population.

How many known gateways did Sheppard have, and what was his recent
ancestry?

Nat Taylor

a genealogist's sketchbook:

my children's 17th-century American immigrant ancestors:
http://home.earthlink.net/~nathanieltaylor/leaves/immigrantsa.htm

Tony