"They chose John Carver, a gentleman of singular piety, rare humility... and well approved amongst them as their Governor for that first year."
- from Mayflower,
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Every family has its lore, and from the time I knew my maiden name was Carver, I also knew about the most famous person in my ancestral past. We were descendents of John Carver, who not only came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, but was the first governor of the Pilgrim settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
My, I was proud. Every Thanksgiving of my school-age years I repeated the story of my noble past. My own children and, most recently, my 10-year-old granddaughter have also recited the same marvel to their astonished peers.
So, when I learned of Jeannie Riddle's Mayflower connection in The News-Times, I was equally excited for my fellow Columbia Countian. But before I called to see if we might be related, I decided to check a few facts.
You see, she had spent years documenting her genealogy before becoming a certificate-proving member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendents, while I had either been too lazy to go the legal route, or too trusting of my "family lore" to bother. Thus, with the help of the Internet, Nathaniel Philbrick's 2006 book Mayflower and a nearly-forgotten family tome called "Carver Genealogy," I went to work.
My pride rose another notch as I read John Carver's resume: Wealthy London merchant, chief figure in securing the Mayflower and arranging the migration to America, generous contributor of supplies needed for the journey, chosen leader while on board the Mayflower and first governor of the Plymouth Colony.
Described by Philbrick as "the man on whose counsel the people had come to depend," Carver also was first to sign the Mayflower Compact, that initial step toward self-government in the colonies.
Naturally I found all this interesting, but what I really wanted to know was his personal information. What about his family, his wife and children?
Exact dates and details are sketchy, but it appears John Carver was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1576, and married Marie de Lannoy there when he was nearly 30 years old. John and Marie had one child, a girl who died either at birth or in infancy. Sadly, either in childbirth or soon afterward, Marie also died. John then moved to Holland, where he joined a Puritan congregation who had fled religious persecution in England, and married his second wife, Katherine. About 1617 Katherine gave birth to John's second child, another girl, who also died in infancy.
For the next three years John and Katherine busied themselves with preparations for the journey to America and, in September, 1620, boarded the Mayflower for that historic trip.
But Carver would not survive to the end of his one-year term. In April, 1621, after working in the fields on an unusually hot day, he came home to rest, lapsed into a coma, and died a few days later. Five weeks later a brokenhearted Katherine, perhaps weakened by her own toil, was laid to rest beside the grave of her husband. According to mayflowerhistory.com, "John Carver is not known to have had any surviving children."
I wept, not just for this sad tale, but for my burst ancestral bubble. Did this mean that generations of Carver's have been living a lie? Retaining a glimmer of hope that the sometimes errant Internet could be wrong again, I turned to that old family tome to see what very distant cousin, Margaret Carver, had to say.
She began with "the question common to every Carver we have met: Are we descended from John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth?" Obviously, as she learned from her surprisingly meticulous research, the answer is, "no."
But although John's was the first Carver name to be recorded in America, a Robert Carver arrived a few boatloads later and settled first in Plymouth and then in nearby Bradford, Massachusetts, where members of my documented family live to this day. Quite likely, it was Robert who planted the seed of our first American family tree. Just as likely, considering the timing and circumstances of their arrivals, Robert, John and, by extension my family, were related.
But if that reasoning doesn't hold authentic Mayflower-descendant water, I can always turn to my grandmother's genealogy because, according to her "family lore": we are also descendants of Miles Standish, another Mayflower passenger who, even according to Wikipedia, had seven children, six of whom lived to adulthood - and "four were sons."
(Barbara Seaborn is a local freelance writer. E-mail comments to seabara@aol.com.)
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