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So until such a “friend tie” is added to genealogical trees, I enjoy trying to find a family connection to my good friends, and to my delight, I have actually found that I am related to several very close friends, as well as to family friends of my parents!
There have been three ways that I’ve found family connections with my friends. One way is with people with certain last names, those in which all who share them come from a common immigrant ancestor. If you do have these particular last names somewhere among your ancestry, you may not realize that almost everyone with that surname is in some way related. Some of the names in my family that I keep an eye out for are Shethar, Claggett, Prather, Polk (believe it or not, most of those who have the name Polk as their surname or in their ancestry are related), Hussey, Coffin, Gorham, and, on the German/Swiss side of my family, Herr, Hershey, and Neidig. If I run into anyone with those names, I know that there is a virtual certainty that we are related. I was so pleased to find out that the daughter of one of my mother’s best friends, a lifelong family friend, whose maiden is Hussey, is indeed a distant cousin of mine, through mutual Hussey ancestors of Nantucket. And I have a great friend I met through my son’s Boy Scout troop with the last name of Hershey – and sure enough, after trading family charts, we find that we are 7th cousins – and that our sons are 8th cousins! (She is more closely related to Milton Hershey of chocolate bar fame than I am, however!)
The next way, which takes a little more time and research, is if you discover that you both have New England Puritan ancestors, or if your ancestors were involved in founding the same town or village. In the 1620s, there were few settlements in Plymouth Colony, and most were very close to each other, so if you share ancestors from that time and place, most likely they intermarried at some point. Even when the Puritan emigration pace picked up starting in 1630, for quite a while settlement in the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies was quite concentrated, and if your ancestor was in a village with your friend’s ancestor, their families could very well have intermarried, and they most likely at least knew each other.
And if you and your friend’s ancestral families were involved in the founding years of places like Hartford, New Haven, Salem, Marshfield, Londonderry (New Hampshire), or Nantucket, among other places, that’s another likely intermarriage point. I knew that my childhood friend, Liz Welch Carr, and I both had early Puritan New England ancestors, and after spending some time searching, I was delighted to find a commonn ancestor in the smidgen of my father’s side that had Puritans in it with one in the smidgen of her father’s Puritan side – Richard Platt, who left England in 1638 and settled in Milford, Connecticut, making us 10th cousins.
Another very close family friend, who has spent the last decade of Thanksgivings with us, has Winslow as his middle name, an old Massachusetts Puritan name. And indeed, we have some Winslows in our family as well, so I discovered that he is the “2nd cousin seven times removed of the husband of my 5th-great-grand-aunt” – pretty tenuous, I know, but our ancestors were in each other’s ambits, and this is enough to put him in the family tree – very satisfying, as his sons have treated my kids like their own cousins.
Finally, if you have a famous, or at least somewhat well-known person among your ancestry, particularly from at least a century or two ago, you will find connections with others who are related to that same person. Several years ago, I was in my kids’ school cafeteria and talking with the son of my great friend, Jeanne, and he was telling me about what they had learned in Social Studies that day, early American history, when he mentioned that he was related to Aaron Burr. Well, I was just thrilled, because we’re related to Aaron Burr, too! Actually, although we are both related to Aaron Burr, we are not technically related to each other – Jeanne counts the Burrs among her ancestors, while I am related to Aaron’s daughter’s husband – Theodosia Burr married Governor Joseph Alston, of South Carolina, my 2nd cousin five times removed. Perhaps not a direct relationship, but a relationship nonetheless!
No matter how distant the family connection might be, I am very happy to have a reason to include these great friends in the family tree, and now those relationships will stay online as long as there is an Internet!