Mayflower Ancestors, Part 1: Voyage

John Alden
Born: About 1599, England
Died: Sep. 12, 1687, Duxbury, Massachusetts
Relation to Author: 10th Great Grandfather in Law

Priscilla Mullins (married name Alden)
Born: c. 1603, England (maybe Dorking or Guildford)
Died: After 1650 (maybe as late as 1685), Duxbury, Massachusetts
Relation to Author: 10th Great Grandmother in Law

William Mullins
Born: Unknown, England
Died: Winter 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Relation to Author: 11th Great Grandfather in Law

Alice Mullins
Born: Unknown, England
Died: Winter 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Relation to Author: 11th Great Grandmother in Law? (so little is known about her that researchers do not know if she was the mother for some, all or none of William’s children)

There were supposed to be two boats sailing to America for the Puritans - the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The former was hired and the latter was purchased by the Puritans. But the Speedwell was leaking at the beginning of the voyage - going in for repairs twice before leaking for the final time when they’d finally set out, which Philbrick suggests was purposeful by the Speedwell’s master - using a mast that was too big and going too fast and straining the boat. Philbrick thinks that the Dutch may have conspired with the Speedwell’s master. Both boats turned around and went to Plymouth, then crowding some of the Speedwell passengers onto the Mayflower and leaving the Speedwell behind. The Speedwell was sold and would make many future voyages without leaking. 

The Mayflower left England September 6, 1620, months later than originally planned because of these and other delays. They were using up some of their provisions while waiting. So they would arrive in America later than planned and closer to winter and with less provisions. The trip across the Atlantic took two months and they arrived in November 1620. 

The Mayflower’s original destination was supposed to be the mouth of Hudson River - what is now New York City but was then considered part of Virginia. The Dutch - former hosts of the Puritans - had their eyes on New York and may have been conspiring against them. 

At some point late in the journey (there don’t seem to be any detailed records of the voyage), after encountering bad weather and storms, the captain did not, and could not, know how close he was to land because he could not determine his longitude. 

He knew he was north of where he wanted to be. But with supplies running low and disease starting to show up, the captain decided to just race west and reach land even if it was to reach Cape Cod first. They could decide once they reached land if they wanted to proceed south to the Hudson River. 

We now know that they were traveling just 2 miles per hour, in part because of the Gulf Stream, which flows up from the Caribbean and then east across the Atlantic. The Mayflower was fighting the east-moving waters. They arrived in America after more than two months at sea. When the Mayflower left in the spring of 1621 to head back to England, it would take just one month to get back across the Atlantic. 

During the journey, only one person died, though they arrived low on provisions facing a New England winter. 

4 Generations: Cheney / Cooper / Horton

Julia Westbrook (married name Cooper)
Born: November 29, 1859; New Jersey
Died: November 7, 1949; New Jersey
Relation to Author: 2nd Great Grandmother

Leila Cooper (married name Cheney)
Born: May 7, 1886; New Jersey
Died: December 7, 1975; Dover, New Jersey
Relation to Author: Great Grandmother

Bruce Judson Cheney
Born: October 28, 1917; Morris County, New Jersey
Died: July 16, 2012; Dover, New Jersey
Relation to Author: Grandfather (aka PopPop)

Bruce Judson Cheney, Jr.
Born: July 26, 1947; Morristown, New Jersey
Died: October 14, 1947; Kenvil, New Jersey
Relation to Author: Uncle

I recently wrote about Baby Bruce - Bruce Cheney, Jr., - and the medical explanation for his early death at 3 months. It is a clinical description of his condition that I was able to write because we have his autopsy. But fortunately, we also have a picture of baby Bruce. We can see the person that lived such a short time.

Pictured here are 4 generations together: Bruce, Jr.; Bruce (Sr. - my PopPop); Leila Cooper - Bruce, Jr.'s grandmother; and Julia Westbrook Cooper - Bruce, Jr.'s great grandmother. 

The picture makes me a little sad, knowing that Baby Bruce died before he reached 3 months. And I imagine it was hard on Bruce and Betty to lose their first child and wonder if they would ever be able to have children. But from the vantage point of more than 75 years in the future, we can take heart that Bruce and Betty had two awesome children after Bruce Jr., and Julia Westbrook would get to meet one more of her great grandchildren.

Our Irish Ancestors and The Famine

Relation to Author: Maternal 2nd Great Grandparents 

Bernard Keenan
Born: November 7, 1829, Hogansburg, New York, USA
We believe his parents were born in County Antrim, Ireland and arrived in America in 1821
Ellen Leary
Born: April 12, 1838 (or 1840), County Cork, Ireland
Arrival in America: 1843

Patrick Leary
Born: March, 1831, Ireland
Arrival in America: 1859
Honora McCarthy
Born: 1831, Ireland
Arrival in America: 1855

Denis O'Leary
Born: December, 1835, Canada
Arrival in America: 1837 from Canada; Parents arrived in Canada from Ireland between 1828 and 1835
Katherine Burns
Born: August, 1835, Ireland
Arrival in America: 1851 or 1852

Michael Barry
Born: 1839, County Kerry, Ireland
Arrival in America: sometime between 1839 and 1844
Mary Enright
Born: November 1844, County Kerry, Ireland
Arrival in America: 1847

All of my maternal ancestors are Irish Catholic (which makes me 50% Irish). Growing up I had thought that all of our Irish ancestors first came over during or because of the Great Famine, which lasted from 1845 to 1852. But that isn't the case. Some came over well before the famine and some came over after it was over. 

The best frame of reference is to look at the generation of my 2nd great grandparents. Six of my eight maternal 2nd great grandparents were born in Ireland and emigrated to America. The other two were born in America and Canada and their parents were born in Ireland and emigrated to North America - both ending up in upstate New York.

Now let's look at when they all came over. Four of my 2nd great grandparents left Ireland before the famine: Bernard Keenan's parents (came over in the 1820s), Ellen Leary (arrived 1843), Dennis Leary's parents (late 1820 or early 1830s), and Michael Barry (parents arrived before 1844) were all in America before 1845.

Two of my 2nd great grandparents did come over over during the famine: Katherine Burns seems to have come over by herself in 1851 or 1852 at age 16 and Mary Enright came over as a two year old with her family in 1847. 

Finally, two of my second great grandparents came over after the famine had ended: Patrick Leary arrived in 1859 at age 28 and Honora McCarthy arrived in 1855 at age 24, also possibly by herself. What really hits me is that these two lived through the famine and then came to America after - ultimately deciding Ireland still wasn't safe.

To conclude: Some of our relatives were lucky enough to come over before the famine. Others, survived some or all of the famine and still came to America.

Mayflower Ancestors - Prelude

John Alden

Born: About 1599, England

Died: Sep. 12, 1687, Duxbury, Massachusetts

Relation to Author: 10th Great Grandfather in Law

Priscilla Mullins (married name Alden) 

Born: c. 1603, England (maybe Dorking or Guildford)

Died: After 1650 (maybe as late as 1685), Duxbury, Massachusetts 

Relation to Author: 10th Great Grandmother in Law

William Mullins

Born: Unknown, England

Died: Winter 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts

Relation to Author: 11th Great Grandfather in Law

Alice (married name Mullins) 

Born: Unknown, England

Died: Winter 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts

Relation to Author: 11th Great Grandmother in Law? (researchers do not actually know whether she was the biological mother for some, all or none of William’s children)

My wife, and therefore our children, are descended from four people who came over on the Mayflower. In the next series of posts, I am going to explore this connection and what we know about them. I’ll start with some context - basic info about the ancestors and the lineage. Then in subsequent posts I’ll look at what we know about their time on the Mayflower and in America, mostly using Nathaniel Philbrick's book Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, but also Caleb Johnson's Mayflower History. 

My wife is descended from John Alden and Priscilla Mullins (married name Alden), through the Blake line. You can see the path at the bottom of this post. Priscilla and John are my wife’s 10th great grandparents. And so Priscilla’s parents, William and Alice, are her 11th Great Grandparents (though again researchers are not sure if she is Priscilla’s biological mother). John Alden’s family history is unknown. 

John Alden and four of the Mullins family came to America on the Mayflower in 1620. We think of the Mayflower as the boat that brought the pilgrims - or puritans - but in fact your ancestors and more than half of the people on the boat were not puritans. John Alden was part of the crew. He’s mentioned early in Philbrick's book: 

“Another important position was that of the cooper, who was in charge of maintaining all barreled supplies and provisions, In Southampton, [Mayflower commanding officer Christopher] Jones secured the twenty-one year old cooper John Alden, who because of his youth and skills was already being encouraged by the Pilgrims to remain in America at the completion of the crossing.” 

The Mayflower settlers did convince Alden to stay in America when the Mayflower sailed back to England in the spring of 1621. He would later marry Priscilla Mullins. And in a transparent attempt to hook you early, dear reader, I'll give you a preview and say that they would go on to have ten children and have a famous poem written of their relationship. 

The Mullins family was connected to the financiers supporting the puritans' trip. The Leiden Puritans were separatists; they believed that the Church of England was corrupt and they wanted to be apart from the Church and worship their own way. They originally fled to Leiden, Holland to find freedom but then wanted to go to America. But they needed financial help to charter the trip. The financiers - the Merchant Adventurers - found other families from London to join the trip, and this included the Mullins family, who were investors in the project. 

Since the Mullins family were not Puritans, we know they didn't come to America for religious freedom and instead guess they came with a plan to make more money. Mullins was a shoemaker, seemingly relatively wealthy (and brought with him 250 shoes and 13 pairs of boots). They traveled with their two younger children, Priscila (~17), Joseph (~15) and a servant or apprentice - Robert Carter - but their two older adult children stayed in England. 

They must have realized that there was danger in going to America - traveling to a new place without any of the infrastructure they were used to and only inhabited by people that were rightfully hostile to them. Though they must not have realized just how risky and dangerous it was going to be. 

Lineage

John Alden & Priscilla Mullins (13)

Ruth Alden and John Bass (12)

Samuel Bass and Mary Adams (11)

Jonathan Bass and Sussanah Byram (10)

Susanna Bass and Zechariah Cary (9)

Luther Cary and Abigail King (8)

Sophia Cary and Silas Blake (7)

Rev. Joseph Blake and Hannah Little Clark (6)

Francis Clark Blake and Winifred Pamelia Ballard (5)

Francis Gilman Blake and Dorothy Palmer Dewey (4)

John Ballard Blake and Jean Place Adams (3)

Baby Bruce

Bruce Cheney, Jr.
Born: July 26, 1947
Died: October 14, 1947
Relation to author: Uncle

Bruce Cheney, Jr., was the first born child of Bruce Judson Cheney and Elizabeth Charlotte Paulus (married name Cheney). Very sadly, Bruce Cheney, Jr. died less than three months after he was born. The diagnosis was congenital heart disease, but more commonly he was what they called a "blue baby".

The term comes from the blue color of the baby's lips (also called cyanosis of the lips), a sign that the baby's body is not getting enough oxygen through the blood. 

We actually have a copy of the autopsy report, so with a little help from a friend (the explanation and diagram are confusing) we can learn about what was happening anatomically. I shared the autopsy (you can see it here and here) with my friend's father who is a pediatric cardiologist (special thank you to him!). He said that Baby Bruce had Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Return (TAPVR). 

For Baby Bruce, the pulmonary veins that should move the oxygenated blood from the lungs to the left atrium (which then would send the blood to the left ventricle and then to the aorta and out to the body) went instead to another vein up toward the upper chest and back to the right atrium, which takes deoxygenated blood from the body and sends it to the right ventricle and then to the lungs, via the pulmonary artery, to add oxygen. In other words, oxygenated blood from his lungs was not getting distributed to his body and was instead mixing with deoxygenated blood right at the heart in a continuous circle. You can see in the image below a normal heart on the right and TAPVR on the left. 

The autopsy also describes that the right atrium and ventricle were hypertrophied (enlarged) because they were receiving both deoxygenated blood from the body and oxygenated blood from the lungs. Meanwhile the left atrium and ventricles were thin-walled, almost paper thin because they received almost no blood. This is a common symptom of the venous circle. 

This condition happens, as best as I can understand and simplify it, because as the fetus develops, the pulmonary venous plexus - the precursor to the pulmonary veins - fails to link to the left atrium and instead retains connections to the primitive (early development) drainage systems and thereby retains a connection the right atrium.

Congenital heart problems for infants are no longer as fatal as they once were. Both early diagnosis (thanks to sonograms) and surgery are possible. In fact, my wife had a special sonogram to check our first baby's heart; during our 20 week anatomy scan, the doctors couldn't get a good view of the heart so they sent her for a special scan. The scan turned out fine, but I couldn't help think about how things would have been different if Bruce and Elizabeth had the technology we have access to today.

Surgery is the recommended solution for babies with this condition. You can see the full details I have here or a user-friendly guide here. They make an incision in the middle of the chest and separate the breastbone to reach the heart. Then they use "cardiopulmonary bypass with circulatory arrest" where the child is attached a heart-lung machine which acts as the child's heart and lungs and then they create a normal pulmonary venous pathway by connecting the pulmonary veins and the left atrium. The vertical vein, which is now unnecessary is usually ligated (tied-off). Basically, they create the connection between pulmonary veins and the left atrium that should exist. 

According to what I've read, the advent of surgery over the past 50 years or so means that most patients with this condition will survive. Early mortality - death within 30 days of surgical correction - is less than 10 percent, and late mortality - death 30 days after surgery - is about 5 percent. Long-term survival to adolescence is about 85 percent.

However, there are some lasting effects. Although the research is somewhat limited, one case series reported a poorer perception of health and school performance in survivors of TAPVC correction. And several case series noted an increased risk of arrhythmias, especially sinus node dysfunction, which, "may be due to disruption of the conduction system by the atrial incision used to repair TAPVC."

It begs the question though when this became treatable. Baby Bruce was born and died in 1947. Pediatric cardiology as a specialty was developing in the early 1950s. The first pediatric cardiac surgery was done in 1944 at Johns Hopkins, but surgeries that followed in the 1950s and 1960s were often unsuccessful. The development of "cardiopulmonary bypass in the mid 1950s and deep hypothermia with circulatory arrest in the early 1970s" allowed for pediatric cardiac surgery to advance. By the 1990s mortality had declined dramatically.  In other words, it would be a few decades before babies like Bruce, Jr., could be saved. 

Typhoid Fever: Charlotte Paulus

Charlotte Poelger (Pilger?) - (married name Paulus)
Born: July 16, 1864, Germany
Died: January 31, 1907, age 42
Relation to Author: 2nd Great Grandmother (Nana / Betty Cheney's paternal grandmother)

Charlotte Paulus died of typhoid fever when she was 42 years old. She was married to Christian Paulus and was the mother of five children, including my great grandfather Frederick Paulus, who was 20 when she died. The youngest child, Emilie Paulus was 13 years old when her mother Charlotte died.

Typhoid fever is a disease that spreads through bacteria in drinking water. It grows in the intestines of the infected person and is spread to other infected people by eating food or drinking water contaminated with feces from an infected person. In other words, it spread through really bad public sanitation. 

(Historians now believe that President William Henry Harrison died of Typhoid fever in 1841, after only 31 days in office, not by catching a cold while giving the longest inaugural speech in history in cold rainy weather without a jacket and then wearing the same wet clothes for the rest of the inauguration day festivities.) 

It looks like Charlotte died during a typhoid fever outbreak in Scranton in 1907. There is a newspaper article from the Scranton Truth on January 18, 1907 discussing infections and deaths, with over 1,000 infections and 113 deaths through mid-January. Her death certificate says her typhoid fever had lasted 19 days, so her infection, but not her death, is likely included in the stats in this article. 

Unfortunately, Charlotte died just a few years before we found a truly effective way to prevent the spread of Typhoid - water chlorination. While the newspaper article recommends boiling water and keeping property clean to avoid another outbreak in the spring, chlorination of public water, which was tested in Europe at the end of the 1800s, wasn't tested in the United States until 1908 in Jersey City, after which the practice spread rapidly across the country. A vaccine for soldiers started in the early 1900s. 

Robert Williams - Coal Miner

Robert R. Williams
Born: January 4, 1855, Wales
Died: December 24, 1919, Scranton, Pennsylvania
Relation to Author: 2nd Great Grandfather (Nana / Betty Cheney's maternal grandfather)

Robert Williams - my Nana's grandfather - was born in Wales in 1855 and married Elizabeth Thomas at 23. They had three children in Wales before emigrating to the United States (separately - more on that in a future post) in the early 1880s. After they arrived in the U.S., they had more children. According to the 1910 census, he and Elizabeth had 12 children but only 7 survived and were alive in 1910. My great grandma Margaret Williams was born in 1887 in Pennsylvania.  

We understand that Robert was a miner in Wales and census records show that he was a coal miner in 1900 in the United States. Below is a picture of him in his mining clothes. We don't know what year it was taken, but he doesn't look young. He reported in the 1900 census that he was working as a coal miner at age 45. In the 1910 census he reported he was doing "company work" in the coal mines industry at age 55 and I wonder if this means at that time he was no longer in the mines and instead doing something easier or safer. 

Robert's wife Elizabeth Thomas (married name Williams - 1859 - 1934) has no occupation listed in the 1900, 1910 and 1920 censuses. 

Robert died in 1919 at the age of 64 from what looks to be chronic myocarditis (heart inflammation) and chronic pulmonary emphysema, which could have been caused by his work as a coal miner. 

Of course life was hard for many of our ancestors - and the further back we go, the harder and more dangerous it likely was. But mining always stands out to me as particularly hard and dangerous. People will do what they have to to survive and provide for their family, but I see no romance or glory in it. Only sadness at the hardship.