I Joined a Lineage Society Because . . .
People have all sorts of motives for doing all sorts of things including joining a lineage society. Last week, on a Facebook page of a group focused on Mayflower descendants, someone asked why those members who had joined lineage societies had done so. I have to confess, one of my reasons was rather silly, but silly is a positive trait in our family. When I was a child, references to Mayflower Descendants and the like usually were associated with the "upper crust," the elite, the rich. My family was anything but. Later on, in adulthood, I had come across the wonderfully hilarious Anna Russell, whose sendups of opera, both grand and comic, as well as of classical music in general, tickled me no end. She has one routine where she instructs her audience how to write their own Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. It centers on the New York City clique during the Gilded Age (the latter part of the 19th Century) known as the Four Hundred. It starts out with a ditty that begins:
We are the great Four Hundred,
If you want to know who we are.
And we put on airs 'cause our forefathairs,
Came over on the Mayflowah!
And it's veddy, veddy snappy
If your mammy or your pappy
Is descended from the Mayflowah!
Thus did Anna Russell satirize Mayflower descendants, and I thought it was hilarious, and exercised a bit of what might be called reverse snobbery about it. I got taken down a peg or two -- though I still think the song is funny -- when I discovered my own direct descent from John Alden & Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower! The line runs from John Alden & Priscilla Mullins through Joseph Alden, Isaac Alden, Mercy Alden (married Zaccheus Packard the younger), Eleazer Packard, Richards Packard, John Alden Packard, Mathew Hale Packard, Oscar Merry Packard, Walter Hetherington Packard, Arden Packard, and me!
So, yeah, one joins a lineage society for "bragging rights," though the actual number of descendants of the Mayflower living today constitutes an "exclusive" club of some 35 million people. H'mmm. Those pilgrims and their progeny down the years have been busy!
One also joins such a society out of a love of history and a desire to be part of that history. I have been an American history buff since I was a child, and in my teens I had a subscription to American Heritage magazine which lasted long into adulthood. Out of a need to free up some of our scarce storage space, I gave all those years of American Heritage to a high-school teacher friend of mine for the school's library.
So it turned out that I have a close association with Thanksgiving, as some of my family were actually there at the table in 1620.
However . . . though I am a Mayflower descendant, I also have studied Florida's colonial Spanish history, living as I do only 35 miles or so from St. Augustine, which has seen now over five hundred years of the history of Florida and of the United States. Thus, I know that Plymouth in 1620 was not the first Thanksgiving on these shores. In September of 1565, in gratitude for the safe delivery of himself and his crew, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his crew and the Seloy band of Timucuan natives celebrated their own Thanksgiving. It's the grateful thing to do, whoever, wherever, and whenever we are. Happy Thanksgiving!
