Last night I watched the latest episode of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "The British Invasion."
Once again, several of the stories had similarities to my own family. Some of my British Denyer cousins migrated to Australia. I don't know their motivations. I have Loyalists in my tree who settled in Ontario, and while I don't believe any of my ancestors were on the Mayflower in 1620, I do have several who immigrated prior to 1650. (Betts, Chamberlain, Horton, Langton, Hallock, Swayze, Kinge, and possibly Van Every.) Unfortunately, I didn't find the Native American ancestry in my DNA that I expected to be there.
I was disappointed in Sally Field's lack of recognition when she heard her ancestor's name. It's been long enough since American History class for me, that I couldn't have provided too many details, but I instantly recognized the name, and the portrait shown was also familiar. I was worried for much of the episode that they wouldn't be able to provide Deepak Chopra with any ancestors he didn't know already. (Of course, if that were true, he wouldn't have been selected for an episode.) I was very impressed by Sting throughout his portions of the episode.
View the episode below. You can read the transcript here.
Not only am I disappointed that Sally Fields did not recognize the name "William Bradford", but I'm shocked that they called the Mayflower passengers Puritans, and proceeded to tell the history of the Puritans. Come on now! Wrong religion, wrong colony!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure, but I believe some historians classify Pilgrim Separatists as a subset of Puritanism.
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