Holy cannoli! Or should I say: “Blimey! That’s quite a lot of Englishmen!”

So, when we last met, I had told you that my bloodlines had finally been established. Well, my goodness! Once you start digging into things you find ALL KINDS of surprises! Good AND bad and ALL VERY ENTERTAINING! SO entertaining, in fact, that Michael started digging into HIS family tree and you know what that carpetbagger from California has done?

Got himself not one, not two, not three, but FOUR TICKETS TO THE MAYFLOWER. That boy’s more Massachusetts THAN I AM! LOL!

LITERALLY outside our window is a piece of land named after one of his direct ancestors. Down the street is another one. He has ancestors in Scituate. He’s EVERYWHERE. And MOST of them are DIRECT ancestors, meaning parent to child parent to child parent to child, etc. (As opposed to it being like a 12th cousin 20 times removed. Like that.)

I cannot even tell you what this all means to me. Just as a mother. For my girls. For their heritage, their legacy. I’m going to do all the paperwork for Mike so he’s registered at the General Society for Mayflower Descendants (which requires the direct relationship I just described) and part of the membership is that they keep your records in perpetuity, so my girls will have a kind of permanence to hand down generation after generation long after we have gone, in a way I scarcely could have imagined just two months ago.

My mother and father are my real family. But I have blood & soil I can trace now, and that satisfies a need in me I didn’t even know I had. I cannot tell you what it means to me to see the occupations, tendencies, travels of my forebears. A lot of it makes sense, God bless them. LOL. “That explains a lot!” has been a phrase uttered around my house with a sarcastic chuckle more than once these last few weeks! I promise to fill in more once we’ve got things nailed down better, but for now just know… Gosh… THAT EXPLAINS A LOT! LOL!