In my last post I wrote about the book The Last Days of Richard III and the fate of his DNA. As I was still reading the book at the time I wrote the post, I had not yet tackled the chapters about identifying the body through DNA. I found those chapters fascinating. It was like a giant puzzle or genealogy in reverse. Because Richard III died in 1485, only mitochondrial or Y DNA could be used in the quest to identify the body. The DNA which follows the female line, mitochondrial or mtDNA, being the more reliable of the two as any disputes over parentage usually follow the male line. What the researchers needed to find was a line from a known female relative in Richard III's direct maternal line and follow that line through successive daughters to the present day, a painstaking in daunting task which the book highlighted.
It reminded me of doing genealogy in reverse, working forward through the years from an ancestor who came earlier. The medieval time period this work took the researchers back to also brought to mind a breakthrough that a fellow volunteer at the BCGS library made. He had found his gateway ancestor, that elusive link to the known genealogies of the great and good, or at least those in the top rungs of the social hierarchy back in history. The people who actually got written up in records that far back. It reminded me that there was a rumour of one of those gateway ancestors on one of my family lines as well. Maybe it was time to look into it.
This possible gateway ancestor connects to my line of Tripps who lived in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the early colonial days. It wasn't the Tripp family but the Cudworth family who married into that Tripp line which was rumoured to have the possible link that would take me much further back into history. As you can see by the fragment of my family tree up above, more than one Cudworth woman married into my Tripp family line, Jabez being one of my direct ancestors. In fact, Abigail and Elizabeth Cudworth were sisters and daughters of James Cudworth. James in turn was the son of Major James Cudworth, an early immigrant who held important offices in the Plymouth Colony. The elder James featured in Douglas Richardson's Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II which takes the Cudworth and many other Colonial lines back to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. This would be perfect except that there appears to be controversy over the inclusion of James Cudworth the elder in this work. It seems the path to true genealogy is never a smooth one.
Sources:
Ashdown-Hill,
John. The Last Days of Richard III and
the fate of his DNA. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2013.
Insurmountable problems with lineage of gateway James Cudworth? https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/5oEUwaUUZBI?pli=1
Richardson, Douglas. Magna Carta Ancestry Volume II https://books.google.vg/books?id=8JcbV309c5UC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_vpt_read#v=onepage&q&f=false
Image:
By Scan by NYPL - https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-8614-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47124218
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