It was Just a Matter of Time

Every summer for the past 8 summers I have taught an intensive 4.5-week graduate course in genealogical sources and services to pre-service librarians for St. John's University, my alma mater. I knew it was just a matter of time before I had a relative among my students. While I didn't know it going into this semester, I knew it was bound to happen. 

Although the Library Science program is fully online, St. John's still has a substantial number of students from New York. If you're from New York, you may very well have deep, long-standing Long Island roots. If you do have ancestors stretching back to the 1600s on Long Island, you're likely related to everyone else who has genealogy stretching back to the 1600s on Long Island. Long Island was quite remote then, which led to a situation called endogamy. Endogamy is when people only marry within their own group or community. In an isolated place where there was limited interaction with outsiders, people ended up marrying others from their own group. For the most part white settlers were not intermarrying with natives, resulting in a small number of families to reproduce with. Do that for a few generations and everyone is related to everyone else in town.

I didn't know going into class that I had a cousin among my students. I only discovered it when I looked at my student's family tree. Her great-grandmother had a common old Long Island surname and a middle name that was also a common old Long Island surname: Smith and Remsen respectively. Seeing that I looked further down that line on her extensive family tree. Smith - - DeMott - - Combs - - Valentine - - and there it was, a union between Benjamin Tredwell (1740-1803) and Keziah Bedell (1747-1803) of Hempstead, Long Island, New York. Who forgets a name like Keziah?

Benjamin and Keziah are my 7th great grandparents; they are student-cousin Pam's 5th great. The connection makes us 6th cousins twice removed. 

It is kind of extraordinary but, again, not all that surprising, truth be told.

Now we are talking about a couple who lived through the American Revolution here on Long Island and lived in locations I commonly drive past.

Pam's tree is much more fleshed out on this shared branch than it is on my tree, in part because there is a lack of documentation about these people. To build a tree like hers, one must rely on published family histories, which certainly exist but which I myself have not delved into extensively. I guess this fall I will be examining Cousin Pam's sources. Thanks, Pam.