Mayflower Confidential  

Author's note: Sometimes family history is the truest when it isn't true at all.)

As always, religiously unedited.

THE DOCUMENT WAS FAKE. He knew that it couldn't have been more so. He also knew he'd had no choice either, and that for as fake as the document was, it was also quite true. He'd known it could only ever be that way since the first day he'd discovered the lineage. He remembered thinking, Well, can't two things be true at once? He'd been working upstairs in the bedroom the day he'd found it. The western sun had set high up, and spring pollen was scattered in the fading light of the dust from an open window. He could hear There Goes My Life crooning away from one of the twins' bedrooms down the hallway. He remembered how he had just sat looking at it. Staring at it really and wondering how the Hell it could even be possible. All he could think was: My great-grandmother is a descendant of Governor William Bradford? Like Plymouth Rock, William Bradford? 

Are you freaking kidding me?

It didn't take him long to connect the dots. In the back of his mind, he kept thinking, "The Mayflower Society." Oh, he'd certainly heard of it before, that exclusive, somewhat revered lineage society for people who could trace their ancestry back to a Mayflower passenger. Hell, he'd heard about that since he was a little kid. He remembered thinking, How cool would it be to belong to something like that? What would it be like to apply? Maybe he could just see if they'd accept his line to her...

Nah, it would never work, he thought. There was one huge problem. While his great-grandmother, the Yankee widow of a Civil War prisoner of war, could easily prove her lineage to William Bradford, his grandmother could not. You see, she, his grandmother, her daughter and only child could not. She was adopted. His grandmother, he knew, was someone who had started life differently as the daughter of an unwed mother. Her adoption had been a secret that no one had been allowed to mention for years.

Still, he thought, what could it hurt to get an application? A week or so later, it had arrived, all embossed and official. Why was he deluding himself into thinking that this was ever going to work?

     

   

   

Looking over the application process he saw it. It was about midway through the formal instructions. An automatic caveat, an exclusion contained in the application:

"Only bloodline descendants need apply."

Discouraged a bit, he shuffled through his files of hard copy vital records and paperwork. There was nothing he could do about it. Nevertheless, there was also really nothing about his grandmother's birth anywhere that said she was adopted. Nothing at all. Birth, death, and marriage records were all in order and more than properly connected. Dang it. He really wanted to be a member of that society. There was something so utterly cool about being descended from one of the people on that boat. They were the "first comers," he thought. Both the devil on his shoulder and his better angels kept telling him, What harm would it be to try? 

After all, the paperwork was all in order.

He worried a little bit that someone might look too closely at the 1920 census record. If there was any document that might not connect his grandmother as of  "one and the same" as a bloodline descendant, it would be that one. But still, he wickedly thought, "I have all the primary vitals." Would it be his fault if they didn't look further than only the legally obvious? 

So he completed the application, and along with the legitimate and ever so official proofs for the other thirteen generations had sent all of it in. After all, she was his great-grandmother, he reasoned. She'd been a non-nonsense holdout from the Victorian era, and he'd grown up sitting on her lap; he'd listened raptly to her tales of Civil War heroes coming home from Rebel Prisons and of Decoration Day celebrations. She had loved the little boy he'd once been with fierce pride. And truth be told, he had loved his great-grandmother dearly too. So what if her only child, his grandmother, had been adopted? Did that make his connection to her any less real?

To absolute Hell with anyone who thought so.

A couple of months later, the certificate arrived. It was official. Oh, he was so very good when it came to 'filling in the blanks.' Besides, most of it had already been done by those genealogists who'd come before him. He was at long last a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Two supplemental lineages followed this one, those from passengers Francis Cooke and Richard Warren, to also attach alongside the Bradford line to his Plymouth Rock Ancestry. He quickly became active in the local society's "colony." He stood at the roll call of the ancestors when they spoke Governor Bradford's name.

They had called him Elder.

The problem was that it was both true and untrue. The document was as fake as he was.

Still, was it?

Was he no better than some Anjouvian hoax?

II.

HE HAD SUSPECTED it was true. Dang it anyway. He'd seen the lineage - that of "the other woman" - his biological great-grandmother. She was a woman whose life anyone in the family had been literally forbidden to mention for years. She was a woman whose whereabouts had remained undiscovered until he'd scratched and scratched away at the surface of them until they'd given way like an avalanche of secrets. (Oh, he was nothing if not thorough when he needed to be.) Yes, that same unwed mother who had given his grandmother away as a baby on some snowy Kansas December day in 1914. Now long since dead, she'd been hiding in plain sight, working as a manicurist at some Hollywood studio.

Though he'd never even met this woman, still, he wasn't sure how he felt about her or her choices. She was no Civil War widow or descendant of William Bradford's he was certain of that. Try as he might, though, he did not want to judge her for giving her baby up. We all have our own paths to walk, he thought. Yet the existential genealogist in him had to know everything about her. He thought about the photo of her on the park bench. What was she thinking?Where did she come from? Who were her family? One thing was for certain: for whatever biological connection he may have had to her, she was not the woman whose knee he was raised on. She was not his great-grandmother.

                 

As he studied her life, he saw it. Yes, there it was. Wait a minute, he thought. Can this be true too? Could she also be a descendant of Mayflower passengers? Why did he see multiple lines to passengers Stephen Hopkins and Richard Warren? Why did he see another line to John Howland? Dang it! This was great, but way way too late now - too late for him to join the Mayflower Society the right way - as a bloodline descendant - he'd already become a member using an inherently "honest-dishonest-sleight-of-hand" - by using those staid genealogical standards of "proper and original documentation." Well, maybe it wasn't all that bad, he thought. He smirked to himself, wondering: Just whose great-grandson am I anyway? Just whose Mayflower ancestry did he truly descend from?

Oddly enough, this meant that both women, the one who had given birth to his grandmother and the one who had raised her, were both descended from the same Mayflower passenger - Richard Warren.

                                           

That meant that two things were both true and false at once.

This meant the fake certificate was, in abstract, also quite true.

III.

THERE WAS LITTLE to be done now except to prove it all out. He attacked it with some sort of fevered survivor's guilt. While he knew he could never reverse course, he could see to it that his biological (and actual) Mayflower ancestry was told in a different way. He could research it ad nauseum. He would make certain that it was preserved. There must be no doubt, he thought. And he went after it like a dog with a bone. 

It was not an immediately easy task. The crux of the line centered around a daughter. A daughter of one Zephaniah Swift (1702-1781). Her name was "Lydia," and she was a daughter who'd been erroneously recorded in several of the older genealogies as having "died young." Everywhere he looked, he could tell this was simply not the case. He just needed to prove it. 

The "kingpin," as it were, was the day he'd called the Vermont State Archives and some kind soul had said to him, "Yes, we have Zephaniah's will here. We have the will of Zephaniah Swift. Let me send it in over." And from there, things just fell in place for the line. Zephaniah's Last Will and Testament had taken decades to fully probate.

And there it was ...."To my daughter Lydia Young..." 

He was actually able to prove that the baby given away at birth, his biological grandmother, and indeed that he himself had biological Mayflower ancestry.

    

He found a kind soul in Boston, a gifted younger man and expert genealogist to whom he was able to plead his case. The young man reviewed his proofs and, accepting them, called for the lineage to be published. Three subsequent journal publications followed tracking his biological descent from passengers Hopkins, Howland, and Warren. It was thorough. It was complete. It meant no one could challenge his legacy. It was also bittersweet. He would never be able to join the General Society as who he actually was - the grandson of a baby born out of wedlock and given away so many years ago.

Like his biological great grandmother, he would remain hidden in plain sight.

  

                          

              

Nevertheless, he must have found his passion that day as the sun set in the dusty light of that open window. He had a legacy he could leave his kids, and he vowed then and there to help anyone he met along the way who might be interested in doing the same. He could still hear Kenny Chesney singing There Goes My Life in the back of his mind, and yes, he'd lied, but with God's grace and some decent karma, he'd also found his way out and back to the truth. He was content. He knew that even in his lie, there was an unbelievable duality of truth and reverence for the past. It was a truth that no one could ever take away.

She was, after all, in the end, still his great-grandmother.

END