Birthdays
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page
In 2019, I finished a two-year genealogy research project I called “Every Day is Somebody’s Birthday.”
Here’s how I came to do this. In August of 2017 I was doing some research on one of my ancestral lines, and realized that the day I was researching – August 18 – was the birthday of the ancestor I was researching. I then thought, “I wonder how many times I’ve done that?” That was the germ of an idea that involved downloading my GEDCOM from Ancestry, using Family Tree Analyzer to convert the GECOM to an Excel spreadsheet, and then manipulating and sorting the entries so that they were in birthday order – although I didn’t care what year it was. Then, each week in 2018, I wrote about the people whose birthdays fell in that week. This was quite a discipline, and I learned a whole lot while I was doing it. Here’s what my outline for the month of March looked like:
I chose to write about my ancestors who were born in March because my birthday is in March – March 30, to be precise. You can see that I share this birthday with my 8th great-grandmother, Mary Farnsworth, 1637-1705). So that’s who I’ll write about today.
I present this information with a BIG caveat: I don’t have absolute proof that Mary Farnsworth was actually born on March 30. As you can imagine, records from early colonial Massachusetts are more reliable than they are from other colonies, but not exactly precise. But I don’t care very much. Having a date to focus on helped me make progress in researching her. I “had” to write about her on this date.
Mary was the third of ten children born to Joseph and Elizabeth Mason Farnsworth. Joseph and Elizabeth had come to Massachusetts in 1630 as part of the Puritan Great Migration and married in 1635.
Mary Farnsworth married Abraham Ripley in Plymouth, MA, in 1656. Abraham was four years old when his parents brought him and his three siblings to Massachusetts on the Diligent in 1638.
Mary and Abraham had, oh, somewhere around 13 children before Abraham died in 1683, my 7th great-grandfather Joseph Ripley, who was their sixth child. Records are a little imprecise.
After Abraham’s death, Mary remarried, in 1684, this time to Edward Jenkins. Five of Mary’s children were still under the age of 20 at this time, so it was probably a financial necessity for Mary to get married again. Edward was 20 years older than Mary and I think his wife had also died, although I’m not sure.
An interesting side note – Edward Jenkins, Mary’s second husband, is my 8th great-grandfather through one of his children by his first wife. His great-great-granddaughter, Martha Jenkins, is my maternal 4th great-grandmother; she married John Thomas Hunt, Sr., in South Carolina in 1781. This means that Mary’s first husband and her second husband are both my 8th great-grandfathers.
How ’bout that?
I connect to Mary through my paternal Arnold family line and to Edward Jenkins Sr. through my maternal Anthis family line.