Family · the stories
Seven Rivers
the deepest lines behind one family, each told from its source
The VanBenschoten namesake line sits at the center of the set; around it run the deep rivers that fed into it — Dutch, English, Scottish, Devonian — each followed back to the furthest name the record holds, and told as one unbroken descent down to the present. Three of them end at a wall; one arrives by adoption; one is carried for six generations by daughters. All of them are true.
The Mayflower, Adopted
Yorkshire → Plymouth Colony
The deepest line in the tree — to a 1487 Yorkshire yeoman and Governor Bradford of the Mayflower. It enters the family by a 1908 adoption: heritage, by love.
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Thirteen Generations
Mechelen → the Hudson
The deepest blood line — from a widow of Mechelen, through the secretary of a Dutch colony and the Albany Schuylers, down to now. Carried by daughters for six generations.
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The Cooper of Lyme
Lyme, Connecticut
Back to a barrel-maker who shipped fish to Barbados and rioted over a town line in 1672 — the longest New England reach in the tree, surviving today as a middle name.
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The Name Itself
Bunschoten → the Esopus → Saratoga
The namesake line — a Dutch immigrant on the Esopus flats, a Revolutionary lieutenant, twelve children on a Saratoga farm, and a name twice nearly gone that a boy named Reed now carries.
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A Door in Connecticut
Durham, Connecticut
A line that runs clean back to a locked door — "John C. Read," a man with no recorded past, his origin the family's deepest brick wall, left honestly shut.
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From Angus to the Big Sky
Angus, Scotland → Montana
Linen handloom weavers and estate gamekeepers of Angus who crossed to a Montana ranch in the 1890s — the longest crossing in the tree, down to an Air Force grandfather.
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Out of North Devon
Inwardleigh, Devon
A rare Devon name, farm labourers of the parishes west of Dartmoor, carried across the Atlantic by way of Ontario to the shore of the Finger Lakes.
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Seven sources, four countries, one delta — and a single name keeping the record.
seven lines · 1487 → now · told from the source
Each story is drawn from the family's GEDCOM and the primary records behind it; walls are left as walls, and adoptive heritage is named as such.
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