Family · the lines · Kirkland
the deepest line in the tree — and the one that arrives by love, not blood
This is the oldest river of all: it runs back through Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower to a Yorkshire yeoman who made his will in 1552. And it reaches the family by the most human of doors — a two-year-old taken in and raised as a son in 1908. By blood the boy belonged to another line; by adoption he became heir to this one. The tree holds both truths at once: the deepest pedigree it owns, and the honest note that it came by love.
c. 1487 → now · Yorkshire → Plymouth Colony → New England → Illinois → Central New York
yeoman of Wellingley
The earliest dated ancestor in the whole tree — a yeoman with lands at Bentley, Wellingley, Tickhill and Wadworth. His will, made in 1552 in the year of his death, names his son William and a bequest to William's daughter Alice: the documentary hinge that proves the link and opens the line.
the yeoman who raised a Governor
Named in his father's 1552 will; the grandfather who helped raise an orphaned grandson. The line is settled at Austerfield now, in the flat country where the Idle meets the Yorkshire levels.
father of the Governor
A yeoman of Austerfield who married Alice Hanson in 1584 and was buried in 1591 — leaving a small boy fatherless. That boy would carry the name across an ocean.
of the Mayflower, 1620
The orphan of Austerfield who sailed on the Mayflower, signed the Compact, served some thirty years as governor of Plymouth Colony, and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation — the founding book of New England. The descent down from him to this family is documented to the Mayflower Society's gold standard.
deputy governor · soldier
The Governor's son — deputy governor of the colony and commander at the Great Swamp Fight of 1675. The family is established in the New World it helped to found.
the Mayflower gateway
Daughter of Thomas Bradford of Norwich and great-granddaughter of the Governor, she married Hezekiah Newcomb in 1716. Through that marriage the Bradford blood passes into the Newcomb name — the gateway through which the whole Mayflower descent enters the family record.
six generations westward
The Newcombs carry the line across a continent's worth of new country — from Lebanon, Connecticut to Bernardston in Massachusetts, on to Vermont and the Illinois prairie at Augusta, where a Proctor Peter Newcomb kept the village bank and the post office for twenty-four years. At the end of that long chain stands Helen Gladys Newcomb, born 1877 — the last to carry the blood before the line changes hands.
the line changes hands
Here the inheritance passes not by birth but by choice. A two-year-old named Samuel was taken into the Kirkland family of Rome and raised as their own — recorded "adopted son" in the 1910 census, and "(adopted)" in the Newcomb genealogy itself. By blood he belonged to another line, the Stocums and Chryslers; by adoption he became heir to the Bradfords and the Mayflower. It is heritage, not bloodline — but heritage all the same, and the family keeps both honestly.
the line enters by adoption, 1908
Sally → Vickey-Jo
Samuel married Dorothy Reed; their daughter Sally Kirkland married John Alvin Doig; and so the adopted Mayflower inheritance — given, then carried — reaches Tim's mother and the living branch.
— and then you
Who proved the descent to the Mayflower Society's standard and, in the same breath, set down the adoption in plain ink — keeping the grandest claim in the tree and its honest asterisk together.
The oldest river in the tree — entered not by blood but by a family's open door.
XV generations · Yorkshire 1487 → now · heritage, by adoption
Descent verified against the Mayflower Society's Silver Books via the WikiTree Mayflower Project; the 1908 adoption is confirmed by the 1910 census and the Newcomb genealogy. Samuel's biological line — Stocum & Chrysler — is kept as its own branch, deliberately distinct.
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