Hey! Martin Hollick over at the Slovak Yankee has a photo of a gateway ancestor we share. (A gateway ancestor is an ancestor who gives descendants a treaceable path back to a new ancestral population—most commonly, in US usage, an early colonial immigrant providing traceable ancestry among medieval nobility and royalty.) She is Mary Lawrence, wife of Lieutenant Thomas Burnham of Ipswich. Here she lies (Martin’s photograph, links to his post):
Mrs Mary Bur-
num wife of
Liuet Thomas
Burnam died
March ye 28
1715 aged
92 years
mother of
15 children
& grandmo-
ther of 70.
Grandmother of 70! No wonder Martin & I are both descendants! Probably everyone else, too, if they’d only look. Martin’s list of gateway ancestors is well worth looking at; here is my own (or rather, the gateways of my children, some through me, some through my wife). Martin also shares with my wife, Rose (Stoughton) Otis, and John Whitney, whom Martin has reinstated following recently published work, while I have not yet (he’s in my partial ‘bogus’ list linked at the same page).
But I would like to know if other gateways my children share have extant gravestones as marvellous as that of grandmother Burnham!
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