A Stevens, Tomes, and Nash Family History

Members of our branch of the Tomes family are among the 35 million+ living people who are descended from the Mayflower passengers. So we aren't exactly in some elite club (well, based on our Mayflower lineage anyway).

 

Americans tend to hold up Mayflower heritage as some sort of badge of honor, but let us be honest, it isn't anything special except a little historically interesting. Moreover, I am pretty offended by groups or families that think that this lineage makes them "better than". Let's face it: The Mayflower passengers were nutjobs. They were religious separatists and extremists who preferred to journey toward certain maritime or wilderness death rather than let their children be raised Dutch. Better dead than Dutch. They were gullible, ill-prepared, and paranoid to boot. We aren't talking about great thinkers, here. So I don't know how being a member of a club celebrating our shared genetic link is any kind of real honor. In fact, that just means that our ancestors were potentially witness (or even a party to) some pretty horrendous atrocities in American history.

 

That acknowledgement aside, I will credit various Mayflower groups with excellent historical research and record-keeping. And flawed and insane as they were, those Mayflower passengers share our blood (at least a few drops, anyway). So let's take a look at how this line of the family went from puritanical paranoia to tattooed wine-drinking feminism.

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