To tell you the truth I was really just looking for the next grandpa back. My dad was a very decent man -- gentle, quirky, loving, full of integrity. But his father? By most accounts, Grandpa Carver was something else again.
It was 1998. My father had recently passed away, and I was in one of those stages of grief -- the numb stage, where you stare out the window too much and finally realize you need a diversion. I knew a fair bit about Dad's generation but nothing about the generations before. Dad thought he remembered seeing Great Grandpa once, when he was very young, but he didn’t remember his name or anything else about him except that he lived to be 104.
So I sat there in my home office, drinking coffee and listening to the rain, searching for my great uncles’ death certificates and looking through my father’s notes. It seemed like each of the great uncles was born in a different county. Did the family really move that much, or were they out visiting when the babies were born?
For years I joked that I was tracking Great Grandma’s uterus across southern Wisconsin. It's 1852; do you know where the uterus is? But I don’t make jokes like that anymore, because anything you say online will get a cut-and-paste, sooner or later, into a family tree somewhere, and from there it will just get copied and copied and copied.
(Yes, unknown person who placed the uterus comment out of context into a note on a tree on familysearch.org, which I have since corrected, I'm talking to you!)
Over time I’ve filled in a lot of the blanks, found things, lost things, met cousins, lost track of cousins, lived regular life, and then circled back again to fill in more blanks. The investigation is ongoing. We are tracking any and all possible leads. The suspects will be apprehended.
Not John's
Grandpa used to say we were descendants of Governor John Carver, from the Mayflower. It’s a popular claim. Carvers across the internet still claim it today.
A more knowledgeable Carver always comes back with The Well Known Fact: Mayflower John had no living descendants. It’s still possible that your ancestors hopped a little boat full of rats and scurvied their way over here with the rest of the Pilgrims, but they weren’t John’s kids.
My Carvers descended from Robert Carver of Marshfield. He came over a few years after the Mayflower. One of his grandsons married an Alden, so a Mayflower connection does exist.
The older generations of this line are recorded in a couple of family histories. The first is
The Carver Family of New England, by Clifford Nickels Carver. I talk about that a little more
here.
Another private family history is
Genealogy of the Robert Carver Family, compiled by Fred E. and Margaret R. Carver, (Originally Entitled: Genealogy of the Rev. Eleazer Carver Family), 1971, additional data compiled by Franz J. Carver, 1997. If you cut and paste the title and authors into a search engine, you can find copies of this online.
