Ancestry

Last year, I discovered that I am a descendant of the Native American Nottaway and Cheraw tribes, which I am very proud of. To get to my point, I sometimes wonder that because I am so mixed with many ethnicities, and I am also a descendant of a few families that married into each other a few times, it makes me wonder if that is why I have a syndrome. For example, I am a descendant of the Putnam family of Salem Village, Massachusetts, four times. The Putnam family was the infamous family of the Salem Witch trials, where Ann Putnam (1679-1716), my first cousin and daughter of my 5th great uncle, Thomas Putnam, Jr. (1651-1699), who did most of the “accusing” during the trials. I have also been a descendant of the Choat family of Massachusetts four times. My 2nd great-grandmother was Mary Sarah Choate (1834-1889), who married my 2nd great-grandfather, Dr. Ernst Bruno von Gersdorff (1820-1883). One of her brothers, Judge William Gardner Choate, Esq. (1830-1920), founded the Choate School. I know I am also a descendant of the Scottish clans Campbell and Stewart about 30 times. If you can go back far enough, say about five generations or so, your ancestors start to repeat each other. If you think about it, we all have ancestors whose ancestors married into each other more than once, and that will cause somebody to have a birth defect of some sort. In fact, I know that there are members of the British royal family who have a few people with disabilities, but they hid them from the public. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to live with disabilities back in those days.