Day 52 (10/16 - Fri)

My family name is Thorne. It's not a super common name, a fact I rather like, but as a surname it's not unheard of. It so happens that we know who our first immigrant ancestor is: a certain William Thorne, who walked off a boat in a port in the new, budding colony of Massachussetts sometime around 1630. I like to envision him with a straw hat and a grin on his face, imagining all that he could make of himself and his future family here in this wild, open land. He probably looked nothing like I envision, but he was real. I found him tonight in the Wheaton College Library in a book entitled something like Dictionary of Early American Genaeology.



That's a long time ago -- my ancestor settled in Long Island when it wasn't even New York yet, but still New Amsterdam! That's pretty cool.