The Wright way

In 1100 Norwich was a major metropolis, rivalling London in importance. It was still significant though diminished in 1600. Today its name is synonymous with boondocks.

Nicholas Wright and Margaret Nelson, living in Norwich in the second half of the 1500s, had five sons. In 1636 three of them, Peter, Anthony, and Nicholas, emigrated to Massachusetts, to seed communities a few miles north of Boston. Were they Puritans? Probably.

Norwich is in a section of England called East Anglia. Sixty percent of the English settlers in Massachusetts came from there. If you toured East Anglia today looking only at place names you’d think you were in Massachusetts: Lynn, Newton, Hingham, Woburn, Medford, Dorchester, Weymouth, and, of course, Boston. They came for one reason—to set up what they believed would be ideal communities adhering to the Puritan way. Between 1630 and 1640 more than 20,000 Puritans crossed the North Atlantic to settle in Massachusetts.

So the Wrights likely were Puritans, but it seems that they didn’t stay Puritans for long. A few years after they landed in Lynn, the brothers moved to Sandwich on Cape Cod and then to Oyster Bay, Long Island. There they became involved in an active Quaker community that is still a source of great local pride. They probably joined the Society of Friends some time in the 1660s. George Fox, founder of the Friends, began proselytizing in England in 1647, ten years after the Wrights left. But his message spread quickly and leapt the ocean. By the time Fox traveled to the New World, there were several Quaker communities here to meet with. In May of 1672 he spent several days with Quakers in Oyster Bay.

Why do we care? Peter Wright, one of the three brothers, married and had seven children, one of whom, Gideon, is a direct ancestor of Mabel Muldrow. But the story gets really interesting with Gideon’s sisters, our multi-great aunts.

Backward through the ages

About 60 years before the ancestors of Preston Thames fled the west coast of France to escape the persecution and massacre of Huguenots, Mabel Muldrow’s ancestors sailed from the east coast of England, headed for Massachusetts and what they believed would be religious freedom.

Ha!

The Huguenots settled in South Carolina, which was founded by entitled if not titled second sons of aristocrats whose main goal was to get filthy rich and rule over vast estates. This mentality is preserved to a large extent today among certain folks I’ll refrain from naming. But the upside was that nobody in authority cared about the religious ideas of some Frenchies setting up housekeeping in the Santee swamp.

Massachusetts was founded by do-gooders who believe there was one way and one way only to do good—their way. That is also still somewhat true today. But I get ahead of myself.

When I say “we” and “our” I refer to the descendents of Preston B. Thames (b.1894) and Mable C. Muldrow (b. 1898), which as of 2009 total 21—two children, five grandchildren, nine great grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren. But the first person plural may also refer to descendents of Preston’s and Mabel’s siblings, second and third cousins and beyond, depending on which side they are on.

First I’m going to go back, way way back, to 1088, when a person by the name of Eudo de Arsik appeared in the Domesday Book, where William the Conqueror recorded the names of the conquered, probably the better to tax them. Family Search website traces the line of Mabel Muldrow back to this name in 1088. (This also means that we have among our cousins one or more Mormons.) The Internet reveals that the current royal family of England, and probably Michael Jackson and Hillary Clinton, are also related to Arsik.

I did the math, counting back the generations to see how many direct ancestors I have: 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-greats and on. By the time I got to the 1700s I had thousands. By 1100 I had a billion, but there were no where near a billion people alive in 1100.

That means that I am related to everyone who was alive in 1100, which means everyone alive today is related to Arsik, from my next-door neighbour to a child born yesterday in the rainforests of Kenya to Prince William, Michelle Obama, and Mark Sanford.

So chew on that a bit and then come forward to 600 years to 1596. I was related to thousands of people alive then but I’m going to zero in on one family that some distant Mormon cousin has identified as related to me through my grandmother Mabel: the Wrights of Norwich.