29 Nov Ancestors Newsletter- November 29, 2025
Contents
ANCESTORS- MY MAYFLOWER ANCESTOR
ANCESTORS- MY MAYFLOWER ANCESTORMy 11th Great Grandfather, Stephen Hopkins (fl. 1579 – d. 1644), is my only Mayflower ancestor. Here are some interesting items about him:
• He was one of 41 signatories of the Mayflower Compact
• He was an assistant to the governor of Plymouth Colony through 1636.
• He was first a minister’s clerk and then worked as a tanner and merchant.
• He was recruited by the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London to provide governance for the colony and to assist with the colony’s ventures.
• He was the only Mayflower passenger with prior New World experience, having been shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1609, while headed to Jamestown, Virginia. Hopkins lived in Jamestown from 1610 to 1614, then returned to England. Hopkins settled in Plymouth Colony and died there in 1644.
• Along with the Aldens, Brewsters, Howlands, and Rogers, Stephen’s descendants are a vast group, including my famous cousins:
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Oddly, none of them invited me over for Thanksgiving!
On 2 June 1609, Hopkins left his wife and family, and in his ministerial clerk’s position, departed for Jamestown in Virginia on the 300-ton Sea Venture, carrying the new Jamestown governor, Sir Thomas Gates, to his post, as well as resupplying the colony with goods and new settlers.
After almost two months into the voyage, a severe tropical storm separated the ships of the flotilla on 24 July 1609. By evening, the storm began raging with greater intensity and lasted for five days. Just when the Sea Venture was about to sink from storm damage, “land” was called out, with that being the island of Bermuda. The ship was forced to run aground about a mile offshore to prevent sinking. The castaways soon found that Bermuda was a Paradise, with plentiful water and food.
The colonists were unwilling to continue the voyage and repeatedly attempted to escape rather than stay in the islands. Hopkins argued that the hurricane had dissolved the settlers’ indentured labor contract with the Virginia Company, as the company had failed to deliver them safely. Each of them could, then, freely choose to accept Gates’ governance, strike out on their own, or join a cooperative settlement. His arguments have been interpreted as an early statement of social contract theory. Hopkins urged this in secret, and Gates considered it mutinous, as he insisted on proceeding and had organized the settlers into a prison labor camp to prevent escapes.
On 1 September 1609, a month after the shipwreck, they had built up their ship’s longboat for an ocean voyage. They sent eight men out to reach Jamestown for help, but they never returned. In late November 1609, they began construction of boats sufficient to transport everyone off the island. By January 1610, although Stephen Hopkins had remained with Governor Gates’ group, he began voicing dissatisfaction with Thomas Gates’ governance and questioning his authority. Hopkins was arrested and charged with mutiny and was found guilty, for which the sentence was death. Many people begged for mercy on his behalf, and he was pardoned. Hopkins ceased voicing controversial issues.
On 10 May 1610, the two newly constructed boats departed Bermuda with all on board and arrived at Jamestown eleven days later. What they found was that the colonists in Jamestown were starving to death due to their inability, and in some cases, unwillingness to produce food. They were afraid to go outside their fort, so they were tearing down their houses for firewood. They were not planting crops, nor trading with the natives, nor catching fish. Much of this had to do with some settlers feeling it was beneath their dignity to work and the violent abuse they gave the native people, which caused much enmity towards the English. Upon his arrival from Bermuda, Governor Gates estimated that there were only a few days’ worth of food left and decided to voyage to Newfoundland, from where he would find a ship heading for England. Just as they were preparing to depart, an English ship came into the harbor with supplies and new settlers, along with a new governor, Lord de la Warr. The colonists were forced to return and reestablish their fort, albeit reluctantly.
While he was away, Stephen’s wife, Mary, had managed to survive by working as a shopkeeper and also receiving some of Stephen’s wages. But she unexpectedly died in May 1613, leaving her three young children all alone. By 1614, a letter arrived for a “Hopkins” in Jamestown, and it is presumed that this was how he learned of her death, as he returned to England soon afterward to care for his children. He then took up residence in London and married his second wife, Elizabeth Fisher.
Although he had been through all manner of hardships and trials in the New World, including shipwreck, being sentenced to death with a last-minute pardon, and traveling to the Jamestown colony, where he labored for several years, when he learned of the planned Mayflower voyage to northern Virginia to establish a colony, he signed on to go to America along with his family. More on that in the next edition!
ANCESTORS- AI AND TRANSCRIBING HEZEKIAH
ANCESTORS- AI AND TRANSCRIBING HEZEKIAHI’ve been working with my tech friends, finding software that could transcribe writing from 1814, written by my wife’s 5th Great Grandfather, Captain and Doctor, Hezekiah Starbuck, in North Carolina, titled “A Treatise on the Various Kinds of Cancerous Affections in Their First Appearance and How to Prepare Medicine and Apply It for Their Removal.” You can refer to my article from early October on Starbuck Hezekiah Starbuck
As a whaling captain for whaling hunts that lasted as many as five years, the captain often became the doctor. When you think of being aboard a ship and exposed to the sun for so long, without any protection but possibly a hat, skin cancer is likely to strike a lot of sailors.
Now that we have successfully translated the document, the subsequent and more ambitious transcription would be a 199-page journal from his whaling journey to the Pacific. The Nantucket Historical Association holds the journal, and only seven pages have been transcribed. I imagine that is because it is very tedious work, involving partially legible cursive, and using words that were common in the 1700s but are often lost to our current vocabulary.
While I understand that translating documents such as this may not be an early aim of the AI effort, hopefully, we will get there. I joked that I could likely have them done in a few days if I could insert Hezekiah’s journal into the Epstein files! If you are a tech person and know of software that offers some degree of transcription from old-time cursive PDFs to Word, and you know there will be words that won’t be translatable, I would be grateful for the information.
ANCESTORS- DIRECTIONS FOR PREPARING MEDICINE FOR CANCEROUS AFFECTIONS
ANCESTORS- DIRECTIONS FOR PREPARING MEDICINE FOR CANCEROUS AFFECTIONSTo one tablespoonful of copperas, add four pieces of blue stone as large as the end of one’s little finger. Put this into a hen’s eggshell, put the shell into an iron ladle over the fire, and observe it, raising the heat to keep the ladle just perceptibly red, and continue it for eight hours. When the eggshell is burnt to crack to pieces, take out the shell from among the medicine, continuing the medicine in the ladle on the fire as above, observing to rub the medicine with a smooth-faced hammer until it is pulverized into a fine powder; and at the end of about eight hours take it from the fire, and when nearly cool mix it in the following manner, viz.:
To two spoonfuls of this, add three spoonfuls of powdered puccoon root, which must be well mixed together for use. This is called the killing or destroying medicine, which must be first applied in the following manner, viz.:
Spread a plaster of well-roasted onion, mashed into a pulp (red onion is best), just as large as the cancer and as thick as a grain of wheat. Scatter on the powder until the face of the onion is just covered, then scatter on a bit of corrosive of mercury, as little as can be perceived, and apply it warm to the cancer. But if the tumor is not broken into an open sore, it is best to open it so the medicine can reach it first.
These plasters must be reapplied with fresh medicine every 12 hours until the cancer turns black or purple, or the medicine ceases to have any pain-relieving effect. Sometimes one plaster will destroy the body of the tumor; pretty frequently two plasters will perform it, and generally three, but sometimes it will take four or five, as the circumstance may be.
ANCESTORS- GARFIELD AND ARTHUR
ANCESTORS- GARFIELD AND ARTHURI recently watched the Netflix series, Death by Lightning, which is the story of James A. Garfield becoming a dark horse candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination, and getting elected president, then being assassinated by a civil service job seeker.
We covered Susan Edson, President Garfield’s personal doctor, in September. Garfield’s widow, Lucretia, unsuccessfully petitioned Congress to ensure she received the same pay as the male doctors. Dr. Edson Unfortunately, Edson was slighted again, as she was not mentioned in the show, which seems like a significant alteration of history, not an uncommon occurrence in historical accounts.
Additionally, they had Chester Arthur, artfully portrayed by Nick Offerman, as the Collector of Customs for New York, a lucrative position. He’d already been removed from that job by Garfield’s predecessor, Rutherford Hayes. Despite that, the series was worth watching, and I did learn things that you wouldn’t necessarily catch with casual reading.
One item was the Civil Service reform, which ended the spoils system, pushed through Congress by his successor, Chester A. Arthur, out of respect for Garfield. That was a surprise, as Arthur was a beneficiary of the spoils system. Sadly, some assassinated presidents can get their signature goal accomplished out of respect by their VP, as was the case with JFK and LBJ with Civil Rights. Both Arthur and Johnson were chosen more for their geopolitical advantages than for their support of their running mate’s agenda.
Ironically, Arthur was criticized for failing to alleviate the federal budget surplus, which had been accumulating since the end of the Civil War. I wish our government had that problem nowadays. Arthur’s failing health and political temperament combined to make his administration less active than those of modern presidents, yet he earned praise among contemporaries for his solid performance in office.
I also learned that his belated sponsor, Secretary of State James G. Blaine, had been hassled by Garfield’s eventual assassination, and finally snapped, “Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live!”
Blaine was the next Republican presidential candidate, losing to Grover Cleveland, which broke a 24-year run of Republican presidencies. Interestingly, except for Cleveland’s two terms and Wilson’s (due to Teddy Roosevelt jumping in as a third-party candidate), the Republicans captured the presidency from Lincoln through Hoover, a period of 68 years, or, excepting Cleveland and Wilson, a period of 52 years.
ANCESTORS- SOCIETY OF PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINS
ANCESTORS- SOCIETY OF PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINSAs mentioned above, the Netflix show “Death by Lightning” is about James Garfield’s assassination. After watching, and with my curiosity, since we’ve reported several times on the Society of Presidential Descendants, on the descendants of presidential assassins. While I didn’t think such a society would ever be formed, we do get inquiries from people surnamed Booth to see how they’re related to John Wilkes Booth. Still, it’s no surprise that most assassins, like Booth, are male loners without children. One exception was Lee Harvey Oswald, who had two children.
Here’s what I found about Oswald’s descendants: “His wife, Marina, married Kenneth Porter in 1965. Her new husband was a good stepfather to LHO’s two daughters. The older daughter, June, went on to become a writer. The younger daughter, Rachel, became a nurse. Both live in the Dallas area. There were many instances of people trying to get interviews and pictures, yet Marina would not allow them” (obviously, she did one time, as seen on the left).
Both girls became aware of what history claimed their father had done. Rachel (I’m not sure about June) did years of research and concluded that her father was probably involved in some way, but did not shoot Kennedy from the TSBD. The family has fared better than expected due to Marina and her husband’s wisdom. From what I read, Americans, with a few exceptions, were kind to the family.”
But I did notice something odd in the Wikipedia list of US assassinations, that while there have been many more than I realized in my lifetime, there was a considerable break between a couple of mobsters (Whitey Bulger and Frank Cali) in 2019, and Brian Thompson, United Health CEO, in 2024, so an unexpected silver lining of the pandemic!
ANCESTORS- MASSACRE REUNION
ANCESTORS- MASSACRE REUNIONIn the 1980s, I remember my mom’s second cousin, Arlene Feldmann Jauken, a descendant of the German family, recounting the tragic story of her ancestors and their connection to the Cheyenne people. On September 9, 1990, descendants of both the German family and Cheyenne leaders Medicine Water and Calf Woman gathered near Russell Springs, Kansas, to commemorate a fateful event from September 11, 1874, when Cheyenne warriors killed five members of the German family.
The roots of this tragedy trace back to earlier violence. In 1864, the Colorado Militia massacred 112 Cheyenne families at Sand Creek, despite the Cheyenne believing they were under U.S. protection. Buffalo Calf Woman, a survivor, lost her entire family in the attack. Four years later, in 1868, Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne village was attacked by General Custer’s cavalry at the Washita River, resulting in further loss.
The Cheyenne, led by Medicine Water and Calf Woman, fiercely resisted encroachment on their lands, which spanned Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota. In 1874, Medicine Water became head of the Cheyenne Bow String Warrior Society and continued to defend his people’s way of life.
Meanwhile, John German, a Confederate veteran from Georgia, moved his family west after the Civil War, seeking new opportunities. After years of travel and hardship, the Germans arrived in Kansas in 1874, unaware of the ongoing conflict between settlers and Native Americans.
On September 11, 1874, the German family was attacked by Medicine Water, Calf Woman, and their group. John German, his wife Liddia, and three children were killed and scalped. Four daughters—Catherine, Sophia, Julia, and Adelaide—survived but were taken captive. Their ordeal lasted months, with the younger girls eventually abandoned and rescued by soldiers, while the older girls were released after negotiations.
The U.S. government provided for the girls’ education and maintenance. Their grandfathers wanted them to return to Georgia, but Catherine chose to remain in Kansas. Medicine Water, Calf Woman, and others were imprisoned as prisoners of war, returning years later. Calf Woman died in 1882; Medicine Water lived until 1925.
The surviving sisters built new lives: Catherine in California, Sophia in Nebraska, Julia in California, and Adelaide in Kansas, becoming the mother of eleven children. Their descendants, including Arlene Feldmann Jauken, continued to honor their legacy.
The 1990 reunion brought together 850 people, including 105 German family members and 35 Native American descendants. The event featured traditional Cheyenne ceremonies and personal stories, symbolizing a spirit of reconciliation. Arlene, drawing from her great-grandmother Sophia’s memories and research, concluded, “The last time our families met, 116 years ago, John’s great-great-grandmother killed my great-great-grandfather. John and I have promised to do better.”
The story of the German family is told in Girl Captives of the Cheyennes, written in 1927 by Grace E. Meredith, a niece of Catherine
PRESERVE YOUR FAMILY HISTORY, TODAY
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