First in Your Family

It's not uncommon for someone in your family to be termed "the first one to go to college."  There's a string of other firsts as well.  It's interesting that for the large part, I'm guessing those firsts are all wrong.  It's really, the first in recent memory.  Or the first within my limited knowledge of my family, meaning my ancestry.  However, as genealogists, we know our ancestors much better--don't we?

My father went to college, so I'm not the first in my family in any case.  He's very likely the first in his family, although I can't say that with 100% certainty.  I think there are a few Slovak ministers hidden back there I need to ferret out and perhaps a college educated (and a European university educated at that), ancestor may be discovered.  Certainly on my mother's side, the earliest person I've found is the Rev. William Browne 1534-1613 who matriculated at Cambridge University (England) Pembroke College in the year 1546. [TAG 15(1938):84]  If that is too uncertain, than certainly the Rev. William Wilson 1542-1615, eventually the Canon of Windsor, graduated Merton College at Oxford in 1564 with a B.A., and 1570 with an M.A., eventually getting a D.D. in 1607. [NEHGR 61 (1907):36-129].  That's 450 years ago.

Likewise, there is still a bit of scandal and disappointment in divorce.  Not in my family, of course, since both sets of my grandparents were divorced in the 1940s, when it still actually was somewhat scandalous.  Yet, doing genealogy, if you descend from John Hicks, a Quaker who came to early Massachusetts, then moved to Rhode Island and eventually Long Island, you probably descend from his wife, Herodias Long.  They were divorced on 3 December 1643.  Herodias deserves her own posting, I love her so much. [see: "The Parentage of George Gardiner of Newport, RI" by G. Andrews Moriarty TAG 21:191-200.] So that first is probably out the window for many Americans.

Inter-religious marriages were also scandalous.  Yet, my great-great-grandparents married 6 January 1878, one protestant, one catholic.  That caused me undue frustration in the beginning of my research since I was assured no one was catholic in my family.  The latin dispensation in original reads: Marriage dispensation in Latin: “Anno 1878 die VI Januarie, necessaria dispensatione obtenta et promulgata et requistita promissione coram testibus signata, ego infrascriptus matrimonio junxi Thompson Pratt, protestantem baptisatimo filium Simonis [sic] Pratt et Rebeccae Thompson, et Elisabeth Stack filiam catholicam Thomae Stack et Abby Cody [sic]. Testes fuerunt, Thomas Stack et Abby Cody." 

However, I'm still certain about this first for me.  But for the rest, it's probably best never to say you're the first in your family to anything (short of space travel and the like). 

Comments

[Lidian]

I love Herodias Long Hicks too - one of my favorite ancestors. John Hicks, on the other hand, always sounded like a piece of work. Mind you, most of my Victorian Hicks ancestors/relatives were, too. My grandmother was a Brooklyn-born Hicks, hence my interest in them.