Where I'm From

Saturday afternoon, with a few hours to kill before meeting my niece for dinner in DC, my sister and I went down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole.  

Christmas of 2016 found my dad and I spitting into a small test tube that would be sent off to Ancestry so the scientist people there could analyze our DNA.  The good news is that my father is most definitely my father.  Not that I ever doubted that, but can you imagine the kind of sticky situations a test like this may provoke?

My father has always been the one interested in the genealogy of the family.  He's gone pretty far back on his mother's side.  Far enough back that I was able to pay a visit to the grave of my distant relatives while in Ireland a few years back.  With all that information readily available I decided to dig into my mother's side of the family.

My maternal grandmother's family came from Germany, so feeling a bit intimidated by a language barrier I opted to look at my maternal grandfather's English relatives, the Middletons.  My mother was a tad worried.  I guess she was thinking I might find out something she didn't want to know.

She shouldn't have been concerned.  It seems my grandfather's family has been in Maryland since the mid-1600s.  The first pilgrims arrived in Maryland aboard two ships, The Ark and The Dove that landed in St. Mary's City in 1634.  I'm still trying to figure out if the Middleton that came over on that voyage is in my ancestral line, so I can't say my family has been around since the first settlement.  

I spent most of Saturday afternoon trying to figure out how my "immigrant relative" ended up about 60 miles north of that settlement by the year 1672.  Many roads lead to my 8th great-grandfather but I can't find that road that got him to Maryland.

So, even though I can't explain how that first Middleton ended up in Maryland at least I can understand why I feel such a connection (and longing) for my home state. Maryland- it's in my blood.