Welcome to my family history blog. Finding more about my family's history is very rewarding as well as being interesting and educational.
I created this blog to share my thoughts, experiences, tips and resources in my search for my ancestors' history and maybe, help you in your research as well. I am particularly interested in the history of Upper Canada and the Loyalist period in history.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Faces of America - My Newfound Cousin

While watching Faces of America last night I found a new cousin, Meryl Streep. My ears perked as soon as Henry Louis Gates,Jr. mentioned Bucks County, PA. I know that my Doane, Twining and Deane ancestors came from Eastham, MA. to Bucks County before 1700 and therefore was quite interested in seeing if there were any connections in Meryl's tree. When the generations chart came up, I noticed a familiar name, Mary Twining. I knew that there had to be a connection because my Twining ancestors lived in Newtown in Bucks County.

I opened my RM4 program and there was Mary Twining. She was the grandniece of my seventh great-grandparents, Daniel and Mehitabel Twining Doane. Her grandfather was Stephen Twining, Mehitabel's brother, named after his maternal grandfather, Stephen Deane, who came over on the Fortune in November, 1621 to Plymouth Colony.

When Meryl Streep mentioned that she was told that some of her ancestors were hanged in PA. for being horse thieves, it is quite possible that she was speaking of cousins Levi and Abraham Doane, two members of the notorious Doan Gang, hanged September of 1788. I would have loved to hear more about this branch of the family.



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Ancestral Notes by Earline Hines Bradt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
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5 comments:

  1. Greetings Earline,
    Wow, that's cool! I'm sure you will be busy adding Meryl's ancestry into your family tree to see exactly how you are related.
    ~Kathryn

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  2. This is great news, perhaps it will entice you to do more reseacrh on your new found family members. Good luck with this

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  3. Yes, I guess I'll be doing a little bit more research, I'll keep you posted on my progress.

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  4. I can't wait to watch the episode (online). I've got Twinings and Doanes as well; not the ones you mention, but I've got Stephen Deane as well. So you may count me as another cousin. :) And have fun researching!

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  5. Wendy, that's great, I love to find new cousins!

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