Hillary traces roots to Durham
Americans mine links with the old country
THERE must be something in the water. The family of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the American presidential hopeful, hails from the same part of northeast England as George Washington, the first president of the United States.
Clinton, wife of Bill Clinton, the former president, traces her ancestry to a mining family in Co Durham. Washington was the descendant of a family who lived in a village, now a town, of the same name 10 miles away on land once owned by the Bishop of Durham.
The lineage of the former first lady, who may one day be an incumbent of the White House in her own right, has been mapped by a computerised genealogy system that will help to track the roots of millions of Americans.
British tourism chiefs are relishing the live launch of the system next month. It is expected to bring a fillip to the “ancestry industry” in which Americans come to the British Isles in search of their roots.
Researchers working for Ancestry.com have traced Clinton’s descendants using the massive genealogies gathered in Utah during the past century by the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
The company has also collated 13m US census records dated between 1790 and the 1930s, the most recent records in the public domain.
The connection between Clinton and the miners of Durham is one of several thrown up by the new subscription search engine, which can be used by Americans to track British ancestors and by Britons to locate distant cousins in the United States.
Clinton is descended from a family of coalminers in Co Durham. Jonathan Rodham, her great-grandfather, hailed from Oxhill, near Stanley. He emigrated to America and made his way to the coalfields of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1881 in search of work. He later became a policeman and then a florist.
The surname Rodham, which also occurs as Roddam, originates in Northumberland and is common in the region. A Celtic strain to the bloodline was added later.
In her autobiography Clinton writes that her father, who was born in Scranton, “got his looks from a line of black-haired Welsh coalminers on his mother’s side”.
John Roddam, 87, of Sacriston, Durham, said: “We have always wondered what the connection was.
“My father was a parish clerk for 35 years and I was a trade union official, so there is a bit of a history of governing and campaigning in the British branch of the family, too.”
The search engine has revealed the roots of many famous Americans in the British Isles.
According to the 1880 American census, the great-great-grandfather of George Clooney, the actor, emigrated from Ireland and became a jeweller.
His son Andrew became mayor of Maysville, Kentucky, and campaigned with the help of George’s singing aunts — Rosemary and Betty — who were radio stars.
Teri Hatcher, the star of television’s Desperate Housewives, also has Irish ancestry.
Mary Kolar, her great- grandmother, was three years old when she emigrated from Ireland with her family in about 1864, according to the 1900 US census.
Julianne Moore, the Oscar-nominated actress, was born in Boston but her maternal line hails from Dunoon in Argyll.
Tom Cruise — whose real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV — was born in Syracuse, New York, but genealogists have linked him to Dylan Henry Mapother, a Welshman who emigrated to Kentucky in 1850.
Search inquiries have also thrown up some intriguing links. President George W. Bush is connected by one blood line to Wild Bill Hickock, the western gunfighter.
Tom Hanks, the actor, is distantly related to Abraham Lincoln but his grandfather, according to the 1930 census, was a “squirrel inspector” or rodent controller.
The computerised records also help to show that arguably the two most eligible bachelors on either side of the Atlantic are descended from the same blood line.
Prince William, 24, second in line to the throne, and Andrew Firestone, 30, scion of an American family tyre and wine fortune and who is also a star of reality TV, can both trace their roots back to a 17th-century Suffolk teenager.
Thomas Parke, from the village of Hitcham, was 15 when he sailed with his family for the New World aboard the Arabella in 1630.
His father, who was a man of means, was looking for more religious liberty.
They settled in Connecticut where Thomas married Dorothy Thompson, herself an immigrant from Preston Capes in Northamptonshire.
Thomas helped to found the First Church of Christ and lived to the age of 93.
Researchers have discovered that both William and Prince Harry, his brother, are descended through their grandmother, the late Frances Shand Kydd, to Parke and his wife.
Firestone, who handed out long-stemmed roses to a bevy of beauties on the television series The Bachelor before proposing on air to the “winner” (they later split up) is directly descended from Parke.
His great-grandmother Elizabeth Parke married Harvey Firestone, founder of one of America’s biggest tyre companies, in 1921. Andrew Firestone’s own mother, Catherine Boulton, was a dancer with the Royal Ballet in London.
Tony Robinson, the actor and presenter of Channel 4’s Time Team, who also acts as a spokesman for Ancestry.co.uk, the British branch of Ancestry.com, said: “The new technology available produces almost infinite possibilities.
“Soon the ability to trace back our ancestors will alter the way we think about history and lead us to rethink our place in the world.”
People on both sides of the Atlantic are already working on those possibilities.
Donna Schumacher from Stonington, Connecticut, another descendant of Thomas Parke, said: “For years off and on, my father had made mention of one of our ancestors signing the Magna Carta. Another story was that another ancestor had to hide his wife and baby in the trunk of a tree while he attempted to fight off Indians.
“Both of those stories intrigued me so much that there was no other way to find out about them only to dive into genealogy.”
Alison Fraser is marketing manager of Begin Your Adventure, a British tourism website set up to exploit the 400th anniversary of the first British settlers landing in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Last month she sailed up the eastern seaboard in Godspeed, a replica of one of the colonists’ vessels.
“The genealogy hook is really strong in the US and 50% of Americans can trace their ancestry back to the British Isles,” she said. “It is very fertile ground for tourism.”
Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article679114.ece?print=yes&randnum=1205637112421
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
