Today, November 27, 2015 The Denver Post ran a brief historical note relating to an early Pilgrim. Here is the article:

Forgotten Pilgrim had huge impact on U.S. History

Denver Post, Friday, November 27, 2015, p. 12A
by The Associated Press

Boston. John Howland is not as famous as William Bradford, John Carver and Miles Standish, notable passengers on the Mayflower, which landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Yet Howland, who boarded the ship as Carver’s servant, probably had a greater impact on the History of the United States than any of them. And Howland almost never even made it to the New World.

He fell overboard in the middle of the Atlantic during a gale but grabbed a trailing rope and was hauled back aboard by sailors using boat hooks.

Howland and his wife, fellow Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Tilley, had 10 children and more than 80 grandchildren. Now, an estimated 2 million Americans can trace their roots to him.

Howland’s descendants include three presidents – Franklin Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush – as well as poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, actors Alec Baldwin and Humphrey Bogart, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith and child care guru Benjamin Spock.

I am among those 2 million descendants. John Howland is my 8th great grandfather. The chain is H. N Anderson, Jr –> H.N. Anderson –> Margaret Horney (wife of Harmon Anderson) –> Jeffrey Horney –> Hannah Chipman (wife of William Horney) –> Perez Chipman –> John Chipman –> Hope Howland (wife of John Chipman, Sr) –> John Howland. So there you have it in brief sequence. This is all solidly documented in the various published genealogical records and my own research of three Anderson generation, my father, grand father and great grandfather where the line shifts to the Chipman line and eventually to John Howland through his daughter Hope.

I expect that the Roosevelts and Bushes are out there on some obscure branch of the family.

A piece of family trivia to go along with our celebration yesterday of Thanksgiving, the first presumably celebrated by the early Pilgrims in the 1620s.