Sunday, January 4, 2015

PRIMITIVE HALL: The Pennock family tree is a very leafy one

As I've mentioned before, I occasionally give tours at a local 18th-century house, and on Saturday morning it was my pleasure to show a couple from Cincinnati around the place. The husband proudly told me that he was descended from Joseph Pennock, who built the house, and showed me on his smartphone a list of seven generations of his ancestors.
They loved the house, as does everyone. But he was practically jumping up and down with excitement when he saw a sampler stitched by Hannah Pennock and a portrait of William Pennock as a boy, because both "Hannah" and "William" were mentioned in his family tree. He took oodles of photos and forwarded them immediately to his family members back in Ohio.
I didn't have the heart to tell him that "Hannah" and "William" were extremely common names, and given the huge families people had back then, the odds that those two were his direct forbears were pretty slim.

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