SPRINGVILLE — A Pilgrim and a Native American at the first Thanksgiving both fall through a magical crevice in the space-time continuum and land about 400 years later in Springville, Utah. Disoriented and lost, the Pilgrim wants to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with a descendant of his people, but the man from the Wampanoag nation wants to eat at the home of a descendant of his people.
Luckily, if the above scenario happened, both men could eat at the home of Lindsy Stewart Cieslewicz, who recently discovered that she was a descendant of not only the famous Pilgrim, William Bradford, but also, quite possibly, Massosoit, the Native American chief of the Wampanoags who was at the first Thanksgiving.
Cieslewicz gave a DNA sample and a pedigree chart to the Genetree.com database about 10 years ago when she was a graduate student at BYU. "I actually hardly remembered even doing it," she said recently from her home in Springville.
Genetree.com, and its associate organization, the nonprofit Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF), have created a huge database of volunteer DNA samples linked to traditional genealogical research. By combining the two methods of looking at ancestors, they are often able to solve family history problems.
Scott Woodward, president of Genetree.com and the executive director of SMGF, said they wanted to do something fun for Thanksgiving. (On Halloween they used their databases to find Amanda Gilbert, a 25-year-old Southern California woman who is a descendant of both a victim and persecutor of the Salem witch trials.) The search for a Thanksgiving link up didn't take long.
A query was made a few weeks ago in the Genetree.com database for descendants of William Bradford. The William Bradford matches were then searched for a descendant of the Wampanoag Indians, which is how they found Cieslewicz, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom and dance instructor.
Genetree.com contacted Cieslewicz through her Facebook page. "My ancestry had come up that I had ancestors on both sides of the Thanksgiving table, so to speak," she said.
Her maternal grandfather, John Sears Barker, was a historian and author. She knew he had some pilgrim ancestry and a vague family story about Native Americans. "There had been a tradition in the family that we had been related to Native American royalty. Which he had actually never believed."
Both lines were confirmed by the Genetree.com search. Cieslewicz is Bradford's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter. Bradford served for 30 years as the Massachusetts colony's governor.
Cieslewicz's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was William Austen, who was captured as a small boy and raised by Native Americans. A press release from Genetree.com said that he "is thought to have married a Wampanoag woman; believed by some to have been a descendant of Massasoit." Massasoit was chief of the Wampanoags during the first Thanksgiving.
Grandpa Barker died a year ago. "We've been kind of laughing that he would have been surprised to learn that this thing that had been passed down in the family for all these years was actually true," Cieslewicz said.
Unfortunately, a DNA connection can't be made yet.
The two main methods of tracing family lines by DNA are via either the maternal line or the paternal line. If you go back from daughter to mother to grandmother to great-grandmother and so forth, DNA links are easy to find. The same thing holds true if you go from son to father to grandfather. But these methods can't leap past a descendant that comes from father to daughter, for example. According to Woodward, that is what happened here. He said future advances in DNA technology may be able to make connections, but that this example shows the value of not relying on just DNA or just genealogical research.
For Cieslewicz the discovery has been positive. "I think more than anything else, it has gotten my children excited about things. As we read Thanksgiving stories it has been really interesting to say, 'Look at that. We are related to both of those groups,'" Cieslewicz said. "It's an exciting thing to see history come to life in your own family."
e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com