Issue Date: November 24, 2002

In this article: Mayflower facts

THANKSGIVING

Beyond the Mayflower

USA WEEKEND set out to find descendants of those original freedom seekers. Now, look how remarkably diverse this uniquely American lineage has become.

By Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts

That could be our family on the cover of this magazine.

Like those three people, our children and grandchildren have direct family ties to at least one of the 102 Pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock 382 years ago. (Cokie's mom is a descendant of William Brewster, the group's spiritual leader.) The smallest cover subject, 3-year-old Akili McMackin, traces his Mayflower roots through his father, who also claims a connection to fellow descendant President Bush; Akili's mother is African American. The mother of Amanda Meiling Woo, 17, is a Mayflower descendant; her dad is a Chinese American, the son of immigrants from Canton. And Tom McCarthy, 43, of Annapolis, Md., counts seven Mayflower passengers, including John Alden (made famous in a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem), among his ancestors.

Akili McMackin, right, and his father, Eric Three-year-old Akili McMackin of Richmond, Va., is a descendant of the first Mayflower Pilgrims through his father; his mother's ancestors were African slaves and Choctaw Indians. Akili shares his Mayflower ancestry with several U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush (they're 11th cousins, twice removed), who all trace their lineage back to Pilgrim John Howland, according to Akili's father, Eric. Mom Christel says she hopes her son's family history will help him "to embrace everything that creates America -- and that's the people." She believes his shared ancestry goes to the core of what America stands for. "It goes back to the very beginning, opportunity," his mother says. "America has been the land of opportunity for us all."

For this Thanksgiving issue of USA WEEKEND, we wanted to show that today's Mayflower descendants come in all colors and cultures. Through the centuries, the children of those first colonists have mixed with a continuous flow of newcomers, enriching the nation's gene pool and helping to define our diversity.

And it all started -- at least symbolically -- on that very first Thanksgiving.

The original Pilgrims established strong ties to the Indians they found living here. If Indian guide Squanto had not taught them how to plant corn, the settlers probably would have died of starvation during that first harsh winter in Massachusetts. And to recognize that act of generosity, the 50 or so colonists who survived until the harvest season invited 90 men from the Wampanoag tribe to join them in the first Thanksgiving celebration.

Fast-forward to November 2002 and look around. Today, some 35 million Americans are linked by blood to those original Pilgrims. Many of those Mayflower descendants resemble the man on the cover -- Tom McCarthy, a history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, who looks like he could have stepped out of a painting of the Plymouth Rock landing.

Many others, however, look more like Carol Rae Bradford, pictured on page 10 with her two daughters. She is connected to 10 Mayflower passengers on her mother's side; her father is Syrian.

Their stories reflect the beating heart of a great nation. History reveres the Mayflower and its journey, but the travelers on that ship, all white Europeans, represent only a part -- a steadily dwindling part -- of America today. We're far stronger as a people because this country continued to welcome new generations of pilgrims, the bravest, strongest, most ambitious pioneers from other lands and cultures.

What these generations of newcomers all shared was a fierce passion for freedom. For William Brewster, it was freedom of religion. He helped form a dissident group called the Separatists, who resisted the domination of the Church of England. In 1608 they emigrated to Holland, where they were able to worship openly and even publish religious tracts on a press operated by Brewster. But their works were banned back home, and after the English ambassador to Holland instigated a search for this insidious printing operation, the Separatists boarded the Mayflower and set out for America in 1620.

The second great promise that drew those first pioneers was economic freedom. The Mayflower's journey was financed by English merchants who hoped to profit by trading with the New World. Another of Cokie's ancestors, William Claiborne, was appointed the first surveyor of the Virginia territory and arrived at Jamestown just months after the landfall at Plymouth to pursue new land and business opportunities. In 1631, he became the first white settler to establish a trading outpost in what is now the state of Maryland, buying an island in the Chesapeake Bay from the local inhabitants for 12 pounds sterling and naming it after his home county of Kent.

The third great theme in American migration was political freedom. The first colonists signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement to form a "civil body politic," the first rudimentary example of democracy in the New World.

Amanda Meiling Woo, right, and her mother, Carol High school senior Amanda Meiling Woo of Louisville says people are surprised to learn she's a descendant, through her mom, of eight Mayflower Pilgrims. Amanda, 17, describes her heritage this way: "It's really interesting. You hear so much about the Mayflower at school, and knowing that your family was a part of that is just incredible." Having a dual heritage -- her father's parents came to this country from China -- is a source of pride. "I think it shows what America is about," she says. "It's about a blending of cultures, all the cultures that make up America."

Like the Bradfords and Woos and McMackins, our family is also a mix: of old stock and new blood, Christians and Jews, Southerners and Yankees, English aristocrats and Russian peasants. We like to joke that we're both children of immigrants -- our ancestors just happened to arrive about 300 years apart.

This tapestry gets even more colorful in the next generation. All three of our grandchildren (and there is a fourth on the way) have a great-grandmother -- Cokie's mother, Lindy Claiborne Boggs -- who is descended from pioneers Brewster and Claiborne. Those same Pilgrim ideals of religious and civic freedom also drew later generations of our family to America. Steve's grandfathers arrived early in the 20th century. His mother's father, Harry Schanbam, was a Bundist (a member of the Bund Jewish political party) back in Russia, a believer in democratic socialism. Family legend has it that the Cossacks would come rampaging through the house, looking to arrest the young firebrand, until his mother finally told him he had to leave. Steve's father's father, Abraham Rogowsky, was an early Zionist, fleeing the anti-Jewish pogroms of Russia and settling in Palestine, where he worked on some of the first roads ever built in Tel Aviv. After returning to his hometown of Bialystok, which is now in northeastern Poland, he was drafted, but he escaped from the czar's army and returned to Palestine. He decided life was too hard for a young family in that turbulent place, so he wrote to his fiancée, Miriam Wasilsky, and told her, "Meet me in Brooklyn."

Our twin grandsons had a great-grandfather on their father's side, Franz Frank, who fled Germany and the Nazis in the 1930s because he was part Jewish; he taught for many years at the University of Texas and became an ardent fan of Longhorn basketball teams. He met his wife, Thomasina Hill, an Englishwoman of uncommon wit and grit, on the boat coming to America. So in naming one child Claiborne Hill Hartman, our daughter and son-in-law covered a lot of history.

America can grow in greatness only if it continues to welcome new infusions of talent, like Steve's grandfathers, and like the grandfather of Amanda Meiling Woo and the father of Carol Rae Bradford, who recharge our national batteries and refresh our national spirit.

Today, with war looming in Iraq, we should remember that many of the soldiers defending this country are newcomers to America, soldiers like Hilda Hernandez-Lara, an immigrant from Mexico and single mother of a 5-year-old son. After a six-month deployment on an aircraft carrier during the Afghan fighting, the Marine supply officer was home only a few weeks before she received new orders: a year-long assignment on the Japanese island of Okinawa without her child. She was upset at the news, but she wasn't ready to quit. "It's my job," she told us.

You don't have to be a Brewster or a Claiborne to understand the history of this country and why we give thanks this week. Hilda Hernandez-Lara knows why. Amanda Meiling Woo and Carol Rae Bradford know. And little Akili McMackin will know, too, someday. He'll know that a boy with his heritage, combining both English Pilgrims and African slaves, embodies the true spirit of America.

Cokie and Steve Roberts are USA WEEKEND contributing editors. Cokie Roberts is a political analyst for ABC and NPR. Steve Roberts is a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and an analyst for ABC. They last wrote for the magazine about women in the White House. Peggy J. Noonan contributed to this report.

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Photographs by Katherine Lambert for USA WEEKEND