My family tree reaches George Soule, who crossed on the Mayflower in 1620. That sentence is the most-searched kind of claim in American genealogy, and most versions of it are wrong. Here is ours, graded link by link — because the useful thing I can offer is not the claim, it’s the method: a descent is exactly as strong as its weakest joint, and the weak joint is almost never where you think.
Everyone checks the famous end first, so let’s start there — and here is the counterintuitive part: the Plymouth end of our chain is the strong end.
George Soule crossed in 1620 as a servant in another man’s household, survived the first winter, and lived until about 1679. His will of 1677 names a daughter Susannah — so she certainly existed. Whom she married comes from one remarkable document: a memorandum book kept in 1802 by her great-grandson Samuel West, recording that his great-grandfather Francis West married a young lady “by the name of Sole, daughter of Mr George Sole,” by whom he had seven sons and two daughters. Nine children — exactly the nine the records show. A Mayflower scholar published that page in 1924 under the title “Susanna Soule’s Husband Identified,” and the Mayflower Society has since printed Susanna’s descendants as a numbered lineage in its own George Soule volumes, which is the Society’s way of saying it accepts her. Is it airtight? No — old Samuel was writing 140 years after the wedding, and in the very same sentence he gets a detail wrong (he has George arriving with his family; George actually crossed alone, as a servant). Strong, institutionally backed, honestly short of proof: that is the grade, and I’d take it to court as long as the judge understood genealogy.
The next stretch is better than the Plymouth end. Susanna’s great-grandson Francis West married Mary Lawton at Westerly, Rhode Island, on 17 February 1757 — read on the page image of the vital record. And Mary’s identity is nailed the best way a woman’s identity gets nailed in that century: her father’s will. Joseph Lawton of Hopkinton, 1765, leaves a bequest to “my daughter Mary West,” and the estate receipts the following year are signed “Francis and Mary West.” Proven, twice over.
Keep going. Francis and Mary joined the Yankee migration into upstate New York in the 1790s; Francis died at Grafton in 1803 with “Esquire” on his stone, in a burying ground still called the Francis West Cemetery. Their son George West (1769–1853) worked west to Erie County. And here — not at Plymouth — is where my Mayflower claim actually lives or dies.
Because no document names the next man, Matthew West (c. 1793–1852), as George’s son. Everything below Matthew is solid: when Matthew died at Brant in July 1852 his probate listed his six heirs, and in an 1854 deed one of them calls Mathew West “my Father” — that son, Wilbur, went to Kansas Territory in 1854 and his line runs straight down to my mother. But the George→Matthew step rests on where people lived, not on anything anyone wrote. George West left no probate at all — the Erie County surrogate’s index runs past him with nothing — so he can never be proven from his own estate. The best circumstantial thread is a man named Stephen West, enumerated in George’s household in 1850, who turned up as a witness to Matthew’s will: suggestive, close, and not a statement of paternity.
So: do I descend from the Mayflower? The honest answer is “very probably — pending one joint in upstate New York, about 1800.” Not pending anything at Plymouth. The famous end of the chain has been worked over by the Mayflower Society for a century; the anonymous middle — a farmer moving between New York counties in the early republic, in the exact gap between the Revolution’s records and the modern census — is where the claim actually rests.
That is the method, and it’s portable. If your tree says Mayflower (or Charlemagne, or Pocahontas), don’t ask whether the famous person existed. Ask: which single parent-child link in my chain has no document behind it? There is nearly always one. Find it, grade the whole claim by that link alone, and then — this is the part most trees skip — write the weakness down where your descendants can see it. A tree that admits its weak joint can be fixed by one record. A tree that hides it just propagates the doubt with the confidence stripped off.
The chain, graded
- George Soule (Mayflower, 1620; will 1677, probate 1680) → daughter Susanna Soule (c. 1642–c. 1684) — strong; accepted in print by the Mayflower Society; rests on an 1802 family memorandum
- Susanna m. Francis West; three generations to Francis West (1735–1803) m. Mary Lawton, Westerly, 1757 — proven on the vital record and her father’s will
- George West (1769–1853), Grafton to Erie County — his own life documented; his fatherhood of the next man is NOT ⚠️
- Matthew West (c. 1793–1852), Brant — proven downward: his 1852 probate and the 1854 “my Father” deed name his son
- Wilbur D. West (1832–1918), Kansas, 1854 → down to Hugh Othal West (1903–1945) of Dodge City and the Texas oil fields → my mother’s line. George Soule, if the joint holds, is my 9×-great-grandfather.
What would settle it: an Erie County guardianship file from 1874 in the name of Stephen West (the county’s case 24181) is the named next document — the man who knew both households, in the one record class that might state the relationship. When it’s read, this page gets amended, whichever way it points.
George Soule’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i3351.html — and Susanna’s is here. The full working tree is on Ancestry — George’s profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Will (1677) and probate (1680) of George Soule, Plymouth Colony — cited on his page in the tree
- Samuel West’s memorandum book (1802), published as “Susanna Soule’s Husband Identified,” The Mayflower Descendant (1924)
- General Society of Mayflower Descendants, George Soule volumes (the “silver books”) — Susanna’s posterity as a numbered lineage
- Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, vol. 5 — the Westerly marriage, 17 Feb 1757 (read on the page image)
- Will of Joseph Lawton of Hopkinton (1765) and estate receipts (1766)
- Erie County, New York probate of Matthew West (1852) and the 1854 deed of Dennis [Wilbur] West (“my Father”)
- Erie County surrogate’s index — the absence of any probate for George West (d. 16 Jun 1853), verified against the index
- Rensselaer County cemetery records — the Francis West Cemetery, Grafton