John D. Austin

Mayflower Families Through Five Generations: Descendants of the Pilgrims who Landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, Volume Six, Third Edition: Family – Stephen Hopkins, compiled by John D. Austin, F.A.S.G., begins with a brief history of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants’ genealogy project before cataloguing five generations of Hopkins’ lineage. Austin compiled a detailed genealogy, complete with a brief summary of Hopkins’ life. The exponential growth of each successive generation reflects the particular fecundity of New England’s colonists, with Hopkins’ own family covering 7 pages, the second generation 14 pages, the third 20 pages, the fourth 98 pages, and the fifth nearly 400 pages. Austin includes an index of places and names to aid the avid genealogist. My own lineage traces from Stephen Hopkins to his son Giles (pg. 8), from Giles and Catherine Welden’s daughter Mary (pg. 21) to Mary and Samuel Smith’s son John (pg. 60), from John and Bethia Snow’s son Stephen (pg. 257) to their son Archeleus (pg. 258), and on for another nine generations. Hopkins himself is particularly noteworthy as being one of the “strangers” on the Mayflower and for having prior experience in the New World, having traveled on the ill-fated Sea Venture that inspired William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A valuable reference work for those looking up their family genealogy.… (meer)