Next Reality Show: Who Do You Think You Are?

While our Househunters is ongoing, let's change channels to NBC for the pilot season of Who Do You Think You Are? We got into this thanks to Shelly.

That, mixed with General Conference, set us off. We did some digging into our own family tree. This led us to Saturday's family vacation, a 2-hour drive from home.
I've mentioned this before. We dug around and are missing the sources to prove the suspicion that a Henson Reeder born between 1784 and 1789 links us to a family of Reeders that crossed the Atlantic in about 1665 and landed in St. Mary's City, which was then the Capitol of Maryland. When Thomas Reeder and his son Simon hopped off the boat, St. Mary's was about 30 years along as a European settlement.
Now it's a huge treasure trove of archeological wonder and historical significance.

Emma and I are checking out the rebuilt Smith's Ordinary... which is the local restaurant and hotel. Fellows arriving from England might stop here for food and a place to sleep until they made more permanent arrangements.
This press is really great. I've seen presses and pictures of presses, but never watched one in action. The printer displayed for us some of the work that he does. He was cleaning up after a reprint of a Silence Dogood letter, and he made one sheet right there for us to see. Historians have been able to identify only 4 documents printed here; though of course there must have been many more.
Some buildings have been rebuilt; others have been given a frame to show where buildings would have been and to give a better idea of the bustling metropolis that was the daily landscape for Thomas and Simon Reeder.
Roughly the same time our ancestors arrived, a brick chapel was constructed. I say 'our' ancestors. If these people are kin to my husband and daughters, then they are personal to me.
From Thomas to Clinton are 12 generations of Reeder men, and next to each man is a woman who loved him. I belong to that line of women.

Around this reconstructed chapel are the unmarked graves of the bold adventurers who came seeking something: wealth, freedom, escape, opportunity, a new beginning, land. Thomas is not among them; he went back to England and died there; but Simon and his wife and children may well be here, or somewhere within a few miles.
As we walked around, Clinton was clearly moved. We both got the shivers a few times. This is where it started, for the Reeder family. This is where they began their journey, and this is our American Heritage, one piece of it, anyway.

We have lots more to discover, including a family of Tories who requested protection from the British and got help to flee to Canada after the revolutionaries ran them off of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A pair of brothers who fought in Union Cavalry during the Civil War. Plains-crossing Mormon Pioneers. Irish potato-famine immigrants. Rulers of Wales, someone from Turkey, and even some Roman politicians at about the change from B.C. to A.D. Wow.