Week 5 - In The Kitchen - Cook Family

 

 Week 5: In The Kitchen - Cook Family

 

“In The kitchen” was a stumbling block for me. I grew up in the era when family women did all of the cooking. If I went to the kitchen as a boy I was told to move on because I was under foot. So although I have no first-hand kitchen experience, I have had the extreme good fortune of being fed by many amazing family cooks. Therefore, while wrestling with this topic I was still stuck until I finally reread Amy’s suggestion, “…how about an ancestor named Kitchen or Cook(e)?”

I met my wife, Tara, in 2009 and we married in 2010. Tara’s grandfather, Roy (1909-1987) was her family’s genealogist and did a great deal of work on her family tree during the 1960s and 70s when research was still done the old fashioned way: oral history, letter writing, family bibles, old photographs, library visits and telephone calls.

Tara had known her whole life that her ancestry went all the way back to the 1620 arrival of the Mayflower, and two passengers by the names of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley. Her grandfather provided each of his grandchildren with three-ring binders chock-full of very legible copies of all of his research and charts. What a gold mine! With our much more modern ability to search records, I have been able to verify all of his work. Although Tara has a lot of interest in family history, I still do all of the research for both of our family trees.

Between 1998 and 2010 I had made reasonably good progress on three of my lines going back about 200 years. The exception was my fourth line, the Cooks.  My grandfather, Harry Goodale Cook, was a brick wall for me. All I knew was that Grandpa Cook had been born in Massachusetts, had been a Civil Engineer for the City of New York, and had died one summer’s day in 1950 while mowing his lawn. I was nine when he passed. By 2010 there were no direct line ancestors of any of my four lines still living. I knew my work on the Cook family was going to be a challenge.

Grandpa Harry Goodale Cook

I had tried many years ago to research Harry’s mother, Rosa Cook, but Ancestry.com didn’t have anything on her at that time, and I didn’t know her maiden name. In 2017 I rediscovered an old photograph of my mother sitting next to her grandmother, Rosa Cook, and tried Ancestry again. 

My Great Grandmother Rosa (Goodale) Cook and my mother, 1940

I stewed about looking for her maiden name, and one day I tried my grandfather’s very unusual middle name, Goodale, and low and behold that turned out to be his mother’s maiden name. I was on my way. By carefully collecting all the information I could on Rosa Goodale Cook, the lines of both Cook and Goodale ancestors began to unfold for me generation by generation. As I worked backwards in time I found that our family’s first Cook (spelled Cooke in the early 1600s) to arrive in the New World was my 9^th great grandmother, Elizabeth Charde Cooke Ford in 1630 at Nantasket, Massachusetts on the ship Mary and John. Her first husband, Aaron Cooke, had died in England in 1615. But all her children with the last name of Cook had arrived with her in Massachusetts in 1630. My Cook line was now fully established in Massachusetts.

I was giddy with joy at how much I had discovered going all the way back to 1630. This was 200 years further back than any other line in my tree. Next it was time to turn my attention from the Cook line to each of my female ancestors along that line. It occurred to me that if the Cooks went way back in Colonial America there had to be other lines that would do the same thing. Each step backward in time I shared with my wife in great detail. This was exciting!  With each new female ancestor I felt like I was opening up Christmas presents or maybe buried treasure.

Thanks to Ancestry.com, more and more information came tumbling out. I was able to follow the various family names back … and back … and back … and one evening my search brought me rather abruptly, to Captain John Gorham’s marriage to Desire Howland, the oldest daughter of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley!

The beginning of Tara’s family in America and the beginning of my family in America had led us to the same place, and we were stunned and excited to discover that we are 10^th cousins!

It is estimated that there are two million living descendants of the Howlands.  To be able to make that connection with one’s spouse is pretty special! And all because of a bunch of Cooks.