Notable Connections

🟢 Direct Mayflower Ancestry (not a cousin connection — see The Mayflower Line)

Unlike everything else on this page, this one IS direct lineage, not a collateral cousin. Four Mayflower passengers sit on Robert's own line:

• John Howland (Compact signer)
• Elizabeth Tilley (his wife)
• John Tilley and Joan (Hurst) Tilley — Elizabeth's parents; both died in the first winter, 1620/21

The path is Lydia Howland → James Brown → Lt. James Brown + Margaret Denison → Mary Brown → James Angell (1682) → William Angell → Thomas Angell (1747) → … → Robert. Independently verified against the Mayflower Society Silver Book (vol. 23) and Lt. James Brown's 1717 will. This corrects and replaces the earlier debunked Turner and Brewster fake-Mayflower claims — it is a separate, real gateway, not a revival of either fabrication.

Also a direct ancestor, not a cousin: Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts Bay, via Major General Daniel Denison's marriage to Patience Dudley. Dudley's daughter Anne Bradstreet (first published poet in the English colonies) is a several-times-great-aunt. See Confirmed Findings and The Denison Family.

All of the people below are found via independent research (published genealogies, scholarly sources, government biographical records) — NOT relying on the GEDCOM's own often-unreliable celebrity notes. Framed explicitly as cousin relationships, since none of them are direct ancestors.

🟢 Howland / Tilley cousins (unlocked by the Mayflower correction)

John and Elizabeth had ten children who survived. Robert's line is Lydia Howland only. Everyone below descends from a different child of that couple, so they are cousins through Howland + Tilley — not extra Mayflower passengers, and not people on the Angell/Barnes path. Exact cousin-degree is not worked out here. Source of the list: the Pilgrim John Howland Society, which exists to document Howland descent; several of the presidential paths are also in Gary Boyd Roberts / MayflowerHistory.com generation charts.

• Three U.S. presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt; George H. W. Bush; George W. Bush (plus Jeb Bush). FDR via Joseph Howland's line; the Bushes via Hope Howland × John Chipman.
• First ladies: Edith (Carow) Roosevelt; Barbara Bush.
• Nathaniel Gorham — president of the Continental Congress; later a Constitution signer.
• Poets and writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson (an all-female line back to Elizabeth Tilley, so he carried her mtDNA); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Phillips Brooks ("O Little Town of Bethlehem"); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
• Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. — U.S. senator, ambassador to the UN / South Vietnam / West Germany.
• Actors: Humphrey Bogart; Alec Baldwin (and brothers); Christopher Lloyd; William H. Macy. (The Society also lists Maude Adams and Lillian Russell.)
• Joseph Smith Jr. — founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.
• Dr. Benjamin Spock — pediatrician.
• Esther Howland — first mass-producer of Valentine cards in America.
• Sarah Palin — listed by the Howland Society; treated here as Society- documented, not independently re-walked.

Do not add Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford as Mayflower cousins. Gary Boyd Roberts is explicit: those three descend from John's brothers Henry and Arthur Howland, who came later and were not on the ship. Shared English grandparents in Fenstanton is a real, much more distant kinship — it is not Mayflower descent.

🟢 Strongly Verified

• Abraham Lincoln — TWO independent paths:
  1. Bridget Gilman (confirmed ancestor) m. Edward Lincoln; their son Samuel Lincoln is Abraham Lincoln's documented immigrant ancestor. Your line descends from Samuel's brother Thomas Lincoln "the Miller."
  2. William Hyde (confirmed ancestor) — independently classified as a "US President Direct Ancestor" (WikiTree), via the Hanks family line to Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
• Bill Gates — via Stephen Gates of Hingham, MA (1638 immigrant); documented by genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner's researched "Ancestry of Bill Gates."
• Senator Charles Sumner — direct descent from William Sumner of Dorchester, MA, per Sumner's own 19th-c. biographer Edward L. Pierce (Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner), matching baptismal date and parish exactly. Sumner was nearly beaten to death on the US Senate floor in 1856 over his anti-slavery "Crime Against Kansas" speech.
• Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth — last Chancellor of NY, nominated to US Supreme Court by Tyler (1844), wrote the definitive Hyde Genealogy. Descends from both the Walworth (Fisher's Island) and Hyde (Norwich) families in your confirmed line.
• Senator Uriah Tracy — President pro tempore of the US Senate (1800), descends from the same Lt. Thomas Tracy of Norwich as your line.
• David Bushnell — inventor of the first combat submarine (the Turtle, 1775); praised by George Washington as "an effort of genius." Likely descends from Francis Bushnell of Guilford, CT (1580–1646), same family as your confirmed ancestor Joseph Bushnell of Saybrook. Exact generation link not fully traced — 🟡.
• Rep./Justice Rufus W. Peckham family — Rufus W. Peckham Sr. (US Representative, NY) and his son, US Supreme Court Justice Rufus W. Peckham Jr., both descend from John Peckham of Newport, RI — same family/era as your ancestor "Sir John Peckham" (title unearned, see Debunked Myths, but the underlying Newport Peckham family is real).
• William Chester Minor — OED contributor, subject of The Professor and the Madman. Explicitly documented (NEHGS) as a direct descendant of Thomas Minor of Stonington.
• Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury — "Apostle to the Choctaws," 60-year missionary to Cherokee and Choctaw nations. Documented via published genealogy as a descendant of Henry Kingsbury of Ipswich, MA — the same immigrant as your confirmed ancestor.

🟡 Plausible, Not Fully Confirmed

• Governor William T. Minor (CT governor, 1855–57) — likely descends from the same Thomas Minor progenitor family, exact link not traced.

Ruled Out — Do Not Claim

• Rockefeller family (29 entries in the tree) — zero are direct ancestors; floating unconnected in the database.
• Morgan "Baronets of Llantarnam" — zero are direct ancestors, and the underlying title claim is unverified/fabricated (see Debunked Myths).
• Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) — different immigrant progenitor (Edward Chapman of Ipswich) than your Chapman line (John Chapman of Folkestone, Kent → Stonington/Bolton, CT).
• Sampson/Cooper Mayflower passengers — don't appear anywhere in the tree by name; the only trace is a misattached source citation on an unrelated 16th-c. Englishwoman's record.
• Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford as Mayflower kin — Howland relatives, yes, but through brothers Henry/Arthur, not John of the Mayflower. See above.