Courtesy of the Kansas City Chiefs
Sometimes my Vita Brevis posts take time to develop. I started this post last year after the then-recent Super Bowl victory of the Kansas City Chiefs over the San Francisco 49ers, prompting me to look at the ancestry of the team’s quarterback and the game’s MVP, Patrick Mahomes. With Mahomes and his team heading to the Super Bowl again this year, I finally decided to complete this post.
Patrick Mahomes, a native of Texas, has ancestors going back there for several generations. While families who settled in Texas in the nineteenth century (from elsewhere in the United States) usually go back to southern states on the east coast (such as the Maverick family from South Carolina to Texas), New England connections to Texas do occur. Genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts, a native of Houston, has a great-great-grandfather Ephraim H. Root (1815-1880), born in New York State with New England ancestry, who settled in Texas in the mid-1850s. A book I co-authored – Ancestors and Descendants of George Rufus Brown and Alice Nelson Pratt – traced the ancestry of Houston residents George Rufus Brown (1898-1983), of Brown & Root, and his wife Alice Nelson Pratt, whose father Minot Tully Pratt (1872-1908) was born in Norwich, Connecticut, and made his way to Texas in the late nineteenth century.
...New England connections to Texas do occur.
Patrick Mahomes is the son of MLB pitcher Pat Mahomes and his wife Randi Gail Martin. The way back to New England goes through Randi’s great-great-great-grandfather William Anson Sharp (1813-1854), who was born in Willsboro, Essex County, New York. Sharp was in San Augustine, Texas by 1844, when he married Martha Ann Kendrick. He served in the Mexican War, died in February 1854, and is buried in Cherokee County, Texas.
William’s father Cornelius Sharp (1779-1869) traces back to several early Dutch families in New York who had arrived there in the mid-seventeenth century. Sharp’s mother Abigail was born in Sutton, Vermont on 25 December 1783, daughter of James and Nancy Bacon. While James’s ancestry can be traced to many early families in seventeenth-century New England, the maiden name of James’s wife is unknown. Through Mahomes’s Vermont ancestry, he has distant kinships to U.S. Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Calvin Coolidge, and George W. Bush, shown below (all unique kinships through different seventeenth-century New England families).
Continued here.
Sources
Gary Boyd Roberts, Ancestors of American Presidents, 435, 58-64, 555; The Gibbs Family Bulletin (1925), 7; John Barber White, Genealogy of the Descendants of Thomas Gleason of Watertown, Mass. 1607-1909 (1909), 19-24, 31; Thomas Baldwin, Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640 and his descendants (1915), 24-32, 34-36, 153-64, 166-67, 179-80, 202; Hardwick Vital Records, 134; 1783 Sutton, Vermont Birth Record of Abigail Bacon; Lucius R. Page, History of Hardwick, Massachusetts. with a Genealogical Register, 322; Gilmer Thompson Woods, The Emerett Nicholson papers and the Sharp, Nicholson, and Thompson families of East Texas, 3-6; Confederate Widow’s Pension, no. 43600, for Mrs. Fannie E. Sharp, widow of D.C. Sharp (while their findagrave gravestone entries list “D.C. Sharp,” as David Cornelius, the gravestone and all other census and vital records, refer to him as “D.C.,” and The Emerett Nicholson papers refer to him as “Carlisle David,” except the 1850 census [as David]); 1940 Texas Death Certificate of Franceis Emaline (Cowan) Sharp; 1952 Texas Death Certificate of Charles Moris Sharp; “Charlie M. Sharp,” The Times [Shreveport, La.], 23 Feb. 1952, p. 10; 1976 Texas Death Certificate of Carroll Houston Martin; Texas Birth Index for Larry Randy Martin (1947), Randi Gail Martin (1976), and Patrick Lavone Mahomes (1995).
