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).
Nice work. How when former Boston boy Brady leads the Bucs to victory in the superbowl will you do Tom Teriffics tree?
Hi Dan, the Boston Globe did a story on Tom Brady’s ancestry in 2017 – https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2017/03/04/tom-brady-roots-run-deep-into-century-boston/fnXhdw7Sxj1JKTMknQgVfK/story.html
A lineal Brady he may be, BUT his FACE is that of his mother’s uncle Col. Michael Buckley. See Globe article and chart. What DNA contains is one thing, what they express is another.
Very good job! I like reading charts, interesting the connections and how New England and New York figure into them!
I spotted my 9th cousin on the chart, but I do not share the same ancestors with her as Patrick does… But, how about the surname Bacon, does Patrick share ancestry with the much-related Kevin Bacon?
I think Kevin Bacon’s ancestors go back to an unrelated Bacon family of Pennsylvania and New Jersey
Great to see that chart! I’ve always thought he looks as though his ancestry must be Greek, Romanian, or anything but NY/NE. Very nice work! You and others at NEHGS ought to do more ancestries like this of well-known athletes. Brady’s would be really neat to do. A couple or three years ago the Boston Globe’s Bob Hohler did a long history of Brady and a few of his athletic ancestors (an uncle was a MLB pitcher). Someone could really make a GBR-style career of this type of research.
My youngest granddaughter’s other grandmother was born in Texas with a southern ancestry. Even so one of her ancestors was a Robert Dennis who was early on Cape Cod and then moved to northern New Jersey from there that line went to North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and on to Texas.
Go Chiefs. Patrick is a very special person. Love his ancestry thank you Chris
Movie director Richard Linklater – a Texan who has made many iconic Texan movies – has a great-great-grandmother named Julia Root, wife of James Linklater. Was she from the same family as Roberts’s Root ancestors, and how closely are Linklater and Roberts related?
Chris: How about Mahomes’ father’s line?
Robert – see my colleague Rich Hall’s website for some material on his paternal ancestry – https://famouskin.com/ahnentafel.php?name=149028+patrick+mahomes – his father’s great-great-grandfather, Cuma/Que Mahomes, was born in Alabama about 1856 (presumably enslaved), and was in Smith County, Texas by 1880 as a laborer (father born Georgia, mother born Alabama)
This site takes the place of the old William Addams Reitwiesner site you were curating, so I should bookmark Hall’s site? And thanks.
It’s a great site! Rich has also written several articles now for Mayflower Descendant, and has an upcoming article on Abraham Lincoln’s ancestry in American Ancestors.
And here I thought you had a corner on Ole Abe. [Just getting around to bookmarking the site.] Why I remember leafing through the Lincoln book, standing there leafing through it in the stacks, I do not know. Don’t think any of the non-direct ladies married into that family and certainly none of the directs.
As to Famous People: I did a very cursory lit search for anything done in modern genealogical formats on Shakespeare-Hathaway, re TAG style where her Dad’s will was printed in full, etc. I tried culling a chronological “fact” list from the modern, well-research books like The Lodger, but stopped. The other, American stuff needs to be done.
Does such a modern sketch exist? If not, can someone be prodded to do it or should I send this idea over to Nathaniel Taylor?
Rich Hall has pointed out that on the second page of the widow’s pension of Fannie E. Sharp does state her husband D.C. Sharp has the full name David Cornelius Sharp.