A Bookworm's Thanksgiving: Why I'm Finally Claiming My American Holidays

Here in New Zealand, Thanksgiving doesn't exist. There are no turkeys on supermarket shelves in November, no Black Friday frenzy (well, mostly), and absolutely no cultural pressure to go around a table listing the things you're grateful for. The Fourth of July is just a Wednesday, or whatever day it lands on, and Memorial Day passes without so much as a barbecue in sight.

I've always watched American holidays from the outside, the way you watch a parade through a rainy window  aware of the noise and colour, but not quite part of it.

That changed when I went down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole.

It started innocently enough, the way all great reading adventures do. One link led to another, one census record to a ship manifest, one name to a date that made my jaw drop. Because there, nestled in my family tree like a well-worn bookmark, was a name I recognised from every American history textbook I'd ever read as a book nerd obsessed with the colonial era: Edward Doty.

The Edward Doty. A passenger on the Mayflower. One of the 102 souls who crossed the Atlantic in 1620 and stepped ashore at Plymouth Colony. And according to Ancestry.com, he is my 9th great-grandfather.

I sat with that for a very long time.

Edward Doty was not exactly a saint among the Mayflower passengers history records him as the first person in Plymouth Colony to fight a duel but he was there. He survived that brutal first winter when nearly half the colonists did not. He built a life, raised children, and somewhere down that long, winding line of generations and oceans and continents... he led to me. A book blogger in Tauranga, New Zealand, who didn't think American history had much personal claim on her.

I was wrong.

Now, I find myself wanting to mark the occasions. Not in an over-the-top, star-spangled way ,I'm still very much a New Zealander, and I will always back the All Blacks but with a quiet, intentional acknowledgment that part of my story begins with a creaky ship and a grey November shore in Massachusetts.

Thanksgiving, especially, hits differently now. The holiday has its complexities and its contested history, and I hold all of that thoughtfully. But the root of it  that first brutal, bewildering winter and the survival that followed is now my history too. Edward Doty sat at that table. In some small, centuries-removed way, so did I.

For those of us who love books, genealogy is the ultimate slow-burn story. It has unreliable narrators (I'm looking at you, 17th-century parish records), shocking plot twists, and characters who feel both impossibly distant and startlingly close. Finding Edward Doty was my plot twist. It sent me straight to my shelves for every Mayflower title I could find, and down another research spiral that has thoroughly derailed my reading queue.

I have no complaints.

If you've ever thought about exploring your own family tree, I cannot recommend it enough. You might find a scoundrel, a survivor, or a quiet ordinary person who crossed an ocean and changed everything. You might find, as I did, that history isn't something that happened to other people.

Sometimes it happened to your people and that changes how you read the whole story.

Happy (belated, adopted, and deeply felt) Thanksgiving, from your 9th great-granddaughter. 🍂