TANGLED LINES

This is a screenshot from RootsMagic of the pedigree chart of my 4x great grandfather Moses Houghton. I had been struck by how entangled the Houghton and Sawyer families were in his ancestry so I marked all the descendants of Thomas and Mary Prescott (my 8x grandparents) in red 

Then I used the Relationship Calculator to see to what degree Moses' parents Elisha Houghton and Meriah Peirce were related.

Instances like this were quite common in colonial America. Outside of the cities, people lived in small villages and towns established by a few families. Then these early settlers were bonded together when they were forced to share the close quarters of garrison homes during Indian attacks which was the case for the Houghtons and Sawyers. Those ties sometimes continued when family members left for other parts of the country,

I have other lines in my Dad's family like this to a lesser extent.but this is the most tangled.