Claiming the DAR and Mayflower Society: A Livingston's Guide

Eligibility. Any woman at least 18 years old who can prove lineal, bloodline descent from an ancestor who aided the cause of American independence is eligible. She must document every statement of birth, marriage, and death in the line, plus the Revolutionary War service of her Patriot ancestor. Men join the parallel Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) on the same lineage logic.

What counts as service. The society accepts service rendered between 19 April 1775 (Lexington) and 26 November 1783 (British withdrawal from New York). Qualifying service is broad: signers of the Declaration of Independence, Continental and state military service, civil officeholding under the patriot government, and material or “patriotic” aid. You do not need a soldier; a wartime governor or a Continental Congress delegate qualifies.

• 1. Connect with a chapter. File the DAR Membership Interest Form and a local chapter registrar will reach out. There are nearly 3,000 chapters; you can also join as a member-at-large.
• 2. Pick your Patriot. Identify the Revolutionary ancestor you descend from. For a Livingston, this is the easy part (see the table below).
• 3. Build the generational chain. Assemble proof (birth, marriage, and death records) for every generation from you back to the Patriot. Marriage records are required where they are needed to prove a parent-child link.
• 4. Prove the service. Document the Patriot's qualifying Revolutionary service.
• 5. Verify, then submit. A chapter registrar helps you assemble the application; it then goes to the national society for verification. Once the formal application opens, you generally have about one year to complete it, so gather documents first.

The family was, in the words of the Descendants of the Signers society, home to a Declaration signer, a Constitution signer, and “at least twenty other members of the larger Livingston family” who served as Revolutionary officers. The strongest direct-ancestor Patriots already in the family database:

Eligibility. The General Society of Mayflower Descendants (GSMD) admits anyone who can document lineal descent from one of the Mayflower passengers of 1620. Of the 102 passengers, only about two dozen have descendants today, though those lines now reach tens of millions of Americans.

The family's documented origin is the problem, and it is not close:

• The immigrant Robert Livingston “the Elder” was born in 1654 at Ancrum, Roxburghshire, Scotland, the son of the exiled Presbyterian minister Rev. John Livingston. The family fled to Rotterdam in 1663, and Robert sailed for Boston only in 1673, settling at Albany. That is 53 years after the Mayflower, and on a different track entirely.
• His wife, Alida Schuyler, and the family's early marriages (Schuyler, Van Brugh, Beekman, Van Rensselaer) were Dutch New Netherland families, not English Pilgrims.
• Even the family's one prominent New England marriage is a red herring: Mary Winthrop, who married Johannes Livingston, was a daughter of Connecticut governor Fitz-John Winthrop. The Winthrops came over in the 1630 Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay, a separate movement from the 1620 Plymouth Pilgrims.

An individual Livingston descendant can sometimes join the Mayflower Society, but only by proving Pilgrim descent through some other ancestral line that married in much later, and that line must be documented on its own. The clearest illustration is already in the family's research: George W. Bush is both a Livingston descendant and a Mayflower descendant, but his Pilgrim blood runs through the Bush and Walker side, not through the Livingston line that connects him to this family (see The Bushes and the Livingstons). A Livingston who wants a Mayflower card must find a Pilgrim ancestor on a branch that has nothing to do with the Livingston surname.

Per an Ancestry.com line of descent, corroborated by published Hopkins-descendant genealogies and by the Jamestowne Society's Lineage Paper Project, the chain runs as follows. All eleven people are now in the family database with their sources attached.

This single line carries at least two, and probably three, Mayflower passengers. It descends from Stephen Hopkins and his daughter Constance Hopkins, both 1620 passengers, and through Elizabeth Snow's husband Thomas Rogers it also descends from a third passenger, Thomas Rogers.

• 1. Run a Mayflower Lineage Match (MLM). Submit a proposed lineage; the society checks it against the documented lines in the Mayflower Families Through Five Generations volumes (the “Silver Books”) and previously approved applications.
• 2. Submit a preliminary application and fees to your state member society.
• 3. Worksheet and review meeting with a state historian to map the generations.
• 4. Documentation. Provide proof for every generation from you to the passenger.
• 5. Review and approval by the state and general society.