When I showed my Stetson results to Twyla, she was interested to learn that Cornet Robert Stetson arrived in Plymouth Colony shortly after the Mayflower. But what about the family members who were actually aboard the original Pilgrim ship?

Those would be the famous couple of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, whose history and genealogy are well documented. How did the Stetson family intersect with this famous Mayflower family? 

It took some doing, but I've succeeded in tracing the Eilertsen-Bennett family's Stetson lineage back to Cornet Robert Stetson, who settled Scituate, Massachusetts in the Plymouth Colony in the first decade after the Mayflower landing. 

The chart shows the family identifier code used by the Stetson Kindred of America, which has published official genealogies for more than 100 years. Cornet Robert is Stetson number 1 and members of each subsequent generation are given by birth order. 

From 1882 to 1903, ship manifests of alien passengers to the United States included in column 10 a designation as "transient, in transit, or intending protracted sojourn." 

It is the last designation that we see on the early Eilertsen manifests. Indeed, not just the Osmundsens but seemingly every one of the passengers and crew on those sailings was intending a protracted sojourn in America. 

James V. Bennett spent his formative years living with his sister Sarah (20 years older than he) and her husband Thomas Peyton on the Peyton farm in Traverse County, MN. It is unclear why he (along with his favorite sister Lizzie) chose to leave their mother and father in favor of this arrangement.

Another piece of family lore relates to James Bennett's time on the Peyton farm. During one of his extended visits, he encountered a group of white settlers torturing a Dakota man, dragging him by a rope affixed to the back of a horse. Grandpa Bennett was allegedly so disturbed that he confronted and fought the torturers, insisting on the man's release.

James V. Bennett spent much of his childhood living among extended family on the Peyton Homestead, along with his favorite sister Lizzie. This photo depicts Lizzie on the Peyton farm (I believe around 1900), smoking a cigar and wearing notably masculine dress. This gender play is fascinating--perhaps denoting an affinity for bloomerism and the suffragette movement?

After sailing with family members to New York in 1893, Eilert Osmundsen returned to America in 1896, arriving May 8 on the White Star Line SS Germanic out of Liverpool. 

He is listed as a sailor and intending a protracted stay in New York. This time he is not accompanied by other family members. 

He was 31 years of age. As we know, he had a wife and four children back home in Farsund.

A big question we are trying to understand is why some members of the Osmundsen/Eilertsen family chose to resettle in the United States while others did not. 

We know that Jskob and Camilla stayed in close contact with their families back home, and made multiple trips back to visit. Nor were they the only family members living in New York. There were cousins from Spind in New York and in midwestern locales like Milwaukee.