John Hodges Wadhams – Protective Arts

The Court of Final Appeal

In 1862, at twenty-one, my great-great-grandfather John Hodges Wadhams left Goshen, Connecticut, to seek his fortune in the West. In 1992, almost exactly 130 years later, I began keeping seriously the journal of my own early adulthood. John was the son of an old Connecticut farming family. Church, town, party, father and Civil War suppliedContinue reading “The Court of Final Appeal”

The Wadhams Surname

In Genetics and New England Pathology, I sketched a possible line to medieval England to illustrate a simpler truth from population genetics: the number of ancestral positions doubles geometrically, while the number of people who actually left you DNA shrinks via pedigree collapse. From this follows an unsettling comfort: living humans are orders of magnitudeContinue reading “The Wadhams Surname”