About Me... Joe Betz

I am an American architect and academic.  I have been actively pursuing genealogy since 1997 and am a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.  

 

Being 1/128th Native American Indian (indigenous/aboriginal/native people), my earliest ancestors to North America probably arrived some 15,000 years ago.  They were from the Snare/Shuswap/Secwépemc tribe near Jasper National Park on the eastern face of the Western Canadian Rockies. (See Daniel Williams Harmon & Harmon's Journal 1820 for genealogy connection.)

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My first European ancestor to America was Stephen Hopkins.  He was shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1609 for a year before arriving in Jamestown, Virginia in 1610.  In 1614 he returned to London.  He then sailed on the on the Mayflower in 1620 to Plymouth.  He was one of four of my ancestors on that voyage: Stephen Hopkins and daughter Constance Hopkins, and William Brewster and wife Mary. 

 

The next immigrants were English who came in the Great Migration of 1630 to Boston, then Scots-Irish in the 1720's to the backwoods of New England, Famine Irish in the 1840's and Germans in the 1870's to New York City and finally Irish Nationals from Northern Ireland in the 1922 partition... the rest is history. 

 

I have served for many years as the Registrar (lineage application reviewer) of the Long Island Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).  I also hold dual Irish/EU citizenship (a birthright without an oath to Ireland) as the result of my genealogical research through my mother's side).

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Copyright  Joseph A. Betz,

(last modified: January 2021)