Make no mistake: they are.
“Am I honored to be descended from the original Mundys of Mundy’s Landing? Absolutely,” John Elsworth Ransom told the Tribune last week. “When I was young, my uncle Max would sit me on his knee and tell me about his boyhood adventures with his pal Frank—-who grew up to become President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I wanted to grow up to become just like him.”
Fresh from his final semester at Harvard Law School, alma mater of both his uncle and FDR, with political aspirations and the New York State bar exam looming, he’s well on his way.
Asked, however, about more distant family members—-namely, James and Elizabeth Mundy—Mr. Ransom was noticeably less effusive. His maternal bloodline descends from their daughter Priscilla Mundy, who was born in England in 1658 and crossed the Atlantic in the spring of 1665 with her parents and older siblings, Jeremiah and Charity. The family narrowly escaped the Great Plague, which killed 100,000 -people, fifteen percent of London’s population.
They arrived on what is now the island of Manhattan. Having been surrendered by the Dutch Republic a year earlier, its name had changed from the Province of New Netherland to the Province of New York, after James, Duke of York. The ship sailed a hundred miles north up the Hudson River, landing in an idyllic spot at the mouth of a creek on the eastern bank. Today, the location is designated by a stone marker at what is now Schaapskill Nature Preserve.
During the ferocious winter of 1665–66, the frozen river stranded a long--awaited ship loaded with sorely needed supplies. When it finally arrived in the spring, only five of the original thirty--odd settlers had survived: James and Elizabeth Mundy and their three children.
There’s no arguing the fact that husband and wife resorted to cannibalism to keep their family alive as their fellow settlers were dying of starvation. They weren’t the first early American colonists to do so, and the longtime consensus among historians, local and beyond, is that they didn’t murder anyone. But in June of 1666, newly arrived colonists convicted them of murder and hanged them with their children watching.
While most modern scholars theorize that the Mundys were guilty only of consuming the flesh of those who were already dead, a stumbling block emerged in 1947. An archaeology team from nearby Hadley College unearthed a partially shattered, severed skull found among discarded human bones behind the Mundy homesite. A medical examiner concluded that it belonged to a young woman and contained fractures consistent with a sharp blow to the head. That can be attributed to an accident, yet some historians consider it evidence that the Mundys themselves killed their victims before eating them.
Today, the skull reportedly rests among the seventeenth--century artifacts in Mundy’s Landing Historical Society’s private collection. John Ransom hasn’t viewed it, nor is he interested in doing so.
His distant cousin Asa Jacob Mundy, a direct descendent of Jeremiah Mundy, the doomed -couple’s only son, concurs. “All I care to know is that this village was named for Jeremiah’s great--grandson, Enoch Mundy. He was a brave general in the Revolutionary War and a hero to many. My father taught me to be proud of my heritage, and I’ve taught my son and daughter the same thing.”
Mr. Mundy’s namesake son, who goes by Jake, may be only seven years old, but the boy is well aware of the hefty legacy that goes along with being born and raised in a town that bears one’s own name. “My great--great--great--great--great--great . . .” He paused and looked up at his father to ask, “How many greats, again?”