Since posting this picture of Lady Lightning, a B-24 that went down over the Netherlands on 15 August 1944, I have heard from two people near where it went down (at Nijensleek). They have collected memorabilia and historical data on the air battle in which this and other planes were lost, and plan a memorial and exhibition this August 15th. I’ll be thinking of them on Friday.
Many who find me online do so because of one long-term project, a genealogy of my male-line kin, the descendants of Richard Taylor, a planter in the Northern Neck of Virginia (’Old Rappahannock’ County, subsequently Richmond County, Virginia) who died in 1679. My work on this Taylor family started out as an article-length manuscript in 1992 and has since blossomed to book length, currently 180 pages. It traces seven generations of male-line Taylor descendants (I myself am in the eleventh generation, so I’m not in the book except in a footnote). The book currently has this title:
(right-click to download to hard drive rather than opening in browser; the book is now 11 MB in size!)
I hear from kin of this family at the rate of two or three new contacts every month, and it is most gratifying to have people share corrections, new vital data, or (best of all) written reminiscences, biographical sketches, or photographs: the book is growing (and the e-book growing in file size) with photographs as I receive, edit, and include them. [Perhaps I should lay out a separate online portrait gallery of these Taylors in the first to seventh generations, since some of the pictures, all from before 1900 or thereabouts, are spectacular in themselves. Since the book with pictures has now broken the 10 MB size barrier, I definitely need to downsample the pictures in the book itself (I should get it below, say, 5 MB) and upload a corresponding, separate high-quality portrait gallery.]
Anyhow, this month brought me a new sort of contact: a manuscript dealer who has offered (and has now sold) me a colonial document from this family, based certainly on finding the principal of the document in my book via a google search. So I now own the original will of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle Thomas Jesper, husband of Sarah3 Taylor, sister of my ancestor John3 Taylor (Simon2, Richard). Not quite a ‘Taylor’ but close enough; indeed one of his sons was ‘Richard Taylor Jesper’ (a middle name being unusual in Virginia in the 1740s).
The will was wriitten 1 January 1747[/8] and was proved in Richmond County on 3 October 1748. (Continued)
The Conde de Clonard has penned a predictable response to an earlier entry in my blog in which I made note of his fascinatingly absurd genealogical claims. The best part of his reply is that it includes a photograph of the illuminated pedigree prepared by the Ulster King of Arms in 1764 for his ancestor Redmond Sutton. Scroll down his page to find it; or (lest it disappear), I have linked a copy here (click for the full-size image as found on Clonard’s website):
The resolution of the photograph almost permits us to read the text, but not quite. (Continued)
When I was in Salt Lake City last month (working hard on a royal descent which has since been disproved!) a friend gave me a couple of those books which have been sliced open for digitization, rendering them highly unstable (lots of loose pages held together by string). This is from William Loftie Rutton, Three branches of the family of Wentworth (London, 1891), which treats cadet branches of the old Yorkshire Wentworth family behind William Wentworth of New Hampshire. In fact, though, I have a descent from one of these cadet branches via Anne (Derehaugh) Stratton of Salem, whose ancestor Sir William Waldegrave married Margery Wentworth, daughter of Henry Wentworth of Gosfield, Essex. This Henry Wentworth’s grandson was Sir John Wentworth for whom the Rutton book reproduces this excellent little brass achievement:
The arms are about 18 cm. high in the book; and at the bottom of the plate is written “two-thirds actual size of the brass,” so the original is about 25 cm high; unfortunately the book doesn’t discuss the rest of the monument, which presumably also has an inscription and perhaps other design elements. The quarterings on the brass are illustrated with a helpful chart in the book, which (since every page is sliced apart) I’ve also scanned, here. Since Anne Derehaugh descends from John’s aunt Margery and therefore not John’s mother Anne (Tyrell) Wentworth, she doesn’t have quarterings nine through fourteen in her ancestry, alas. But it’s still a nice piece for virtual wall-hanging. (A descent from Anne Derehaugh can be found elsewhere on this site.) In addition to Anne Derehaugh, other colonial American descendants of Margery (Wentworth) Waldegrave include Jemima Waldegrave, Thomas Booth, Elizabeth Butler, Mary Johanna Somerset, William Clopton, Nathaniel Burrough, and the Kempe siblings. William Jennings and Sir Marmaduke Beckwith, Bart., of Virginia, descend from Margaret (Wentworth) Berney, sister of the Sir John of the brass, and therefore descend from all fourteen families represented in it.
In the annals of genealogical fantasists the Conde de Clonard is an interesting case. The condes de Clonard descend from an Irish mercantile family in eighteenth-century Spain, the Suttons of county Wexford, of whom Don Miguel Sutton (hispanized ‘de Soto’ or ‘de Sotto’) was ennobled in 1770 as the ‘conde de Clonard’, taking his title from an ancestral holding of his family in Wexford. Interestingly, in the same generation, another Wexford Sutton, apparently a third or fourth cousin, settled in France, was also prominent in mercantile circles (no doubt participating in the same Atlantic trading network) and was ennobled in France as the “Comte de Clonard.” These two related Sutton branches in France and Spain shared a tradition that the Wexford Suttons were descended from Thomas, a younger son of John Sutton alias Dudley, 1st Baron Dudley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who died in 1487. However, John, Baron Dudley, had no son Thomas; and the available published documentation on the Wexford Suttons offer no evidence to support a descent from the baronial Sutton Dudleys.
The current conde de Clonard has stated that his family has an illuminated pedigree, 183 centimeters high, prepared and signed by James MacCulloch, Ulster King of Arms, in 1764, giving a genealogy of the Wexford Suttons and stating their descent from John, Baron Dudley (a brief passage from this is quoted here). This would be an interesting document to examine in its entirety, since British documents created to satisfy other nations’ social or legal requirements of noble ancestry have not been carefully studied. They likely were never common; and they were surely subject to a great deal of abuse—either outright forgery, or at least or knowing exaggeration or falsification of information in them even by legitimate authorities. For an example of such a document, allegedly created by King James VI & I in 1616 for use in the duchy of Stettin-Pomerania, see another blog post here.
The current conde de Clonard is José Antonio Guijarro Torija y de Sotto. (Continued)
At the request of a correspondent on rec.heraldry I am posting something interesting here. It purports to be a copy of charter of King James VI & I, dated 16 July 1616, which attests the noble ancestry and good character of an expatriate Scotsman, Captain Daniel Hepburn, “legitimate son of the late Alexander Hepburn,” resident at that time in the duchy of Stettin - Pomerania (the document is addressed partly to Phillip II, Duke of Stettin & Pomerania from 1606 to 1618). Hepburn having been the subject of calumnies against his ancestry, King James wishes all to know that quondam Alexandrum Hepburnum ex legitimo matrimonio et generosis parentibus ortum fuisse, et ex nobilibus familiis tam a paterno quam materno genere descendisse. The document goes on to specify that Alexander Hepburn was son of one John Hepburn, virum vere nobilem et bonarum omnium artium studiosum, and that John Hepburn was ‘nepos’ of the late Patrick Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Lord of Hailes, and Admiral of Scotland. [Right-click on this cap of page 1 to download whole document as a pdf.]
Not particularly strong. This is a classic case of a circumstantial argument for the identity of an early colonist, which (unsurprisingly) connects him to a mother (Margaret Campbell of Keithick) with demonstrable noble ancestry. I have just dug up the two articles by Charles G. Kurz (based on research of Thomas Garland Magruder, Jr.) which build the case for his identity and lay out some details on his alleged mother’s ancestry. For those who are interested and who haven’t seen the original articles, I’ll make them available here for download as pdfs:
These articles do make some effort to cite primary sources, but there is no systematic presentation of the strengths and admission of the weaknesses of Magruder’s claimed parentage. Kurz treads very lightly on the idea that these Magruders have nothing to do with the MacGregors, while still indulging in the old game of self-congratulatory worship of noble ancestors. Speaking of which, here’s something a little weird: the mixed-genre poem by Susan Tichy (poet, and Associate Professor of English at George Mason University) called “Heath IV,” a modern reflection on Magruder which of course preserves some of the old canards about his life and spurious relation to clan Gregor.
I am researching the Mackworth family of Rutland and Shropshire, who descend from Thomas Mackworth of Derby, who with his brother John (a canon of Lincoln cathedral) was granted arms privately by John Touchet, lord Audley, in 1404. I was curious about the phenomenon of early private grants of arms until I found the excellent set of examples put together by Sebastian Nelson (now an archivist working for the State of California at Sacramento) on two pages, one for private grants of the fourteenth century, and another for early heralds’ grants (but with an introduction discussing private grants).
The original of the Mackworth grant of 1404 was in the possession of the Mackworth baronets of Normanton (Rutland) at the time of the Visitation of Rutland of 1681-82. (Continued)
A new genetic study (Pierre A. Zalloua et al., “Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Lebanon Is Structured by Recent Historical Events,” American Journal of Human Genetics [2008] 01.020) shows a small proportion of WES1, a Western-European haplotype within the R1b haplogroup of DNA signatures of the Y-chromosome, present among the modern Christian population of Lebanon. The study, by members of “The Genographic Project,” suggests that this genetic legacy (which is inherited in the agnate line, from father to son) is likely to have been introduced by Western Europeans during the Crusades. The actual sample with this attribute appears to be small (5 individuals out of nearly 1000 Lebanese studied) but the statistical arguments for its importance may be sound. This attribute is not found in any other sample studied by the same consortium, east of Hungary.
If the authors’ theory of its historical introduction into Lebanon is correct, it casts an interesting sidelight on the Nachleben of crusading. What was the likely cultural path for the bearers of this genetic legacy, before and after 1291? Were they unacknowledged bastards of the Franks, living among a local Christian population under Frankish rule, whose descendants were fortuitously undisturbed during the long centuries of Mamluk and Ottoman rule? Or were they Latin-Christian Franks who never left after 1291, perhaps adopting a new sect and living a quiet life in the countryside—gone native? More likely the former.
[Thanks to Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.]
I haven’t actually seen the cable TV serial “The Tudors” but I can understand heavy marketing for its new season to cash in on the recent theatrical release of the unrelated Boleyn film (which owes much to the work of genealogist Tony Hoskins, a probable Henry VIII descendant via one of Mary Boleyn’s ‘Carey’ children). But at any rate today my eye was caught by a glossy magazine spread —
— promoting “The Tudors,” featuring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Natalie Dormer (as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn) wearing things unlikely to have been designed in the 16th century. But the text was even more interesting: a sweepstakes offer tied into the show, offering $50,000 plus an “authentic English title such as lord or lady” to a lucky entrant. Presumably a lordship of the manor?
In the fine print of the promotion rules there is the following:
Prize: One (1) Grand Prize includes … an authentic English title such as “Lord” or “Lady”. English titles shall be awarded subject to then-current English legislation, and are non-inheritable and for show purposes only. …
What on earth is a ‘title such as lord or lady’ which is ‘non-inheritable and for show purposes only’? This cannot describe a lordship of the manor, which may be freely bought and sold. Unless the promoter can arrange to have some sort of private lease or lifetime grant of such a lordship, while retaining ownership? At any rate, American credulity in the matter of aristocratic titles is profound and endless, but this seems to plumb a new depth.
