Skip to content

Category Archives: militaria

sewing for the 8th Air Force

Wilbur Floyd Whiting (1919-2006) died just over a year ago, around Christmastime. He was my grandmother’s first cousin. His mother Mamie (Marie Henriette Lembke) was my great-grandmother’s baby sister, and she and her husband Floyd were always close to my great grandparents. Wilbur, their only child, was sort of an auxiliary sibling alongside my grandmother’s […]

Owre Kyng went forthe to Normandy: the Agincourt carol

Trolling through hymns while recently masquerading as a substitute organist, I noticed an interesting setting of the melody of the Agincourt carol in the Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church(*), which sent me scurrying back to the edition in William Chappell’s Early English Popular Music (1893). And that sent me to MS Arch. Selden B.26 […]

Another revolutionary officer

I just updated one of the four charts showing the Revolutionary ancestors of our children: the ‘quartier’ for my mother-in-law, Paula Fitts. See these charts and other ancestry items listed out here. Only some time after we moved to the area I realized that ancestors of my mother in law lay buried just four miles […]

(US): George Washington Lane’s Civil War belt

It unrolls easily. I coil it artfully on the black velvet under my camera. The leather is supple enough, but also feels fragile. The belt is very light, as if desiccated, and the buckle seems disproportionately heavy. Waxed black thread, worked erratically but securely, still holds the brass clip onto the tongue end of the […]

Samuel Harmon’s commission

Just yesterday I got back from conservation and framing a commission in a colonial militia given to one of my wife’s ancestors at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The commission is typeset with blanks filled in by hand. I give the whole text here [filled-in portions, as opposed to typeset boilerplate, are in […]

Crusader Ancestors of George W. Bush

When President George W. Bush used the word ‘Crusade’ in a speech about fighting terrorism on September 16, 2001, handlers and spin-doctors interjected quickly to disavow the loaded language. To speak of ‘Crusading’ was rightly perceived as antagonistic to the U.S. and global Muslim community—a group which at least some in the current U.S. administration […]

Descents from Agincourt

Browsing this morning in Sir Nicholas H. Nicolas’ biographical sketches of the Scrope v. Grosvenor deponents, I noticed that Sir Richard Waldegrave (d. 1435), ancestor, via Sir William and Margery (Wentworth) Waldegrave, to many American colonists (including my ancestor Anne [Derehaugh] Stratton), is stated by Nicolas to have fought at the battle of Agincourt (October […]