“I stumbled across your page on JRD’s coat of arms and thought I would write you with a probable explanation for the mushrooms at the bottom right of the bookplate. JRD’s wife, Violetta S. White Delafield, was an accomplished mycologist who published some scholarly monographs on different mushroom families prior to her marriage to JRD. Her interest in fungi continued throughout her life, and HHV has in its collection many beautiful annotated watercolors she made over the years whenever she had the time to go looking for mushrooms on summer holidays.”

Essentially, we are getting in on the ground floor of a new way of looking at families. But we have to be patient: over the next few years I expect more genetic matches will certainly turn up, and shed new light not only on branches of this family in the US, but on other Taylors (in the UK or in the States) who may be related to us from back before our own first Taylor ancestor came to Virginia.

Because the ‘Taylor’ surname is so common, and comes originally not from a unique person or place, but from an occupation practiced everywhere, most Taylor families are unrelated to each other. In fact there may be as many as hundreds of genetically distinct Taylor families in the English-speaking world–each one descended from a different tailor who began to use his occupation as his surname. Finding more of ‘our’ Taylors will be like needles in a haystack–but that is something that computers and genetic databases will be able to do as curiosity-based genetic testing becomes cheaper and more common.