Thursday, September 18, 2008
For many years I have been interested in the theory of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Thomas Dudley’s possible descent from the baronial Sutton-Dudley family of Staffordshire. In the early 1990s Marshall Kirk began circulating notes on a roundup of the various existing theories of Dudley’s ancestry, along with the exposition of a new hypothesis for […]
Monday, September 15, 2008
Here’s another piece of WWI memorabilia from the family, this time something I cannot identify. They are a pair of enamel cardinal pins, found with a cache of WWI and WWII material of mixed provenance (a WWI victory medal & ‘honorable discharge’ pin from my mother’s father, a WWII Sustineo Alas AAF Air Services Command […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
As a followup to my post and queries about cousin Wilbur’s (S/Sgt Wilbur F. Whiting, USAAF) sketch for the Scrubbed Goose, the helpful folks over on the message boards at armyairforces.com haven’t been able to locate an actual aircraft with that name, but it could have been a sketch for a plane which was lost […]
I just noticed (via google) that my grandfather is mentioned in a recent book on the war: Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (Holt, 1994), p. 443, on the allied advance near Soissons on 18 July 1918: Pershing’s biographer cites the diary of Marvin H. Taylor, who recorded reaching a German machine-gun […]
In the spring of 1917 my grandfather, aged 21, left college to become an infantry officer in the first wave of volunteers for what would be called the American Expeditionary Force in France; he was comissioned lieutenant in August and shipped to France the next month. He saw service in the heavy fighting in northeastern […]
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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 […]
