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potential Indiana baronet — Stirling of Glorat

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

From the papers, the fascinating story of the (apparent) heir to the Scottish baronetcy of Stirling of Glorat (William J. Booher, “Tracing Family Tree Turns into a Title Search: Greenwood man has some details to confirm before becoming baronet,” Indianapolis Star, 19 March 2009).


Coat of arms from the frontispiece to Bain (1883).
The coat would correctly represent Stirling of Glorat
only without the roses and supporters.

Mr. Booher’s article dwells on the current descendant, Mr. John C. Stirling, Jr., and his (surely) surprising and rewarding investigation of his own ancestry. But even more compelling is the narrative of his ancestors’ experience in the century from 1760 to 1860. The story of John Stirling has wonderful elements: young adventure, illness on an exotic shore, providential intervention, love, separation and anxiety, succession to wealth and title, seventeen (!) children; (Continued)

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update on the Crosbie-Pitcairn pistols

Monday, March 23, 2009

I’ve now found confirmation of Captain (later General) William Crosbie’s place in the Anglo-Irish gentry Crosbie family which bore the swords-and-snake crest found on the pistols traditionally identified as Major Pitcairn’s (see my previous post, linked here). I had suggested that he belonged somewhere in the Ardfert Crosbie family found in Burke’s 1866 Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerage and similar Landed Gentry of Ireland account. Crosbie’s brief stint in parliament proved the clue to further data: his sketch in R. G. Thorne’s House of Commons, 1790-1820 (5 vols., London, 1986, 3:540), shows him as born about 1740, son of “Major John Crosbie.” This puts him among the “numerous family” stated (but not named) by Burke as children of Major John Crosbie, “living in the County Wicklow in 1752,” Major John being sixth son of Sir Thomas Crosbie of Ardfert, grandfather of Sir Maurice Crosbie, 1st Lord Branden of Branden (d. 1762), who was therefore General William Crosbie’s first cousin. Elsewhere we learn that Major John (William’s father) died sometime before 1762, and was a long-serving Captain in the 21st Foot (later the Royal Scots Fusiliers), present both at Dettingen—where he lost an arm—and Culloden (google turns up snippets on him in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 27-28 [1949], 71; and Aberdeen University Review 34-35 [1952], 359). This no doubt provided the basis for the well-connected careers of his sons William and Charles, who both became army generals. The House of Commons entry sketches William’s military career, beginning with commission as an ensign in the 38th Foot in 1757, promition to captain in 1769 and to major in 1778 (following the British evacuation from Boston), and on (as sketched in my previous post) to the rank of major-general in command of the 22d Foot.

Looking at his will had already revealed General William Crosbie’s mistress and bastard son. The House of Commons sketch adds one more interesting element: Crosbie’s death on 16 June 1798 was apparently suicide, as the Duke of York later wrote to the King that Cosbie “made away with himself at Portsmouth. . . . He had appeared very low and unwell for some time, and was undoubtedly under the influence of mental derangement.”

The fact that Crosbie, who was indeed on the Lexington & Concord foray on 19 April 1775, had a hereditary right to the swords-and-snake crest on the pistols, certainly cements J. L. Bell’s reidentification of their original ownership—though of course they still might have belonged to Major Pitcairn on the day of the battle. However, I am not sure, given these glimpses into Crosbie’s character and career, whether the pistols, as artifacts, are thereby burnished or tarnished.

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crescit progenies nostra

Friday, March 20, 2009

Hwaet! Unto us this day is born, in the city of Pawtucket, in the state of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, our fourth child and second son, Simon Lane Taylor.

Like genograms but for soccer moms rather than therapists, those self-satisfied minivan decals have emerged as the latest diagrammatic lexicon for identifying one’s family. If we indulged in them (and we do, I admit, have a minivan) here’s what ours might look like now:

Except the littlest one doesn’t stand…

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Pitcairn’s pistols were Crosbie’s—heraldry on a famous revolutionary artifact

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The first spoils of the Revolutionary War are surely the handsome pair of Murdoch pistols long attributed to Major John Pitcairn, who is said to have lost them on April 19 1775 during the harrowing return from Concord to Boston (they were variously said to have been in the baggage train, or on his horse). Despite their two centuries of iconic status as the first revolutionary spoils, it has only recently been pointed out that the crest engraved on the pistols did not match that of Pitcairn’s family. And only yesterday did historical blogger J. L. Bell think to google a blazon of the crest —


[actually a detail from a reproduction, on sale here]

— and identify it as belonging to a Crosbie family [probably here, which one can find by googling “three swords” with “snake” and “crest”); Bell noticed that indeed there was an officer named Crosbie present in the Lexington-Concord foray: Capt. William Crosbie of the grenadier company in the 38th Regiment of Foot. (Continued)

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tewkesbury tiles: medieval heraldic dingbats

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

One of the hidden treasures that has rewarded my browsing in The Ancestor (of which I recently bought a set of all twelve volumes in their original publisher’s bindings), is a handsome set of cuts made after fourteenth-century encaustic floor tiles from Tewkesbury Abbey. See Hal Hall, “Notes on the Tiles at Tewkesbury Abbey,” The Ancestor 9 (1904), 46-64. The digital copy of the journal (linked here) contains fine scans of these, of which the following sample set of eight (there are several others) are reduced in size and flattened nearly to black-and-white. The captions here are as given in the article. Excellent source of dingbats for a heraldry blog!


Arms of Somerville of Gloucestershire

(Continued)

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boy meets ancestor; boy loses ancestor; boy gets ancestor back

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

It’s the plot of an old romance film mapped onto a common genealogical trajectory: boy meets ancestor, boy loses ancestor. Marshall Kirk used to talk about ‘former ancestors’—people you once believed you were descended from, and of whom you still might be fond. Sometimes they even find a way back into the family tree via another path. This just happened to me, not with actual ancestors, but with The Ancestor. While I was writing, recently, on The Ancestor and its editor Oswald Barron, and admiring the journal in its online form at archive.org, I was put in mind to shop for an actual set. A big west-coast used bookseller had the twelve-volume complete run for an astonishing $56, shipped free via USPS ‘media mail’. I ordered it without blinking and looked forward to its arrival. Imagine my dismay when a tattered, gaping open box showed up on my doorstep with just six volumes, held in by clear tape, the box itself missing one end and festooned with stamps stating “Received in Damaged Condition.”

(Continued)

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Sancha de Ayala’s heritage — Quejana, the Ayala chapel

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

[Part of a series of posts and pages dedicated to Sancha de Ayala]

More photos of Sancha de Ayala’s maternal ancestral home, the Ayala stronghold at Quejana (Álava), near Bilbao. It is fascinating, and fortuitous, that the houses of both Sancha de Ayala’s paternal and maternal families have been preserved since the fourteenth century due to their conversion into monastic establishments. Quejana is now a Dominican convent, and the old family chapel is now dwarfed by the late-Renaissance convent church (where Fernán Pérez de Ayala, Sancha’s first cousin, is buried). But the older palace chapel, built by Sancha’s uncle, the Chancellor Pero López de Ayala, as a resting place for his parents—Sancha’s grandparents—still houses their tombs and the relics of the Virgen del Cabello (our lady of the hair) with an elaborate painted retable commissioned by the Chancellor—on which later.

The alabaster effigies of Sancha’s maternal grandparents, Fernán Pérez de Ayala and his wife Elvira de Ceballos, now rest in niches in the chapel, (Continued)

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seals and medieval family identity

Monday, February 23, 2009

In Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak’s review of Ted Evergates’ Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100-1300 (U. Penn. Press, 2007), just out in American Historical Review 114 (2009):192-3, she is not the first to point out how Evergates contradicts Duby’s orthodoxy by showing that the most important aristocratic family unit is not the lignage, but rather the nuclear or conjugal family. When I first saw this in another review (probably TMR) I read Evergates carefully. He does not busy himself destroying paradigms, but he does convincingly show the primacy of the conjugal family in many aspects of aristocratic economic and social life in Champagne. I am sure that he would not deny that, elsewhere and even in Champagne, certain types of evidence do show the rise, in the 11th and 12th centuries, of the land-based agnatic ‘lignage’ as a model for identification of one’s extended family; but Evergates’ work reminds us that this paradigm (or other paradigms of spiritual and commemorative kinship), no matter how compelling, should not lead us to neglect the day-to-day importance of the conjugal family; and especially that women were not (as Duby implied) necessarily systematically victimized and disenfranchised in aristocratic society—so long as they married.

In her review Bedos-Rezak makes one interesting suggestion—that more attention could be paid to seal epigraphy and and iconography—including heraldry—as a way to trace the evolution or relative strength of agnatic lineages in self- and family-identification. Here’s an interesting way to take an old and marginalized antiquarian field and make it relevant to the current social history! Of course, given that the trend of heraldic identification on seals only appears late in the ‘mutation féodale’ timetable, there is the potential pitfall of a ‘mutation documentaire’ suggesting false societal trends, but reviewing the evidence for such a comparitive study would be a fun way to look afresh at a corpus of seals…

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Oswald Barron, The Ancestor, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Not everyone agrees with all of Oswald Barron‘s opinions, but he is one of the revered champions of the golden age of critical genealogy (and other auxiliary historical disciplines) in late Victorian and Edwardian England. His own short-lived journal, The Ancestor, is a splendid readable collection of critical genealogy—Horace Round was a regular contributor. All twelve volumes are accessible on archive.org, and even (surprisingly to me) available at reasonable prices, in the flesh, from some antiquarian booksellers. I’ve extracted Oswald Barron’s learned diatribe “Heraldry Revived” from the first issue of The Ancestor, and also for good measure his magnificent illustrated article “Heraldry” from vol. 13 of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (which everyone should also have in its entirety on their laptops).

(Continued)

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George Thorold and a lost legacy

Friday, February 13, 2009

In the Rhode Island Historical Society library is a strange heraldic treasure — a grant of arms, from 1631, to a George Thorold of Boston, Lincolnshire. It is a copy, probably from the beginning of the 18th century, darkened and greasy with long handling and haphazard storage. The copy is inexpert—the lettering is unstudied, and the painting of the arms is atrocious. This copy of the grant apparently belonged to another George Thorold, who came to the other Boston, in New England, around 1700 and died at New York in 1721, leaving three ‘Orphaned’ unmarried daughters, one of whom in 1773 summoned her minister (who happened to be Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale College) to write down, on the back of the same document—probably condensing and paraphrasing from her rambling narration—a curious genealogical memoir: “Mrs. Anne Sabin, widow, aet. about 70, now living in Newport, desires me in her Presence to write this account…”

The account is of the descent of her father George Thorold of New England from the earlier George Thorold of the grant, with of course the added drama of a lost legacy of £1500 due to New England George’s three ‘Orphan girls’, and a stoutly claimed kinship to another George — Sir George Thorold, Bart., Lord Mayor of London at the time of his New England namesake’s death, and supposedly second cousin of the girls. Despite machinations and some Newport friend’s trip to London, all that came of the long-sought legacy and claimed kinship was one guinea, hastily proffered by a London Thorold, for gowns for the three needy Thorold girls in the colony. After fifty years it still rankled. So, as Stiles concluded, “at Mrs. Sabin’s desire and in her Presence I have here made her memoir for the Gratification of her Posterity.” One can almost feel Stiles’ sense of this tale as improbable, or at best futilely burdensome. Why pass on such a tale—would it ‘gratify’ her posterity? (Continued)

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