I just rediscovered the digitized microforms of the Revolutionary War pension files (pensions granted from 1832 onward) available from ‘HeritageQuest’ via many subscription libraries (including the Boston Public Library, for Massachusetts Residents, and many other public libraries throughout the US). By my count my children have 39 ancestors listed in the DAR Patriot Index, of whom 28 apparently saw military service (almost all in local militias, not Continental Army units). [I have 16, of whom 11 saw military service; my wife has 23, of whom 17 saw military service. She has all the militia officers too — a couple of captains and three lieutenants. See our revolutionary ancestors marked in these four charts, one for each of my parents, and one for each of her parents: MHT, EDT, JRS, PLF.]
Of these 28 military men, six are represented by applications under the 1832 federal pension program, either for themselves or by their widows. Of these six pension applications, four were rejected! The six are (with file numbers):
Andrew Griffin (1758-1829) of Gloucester, Massachusetts — R4316
Willey Hill (1759-1849) of Lee, New Hampshire — R5015
Caleb Lane (1759-1850), of Gloucester — S29961
Jonathan Robinson (1760-1843) of Gloucester — S30072
Richard Taylor (1760-1843) of Frederick Co., Virginia and Ohio Co., Kentucky — R10425
John Wingfield, Jr. (1761-1802) of Hanover Co., Virginia and Wilkes Co., Georgia — R11715
(Continued)
So here I am in Savannah, on a rare occasion when I’ve accompanied my wife to an academic conference but we have not brought any children. Aside from blessed sleep, I’ve been able to be a genealogical tourist when on my own. As it turns out my wife has distant roots in Savannah, her ancestor with the amazing name of John Francis William Courvoisie Armstrong having been born here in 1808 (named after a fellow Savannah resident with whom there must have been some close connection). JFWC Armstrong’s father James Armstrong was an early Baptist who spent some years in Savannah before settling in Wilkes County, Georgia, where several generations of his descendants lived. Julie’s great-grandmother was Selene Armstrong, hence ‘Armstrong’ is one of our children’s ‘seize quartiers’.
What I knew of James Armstrong, who lived at Savannah from about 1800 to 1820, had come from a typescript by distant cousin Emelyn (Arstrong) Fenenga. But yesterday an afternoon at the library of the Georgia Historical Society —
— got me some interesting additional information on James Armstrong and his two wives, Mary (or Jane), who died at Savannah in 1806, and Elizabeth, whom he married in 1807, and who was mother of JFWC Armstrong. (Continued)
Saturday, January 24, 2009
John Ross Delafield (1874-1964), a scion of New York’s pre-Gilded Age oligarchy, appears to have been the man who invented the 20th-century practice of honorary grants of arms by the College of Arms for the use of Americans of English (or British) descent.
The practice may well have emerged as a result of the College’s work with Delafield—his interactions with them date from 1916 to, at least, 1932. (Continued)
Monday, December 15, 2008
[Part of a series of posts and pages dedicated to Sancha de Ayala]
The first of a series of photographs of the rural Ayala castle at Quejana, home of Sancha de Ayala’s mother Ines, daughter of Fernán Pérez de Ayala and Elvira de Ceballos (who are buried in the chapel, along with Sancha’s famous uncle Pero López de Ayala). From the distance, looking down into the valley in which it nestles, it seems humble, sort of a fortified compound rather than a castle.
(Continued)
Monday, December 15, 2008
Heavy, thick and dark, this book. It’s actually four books in one: a Book of Common Prayer, a (Geneva) Bible, a Concordance, and paraphrases of the Psalms. All printed in London, 1599 and 1600. A typical omnibus for devout and plain, but respectable if not substantial folk: a quarto, period bound in blind-stamped leather, much repaired. Whisked out for me in the reading room of the Houghton Library.
Samuel Andrews, a draper, of London, and his wife Jane, came to New England in 1634, and settled at Saco, Maine, with their children. After Samuel’s death Jane married Arthur Mackworth of Saco and Falmouth, and had two more daughters with him. The bible records the first four of Jane and Samuel’s children, born in London before their emigration. (Continued)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
For years I only knew him as a correspondent of my mother’s cousin Dick Brownell. After cousin Dick had visited the old Brownell home-place at Stackallan, County Meath, Ireland, in the 1980s, he corresponded with far-flung members of the Brownell family in Ireland, England, Canada, and South Africa. Long ago Dick showed me (and I carefully copied) enormous, intricate charts of the Brownells compiled by a South African member of the family, Fred Brownell. Only years later did I realize that distant cousin Fred was also chief of the Bureau of Heraldry for the Republic of South Africa, and the man who designed the current South African national flag. I sought to contact him once a few years ago (via the Bureau) but learned he had recently retired and didn’t pursue it further. However, when I was at the International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences at Québec this past June, I found some South African heralds chatting in the hallway and asked one of them whether there was some way I could get in touch with my cousin Frederick Brownell. He smiled, and graciously led me a few steps—to Fred!
It was a pleasurable and completely unexpected meeting. (Continued)
Friday, November 21, 2008
Tipped into the copy of Charles Knowles Bolton’s Bolton’s American Armory in the reading room of the Rhode Island Historical Society Library is a photocopy of an excerpt from a letter by Horold Bowditch, longtime chair of the Committee on Heraldry of the New England Historic Genealogical Society; it amounts to a review of the book but is decidedly personal and not for publication. The person who typed the excerpt did not state to whom the letter was written, but it is dated 1947—20 years after the Armory came out. Here it is:
Abstracted from a letter written by Harold Bowditch in 1947.
Bolton’s American Armory, 1927. … Bolton was for many years the librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, a very old private library. He had a genius for writing books on many subjects which gave him a reputation among those who did not see very deeply into them; his trouble was that he was too many-sided and too superficial and hurried. As to heraldry, he may be almost said to be an ignoramus; (Continued)
Friday, November 14, 2008
Sooner or later a genealogy blog is going to reference Mormonism, however tangentially.
My daughter’s third grade class has paired with a class in the Southwest; each pupil has a penpal in the other class. They have been trading letters filled with short, declarative sentences alternated with personal queries.
My daughter’s penpal:
“ … Do you have any books? I have a Book of Mormon. …”
Only after my daughter had written her reply did she ask me about it. “What are Mormon books?”
(Continued)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
I’ve been reading some of the works of the Appleton era, when the Committee on Heraldry of the New England Historic Genealogical Society kept a conservative eye on New Englanders with proved rights to English arms, and cast a jaundiced and disapproving eye on everyone else who affected arms. Before the Committee began in earnest to publish its Roll of Arms in the 1920s, the only such published list which pretended to (or which attained) scholarly rigor was that by William Sumner Appleton himself, “Positive Pedigrees and Authorized Arms of New England,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 45 (1891), 187-90; and 52 (1898), 185, which I have linked here as a 196K pdf file. Appleton’s list of 32 immigrants “whose ancestors are recorded in the heraldic visitations of England and whose descendants are probably living in the United States of America,” is precisely the list of 32 immigrants reproduced by George W. Chamberlain as “Armorial Families of New England,” Magazine of History with Notes and Queries 6 (Jul-Dec 1907), 285-90; 8 (July-Dec 1908), 22-28, 101-107, 168-76, which I have linked here as a 644K pdf. To be fair, Chamberlain’s list gives more genealogical detail on the families of these 32 colonists. He further notes Appleton’s pessimistic view that, in addition to the thirty-two armigers already proved, “a dozen more names was a limit not likely to be exceeded.” The Roll of Arms no longer consists wholly of New Englanders nor of colonists with English origin and arms, but it now numbers well over 800, of which 713 arms have been published (among which some couple dozen entries belonged to Americans with modern honorary grants, a practice now discontinued).
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
[UPDATED: better, credited photo of the modern painting of Don Pedro.]
We New Englanders, and Anglos generally, have neglected the other colonies in our search for armigerous early settlers in the colonies that would become the United States. (This is the mandate behind the Roll of Arms compiled by the Committee on Heraldry of the NEHGS.) In over a hundred years of active compilation of the Roll (now with over 800 arms in it), the early colonists of Florida, Louisiana, and California (or other parts of Nueva España or Nouvelle France) have been entirely overlooked—at least the Dutch settlers of Nieuw Amsterdam have been represented to a degree.
Casting about in early Florida gets us to the Almirante Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519-1574), first colonial governor, founder of Saint Augustine.
One remarkable thing is that his own coat of arms survives, painted on a panel from his original coffin:
(Continued)
