Some years ago Chico Doria, a Brazilian mathematician and genealogist, wrote “One of my distant 15th-century ancestors was a canon who used to fool around with Angela Mendes, ‘a bonitinha,’ The Pretty One. I’m fascinated by her; I sometimes try to find out her face in the faces that I see in the streets.”
Chico’s words are humanistic genealogy at its best. After all, the subject of our interest is people. We cannot and should not prefer those we find only on paper (or on parchment, or in stone) to those inhabiting this world with us now, all of whose blood we share. Some genealogists do not seem particularly interested in, or particularly good at dealing with, living people. But the connections between the living and the dead are far stronger and more complex than we realize.
Search the faces. She is there.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Too many Jeremiahs! Since writing about Natalie’s people, my New York great-aunt’s ancestry, I have been drawn into her Vanderbilt connection. Her great-grandfather, Thomas Atwater Jerome, was an uncle of the famous Jennie Jerome, Churchill’s mother. Jerome’s wife was Emma Vanderbilt, and I had thought that with such a famous person in it—the Commodore—this family would surely be all well documented in some ‘Vanderbilt genealogy’ available on google books or ancestry.com. Unfortunately not!
From a database of death notices from the New York Evening Post (online at the NEHGS website, newenglandancestors.org) I found that Emma Vanderbilt’s mother was Hannah, widow of a Jeremiah Vanderbilt; Hannah died in 1865 leaving sons-in-law J. R. Lott and T. A. Jerome. On the ‘Vanderbilt’ message board on genealogy.com I found a descendant of the Lott son-in-law who has similarly searched for Jeremiah Vanderbilt. As it turns out, this Lott descendant has an heirloom which provides a clue to the mystery: a very fine letter of commission, from the New York provincial governor in the name of King George III, appointing an obviously earlier Jeremiah Vanderbilt ‘Jr.’ as High Sheriff of King’s County (Long Island), for the year 1764-1765.
From this Lott descendant we learn that his ancestor James Lott’s wife was named Harriet (no pillar of salt jokes please); (Continued)
Today, almost eight years later, I finally visited Carolyn. My wife’s grandmother Carolyn Harmon Scott, née Carolyn Ayer Harmon, died in the year our oldest daughter was born, so she lived to see her first great-grandchild. Their first visit was when Cassandra was four days old—
— but within a year, as Carolyn was at the end of her life, Cassandra got to play among the oxygen tubing that ran about her bed. Carolyn died 27 December 2000, while we were living in Kentucky. Mount Auburn Cemetery is lovely, and it did not take long to find my way to the Nye – Scott plot, somewhere between Mary Baker Eddy and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The small, unassuming plot dates from 1859 when David Charles Nye bought it to bury his own son, Carolyn’s husband’s great-grandfather Charles Ruggles Nye (1831-59). The oldest marble stone, probably erected to the son Charles Ruggles Nye, is now illegible but a closely matching one still legibly marks David C. Nye himself, who died in 1870.
(Continued)
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Yesterday, in the R. Stanton Avery Manuscript Collection of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) in Boston, I had the chance to look at (and, with the acquiescence of Timothy Salls, the manuscript curator, take a couple of photographs of) the Promptuarium armorum, a heraldic miscellany by William Smith, Rouge Dragon Poursuivant in the College of Arms from 1597 to 1618.
This manuscript’s title page says it was begun in 1602. It has long been known in New England heraldic circles; it belonged to John Gore and Samuel Gore, two heraldic and decorative painters, father and son, who created the ‘Gore Roll’ in the early or mid 18th century. The signatures of the Gores on the Promptuarium give it a strong provenance (though substantial gaps remain). It was in New England at least by the early 18th century, and in this regard is an important colonial document even though it is a book of English arms by an English herald.
I wonder whether anyone (at least here in New England) had previously noticed that the Promptuarium exists in two copies; the other is British Library MS Harley 5807. My purpose in visiting was to get some information about the Promptuarium with which to compare the Boston manuscript with that in London. (Continued)
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
I’ve finally made some progress on the family of my great-aunt Natalie, wife of my great uncle George A. Smith (born Schmitt) of Louisville and New York City. Smith, an actor on stage and screen, married Natalie, a New York socialite when they were both in their late 40s, during the war in 1944; they had no children.
Unc died before I was born but I well remember sitting in the back garden of Natalie’s townhouse on the Upper East Side on one overnight visit to New York. I was about five at the time (around 1970), and there is still a picture of me from that particular afternoon, with a great big bowl cut and my favorite loud striped pants. That afternoon I choked on a bullion cube; the next day when we went home I left my stuffed frog behind. Obviously the choke was not fatal, and Natalie later mailed the frog to me with a little note: “So glad to be home again.”
Anyway a couple of years ago I found out that Unc was in a movie that I could actually find on tape: ‘Stolen Heaven’ (1931). He has a small part and does a great comic routine with a cello. The place I got the tape from (a very dark nth generation bootleg) specialized in some weird porn and cult flicks; I’m not sure how this 30’s young love – crime melodrama fit into their catalogue. I started to look for examples of his TV work in the early 50s (he died in 1959), but don’t have any of the shows—preserved kinescope tapes of obscure early 1950s TV are rare, and these shows haven’t been collected on line yet, maybe never will.
Anyway, Natalie, who was born Natalie Slocum, has some interesting family connections. Her father, Henry Warner Slocum Jr., was a lawyer and sometime US tennis champion in the 1880s.
Her grandfather was Civil War general Henry Warner Slocum.
(Continued)
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
One thing that surprised me in the days following Sarah Palin’s emergence in September was the number of folks from among her base who did not recognize the pin she wore at the GOP convention and on her meet-world-leaders day at the U.N.: many wondered if she was wearing an Israeli flag pin, when actually it was a service banner, an emblem with a tradition established during WWI. Three service-banner items are found among the memorabilia in our family, including (I just recently found) a pin like that worn by Governor Palin.
(Continued)
Sunday, September 28, 2008
OK, after a marathon session online I’ve identified most of the odd bits of militaria in the previous post, except for the small star pin which I’m reposting by itself here:
Any ideas?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
OK, I’ve come to the bottom of my family militaria barrel but hope to identify things. This is a batch of things, of obviously mixed provenance, kept by my mother. A few messages to rec.heraldry helped narrow down the cardinals: likely something from WWII and hence from cousin Wilbur (army air forces) rather than from my grandfathers in WWI. But they could come from my grandfather Marvin, who subsequent to WWI was a reserve officer in Kentucky. But here’s the whole group of potentially military items:
The WWI Victory Medal and the ‘Honorably Discharged – World War’ pin must both have belonged to my mother’s father Carle Tucker, who had enlisted but was in an officer training camp when WWI ended and was presumably discharged as a private shortly thereafter. The small heraldic badge with motto ‘sustineo alas’ certainly belonged to my cousin Wilbur, who was in the Army Air Forces in WWII and trained in parachute repair / rigging at Chanute Field in Illinois; this was the DUI of the AAF Technical Services Command which was based at Chanute AFB. The cardinals remain a mystery; and what about the ’50-500′ star pin? And what about the thing that looks like a lieutenant’s bar but is light-blue enamel over gold-tone base metal? Something non-military? Something pre-WWI? I should warn that the baggie of goods out of which these came contained also a masonic pin and a pin from the Gloucester (Massachusetts) High School marching band. So: this bar could be non-military or have some other origin. Any ideas? I have Wilbur’s separation record but not one for either grandfather; perhaps I should request those records to see whether they help illuminate things.
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 whose genesis he gladly shared credit with David H. Kelley, who had voiced a similar hypothesis many years earlier. Marshall found no proof but the hypothesis has found its way into compilations of lineages. One of the key aspects of Marshall’s study was a systematic review of the baronial Sutton Dudley family into which one could argue Dudley must fit. The best existing work on the Staffordshire family is still that by H. Sydney Grazebrook: “The Barons of Dudley,” Collections for a History of Staffordshire 9.2 (1888); and “Junior Branches of the Family of Sutton, Alias Dudley,” Collections for a History of Staffordshire 10.2 (1889); followed by W. F. Carter and G. P. Mander, “Additions to Grazebrook’s ‘The Barons of Dudley’,” Collections for a History of Staffordshire for 1941 (1942), 21-80.
Well, the first two sections of Grazebrook’s work are on archive.org (where I have linked to them); but the 1941 additions have not been available until now: I have scanned them and put them up at the link above. In addition, the archive.org scans of the earlier vols. of the Staffordshire serial lack the enormous foldout pedigree charts printed with Grazebrook’s study: two accompanying the first part in vol. 9; one more accompanying the second part in vol. 10. So I have now created a pdf of the three foldout charts from Grazebrook also for download from my website.
The interesting question for the Massachusetts Dudleys is whether DNA testing can be used to test the theory of descent from the baronial Sutton-Dudleys. Are there male-line branches of the Staffordshire family sufficiently well documented to the present to be tested against any of the apparently numerous well-documented modern male-line descents from Gov. Thomas Dudley? This might tell us whether Marshall Kirk’s basic premise is sound—that Gov. Dudley had to fit into the Staffordshire family somewhere or else he would not have used the baronial arms (being neither a fool nor a liar), and the allusions of others to his status by birth would have made no sense. Does Grazebrook give us good data on any modern descendants?
One thing appears clear from Grazebrook: there is no room for the alleged descent of the Wexford, Ireland Suttons (a quo the condes de Clonard & comtes de Clonard) from the first Lord Dudley.
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 pin from my mother’s cousin Wilbur), these may have belonged to my mother’s father, who enlisted the army in 1918 and was in an officer training program somewhere in the Southeast when the Armistice happened and he ended up discharged soon thereafter. These either come from him, or from my father’s father, who was an infantry lieutenant who served in France in 1918 (I’ve posted his medals and am still editing his 280-page WWI journal). These cardinals are about an inch high and as you can see they aren’t identical. One was made in Rochester, New York; the other in Attleborough, Massachusetts. I’m not sure where to turn to identify them. Anyone have any ideas?
