It unrolls easily. I coil it artfully on the black velvet under my camera. The leather is supple enough, but also feels fragile. The belt is very light, as if desiccated, and the buckle seems disproportionately heavy. Waxed black thread, worked erratically but securely, still holds the brass clip onto the tongue end of the belt where it must have been loose. Perhaps it was stitched on in a pestilential camp trench near the Rappahannock river, or at bivouac behind a fence in a field near Gettysburg.
(Continued)
On Tuesday afternoon I had the chance to inspect the tomb of Sancha de Ayala’s brother, now in the Museu Frederic Marès in Barcelona. A very fine alabaster effigy, like that of his uncle Pero Lopes de Ayala and those of his grandparents Fernán Pérez de Ayala and Elvira de Ceballos, at Quejana (Alava).
The triple-towered castles of his paternal arms flank the arms of the Orden de la Banda on the visible side of the tomb. The inscription was preserved as well, and (Continued)
I was at the office of the fabric conservator at RISD when we pulled apart the frame. She was doubtful, since she had seen many of these things simply glued to some sort of acidic backing. But no, this one was actually just stitched to a piece of cardboard and was remarkably supple and stable after 180 years. Some color is faded and there’s one hole (some sort of corrosion) but it cleaned up nicely:
Another amazing artifact from the Connecticut Harmons which has now come our way. They lived in Suffield, Connecticut. Cynthia’s grandfather Samuel Harmon was the militia lieutenant whose commission was also given to us last year; now these hang together. Cynthia died at age 21 and is buried in West Suffield. Her brother James Hezron Harmon (see his daguerreotype here) must have passed down his sister’s sampler.
I wonder what she was like?
Years ago my grandmother had this in her room. Written over its oval paper mat were (left, middle, right): “Mamie; Uncle Johnny; Mother.” Her mother, Martha Sophie Lembke, was born in October of 1868. Aunt Mamie was not born until 1878. Uncle Johnny, the oldest, was born back in 1864. The problem is that everybody is young; the two figures flanking the older boy are really toddlers — perhaps three and a half or four, while the boy cannot be over eight. But Martha Sophie (my great-grandmother) was an adolescent when sister Mamie was a toddler. What gives?
(Continued)
Here’s an interesting item: Count Rumford’s grant of arms from the English College of Arms:
This is from a fine on-line article on Count Rumford: Allen L. King, “Count Rumford, Sanborn Brown, and the Rumford Mosaic,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin 35, New Series (1995).
I see this is one of those modern grants taking notice of an assumption of arms belonging to another family of the same name (and no proved connection), by granting a new coat with “such variations … as may distinguish [him] from others of the name”. The “ancient and respectable family of Thompson of the County of York,” on whose arms the grant was based, appears in the 1665-6 visitation of Yorkshire. As Matt Tompkins pointed out on rec.heraldry back in August 2006, the original family’s arms are, per fess Argent and Sable, a fess counter-embattled between three falcons, all counterchanged. Count Rumford’s arms differed from those in the substitution of a White Horse for the lower falcon.
Interesting to have the image of such a fine document granting arms to the man who, for a string of weird reasons, gave my street its fascinating defunct baking powder plant and gave our village its name.
Just yesterday I got back from conservation and framing a commission in a colonial militia given to one of my wife’s ancestors at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. The commission is typeset with blanks filled in by hand.
I give the whole text here [filled-in portions, as opposed to typeset boilerplate, are in brackets]: (Continued)
On another page, I have offered a genealogical definition of my children’s identity based on their seize quartiers, or their sixteen great-great-grandparents. Here is another form of such a definition. For persons predominantly or even partially descended from colonial lines in the United States, one shorthand for the ancestry is those people who are traditionally represented as the heads of their respective families in North America: the immigrants (usually men) who founded particular families bearing particular surnames. Both for New England and for the Mid-Atlantic and Southern regions, the early waves of immigration had specific collective identities, some of which are explored in such works as David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989).
My children’s ancestry includes many who immigrated, or who appear to have immigrated, to the North American colonies or the United States after 1700—the most recent one, my wife’s mother’s mother’s father, came over about 1900—but the greatest likely overlap between them and other genealogists in this country is via common ancestors who came to the colonies before 1700: seventeenth-century immigrants. With many traceable New England lines via three out of four grandparents, our children have well over four hundred distinct seventeenth-century immigrant ancestors, if we take ‘immigrant ancestor’ to mean the first person in a particular agnate line to have come to this continent (thus eliminating doubling of father-son pairs who both came over, etc.). In addition to male founders of agnate lines, this list includes some women, of known surname, who appear to have immigrated without father or husband (or whose immigrant husband, if he came, remains unknown in colonial sources).
So as a sort of genealogical blueprint I have now drawn up a table of all ancestors known to have immigrated to (or be first known of their line in) the North American colonies before 1700. The table is available sorted in alphabetical order, date order (dated to apparent year of arrival), geographical order (sorted by state and town of principal residence), or pedigree order (based on the logical order of families in my children’s pedigree chart, following an order of precedence as if combining heraldic heirs).
I recently was thumbing through the book of UK Landmark Trust properties for short-term rent, and came across Calverley Old Hall, just outside Leeds, seat of the Calverleys who are ancestral to a cluster of American immigrants, including my ancestor William Wentworth of New Hampshire, who descends from Sir Walter Calverley (fl. 1415), husband of Elizabeth Markenfield. Most of the hall appears to date from one or two generations after this Sir Walter, however. One website mentions the later Sir Walter Calverley who murdered his two children (and tried to murder his wife) and was pressed to death in 1604.
The Landmark Trust book says that the rooms where the murders happened are not current bedrooms for renters—but how do they know? It might be fun to stay here while attending the annual medieval congress at Leeds some July (better than the dorms on campus). As Landmark Trust properties go, it’s not as pricey, as, say, Rosslyn Castle (home of the chapel famous for its carving and alleged Grail / Templar associations and now by that wretched Da Vinci Code).
How many houses ancestral to my family (say, 15th century and later) are available for paid lodging? This is the only one I’m aware of—so far.
I finally did it today: I completed plotting, on an outline map of the continental United States, the places lived in by the first seven generations, in the male line, of my Taylor family, descendants of Richard Taylor, who died, testate, in 1679 in Old Rappahannock County on the Northern Neck of Virginia.
Looking at this family geographically in this way raises questions: is this family truly ‘Southern’? Why did no one settle between the Mississippi and the West Coast? The migration south to North Carolina opens up a whole separate path (North Carolina > Georgia > Texas) not discovered by me until recently (2002). What other unknown early branches may open up whole other geographic distributions?
It would be nice to see this as a time-series, perhaps (though this is beyond me) as an animated Flash picture, showing the migrations dynamically, and also showing the petering-out of earlier settlements (for example, I’m not sure whether any of this line stayed in Richmond County, Virginia—ground zero of the migration pattern—beyond say 1750).
But that, I suppose, is a project for another day.
The current version of my complete textual genealogy of this Taylor family is available as a pdf here.
When President George W. Bush used the word ‘Crusade’ in a speech about fighting terrorism on September 16, 2001, handlers and spin-doctors interjected quickly to disavow the loaded language. To speak of ‘Crusading’ was rightly perceived as antagonistic to the U.S. and global Muslim community—a group which at least some in the current U.S. administration would rather not alienate so decisively. But is ‘Crusading’ officially a dirty word? It may be helpful to quote the twentieth century’s most masterly and readable history of the Crusades, that by Sir Steven Runciman, which concludes with this judgment of the two centuries of massive military campaigns and colonization efforts by Western Europeans in the Holy Land:
The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honour, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself is nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost. [Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1951-4), 3:480 (“The Summing-Up”, conclusion).]
the home team (3d Crusade): from an English work of 1850Perhaps we owe the Crusaders a little more benefit of the doubt. (Continued)
