One of the most pleasing of lineage societies has long been a fixture in my head, since as a child I watched endless ranks of minutemen file past on the Patriot’s Day parades each April 19 in Lexington, Massachusetts: the ‘Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company‘ of Massachusetts. Does ‘honorable’ necessarily belong with anything ancient, or if one hears it repeated in the title frequently enough, one believes it must be true? At any rate, this group wins both for its pleasing name (wearing its self-image in its very title) and for its ancient-ness, since being founded in 1637 it leads the order of precedence repeated among ‘lineage societies’—for those who care about such matters (I have more to say about the spurious age of some lineage societies elsewhere).
One thing I like about the ‘Ancient and Honorable’ is that one needn’t be a descendant to join: it is a fraternal organization, a reenactor’s group, and a civic group with a purpose which has un undeniably timely cachet in our current hawkish and defense-conscious regime. But it seems fun that there is a membership category for members ‘by right of descent’.
At any rate, this is one of the few ‘lineage societies’ I take some pleasure in contemplating, and, though I have no ‘Ancient and Honorable’ descents myself, maybe my son might be interested in being affiliated with things that go bang. Or my brother-in-law, who introduced me to the pleasures of spud-chucking. On a separate page I give their descents from some of the early artillery company leaders and members.
I broke down and had my copy of James Anderson’s Royal Genealogies (second printing, 1735) rebacked five years ago, but told the binder to retain the interesting bookplate which was there when I bought it: the bookplate of the ‘Magna Charta Library’ of the ‘National Society Magna Charta Dames’. It has the arms of the Dames at center top, surrounded by the arms borne by the 25 sureties chosen to watch over and harrass the king should he renege on his various concessions (see clause 63 of the charter of 1215, where the king tells them what they can do to him).
Indeed, for some time after buying the book (from a crazy but lovable Harvard Square bookman) I had pangs of guilt. Was it pilfered from the library of such an organization? No, I learned while talking with Lewis Neilson, the group’s chancellor: long ago the organization had a headquarters with research library, but this (and perhaps all other assets) had dissolved during a long dormancy. I gather that the current group is something of a recent reanimation, which would fit with the ebb, then revival of genealogy in the United States over the past two generations. The upshot was that I should feel no guilt about possessing this institutional vestige.
And perhaps I should not have felt too guilty anyhow. (Continued)
Three Daguerreotypes sat in the box with a make-up compact, a pill box, and little cut-glass dish, and two sandwich bags filled mostly with coins from Vichy France. The box was addressed to ‘Nathaniel Taylor, Historian’, and sent by my wife’s aunt.
I had never looked seriously into old cased photographs, though in my own family, along with about a century of memorabilia, there are a few miniatures in cases whose identities are no longer known (including an interesting mourning brooch, on which I will write later). With these Harmon family images, though, an assiduous great-great-aunt (Miss Hazel Harmon, quite a character) had kept them safe and labeled them, insuring their recognition into a third century.
Hannah (Beecher) Hotchkiss (1789-1854) [=Hannah6 Beecher (Benjamin5, Isaac4, John3, Isaac2-1)] had been widowed for some years when she sat for this photo, around 1850. She sits with a certain dourness (perhaps the product of a mixture of physical discomfort and skepticism of this odd fad). Her bonnet and gloves are proper and unadorned, and hark back to her eighteenth-century childhood as much as to appropriate going-out wear for the 1840s.
Her granddaughter’s father-in-law, James Hezron Harmon (1821-95) may have posed for this at the time of his wedding, 1844, in West Springfield, Massachusetts:
(Continued)
The pond in the heart of East Washington Village is stillness and motion as we walk (dog and I) over the dam. The dam and pond lie at the junction of Purling Beck and Woodward Brook, below Mount Lovewell. Below it is Beard’s Brook, a tributary of the Contocook, a tributary (I think, for here my map fails me) of the Merrimack.
The village of East Washington was founded around 1800 (Continued)
Do You descend from Robert Abell? After three years of living in a nondescript suburb and caring little about the genealogy of place, I’ve been waking up to the history of my own neighborhood. Given my genealogical interests, I feel sheepish not to have looked into it earlier. The house we selected for convenience and modern creature comforts, just minutes from downtown Providence and from Julie’s hospital, turns out to be on the “Ring of the Green”, the original perimeter of the broad common pasture of the original Rehoboth parish, between Robert Abell’s houselot and Samuel Newman’s. The Newman houselot—now a very fine 18th-century house on the same foundation, the ‘Phanuel Bishop House’—is next door to us:
(Continued)
Lately I’ve been obsessed with the Willey Slide — the 1826 landslide the killed the entire Willey family, innkeepers in desolate but strategic Crawford Notch in the White Mountains, leaving their house intact—now called the Willey House, in the shadow of Mount Willey. There, on one hot summer day in the 1970s, I had my first experience with that great American icon, a foot-long hot dog. Wrinkled and gamey, with both ends sticking far out the ends of a standard-sized bun, it didn’t sit well. I heard the story of the disaster with the morbid fascination of a pre-teen, and prehaps even then I was conscious of the irony of road-food as a typically inappropriate American commemoration of family tragedy. The bodies of three of the Willey children were never found. (Continued)
A graceful seventeenth-century churchyard — the Newman Congregational cemetery — lies near my house in Rumford. Formed in 1642 as the parish of Seacunke (soon renamed Rehoboth) in the Plymouth Colony, this parish grew and inherited the name of Rumford at the end of the eighteenth century, when other towns (including Rehoboth and Seekonk) were partitioned from the original parish. Now, having changed hands in the border shift between two New England states, Rumford has been subsumed in the city of East Providence, Rhode Island. The oldest surviving dated stones date from the 1680s, and include a rough-cut flat slab (Ephraim Harmon, 1687) as well as smaller field stones with only initials or no carving at all. In the eighteenth century, Rehoboth was served by more than one skilled carver, leaving dozens of pediments with death’s heads, cherubs, or more abstract tympana or borders, armorial achievements, and many with typography-quality lettering nearly as crisp now as when carved.
The old churchyard has now merged with a much larger, nondescript municipal cemetery, but it is not hard to make out the limits of the old yard by the change in material, style and date of the stones as one gets closer to the church. Yet a few anomalies stand out. There is an occasional modern burial — a twentieth-century descendant whose granite monument stands out among the slate nucleus of the old Rehoboth parishioners. There are fewer anomalies in the other direction, but I was quickly drawn to two eighteenth-century slate stones which lie incongruously next to a twentieth-century squat basalt pyramid near the Southwest fence.
The stones mark the graves of two slaves, Sherrey and Anna:
(Continued)
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Browsing this morning in Sir Nicholas H. Nicolas’ biographical sketches of the Scrope v. Grosvenor deponents, I noticed that Sir Richard Waldegrave (d. 1435), ancestor, via Sir William and Margery (Wentworth) Waldegrave, to many American colonists (including my ancestor Anne [Derehaugh] Stratton), is stated by Nicolas to have fought at the battle of Agincourt (October 1415). I had not previously noted any specific ancestor of mine at Agincourt, though to be sure I had not looked. Given the stirring speech Shakespeare put into Henry V’s mouth about the participants, the memory of the battle, and their posterity, I think this is sort of interesting.
Kenneth Branagh as Henry VThis is not traditionally held as a ‘plum’ by American genealogical enthusiasts, even those with a fascination for military descents. (Continued)
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Did Charlemagne exist? Were the Middle Ages nothing but a vast chronological hoax? Conspiracy fantasies about this have been thriving since the early 1990s, when a German self-promoter, Heribert Illig, began to publish on the subject. (Continued)
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
What is a Gateway Ancestor? In tracing any extended ancestry beyond, say, one hundred years ago, we see ancestors clumping into groups, sharing a single geographic location (perhaps the Connecticut Valley, or the Casco Bay area) or a common economic or ethnic identity (say, working-class Irish immigrants in New York City, or wealthy merchant barons intermarried between Newport and Baltimore). Further back in time, as new ‘clumps’ of similar ancestors appear, each new clump is connected to the rest through a single ancestor whom we can call a ‘gateway’. (Continued)
