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a past ‘distant and unknown’? — a clipping from the loft

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

A fine Father’s Day gift was time to putter in the attic, pulling down pine planks (some flooring and some wall planks) that had been repurposed as ceiling furring, being nailed to the underside of the tie beams to support a modern lath & plaster ceiling in the west end. Above the tie beams lay another set of planks, whitewashed on the bottom, serving as an original ceiling for the west-end attic room, and serving as floor for a loft of sorts — almost a fourth floor. I hadn’t been up above these planks since we bought the house, but needed to get up there to clear out a wasp nest and rescreen a louvered gable vent. The loft floor is thick with dust and generations of roofing debris. And near the hatch-hole I found a newspaper clipping, black with dust. (Continued)

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Fragments of Taylor history

Friday, May 18, 2012

Just found out the Hartford Herald (Hartford, Ohio County, Kentucky) is online in beautiful images as part of the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” database of historic newspapers. This led me to download all 45-odd installments of Harrison D. Taylor’s serial column “Fragments of the Early History of Ohio County,” which ran from April 1877 to March 1878. (This is page 1 of September 26, 1877, with chapter 24 in it. Click the picture to go to the source at the Library of Congress:)

Subsequently edited and reprinted in 1926 as a book, Ohio County, Kentucky in the Olden Days, these columns, and especially chapters 24 and 25 constitute nearly the earliest printed genealogical account of the Taylors. Actually, chapters 24 and 25, with the genealogical account, are based on a pamphlet printed in 1875 following a family reunion, which I have not seen in its original form — but which was reprinted separately in Ohio County, Kentucky, in the Olden Days. (There is a text online which may have been typed from a copy of the original 1875 pamphlet, but which I haven’t been able to verify — yet.)

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a living six-generation matriline

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Genealogically amazing, from ABC News, via Huffington Post: a 111-year-old great-great-great-grandmother posed for a photograph with her seven-week old great-great-great-granddaughter, and the four generations of daughters in between.

Are other examples of six living generations readily found, present or past?

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Taylor genealogy updated — marking genetically tested lines in a traditional genealogy

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

I just uploaded a new version of my e-book An American Taylor Family, which incorporates some revisions which have been on my ‘to-do’ list for over a year! This post is not just self-congratulatory, however, it’s to draw attention (my own as well as anyone’s who might read this) to a feature which I haven’t seen elsewhere. In 2010 five descendants of Simon2 Taylor established a Y-DNA genetic profile for him as our MRCA. I’ve blogged the results here and they’ve made it onto the ‘Taylor’ surname project site at ftdna.com. What hadn’t happened until now was incorporating this information into a traditional Register-style compiled genealogy. Now there’s a presentation of the DNA data in the introduction to the book, but also, each head-of-household in the direct ancestry of a tested individual (who has therefore been confirmed to belong, biologically, to this family) is indicated with a little double-helix icon next to his entry:

So: has anyone else done this, or seen it, in a compiled genealogy? I should ask Alvy Ray Smith, who has put together big Riggs genealogies and done good Y-DNA work on them too.

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new version of Taylor book — now with triplet photos

Thursday, December 8, 2011

After two years since the last upload, I’ve finally uploaded a minor revision of my Taylor book. I think I will be working on it forever. Notable things in the last two years still haven’t made it into the book — the success of our triangulation of a DNA profile for Simon2 Taylor, and the publication of my article on the possible parents of his father Richard — but I’ve been hearing from a steady stream of cousins. Notable among them have been descendants of the media-sensation triplets William9, Jennings9, and Bryan9 Taylor, sons of Frank L.8 Taylor (Joseph W.7, Tarpley6, John Clark5, Tarpley4, George3, Simon2, Richard). They toured as exhibition boxers in the nineteen-twenties, and each of them has living descendants who have found the book. There are some good triplet photos in the book now; the earliest is this one, courtesy of descendant Tim W., via Doug Lewis:

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fasg

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

[10/19/11: OK, this has now been made public, so I will post:]

The Saturday of Columbus Day weekend, about lunchtime, came a terse e-mail from a genealogist I’d met once, six years ago at Salt Lake City, but know better by reputation. “What’s yer phone number?” Shot it to him quick (with a sentence or two about our recent move), looking forward to his call, whatever it might be about: I’m always happy to hear from pretty much anyone about genealogy.

So I was still surprised when the phone rang (during a rather harried dinner prep for the smalls), and there were two different prominent genealogists on the other end, letting me know that I had just been elected the 160th fellow of the American Society of Genealogists!

Woot! I did ask if it were an elaborate prank, designed to make me burn the smalls’ dinner. They needn’t have resorted to such a strategem: I have burned dinner for far less.

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adding Connecticut ancestors — New England roots of a Nova Scotia loyalist

Friday, September 23, 2011

OK, so Julie has had them for years now: Connecticut ancestors. And it seems like every other New Englander with whom I perform the parlor trick of finding common ancestors has them too. But until now, I have not had any — my New England ancestors all lived north of Boston. My single solitary Connecticut ancestor has been a cheat: Great-Migration colonist Andrew Lester or Lister of Gloucester, who migrated to Connecticut, leaving some children settling in each place. Julie descends from one of the CT children, I from one of the Gloucester ones.

But now something new has come up, the identification of a Nova Scotia loyalist in my family tree, Isaac Andrews, whose granddaughter came to Gloucester in the nineteenth century, as a member of a specific Connecticut family. I recently pulled up the 2009 revised edition of A. C. Jost’s Guysborough Sketches and Essays, and saw that it supplied information which had not been in the 1950 original edition: it identified Isaac Andrews as the man of that name who was son of Elon and Sarah (—) Andrews of Wallingford, Connecticut! But the revised Jost doesn’t show what the evidence is to make that identification. Was it a guess, or is there documentation showing it? I rather suspect there’s something clear-cut that shows it but don’t want to reinvent the wheel to seek it. The most efficient thing is to find out who is responsible for the revisions to Jost and work from there (there is no independent editor credited, but the book is substantially updated from the 1950 1st ed., and Mr. Jost himself must have been deceased for 40 years or so). Before taking that step, tracing out my newfound Connecticut ancestors may be a wasted chore. But I’ll admit that hasn’t stopped me from snooping among them already…

UPDATE, 18 October 2011: I went through the Guysborough (Nova Scotia) Historical Society to get hold of the editor of the 2009 revision of Jost. And now, courtesy of the Guysborough Historical Society, I have a citation to a deed of 21 April 1800 in which Isaac Andrews of Manchester, Nova Scotia (across the harbor from Guysborough) sold land in Wallingford inherited from his father, Elon Andrews: so I may now with confidence trace my newfound ancestors in Ancient New Haven. For example, I have already found confirmation (while many sources show her surname as unknown) that Sarah, wife of Elon Andrews of Wallingford, was the daughter of Caleb Beach of Winchester (Caleb’s will names her as wife of ‘Elon Andros’; see Annals and Family Records of Winchester, Connecticut [Hartford, 1873], 32-33). Always happy to have more Calebs in the family tree. And here, I found online, is his house, falling down circa 1910:

It actually did fall down soon thereafter, since the WPA guide for Connecticut (early 1930s) mentions it as just a chimney…

The is the second most exciting thing that has happened to me, genealogically, this month. I’m waiting a bit, before posting on the most exciting thing.

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the mother of all medieval genealogies — the ‘great stemma’

Monday, August 22, 2011

An important new interpretation has just appeared, resolving longstanding questions about the puzzling biblical genealogies that appear mainly in several 10th-century Spanish manuscripts of Beatus of Liebana’s commentary on the Apocalypse (like the Morgan Beatus). Jean-Baptiste Piggin, approaching the whole question of this corpus of genealogies from an interest in informational graphics, has tabulated and linked to online versions, when available, of all the manuscripts, and he has collated the texts of the principal recensions. The recension closest to the original (and lost intermediate versions) is a very plain eleventh-century copy in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. The whole thing is available online (Cosimo de’ Medici would be proud! — here is a link to the first page). Here is Esau’s family:

Alone among the scholars who have studied these manuscripts, Mr. Piggin has now convincingly shown the whole to derive from a long scroll of Late-Antique origin, perhaps 4th or early 5th century! His work has been presented at the Oxford Patristics conference, and is more fully explored in a series of amazing essay-pages on his website. Most interesting of all is that he offers a dynamically zoom- & scrollable version of a tentatively reconstructed archetype, as well as the Bibl. Medicea Laurenziana witness. This is ‘medieval genealogy’ — the exploration of genealogy as it was used and understood during the middle ages — at its finest.

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a new old map of Barrington

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Here’s something that seems to have flown under the radar.

A 1993 book, Historical and Architectural Resources of Barrington, Rhode Island, reproduced two fine old maps, from 1851 and 1870, demonstrating the growth of this town, especially since a railway station was put in at West Barrington in 1868 and development of farmland into bayside summer colonies began. Those maps show the location of houses, but no property parcel divisions, in what was in 1851 still a town of farms. Thumbing in the library through Thomas Bicknell’s Historical Address and Poem and Delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Barrington (Providence, 1870) brought me to a map — very faint and faded — that I had not seen before, showing Barrington in 1866, and most importantly, showing parcel lines instead of structures. Turns out the people at the Preservation Society had not been aware of this map either, sitting quietly on the shelves upstairs at the library. Perhaps the map has escaped notice because it is so faint: a digitized copy of the book available via Yale has only blank pages where the map should be, suggesting the automated scanner ignored its faint lines entirely. There does not seem to be an original around anywhere, either among the Preservation Society papers or the Town Hall deeds & plats collection, so I’d like to scan the printed version and digitally clean it.

Here’s a first effort in that direction, from the circulating copy of the book, which unfortunately had the map sliced in half and rebound with loss of a considerable strip across the center of town (there is another, uncirculating, copy of this map in its original uncut fold-out form, which hopefully can be reproduced more clearly). Click on each image (North and South halves) to load a large-format (600dpi) grayscale jpg in a new window.

As a contrast, here’s the 1870 Beer’s Atlas map (again, click for hi-res):

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visiting the Prudence Island Allins

Monday, July 11, 2011

Prudence Island: our Allins came to Barrington from there before 1680; and the story goes that in the winter of 1682, Narragansett Bay froze solid enough for William1 Allin to haul his house over it (presumably minus the stone-end chimney), a few miles up the bay from Prudence to Annawomscutt in West Barrington. Now it’s a ferry ride, ten minutes out from Bristol harbor and fifty years back in time. We spent a gorgeous daytrip there Saturday, biking around to beaches (on dirt roads, with kids in trailers), which wore us all out. But not before visiting the historical cemetery there. Actually, I only brought the 2-year-old to the graves: the others were enjoying one last swim.

The graveyard lies up in the woods, blocks from the shore, long overgrown by pines but neatly kept beneath them. A couple dozen slate stones, still neatly matched head and footstones. Many of them small, though, not having had (or no longer showing) any formal carving. Two modern granite stones, and one table-tomb built up of flat fieldstones, but with the inscribed top stone (presumably slate) long gone. Of the few full-sized formal carved slate stones, Allins were readily visible. The first we found was Captain Joshua4 Allin, d. 1764 (John3, William2-1), a second cousin of our General Thomas. Here is Simon with Capt. Joshua:

Of the words on his stone, his forename is the hardest to read. (Continued)

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