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eighteenth-century trigonometry homework

Friday, April 30, 2010

That’s what we found this morning, among the miscellanous recycled papers — accounts, one page of a letter, and some odd scraps of letterpress printing — all pasted over some of the remaining vertical boards which made up a dividing wall of the original attic room in our new house. There’s a much newer door in the same attic wall, which is covered with a couple of generations of graffiti by 20th-century kids inhabiting the house (I think from the 50s to 70s). Those kids seem to have used the attic room as a clubhouse, but the 18th-century papering is on the other side of the clubhouse wall. I wonder if any of those kids noticed their predecessors’ trig homework? I’ll try to make a set of legible photos of the various pasted-up papers, though we plan to leave them right where they are, after knocking out the 20th-century lath & plaster now backed up against them.

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two beehive ovens

Sunday, April 18, 2010

This weekend I was riveted by Anne ‘Pete’ Baker’s book, Collecting Houses: 17th-century Houses — 20th-century Adventure, recommended to me by aunt Amy, who knows Pete slightly. It’s a chronicle of how Pete taught herself to evaluate and restore the oldest houses of Southeastern New England, especially the detective work of discerning and dating the earlier cores to houses built up over generations. Last week, one of our experts pointed out a couple of things that seemed to suggest an older core in the Allin house, than the now traditional date of 1783 for the construction of the main Georgian house. The most obvious clue is the kitchen fireplace: it has not one, but two intact beehive baking ovens, which is apparently unusual. One opens directly into the back of the main firebox (common in older houses); the other is at the right, with its woodbox below it, behind a fine old two-panel door. Here is young Simon, for scale, and only slightly sooty, in front of the fireplace:

Seems the oven & box at the right were added, perhaps (and here I’m speculating) when the whole central chimney system was enlarged, perhaps when the house was expanded from an earlier core (a Georgian two-story half-house?) to its present full plan. Next orders of business: pull the Allin family deeds and wills, to see if stages of the growth of this house can be documented there; and look more closely inside the house (cellar and attic) to see if we can see evidence of the growth of the frame from a smaller footprint. The chimney system itself needs to be more fully investigated from inside to see if successive phases of construction can be discerned. Simon is the right size, physically, but not quite old and steady enough yet to be tasked with that. Remember what happened when Tom Kitten went up the chimney and was almost baked into a pudding by the rats?

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Simon Taylor’s marriage bond, 1641

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Well, the second half of my article on the possible English origin of my Taylor family has come to my mailbox in the latest issue of The American Genealogist, so having duly waited I’m happy to trot out the speculation that lies at the heart of it. My earliest known male ancestor, Richard1 Taylor (d. 1679), left three minor children when he died in Virginia in 1679: Constance, Richard and Simon — Constance and Simon being rather uncommon given names. As a young man, in 1662-1663, he first appeared as a servant to Colonel Moore Fauntleroy, at a large plantation on the Rappahannock. Colonel Fauntleroy had patented much of this tract back in 1650, based on 107 headrights including another Simon Taylor, who might be reasonably conjectured to be connected to the later Richard who named a son Simon—perhaps his father. Looking at the IGI to gauge the number of people named ‘Simon Taylor’ in England in the early 17th century turned up a tantalizing coincidence, the record of a marriage license between a Simon Taylor and a Constance Berryson (recte Berrington, as it turns out) in Stanford-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, in 1641. My article explores the possibility that this Simon & Constance Taylor might be parents of Richard Taylor of Virginia, and reviews the genealogy of the family in Virginia. But here on my blog I will share Simon and Constance’s original marriage license (Diocese of York: Archdeaconry of Nottingham: Marriage Allegations, 1641-1665, FHL film 0592745), which I have transcribed (leaving the bond in Latin) below. Click the document to get a full-sized blowup. Anyone who can fill in the two uncertain words, and the name / title of the scribe at the bottom, please let me know!

Noverint universi per presentes nos Symonem Taylor parochie de Stanford
in comitatu Nottinghamie yeoman (Continued)

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she grew up here: Amy (Allin) Horn

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Bicknell’s History of Barrington has another great tidbit, a portrait of Amy Allin:

Thomas Allin’s oldest daughter, Amy, was born in 1773, and married John Horn in 1796 (per some hits on Worldconnect). She would have seen this house built (or enlarged) in 1783, and grown up in it. Our oldest will be moving in at age 10 too.

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Thomas Allin and us: the house

Saturday, April 10, 2010

This has been a busy spring with little time for posting here. But one non-genealogical component of our family life has recently taken on a genealogical and historical dimension.

We have just bought a new house — new to us, but built in the 1780s by a Revolutionary officer, Lieut. Col. (later Brig. Gen’l.) Thomas Allin (1742-1800), at Annawomscutt, or West Barrington, Rhode Island, possibly incorporating an earlier core built a generation previously by his father or grandfather. (Continued)

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Taylor DNA: 67 markers for Simon2

Saturday, April 10, 2010

In March, our patience in tracking down yet another distant Taylor cousin for DNA testing paid off. We now have a complete 67-marker Y–DNA profile for the earliest testable genetic ancestor of this family, Simon2 Taylor of Old Rappahannock County, Virginia, who died in 1729. Five test subjects with known descent paths from Simon’s three sons known to have left male issue have been found.

What do these circled areas mean? By triangulating the genetic discrepancies uncovered, it has been possible not only to deduce Simon’s original STR values for 67 genetic markers on the Y chromosome, but also to deduce roughly where in the family tree each of these discrepancies must have occurred. (Continued)

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Morgan Colman’s big genealogy of James I and Anne

Monday, March 15, 2010

Browsing in my own hard drive I just unearthed Morgan Colman’s huge 1608 genealogy of King James I and his Queen, Anne. Of all the congratulatory heraldic and genealogical stuff prepared early in James’s reign, this might be the most impressive piece of genealogical diagrammatic typography. Great pity that a better version of this is not available online. Here is King Egbert from the left-hand side:

The title is given in STC as “Most noble Henry, heir but not the son…”, which is the first line of the dedicatory verse at top left. As far as I can see there are only incomplete copies of this at Oxford and in London. (Continued)

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William, Jennings & Bryan Taylor, notorious triplets

Thursday, January 21, 2010

I notice that at least one web-search that led to my site this month was a search for my sixth cousins twice removed, the triplets William, Jennings & Bryan Taylor, named after the great turn-of-the-century populist orator. They were sons of Frank L.8 Taylor (Joseph W.7, Tarpley6, John Clark5, Tarpley4, George3, Simon2, Richard). Duplicating the search myself led (thanks, Google News) to the following, from the Boston Evening Transcript of 7 July 1904:

Here I read it into the record:

Bryan’s Immortality Secure
[From the Chicago Record-Herald. Ind.]

Nature, cruel and inexorable, has played sad havoc with the ratio for which he stood, but the name of the “peerless leader” himself is not to be effaced.

It required triplets to assure William Jennings Bryan of this immortality. Thousands of youngsters have been named after the silver leader, but it took a triple combination to carry his full name down the corridors of time to posterity. The triplets were provided by Mr. and Mrs. F. L. Taylor of St. Louis, and this names are William Taylor, Jennings Taylor and Bryan Taylor.

When the mother calls them in from the street in a bunch she will repeat the name of the peerless leader, and as the youngsters grow up the memory of the eloquent champion of sixteen-to-one will be kept green. Of course many things may happen to break the triple alliance. The contingencies of life in St. Louis are to be faced. The perils of existence in the Missouri town have been lessened, it is true, by the purification of the water supply through the Chicago drainage canal. But this does not remove the danger of trolley accident. If Jennings should swallow a large button and suddenly shuffle off there would be nothing left but William Bryan, which is not the name that stirred his six million followers in two campaigns. This would put a large crimp in the immortality of the venerated leader. It is to be hoped, however, that no such fate awaits the Taylor triplets or the immortality of Mr. Bryan.

Luckily, the somewhat callous hypothetical by this author never came to pass. Jennings, at least, prospered — I was contacted by a male-line grandson in 2008!

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passages — Bruno

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Bruno, a cat, departed this life 31st December 2009, early in the morning, aged 14 years. He had struggled in recent years with obesity, and all his life with a certain simple-mindedness and avoidance of people. Back in 2005 he spent six days inside a wall. He leaves a twin sister, Oda, and a human family.

Committal will be in the Spring, at East Washington, New Hampshire.

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of gateways and gravestones: Mary (Lawrence) Burnham

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Hey! Martin Hollick over at the Slovak Yankee has a photo of a gateway ancestor we share. (A gateway ancestor is an ancestor who gives descendants a treaceable path back to a new ancestral population—most commonly, in US usage, an early colonial immigrant providing traceable ancestry among medieval nobility and royalty.) She is Mary Lawrence, wife of Lieutenant Thomas Burnham of Ipswich. Here she lies (Martin’s photograph, links to his post):

Mrs Mary Bur-
num wife of
Liuet Thomas
Burnam died
March ye 28
1715 aged
92 years
mother of
15 children
& grandmo-
ther of 70.

Grandmother of 70! No wonder Martin & I are both descendants! Probably everyone else, too, if they’d only look. Martin’s list of gateway ancestors is well worth looking at; here is my own (or rather, the gateways of my children, some through me, some through my wife). Martin also shares with my wife, Rose (Stoughton) Otis, and John Whitney, whom Martin has reinstated following recently published work, while I have not yet (he’s in my partial ‘bogus’ list linked at the same page).

But I would like to know if other gateways my children share have extant gravestones as marvellous as that of grandmother Burnham!

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