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)
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!
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.
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!
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Well, to leave aside DNA for a moment and get back to real, paper genealogy, an e-mail last night told me that the first half of my article on the beginnings of our Taylor family is now out in the new issue of The American Genealogist — even though my copy hasn’t yet shown up in the mail. The article gathers the known data on the first three generations of the family in Virginia, and lays out a new theory for the origins and parentage of the founder of the family, Richard1 Taylor of Old Rappahannock County (subsequently Richmond County). Here’s Richard’s will:
Interested readers should buy the issues and support The American Genealogist. The new origins theory is not currently found in my e-book on the family.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The last time I blogged this we had just received preliminary data from a fourth member of our family to be tested, a cousin whose data pushes the ‘common ancestor’ back to Simon2 Taylor, who died in 1729. Now more of this cousin’s data are available, yielding the following data table:
This raises some interesting questions about interpreting DNA data. Judging only from the discrepancies in loci 34 and 35, the first and second subjects look more closely related, and the third and fourth also. Following the pedigree chart in my last Taylor DNA post shows that this is true for the first pair, but not for the latter pair: the third subject is more closely related to the first two, than to the fourth subject. The fact that nos. 1 and 2 share a common ancestor whose father was the ancestor of 3, and whose grandfather was the ancestor of 4, suggests that the values held by 3 and 4 in those loci are the original values, and that the common ancestor of nos. 1 and 2, Harrison Taylor, was the man who had a spontaneous mutation in both loci, 34 and 35. This is based on the assumptions that (1) the people in this DNA sample are related in the way they are shown to be by the traditional genealogcial evidence; and (2) when two people with a known common ancestor share a particular DNA STR value in a given genetic locus, then their common ancestor also had that value, since the probability of two identical mutations occurring in near cousins is statistically insignificant. Unless one of these assumptions is wrong, then we conclude that the third and fourth subjects determine the ‘original’ values for their common ancestor, Simon2 Taylor; and furthermore only locus 9, out of the first 37, remains ambiguous for the common ancestor, Simon2 Taylor (1667/70 – 1729). We are in the process of collecting more detailed data, to build an unambiguous 67-marker profile for Simon2 Taylor. This chart might help:
To test this theory (that Harrison4 Taylor is the originator of mutations in both loci 34 and 35), hopefully we can secure samples from a descendant of another of Harrison’s sons, as well as from the descendant of Septimus3, brother of George3 and John3, who has already agreed to a test. So there is more to come!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Just the other day I uploaded a new revised version of my book on the Taylors — see here for the download page — and thought I’d signal it with one of the new included photos.
This is James Wesley Taylor (1853-1896) of Tama County, Iowa, and Meade County, South Dakota, with his wife Mary Evangeline Wise Taylor and their extended family. It comes from Darryl Brent Adair, of Texas, whose meticulous research into this particular branch of our Taylor family has formed the basis of some of the recent edits. Here is what Darryl wrote about this photograph:
. . . My favorite old-timey photo probably taken in Tama County Iowa before this Taylor family moved to the Black Hills of South Dakota (Continued)
Friday, December 18, 2009
This morning I gave an exam to three students in the ‘Pavilion Room’, a formal dining room or parlor added to the Victorian house at Brown University which now houses the History Department. And I brought my camera to photograph the wood coat of arms, on the amazing scallop-shiplapped chimney hood:
More or less argent a lion rampant gules, on a chief sable three crescents or. Papworth doesn’t give us anything close to this (1:105 is where the lions with stuff on a chief are found). Burke’s general armory (1032) may get us into the ballpark, with the only family using ‘fortis non ferox’ as that of Trotter, and specifically a Trotter family that combines a lion rampant (azure) and a chief (ermine).
Unfortunately no such imaginative late-Victorian Providence Trotter is found in Crozier, Bolton or Matthews. I suppose I’ll have to look up the house itself, but it would be more fun to smoke this out another way. Not a plaque or brochure at all in the house itself, mind you, except those relating to Mr. Peter Green, the late 20th-century benefactor after whom the house is now named.
UPDATE: the family is Kimball — see comment.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Good news! Following work begun in the summer and already blogged here, and here, we now have another matching DNA sample from another branch of our Taylor family, which pushes the ‘most recent common ancestor’ of all test subjects back another generation, to Simon2 Taylor.
The chart shows the new addition, test subject no. 166642, whose ancestor, George3 Taylor, was brother of the common ancestor of all the previous subjects, John3 Taylor. Not all the data are in, but he so far matches the rest of them 24 for 25. Now to find a descendant of their brother, Septimus3 Taylor, who would agree to testing. There are extant male lines of descent from Charles4 Taylor, son of Septimus3, in Mississippi and Texas; hopefully someone in this part of the family will be interested and able to participate.
UPDATE: have now made contact with male-line descendants of Septimus3 Taylor, and testing is planned in the near future!
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Ph. Schillinger
To his Beloved Wife
Phillip Schillinger (1831-1888) and Katherine Jenne Schillinger (1832-1918) were my father’s mother’s mother’s parents, German bourgeoisie in Louisville, Kentucky, whence they had immigrated in 1854 and 1855 from the small town of Kippenheim in the kingdom of Baden-Württemberg. Schillinger was a brewer, and this hideous-toothed beer-drinker from an ad for his brew was an early trophy of my genealogical digging. How I came to find many generations of their ancestors in Kippenheim — quite by accident during a job interview — is another fine story.
But to the watch. This month it came to our possession and of course the first thing I did was photograph it; the second was take it to someone to have it looked at, to see if it could be restored.
For as long as I had known it it had lacked a crystal, and the minute hand. I assumed I would be told it was hopeless, or prohibitively expensive, to restore. But I took it to a good, old watch place here in Rhode Island, and was astonished when one of the artisans simply wound it up and it seemed to run fine (of course we have no key to have tried on it ourselves). But the lack of a crystal is a problem: without it, the watch dial, hands, and presumably works are vulnerable, and it is only worth cleaning the works and considering wearing it if a crystal can be found to fit it. The folks will need to search for a perfect-fitting crystal in a hundred years of old stock, then fit a hand to match the size and style. I will be patient and hope this works! I would love to see my wife, or one of my daughters, wear this red-gold watch on its long gold chain with enameled & gilt slide brooch. More pictures after the jump. (Continued)
