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The mystery of the Samuel Matlacks

Monday, September 21, 2009

Browsing somewhere online the other day, my eye jumped to a newly-published regimental history of the 10th Kentucky Infantry in the Civil War. This was the regiment of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Matlack (1815-1881), regimental quartermaster, then lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Brig. General Speed S. Fry, at Camp Nelson, Kentucky.


Samuel and Mildred Ann (Gregory) Matlack, in my grandfather’s photo album.

Beyond his own Civil War record Matlack has long held my interest for the unknowns of his family history. According to his obituary in a Louisville newspaper, Samuel Matlack was born in Fairfield County, Ohio, in 1815, son of another Samuel Matlack and his wife Elizabeth Lynch. But there the issue gets complicated, as there were two adult Samuel Matlacks in Fairfield County, Ohio in the early nineteenth century. Over the years I’ve drafted a study of these Matlacks, trying to reconcile various (unreconcilable) statements in sources which appear to mix them up, and trying to discover their relation to the Quaker Matlack family of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to which they apparently belonged. In the process I’ve discovered various weird anomalies about (as is often the case) the other Samuel Matlack’s family. I just realized I never got around to putting this unfinished work online. In the hopes that (as has happened before) search engines might attract others with insights, I’m doing so here:

Click to read (pdf) “The Two (or Three) Samuel Matlacks of Fairfield County, Ohio.”


A chapter officer’s pin from Matlack’s G.A.R. insignia.
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Sancha de Ayala’s prayer book? (and her sister’s tomb)

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Last fall I got a message from Sor María Jesús, of the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Toledo, noting an error in one of my earlier webpages on Sancha de Ayala, where I had confused the two convents, the convent of Poor Clares, “Santa Isabel de los Reyes,” which is constructed in the palace of Sancha’s father Diego Gómez, and Santo Domingo el Real, which is where Sancha’s sister, Doña Teresa de Ayala, was prioress. Sor María Jesús gently corrected my caption identifying the wrong convent, for the beautiful carved tomb slab of Doña Teresa, when I included a photograph (from a 1980 book) in my little essay on Sancha de Ayala’s literary heritage. Now Sor María Jesús has sent me another, much sharper photograph of the tomb of Doña Teresa, which I include here (click for larger image):

Sor María Jesús has also let me know about an interesting artifact, a fourteenth-century prayer book (Continued)

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looking for Mr. Wright (& knocking down a brick wall)

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Here is the successful breach of a brick wall, with some unusual documentary evidence, leading to a goose-chase for a ‘Mr Wright’. The starting point is my wife’s XY line, which, as I noted in the last post, went back to Whiting B. Dudley (1823-1882) and then stopped. Here is what I knew:

A family bible entry stated that Whiting Dudley was born 14 August 1823 in North Haven, Connecticut, but named no parents. No birth was found in the Barbour collection, etc. Our only testimony about his parentage comes obliquely from his daughter, Rosa Whiting Dudley (Mrs. John Milton Harmon), 1857-1940. Here is Rosa — a handsome woman:

Sometime in the late 1930s I think, Rosa was reminiscing to her daughter-in-law, Beth (Battles) Harmon, about the provenance of various family heirlooms, telling stories to explain objects. Beth took notes on small note paper, of which a few leaves survived among odd papers (but without any attribution—I had to deduce who wrote them and when). Some notes concern other ancestral lines, but the passage relevant to Whiting Dudley read as follows:

That lead doll my grandfather Dudley bought in New York for oldest daughter. Also the pewter tea set. He went often to N.Y. He was taken ill there with yellow fever & grandmother went after him & brought him home in the stage. Father was 5 or so. Says he remembered his father calling him into the room. & talking to him. Told him to be a good boy. … (Continued)

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my medieval XY line

Monday, June 1, 2009

Besides our agnate (male-line) ancestry, and our matrilineal ancestry (also called the umbilical or mitochondrial line, to indicate the uterine mother-child bond or the exclusively maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA), what specific lines have any distinction, in an abstract sense, in the vast swath of the pedigree chart that lies between these two bookends? The ‘xy’ or gender-alternating line has, as Todd Farmerie explained, a theoretically heightened role in the transmission of some genetic material. But it is also the simplest ‘unique’ path to follow among ancestors after the all-male and all-female lines. There is the interesting oddity that siblings of different genders have wholly different XY lines, since a man’s line starts with his mother while a woman’s line starts with her father. As it turns out, my ‘XY’ line is pretty long, leading back through a Great-Migration colonist into late medieval England. Today the ever-vigilant John Brandon of Charleston, South Carolina, noticed some generations of ancestors of Dorothy (Nicholl) Stratton in the 1563 Visitation of Suffolk. So my line now stretches 19 generations from my daughters back to Avelyn Pelham, who probably lived in the mid to later 15th century:

1. Avelyn Pelham = John Colbye, Gent., of Banham, Norfolk (Continued)

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John Morgan Stanwood of Dogtown: finding ancestors in a novel

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Quite by accident I found it. I was scanning my local branch library for editions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when I saw The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Pulling it off the shelf doubtfully (there are many Dogtowns) I was surprised to see that it was indeed about my Dogtown, the upland village in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where some of my grandfather’s ancestors had lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Dogtown was wholly abandoned by about 1840, and by the end of the nineteenth century was subjected to nostalgic tale-spinning, notably by Charles E. Mann in In the Heart of Cape Ann, or the Story of Dogtown (1896) [on archive.org]. Mann depicted the last inhabitants as curmudgeons and simpletons—and his printer seemed to have some extra engravings of witches lying around —

— which somewhat distorted Mann’s bucolic elegy but may have got it a few more readers. (Continued)

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a royal descent for the American Stirlings of Glorat

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Following yesterday’s post on the romantic Stirling of Glorat story, I put together a royal descent (probably the closest one) for the American branch of the Stirlings of Glorat, as follows:

1. James V, King of Scots (d. 1542).

2. (illegitimate by Catherine, daughter of Sir John Carmichael) John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham, Lord Darnley (d. 1563), m. Jane Hepburn.

3. Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell (attainted; d. 1612), m. Margaret Douglas.

4. John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham (noticed in 1606), m. Margaret Home.

5. Margaret Stewart, m. Sir John Home of Renton (d. 1671).

6. Sir Alexander Home of Renton, 1st Bart. (d. 1698), m. Margaret Scott.

7. Elizabeth Home, m. John Stirling of Glorat (3d son of 1st Bart.).

8. Sir Alexander Stirling of Glorat, 4th Bart. (d. 1791), m. Mary Willis (of Strood, Kent).

9. Sir John Stirling of Glorat, 5th Bart. (d. 1818), sojourned in America, where he m. at Stratford, Connecticut, about 1770, Ann (Gloriana) Folsom.

10. Robert Stirling (8th son), bapt. at Campsie, Stirlingshire, 19 October 1792; settled in North America by 1820; m. at Eastport, Maine, 2 November 1820, Mary Ann Pine (she d. at Ottawa in 1832); he d. at Batavia, Ohio, 9 December 1860. His male-line descendants are now the presumed heirs of the baronetcy since the extinction of senior lines in 1949.

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potential Indiana baronet — Stirling of Glorat

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

From the papers, the fascinating story of the (apparent) heir to the Scottish baronetcy of Stirling of Glorat (William J. Booher, “Tracing Family Tree Turns into a Title Search: Greenwood man has some details to confirm before becoming baronet,” Indianapolis Star, 19 March 2009).


Coat of arms from the frontispiece to Bain (1883).
The coat would correctly represent Stirling of Glorat
only without the roses and supporters.

Mr. Booher’s article dwells on the current descendant, Mr. John C. Stirling, Jr., and his (surely) surprising and rewarding investigation of his own ancestry. But even more compelling is the narrative of his ancestors’ experience in the century from 1760 to 1860. The story of John Stirling has wonderful elements: young adventure, illness on an exotic shore, providential intervention, love, separation and anxiety, succession to wealth and title, seventeen (!) children; (Continued)

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update on the Crosbie-Pitcairn pistols

Monday, March 23, 2009

I’ve now found confirmation of Captain (later General) William Crosbie’s place in the Anglo-Irish gentry Crosbie family which bore the swords-and-snake crest found on the pistols traditionally identified as Major Pitcairn’s (see my previous post, linked here). I had suggested that he belonged somewhere in the Ardfert Crosbie family found in Burke’s 1866 Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerage and similar Landed Gentry of Ireland account. Crosbie’s brief stint in parliament proved the clue to further data: his sketch in R. G. Thorne’s House of Commons, 1790-1820 (5 vols., London, 1986, 3:540), shows him as born about 1740, son of “Major John Crosbie.” This puts him among the “numerous family” stated (but not named) by Burke as children of Major John Crosbie, “living in the County Wicklow in 1752,” Major John being sixth son of Sir Thomas Crosbie of Ardfert, grandfather of Sir Maurice Crosbie, 1st Lord Branden of Branden (d. 1762), who was therefore General William Crosbie’s first cousin. Elsewhere we learn that Major John (William’s father) died sometime before 1762, and was a long-serving Captain in the 21st Foot (later the Royal Scots Fusiliers), present both at Dettingen—where he lost an arm—and Culloden (google turns up snippets on him in Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 27-28 [1949], 71; and Aberdeen University Review 34-35 [1952], 359). This no doubt provided the basis for the well-connected careers of his sons William and Charles, who both became army generals. The House of Commons entry sketches William’s military career, beginning with commission as an ensign in the 38th Foot in 1757, promition to captain in 1769 and to major in 1778 (following the British evacuation from Boston), and on (as sketched in my previous post) to the rank of major-general in command of the 22d Foot.

Looking at his will had already revealed General William Crosbie’s mistress and bastard son. The House of Commons sketch adds one more interesting element: Crosbie’s death on 16 June 1798 was apparently suicide, as the Duke of York later wrote to the King that Cosbie “made away with himself at Portsmouth. . . . He had appeared very low and unwell for some time, and was undoubtedly under the influence of mental derangement.”

The fact that Crosbie, who was indeed on the Lexington & Concord foray on 19 April 1775, had a hereditary right to the swords-and-snake crest on the pistols, certainly cements J. L. Bell’s reidentification of their original ownership—though of course they still might have belonged to Major Pitcairn on the day of the battle. However, I am not sure, given these glimpses into Crosbie’s character and career, whether the pistols, as artifacts, are thereby burnished or tarnished.

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crescit progenies nostra

Friday, March 20, 2009

Hwaet! Unto us this day is born, in the city of Pawtucket, in the state of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, our fourth child and second son, Simon Lane Taylor.

Like genograms but for soccer moms rather than therapists, those self-satisfied minivan decals have emerged as the latest diagrammatic lexicon for identifying one’s family. If we indulged in them (and we do, I admit, have a minivan) here’s what ours might look like now:

Except the littlest one doesn’t stand…

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Pitcairn’s pistols were Crosbie’s—heraldry on a famous revolutionary artifact

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The first spoils of the Revolutionary War are surely the handsome pair of Murdoch pistols long attributed to Major John Pitcairn, who is said to have lost them on April 19 1775 during the harrowing return from Concord to Boston (they were variously said to have been in the baggage train, or on his horse). Despite their two centuries of iconic status as the first revolutionary spoils, it has only recently been pointed out that the crest engraved on the pistols did not match that of Pitcairn’s family. And only yesterday did historical blogger J. L. Bell think to google a blazon of the crest —


[actually a detail from a reproduction, on sale here]

— and identify it as belonging to a Crosbie family [probably here, which one can find by googling “three swords” with “snake” and “crest”); Bell noticed that indeed there was an officer named Crosbie present in the Lexington-Concord foray: Capt. William Crosbie of the grenadier company in the 38th Regiment of Foot. (Continued)

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