Book Reviews

Book Reviews Ye Colonial Kinsmen. By Joseph N. Kearney. (Roadmaps Thru History — Associates, P. O. Box 90622, Airport Station, Los Angeles, California 90009). Eight charts, 253(38. $27,50, including mailing tube. This genealogical chart consists of eight sheets quaintly subtitled in script: "Ye Colonial Kinsman from Plymouth to York Towne, being a Genealogical Discovery. Ye Charte spans six generations. It begins with some 200 hardy soules from amongst ye earliest arrivals in ye Colonies. It shows how great numbers of their Descendants intermarried, or married later arrivals to these bountiful shores. All this, in such Combination, so as to produce a Single Fabric of Kinship among ye 3500 or more persons hereon shown. Some close —some quite remote yet Kinsmen All," At the top of Sheet 3 is a reproduction of a map drawn in 1768 showing the landowners along a road dividing Somerset County, New Jersey, from Middlesex County, extending eastward from the Hunterdon County line to New Brunswick. The arrangement and numbering system is an ingenious method of showing the interrelationship of families and lines of descent from an immigrant ancestor through six generations. Most of the lines trace back to an ancestor who came from Holland to New Amsterdam, although others settled in New England and southward as far as Virginia. Each sheet is divided into six columns which are in turn subdivided into family groups. The family groups in Column I are numbered 1001 through 1105; Column 2, 2001 through 2108, and so forth, ending with the number 6105. Source material is coded and explained in the tables. Multiplying by 680, the number of families, indicates the vast amount of data available on these six sheets, with source references including the names of researchers Lewis 0. Cook among them and historical and biographical notations. This format is effective when applied to an area where many settlers intermarried, such as Burlington County, New Jersey. Many of the families shown on these charts migrated to Cumberland County, New jersey where they intermarried with families from Long Island, New York and Connecticut. The sheets are artistically printed in brown ink on cream-colored paper. This combined with the size of the sheets makes reading them somewhat difficult. An instruction sheet is included explaining the arrangement and the numbering system, as well as a plan for attaching the sheets for easy use and filing, or framing. An index is in the process of being prepared which should greatly assist the user. 58 Book Reviews 59 Through the clever numbering system one can readily trace those ancestors or descendants charted. This is a great accomplishment and represents nine years of research and preparation. Combined with the documentation of the lines, it is a tribute to Mr. Kearney's efforts. Winfield Scott Weer Kindred Davis-Stansbury Lines, By Helen E. Davis. (Dorrance & Co., Philadelphia, 1977) Illustrated, indexed. 305 p. $10.00. Part I of Miss Davis's extensive genealogy treats the Davis Family, beginning with Moses Davis, 1768-1870, of the Upper Dublin area of Montgomery County, and continues with William Warren Davis who in 1888 married Eliza Noble Stansbury. They were members of the Wrightstown Friends Meeting. In this section there are genealogies of connected families in Bucks and Philadelphia Counties: Paxton, Searle, Singley, Tomlinson, Walmsley, Worthington, Roberts, Caffey, McKenney, Ryan and Skinner. Part H concerns the Stansbury Family, beginning with Tobias Stansbury who armed in Maryland in 1658. Their connections are in Maryland and Virginia, including the following families: Beedle, Besson, Body, Bussey, Garvin, Dixon, Freeborne, Frisby, Gassaway, Gouldsmith, Hall, Hanslep, Hayes, Holland, Howard, Knight, Parker, Phillips, Raven, Reade, Roper, Tolley and Li tie. Part III deals with the Carr Family, a musical family who came from London and opened music stores in Baltimore and Philadelphia in the early 1800s. Their lines extend to the Maryland families of Bell, Rogers, Bowen and Jordan, the Virginia Merryman family and two New jersey families, Ming and Nicoll. The book is very well laid out, the lines clearly drawn so as to be easy to follow. It is swell-documented, professional work. Helen Hutchison Woodroofe Charles Springer's Family in Swedish History. By Baldwin Mau11_ (Delaware Swedish Colonial Society, Wilmington, Delaware 19807, 1978) Illustrations, charts, index. 34 p. $5.00. One seldom encounters a genealogy that has all the ingredients of a Hollywood historical-spectacular. Charles or Carl Springer, a prominent Swedish settler in Delaware, would easily be the perfect protagonist for such a production. He arrived in New Castle County about 1684, and family tradition had long held that he came from swell-connected family in Sweden. The story went that while studying in London he had been shanghaied and taken to Virginia where he was sold as an indentured servant. After his five years of service he joined the Swedish colony in Delaware. Several books have been published over the years, creating an extravagant, and later proved, over-blown account of the Springers. In 1941 Milton Rubincam published an analysis of the ancestry in The American 60 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine Genealogist which indicated much of the material printed had been a fabrication. It was this revelation that led Courtland B. Springer to arrange for research on the family origins in Sweden. In the course of this effort a letter that Charles Springer had written to his mother in Sweden was uncovered. The letter, written in 1693, verifies the story of his adventures, a far more fascinating document that a questionable descent from Charlemagne. Mr. Mau11, a direct descendant in the eighth generation, undertook to learn more about Charles' mother and her family. Beata Salina, after the death of her husband Christopher Springer in 1669, had by 1678 become Royal housekeeper to Queen Hedwig Eleanora of Sweden at Gripsholm Castle. It may be presumed that her position in the dowager-queen's household would account for the preservation of the letter. Baldwin Maull has aided in the research of the Springer, Salinas, Brack and Christofferson families of Sweden. He has combined their histories with the social history of Sweden. This is a well-documented and fascinating family history. Helen Hutchison Woodroofe Hans Hanson of Red Lyon Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware. By Baldwin Maul'. (privately printed by Baldwin Maul!, 250 Park Avenue, New York 10017, 1978) Index. 25 p. $8.00. A four-geperation account of the Hanson family of New Castle, Delaware, this scholarly work could stand as a textbook example of the proper way to prepare a genealogical study. Mr. Maul], has documented the work by the use of deeds, wills and various court records. Beginning with the first mention of "Hans Hanson alias Miller", ca. 1671, he has made every effort to properly establish the identity of the man, sorting through a most confusing similarity of names in the area. Along with the genealogical facts for this particular Hanson family, he has provided notes on other Hansons, who may or may not be related. Baumann/Bowman Family of the Mohawk, Susquehanna & Niagara Rivers. By Maryly B. Penrose. (Liberty Bell Associates, Franklin Park, New Jersey 08823) Index, 314 p. Johann Adam Baumann, the progenitor of this family, left Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, being one of the Palatines sent by Queen Anne to settle in New York state. They settled on the Livingston tract on the west side of the Hudson River, now in Ulster County. From there, in 1712, they removed to land in the Schoharie Valley. By 1725, Johann's son Johann Adam, had taken possession of land in the Burnetsfield Patent, now in Herkimer County, New York. A second son, Jacob, prior to 1757, moved his family to Canajoharie, now in Montgomery County, New York. Jacob's son George Adam moved to lands along the Susquehanna River, near Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, just before the Revolution. He remained loyal to the British Crown, and Book Reviews 61 enlisted in the Corps of Rangers. Following the war he joined his family in the Niagara District of Ontario, Canada. Miss Penrose follows the various branches of the family through the seventh generation. She also includes material on "unplaced Baumann/ Bowman families". An appendix cites documents: wills, military commissions, petitions and pension application for various Bowrnans. The research appears to be very thorough and complete; however, the format is confusing at times. A Pioneer Family in Colonial Pennsylvania. By Roger C. Heimer. (Dorrance Co., Philadelphia, 1978) 139 p. $6.95. This cannot be called a genealogy, but rather a social history, as Mr. Heimer follows the family of John Hahn, who came to Pennsylvania on the ship Marlborough, out of Rotterdam, in 1741. Through the narrative technique we follow John Hahn's Me as an indentured servant in Philadelphia. His indenture completed, he set out for the Forks of the Delaware, accompanied by Maria Stumpf, a pretty nineteen-year-old who still had two years to serve but decided to run away with John. As things evlved, they did not marry, Maria finding a prosperous farmer and John marrying Susanna Bauer, a widow. We suffer with the Hahns as they work their frontier farm, build their log house, raise crops and babies. There were happy moments when a log church was built, and terrifying moments when the Indians attacked the settlement. This is a most remarkable picture of the lives of this family, how they ate, kept warm in winter, what they wore. We share all this up to the day of Susanna's death in 1777, leaving John and their children to mourn a brave pioneer woman. Mr. Heimer has provided in the Appendix the history of ten historic Union Churches in Montgomery, Bucks, York, Northampton, Lehigh, Lebanon and Lancaster Counties. He sketches the origin of the custom of two distinct religious denominations sharing a single church building. This is of great value. Rockdale: The growth of an American village in the early Industrial Revolution. By Anthony F. C. Wallace. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978) Illustrations. Charts. Index. 553 p. $17.50. Rockdale is a book that is not only a labor of love but a thoroughly documented chronicle of a small American town and the people who lived and worked there, from 1825 to 1865. Anthony F. C. Wallace terms it "a way of life," and indeed it was. He subtitles it "The Growth of an American Village in the early in Revolution." It is that, emphatically. Mr. Wallace does exactly what he explained on the title page that he intended to do: "An account of the coming of the machines, the making of a new way of life in the mill hamlets, the triumph of evangelical capitalists over socialists and infidels, 62 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine and the transformation of the workers into Christian soldiers in a cottonmanufacturing district in Pennsylvania in the years before and during the Civil War." The table of contents in this book is almost as good as an index, and the appendix, notes, bibliography and index themselves are exhaustive. He has used the 1850 census most skillfully as a tool for a social survey of Rockdale. 11 is not often that we encounter a book as scholarly as this one and at the same time find the writer's style so graceful and enjoyable. One reads with avidity of the doings of Clementine and Harriet Smith "sweetly instructing the mill hands in the Christian faith;" manufacturer John P. Crozer swearing as he fills out his financial reports for the bank; and John S. Phillips driving his horse Mazeppa down the hills and over the bridges on his way to court the DuPont girls on the Brandywine, fifteen miles away. indeed it is true, as Mr. Wallace tells the reader at the beginning, that he can "almost touch the people I have come to know from their letters and diaries and ledgers . . through a golden haze . So it was because he himself lived in Rockdale, that he made his fascinating journey into the past, as he wandered about the old mills and tenements that lined the bottom of the hill, strung out along Chester Creek. For to him the crumbling ruins of the Rockdale, Glen Riddle, Knowlton, West Branch, Lenni, Parkmount and Crozerville mills were haunted by the long-gone oligarchy of Crozer, Lammot, Smith and Riddle, and their widespread connections by marriage with DuPonts, Pooles and Peales. Each hamlet was a kind of patriarchal domain, dominated by the mill owner and/or manufacturer, and teeming with the families of the mill workers. The mill operators were the "society people" of the hamlets; they were for the main part intensely religious, with touches of the "Enlightenment" and Freethinking, it is true. The mill workers were provided with churches that accommodated their varied religious preferences, as Rockdale endeavored to "turn backward infidels into Christian men of enterprise." And so, for about four decades, cotton was spun, woven, bleached and dyed along the creek. Mr. Wallace has some most detailed and informative chapters about the machines themselves —their inventors, their methods of operation, and the buying and selling that were part of the process. These are technical to a degree and round out the chronicle thoroughly. But the book's primary interest to readers of this magazine will be the rich genealogical plums that are lavishly spread throughout this historical delight. The notes and bibliography may well prove invaluable. "Sweet, quiet Rockdale," Sophie DuPont called it. A harmony of rural and industrial life in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is a history-lover's Currier and Ives. Ruth Hutchison