The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry

The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry* WALLACE EVAN DAVIES T HIS is a genealogical essay that teaches a moral lesson (and isn't it time that the Genealogical Magazine published one?)• The moral is a simple one, but one that is often very difficult for all of us amateur genealogists to follow: Don't Believe Everything You See in Print! It will be taught through a personal case study of a line of alleged, and frequently repeated, English royal and noble ancestry. Admittedly the story will be more directly pertinent to those with Nantucket forebears, but I think that the moral is universal in its applicability. It all began with browsing through a book on early Nantucket which my fellow board members of the Genealogical Society had presented to me after I had been the speaker at the Society's Annual Meeting in 1964. In it I noticed several references to an ancestor of mine named William Gayer (c. 1640-1710) to whom I had never paid very much attention, probably because, although he has innumerable descendants all over the United States, he has none in the male line, so that the Gayer name itself has died out and therefore is seldom encountered in our country's annals.' This time I was struck by a comment that William Gayer was "one of the best educated of his generation on Nantucket, descended from a well-born Puritan family," without any specific evidence being given to support the statement.' But this also rang a faint bell in the back of my mind that there had been something to this effect in the genealogical records compiled by my late mother, Daisy (Hitch) Davies, so I dug them out to see what was there. I found listed a long pedigree for William Gayer allegedly going right back to King Edward I (1239-1307). Edward's daughter Elizabeth (1282Based on the talk entitled "Pitfalls of English Ancestry" given before the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania on 23 February 1971. William Gayer, Jr. (1677-1712), the only son of William's marriage to Dorcas Starbuck, died in England without issue. His sisters, Darnaris Gayer (1673-1764), who married Nathaniel Coffin, and Dorcas Gayer (1675-1747), who married Jethro Starbuck, became the progenitors of a prolific progeny. Dorcas and Jethro were first cousins, and Jethro in turn was Nathaniel's first cousin. This somewhat inbred situation explains why nearly all persons of Nantucket ancestry are related to each other and therefore frequently descend from William Gayer. His most famous Philadelphia descendant was Lucretia (Coffin) Mott, abolitionist and women's rights leader. The best summary of Gayer's career and of his offspring is Henry Howard Worth, "William Gayer and His Descendants", Proceedings of the Nantucket Historical Association, 1922 (Nantucket, Mass.), 38 - 47. 2 Florence Bennett Anderson, A Grandfather for Benjamin Franklin (Boston, 1940), 356- 14 The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 15 1316) in 1302 had married Humphrey de Bohun (1276-1321/2), Earl of Hereford, one of the leaders of the barons who forced the monarch to confirm Magna Carta and who once refused to lead troops for the King into an expedition in France (there is a story that in a passion the King exclaimed, "Sir Earl, by God you shall either go or hang," to which Humphrey replied, "By God, Sir King, I will neither go nor hang")." Then in 1325, Humphrey de Bohun's daughter Margaret (d. 1392), married Hugh (1303-1377), the head of the noble Courtenay family, who was the Earl of Devon, and from them the line went through several Courtenays who were the knights of Powderham Castle in Devon, outside Exeter, until sometime around 1500, Alice Courtenay, daughter of a younger son, married Reginald Gayer (d. c. 1519), a Cornish lawyer. Their son, John Gayer, a member of Parliament in 1553, 1557 and 1571, was the ancestor of several generations of Gayers who were minor gentry in St. Keverne, Cornwall. In the late 16th century the last of these Gayers, another John (d. c. 1594), moved to Plymouth, married in 1583 into the famous Trelawney family, became a prominent merchant and served as Lord Mayor. His fourth son, Humphrey Gayer (d. post 1594), also a Plymouth merchant, was the father of the William Gayer who emigrated to Nantucket. All of this was tremendously impressive, with the name of each generation specifically given, and even an occasional date. The only question was: how true was it? As a professional historian, I am always a little dubious about all American claims to English royal and aristocratic ancestry. Also I noticed in this pedigree that my mother had found somewhere the statement that William Gayer's brother was Sir John Gayer (d. 1711?), Governor of Bombay. Could I really have had an immigrant ancestor whose brother was a knight and a colonial governor? Somehow I found it hard to believe. But, I thought, if there really was a Sir John Gayer who was Governor of Bombay, then he ought to have been prominent enough to have a biographical Sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography, the standard scholarly multi-volume work which is the British counterpart of our Dictionary of American Biography (of course the British, quite correctly, would put this the other way around). Since this set is readily available in any major library, it was easy to check this quickly. And sure enough, there was an account of Sir John Gayer, his services to the East India Company, his being knighted in 1693, his career as Governor of Bombay after 1693, and his several years "If we are to believe the account by the 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, in The History of England (New York, n.d.), II, 114, perhaps not the most modern 01 reliable scholarly authority. 16 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine of imprisonment by the Indians at Surat.' I even found a story that he had insisted his predecessor's niece marry his son- Instead, she secretly married someone else, but, since this was without the Governor's consent, the union was not recognized and the Governor transferred her to his son anyway. Then the young husband left for China, the wife had an affair with a schoolmaster named Coleman, but Lady Gayer discovered it and the unfortunate Coleman was sent back to England in chains." Eventually I learned also of Sir John's death as a prisoner from injuries suffered bravely trying to repel a French attack upon the ship on which he was returning to England after his release (the War of the Spanish Succession was going on at this time).' There was also a British traveller's admiring account of Lady Gayer's tomb at Mendham's Point, near Bombay: ' It is a noble structure and takes up near a hundred foot square, having four gates and a handsome court before you enter the tomb, to which you ascend by steps. It is a hollow square within, the outside being emboss'd with pillars and cornish work, the top covered with a cone surmounted with a pyramid and looks white as alabaster. By this time the resting place of the first Lady Gayer (or Aunt Priscilla, as I soon came to think of her ) had assumed in my mind the magnificence and the beauty of the Taj Mahal. Alas for human vanity, the monument was razed in 1762. That eliminated a possible pilgrimage, but it certainly saved a lot of money. Investigation down further by-paths led to the re-marriage of Mary, the widowed second Lady Gayer, to Archibald Hutcheson, AttorneyGeneral of the Leeward Islands 1688 - 1702, M.1'. for Hastings 1713-1727, Fellow of the Royal Society and author of a number of rather dull pamphlets on financial questions, but it did seem difficult to make much out of the see"Sir John Gayer (d. 17117)," Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). XXI (London, 18901, 91-93. Philip Anderson, The English in We.stern India (Bombay, 1854), 130. 1, For Sir John's career, see Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword (London, 1903), II. 46; Sit Cornelius Neale Dalton, The Life of Thomas Pitt (Cambridge, 1915), 424; Sir William Hunter, A History of British India (London, 1900 - 1919), II, 375: Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and HD Times (London, 1918), 48-49, 190-191, 220-223, 260, 295'297. The fullest account of him, on which the DNB article drew heavily, is Sir Henry Yule, ed., Diary of William Hedges, Hakluyt Society Publications, LXXIV, LXXV and LXVIII (London, 188718891 I, 65; II, lxvii-cxii, cxxxvii ,c1v; III, Ix, lxiii. 7 John Burnell, Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne, Hakluyt Society Publications, 2nd Series, LXXII (London, 1933), 26. a The DNB did not know thp first name of Sir John's first wife, referring to her simply as a Miss Harper, but their marriage record in London in 1672 shows that she was Priscilla Harper The Registers of Christenings MaDiages and Burials of the Parish of All Hallows Londe*, Wall 1559 to 1675 (London, 18781, 445, The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 17 ond husband of the widow of a remote great-uncle.' But, as we shall see, sometimes we have to make do with what we have. The ONE article was the first indication that maybe there was something to the distinguished lineage after all. To be sure, it did not say specifically that Sir John had had a brother William on Nantucket, and I knew that many persons have claimed famous individuals as close relatives of immigrant ancestors on no better basis than similarity of surname, but it did say that Sir John was the son of the same Humphrey Gayer who was supposedly also William's father. Furthermore, although my mother was not given to the full and accurate documentation that would enable her to publish in this journal, she did mention an article that had appeared in the New-England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1877. This, of course, was easy enough to locate on the shelves of the main reading room of the Historical Society. Included in this article on William Gayer and his immediate family was a letter to William from his mother, Jane Gayer, in England referring to "your Brother S": John," and also the will of Sir John Gayer himself, drawn up at Bombay Castle just before he started on his final ill-fated voyage. In this will Sir John left "Unto my Brother William Gayer, of the Island of Nantucket, one Hundred Pounds Sterling." " This was certainly conclusive, and thus it turned out that I had been unduly suspicious that I couldn't have an ancestor whose brother was a knight and a colonial governor. It was true. Moreover, the Dictionary of National Biography article mentioned that Sir John Gayer was not only the son of Humphrey Gayer but was also the nephew of another Sir John Gayer, a wealthy merchant who made a great fortune in the East India Company, was knighted in 1671, was Lord Mayor of London in 1646 and 1647, was imprisoned in 1648 for a while in the Tower of London, and left a legacy for an annual "Lion Sermon" at the church of St. Katharine Cree in London to commemorate his escape from a lion in Arabia, a sermon that continued down practically to the present time. The DNB also stated that he was the son of John Gayer (d. 1649), Lord Allegations for Marriage Licenses issued by the Bishop of London 1611-1828, Hadrian Society Publications, XXVI (London, 1887), 339; Musgrave's Obituary Prior to 1800, Harleian Society Publications, XLIVXLVIII (London, 1899-1901), III, 18, 287; "The Chronological Diary for the Year 1727," in Historical Register, (London, 1727)4 XII, 12; Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons 1715'1754 (New York, 1970), 163-164; J. Manwaring Barnes, Historic Plantings (Hastings, 1955), 48-49. William C. Folger, 'The Gayer Family," New-England Historic and Genealogical Register, XXI (July, 1877), 297-302. Folger, a descendant of William Gayer, apparently owned or had access to various Gayer family papers. 18 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine Mayor of Plymouth, who descended from an old Cornish family of St. Keverne" Further investigation disclosed that this Sir John's mother, Margaret Trelawney, was a relative of the celebrated Elizabethan sea-dog, Sir John Hawkins, and an aunt of a royalist member of Parliament, Robert Trelawney, who at one time had the grant of much of what is now Maine.' His sons, first John (whose widow then married the Lord Berkeley for whom Berkeley Square is named and figures prominently in John Evelyn's diary)," and Sir Robert (knighted after the Restoration), from the late 1650's on owned the estate of Stoke Poges which in the 18th century passed into the hands of the Penns, a particularly interesting connection to present-day Philadelphians. An ardent Stuart supporter who married the sister of the Jacobite Earl of Ailesbury, Sir Robert once refused William III admission to his house despite the pleas of his wife on bended knee. He also presented the silver plate to St. James, Piccadilly, the beautifully restored Wren church so familiar to many tourists as they stroll from Piccadilly Circus to the Burlington Arcade." This all illustrated very graphically how the wealthy merchants of one generation became the gentlemen of the next. Thus everything so far checked with the alleged pedigree in my mother's records, with even more splendid ramifications than she had ever suspected, and it looked as though I had vastly under-rated my aristocratic antecedents. I was simply delighted, and began acting a shade condescendingly toward those of more common clay. Nevertheless, I decided to see how much of it really could be documented. There could be two ways of trying to do this. One would be to start with William Gayer and to work backward, which I felt would be harder because his immediate ancestors were the least prominent in "See "Sir John Gayer (d. I649)" in DNB. XXI, 91-92, cited in Note 41 51 1. L. Vivian, ed., The Visitations of Cornwall (Exeter, 1887), 476; James A. Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth (London, 1949), 18-20; James Phinney Baxter, ed., Documentary History of the State of Maine. Vol. !IL containing The Trehomey Papers (Portland, 1884), passim. J.j, G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage (London, 1910-1959), II, 147-148; Sir Bernard Burke, A Genealogical History of the Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire (London, 1883), 46-47; E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1955), II, 279; III, 436, 625; IV, 381-382, 397; Walter George Hiscock, John Evelyn and Mrs. Godolphin (London, 1951), 42-43. An Historical and Descriptive Account of Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire (London, 1813), 20-22; George Lipscomb, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham (London, 1847), III, 554; Howard Malcolm Jenkins, The Family of William Penn (Philadelphia, 1899); William Page, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Buckingham (London, 1905-1927), III, 303, 306-307; Diary of John Evelyn, IV. 397, cited in Note 13; Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham. London Past and Present (London, 1891) II, 297.. The Case of the Van;shing Ancestry 19 the line. The other would be to start with Edward I and work down, since the first few generations would be the sort of people whose identity could be easily established. So this is what I did, and for a while everything was easy. Cokayne's Complete Peerage gave full information about Edward I's daughter who married Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and about their daughter Margaret who married the Courtenay who was Earl of Devon. Burke's and Debrett's Peerages supplied data about the several generations of Courtenay knights at Powderham Castle, which ordinarily they would not have done, but it turned out that some centuries after the senior line of Earls of Devon died out, in what Cokayne called "an astonishing decision," the title was revived for the descendants of this junior line so that therefore its full lineage was recorded." Along the way I discovered an Archbishop of Canterbury and a couple of prominent medieval bishops among the collaterals." Eventually all the earlier part of the pedigree through the Courtenays was established. But the more difficult part was yet to come. Had Alice Courtenay indeed married Reginald Gayer and could a direct line be proved from them down to William Gayer a century and a half later? Fortunately the DNB articles on the two Sir John Gayers had given as a reference for their ancestry Vivian's Visitations of Cornwall. At that point I must confess that I had no idea what the Visitations of Cornwall were, but I soon found out. In the 16th and 17th centuries the College of Heralds made "Visitations" to all the counties of England to check whether families claiming coats of arms could actually prove their right to them. This meant that claimants had to produce their pedigrees, and the records of the ones that were approved ( though not always reliably) were then sent back to London." In the late 19th century, the manuscripts of these heraldic visitations were at last printed, and I discovered in the excellent English history section of the Historical Society's stacks the Visitations of Cornwall to which the DNB had referred but which not even the University of Pennsylvania library possessed. In it was a Gayer pedigree, beginning with the Alice Courtenay who married Reginald Gayer and going right down through their son who was a member of .Cokayne, Complete Peerage, IV, 324-332, 335; Peter Townend, ed., Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (London, 1970), 791-793; P. W Montague-Smith, ed., Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knighthood and Companionage (Kingston upon Thames, 1967), 354. For Edward Courtenay (d. 1509), second son of Sir William Courtenay of Powderham Castle and father of Alice Courtenay, see Sir Bernard Burke, The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales (London, 1884), 235; Joseph Polsue, A Complete Parochial History of the County of Cornwall (Truro, 1867-1872), II, 398-401. IV, 1264-1272. al Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 15501641 (London, Oxford and New York, 1967). 38-39. 20 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine Parliament and the several generations at St. Keverne to the John who moved to Plymouth and became Lord Mayor there, his son Humphrey and his grandson, the Governor of Bombay," whose will established that William Gayer of Nantucket was his brother and therefore also a son of Humphrey. And then, after I had laboriously worked this all out, I discovered that I could have found all of this noble and royal ancestry of William Gayer written up again and again in the volumes entitled Living Descendants of Blood Royal, edited by the very distinguished Boston genealogist, the late Arthur Adams, in collaboration with Howard Horace, Count d'Angerville. They showed how many American families with Nantucket forebears could claim this lineage and furthermore gave a number of references to document its validity." They supplied this proof because they had been "appalled to find that so many of the pedigrees sent to us in all good faith and full confidence simply would not bear critical examination." The reason, they felt all too correctly, was that many American genealogists " lost all critical sense and judgment when they crossed the Atlantic and had to deal with records centuries old. . . . They found in the 'Visitations' and county histories pedigrees of families bearing the same names. So misled partly by wishful thinking, often ludicrous identifications were made by finding persons of the names of their ancestors in Visitations and other pedigrees, and assuming that identity of name implied identity of persons. The results were pedigrees that lacked authenticity when one applied the critical tests of chronology and demanded record proof for each material identification made. In their volumes, the editors declared reassuringly, "each pedigree has been rigorously scrutinized for accuracy prior to publication. As a result, the Editors are able to present a unique assembly of American Families who are, without doubt LIVING DESCENDANTS OF BLOOD ROYAL." So you see, there it had been in print all the time, with proof. And if a Boston Adams and a French count insisted that I was descended from royalty and nobility, who was I to deny my rightful heritage? Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had always known that I was an aristocrat. After all, blood will tell. This also led to reading much more about Cornwall than I had ever expected to do, especially the fascinating book Tudor Cornwall by A. L. Rowse, 0, Visitations of Cornwall, 172-173, cited 41 Note 12. Arthur Adams and Count d'Angerville, Living Descendants of Blood Royal (London, 1959-1964), I, 52-56; 247-250 and passim; III, 48-51, 523-526 and passim. 00 Ibid.. 1, vii-viii. Ibid., The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 21 the distinguished Cornish historian who gave such a delightful talk to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania a few years ago. He had considerable detail about the activities, always interesting though not always exemplary, of prominent families such as the Treffrys and the Killigrews into which the Gayers had married. He even had some references to the Gayers of St. Keverne as well known members of the Cornish gentry in the 16th century. Especially intriguing was the story of Christian Gayer, the lovely daughter of one of these Gayer ancestors, whose virtues were so famed that finally one man even became engaged to her without asking for a dowry. But then he began to hear stories that she was not quite so virtuous as he had supposed. Indeed, there were even stories that she had had an illegitimate child, and finally there even came reports that the child's father was her own father. The engagement was broken off. This became the top scandal in Cornwall in 1577; Christian's life was ruined and she never married, though to this day no one knows whether there really was any basis to this gossip." Some people might once have found such a discovery a bit disconcerting, but surely not in this permissive age. I was merely fascinated with this example of real aristocratic inbreeding. And what a role it would have made for Lillian Gish in the heyday of her silent screen suffering! But, being a historian, I still wanted everything really pinned down and documented. Therefore I began to look more carefully at the references given in Adams and d'Angerville, and to check them myself to see if they really proved what they were supposed to prove. That was my undoing. When I looked more critically at the Gayer pedigree in the printed Visitations of Cornwall for 1573, which both the Dictionary of National Biography and Messrs. Adams and d'Angerville had accepted without question as authoritative documentation, I realized that obviously a lineage submitted in 1573 could not have included descendants down into the mid-17th century and beyond. Therefore the part which was the vital connection simply could not have been part of the original document. What had happened, it soon became evident, was that when these Visitations were at last printed in the late 19th century, the editor had expanded the pedigrees in them and brought them down to date as far as possible. Indeed, close scrutiny showed that he had been scrupulously careful to indicate where this had occurred. Only the names in italics were those in the original manuscript, and any additional names had been derived from other sources. But this then turned out to mean that the original document had not had In it the marriage of Alice Courtenay to Reginald Gayer, which was absolutely A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (London, 1941), 444-446) 22 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine essential to have the royal and noble ancestry. Neither had it claimed that the John Gayer who was a member of Parliament was their son. The 1573 Visitation simply began with the later individual without saying anything about his parentage or public service. Moreover, it was not in the original document that the John Gayer who became Lord Mayor of Plymouth was a son of the family in St. Keverne. The editor of the Visitation did have a footnote saying where he had secured all this additional information. It was not from any parish registers or tombstones or wills or deeds, which would have been contemporary source material, but instead it all came from a history of the Gayer family published in 1870 by the Rev. Arthur Gayer, an Anglican clergyman in Ireland." This was the basic source for the amplified pedigree in the Visitations, it was what the Dictionary of National Biography had used for its account of the Gayer ancestry, and it was what Adams and d'Angerville gave as a reference along with other works which, however, turned out also to be based on the Rev. Mr. Gayer. In other words, all the alleged proof of the Gayer ancestry was no better than this one Victorian family history. And that depended on how carefully this gentleman had documented his statements. True, he claimed that his facts were "Compiled from Authentic Sources," but the essential thing was to examine them critically and see whether they really did prove what he said they did. The first task was to locate this book. Not surprisingly, the Historical Society does not have a copy of this obscure genealogy published by the author himself a century ago in England in a limited edition. According to the Union Library Catalogue of the Philadelphia area, that indispensable aid in the University of Pennsylvania Library, there isn't even a copy anywhere in the neighborhood. On the other hand, since my mother's account of the Gayer family indicated that she had seen the book, it surely was available in the New York Public Library, where she had done nearly all her research. So, starting off to visit a fourth cousin in the Berkshires for a summer weekend (one of the dividends in knowing who your relatives are), I left early enough to have time to seek Mr. Gayer's book in the New York Public. I did find it there, just as I had expected, and in it were all the statements on which all the other accounts had clearly been based. I looked anxiously for the author's documentation, but he simply didn't have any. There was nothing to support such crucial statements as that Alice Courtenay had married Reginald Gayer, or that their son was a member of Parliament, or that the 53 Arthur Edward Gayer, Memoirs of the Family of Gayer Compiled from Authentic sagtolta (London, 1870)• The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 23 John Gayer who became Lord Mayor of Plymouth really was a scion of the St. Keverne family, or that Sir John Gayer who became Governor of Bombay was the son of Humphrey Gayer, and there was no mention of a William Gayer at all. He simply made a number of flat statements without having any proof for them. The nearest to it was when he pointed out that Sir John Gayer, the Lord Mayor of London, did mention in his will his nephew John, son of his brother Humphrey." But Mr. Gayer assumed that this John, then a young boy under age, was the same Sir John Gayer who later became Governor of Bombay simply because they had the same name and were roughly contemporaries. All this was extremely unnerving, and it was quite clear that much more digging was going to be required. Not only did the Gayer volume lack documentation, but other difficulties began to emerge- Between the alleged marriage of Alice Courtenay to Reginald Gayer and the appearance of John Gayer as Lord Mayor of Plymouth a century later there were simply too many generations — in fact, six of them. As far as I could estimate, if in every generation marriage had taken place at the age of twenty, even so at best the Lord Mayor would still have been only about thirteen years old when he married Margaret Trelawney in 1583, one date that was fixed by the parish register of St. Andrew's in Plymouth." It just did not seem right, and simply would not work out no matter how much I tried. Then a more serious problem began to nag me. Up to this point, although I was growing very dubious about the alleged Courtenay ancestry that was supposed to link the Gayers to royalty, and was even uncertain that the Plymouth Gayers descended from the St. Keverne ones in the way claimed, I had never questioned the Dictionary of National Biography when it said that the Sir John Gayer who became Governor of Bombay was the nephew of the Lord Mayor of London and grandson of the Lord Mayor of Plymouth of the same name. I assumed that the DNB had the same scholarly accuracy as the DAB when it made statements about immediate family background; it is, after all, the standard English biographical reference work. But the will of the Governor of Bombay mentioned several siblings: his brother William, an unnamed deceased brother, and sisters Jane, Joan and Elizabeth, along with the sisters' married names, Elizabeth's being Matthews." These presumably were also children of Humphrey Gayer of Plymouth. But Ibid., 30. The Register of Baptisms. Marriages and Burials of the Parish of St. Andrew's Plymouth, Co. Devon, Devon and Cornwall Record Society (Exeter, 1954), 8. Folger. "Gayer Family," 300-301, cited in Note 10. 24 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine the Visitations of Cornwall said that Humphrey's children, in addition to John, were Alice, Mary and Elizabeth. There was no William, there was no other son, there was no Jane or Joan and, while there was an Elizabeth, she had married a man named Calmady and could not have married Matthews as a second husband because she died before Calmady did." Furthermore, Humphrey's daughters all married into the Cornish gentry and could easily be traced. Nowhere could I find any mention of the families that the Governor's sisters had married into, suggesting that they were of a much more obscure social status. In addition, the will mentioned cousins named Throgmorton, Rither, Phrip, Hole and Dale, names which did not appear among any of Humphrey Gayer's relatives. It became forced upon my unwilling consciousness that obviously these were two different families, and that it was highly unlikely that William Gayer and his brothers and sisters were the children of Humphrey Gayer, or had any of his alleged ancestry. By this time, combing the English history section of the Historical Society's stacks for every bit of evidence that I could find, I decided to go through all the volumes of the Devon and Cornwall Record Society's Notes and Queries. There I eventually stumbled onto an announcement, in the late 1940's, that a gentleman named Robert Gayre was seeking information on the Gayer family of that area since he was preparing a family history." Of course I immediately wondered whether he had ever completed this project and what he might have found having the advantage of unpublished English documents unavailable on this side of the ocean. In the printed catalogue of the British Museum I discovered that Robert Gayre of Gayre and Nigg (along with R. L. Gair ) had indeed published four volumes called Gayre's Book.. But once again — could a copy be located in the United States? The Union Catalogue showed that there was not any in metropolitan Philadelphia. But the printed Library of Congress National Union Catalogue showed that there were two repositories in the country which had it, the Newberry Library in Chicago, which is not very accessible to us here, and the New York Public So it was back to New York City again (at least the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad was benefiting from this research). There were the four volumes, which proved to be extremely discursive and at times almost incoherently organized. It was in no sense a genealogy as we would consider that one ought to be, giving all the known members of a family in a systematic fashion, sa Vivian, Visitations of Cornwall, 173, cited in Note 12. R. Gayre, "Gayre Family" Devon and Cornwall Notes & Queries, XXIII (October, 1948), 266-267. Robert Gayer of Gayre and Nigg and R. L. Gair, Gayre's Book: Being a History of the Family of Gayre (London, 1948 - 1959). The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 25 but it certainly was full of all sorts of interesting odds and ends of information about the Gayers. Much of it was based on evidence from heraldry, on which Mr. Gayre has written extensively, but about which I am not qualified to judge, and could not tell how much to accept conclusions drawn from it. Certainly it is a technique of which most Americans are not capable. Thus Mr. Gayre pointed out that a baptismal font in St. Katharine Cree's, London, bearing the Gayer coat of arms, must have been given by Humphrey Gayer because the arms included a swallow, the emblem of a fourth son, which indeed he was, and that this would also explain why he had named a ship he owned The Swallow.. But Mr. Gayre did not confine himself to this more esoteric methodology. As I had hoped, he also worked quite thoroughly in wills and deeds which had never been published, and were therefore unknown to American researchers. When at last I worked my way into Volume IV, I found Mr. Gayre's unqualified conclusion that the Rev. Mr. Gayer's family history was simply the false product of wishful thinking. Yet the one thing about which I had originally been the most dubious turned out to be true after all. Alice Courtenay had married a Reginald Gayer, but it was a different Reginald Gayer, a grandson of an earlier Reginald, so that the Gayer line in Cornwall, which came through the younger Reginald's brother, did not go back to royalty at all. Farewell to Edward I, farewell to Humphrey de Bohun, farewell to the noble Courtenays! Moreover, as my efforts to create a coherent chronology had already suggested, Mr. Gayre showed how the Rev. Mr. Gayer had mixed up the generations in Cornwall in hopeless confusion. The member of Parliament was not the John that he had claimed, but instead his grandson of the same name (the father of the hapless Christian, in fact)." But more important, Mr. Gayre proved that his clerical predecessor had been "entirely erroneous" as to the parentage of the John Gayer who became Lord Mayor of Plymouth. No one knows who his parents were, but certainly he was not a son of the St. Keverne family. The John in that family did not move to Plymouth, but stayed in Cornwall, had a quite different wife named Elizabeth Cade, and had quite different children. 5° Farewell to John the M.P., farewell to St. Keverne, farewell to the unfortunate Christian Gayer! The National Union Catalog. A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries, 1958-1962 (New York, 1963), XVI, 304. Gayre and Gain Gayre's Book, IV, 47-49, cited above. For Humphrey Gayer's ownership of The Swallow, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series 1629-1631 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967), 152. .Gayre and Gain Gayre's Book, III, 26, cited above 05 Ibid., III, 30- 26 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine And finally, the Sir John Gayer who became Governor of Bombay and his brother William were not the children of Humphrey Gayer, or nephews of the Lord Mayor of London, for exactly the reasons that I had already surmised. As Mr. Gayre put it, there were "no grounds whatsoever" for thinking they were." He had examined the will of Robert Gayer, another brother of Humphrey and the Lord Mayor of London, who was a London "marchant, citizen and fishmonger," had also been active in the East India Company, had no children of his own, and therefore named all of his brothers' children in his will. Humphrey's children did not include any William or any of the sisters mentioned by the Governor of Bombay- Furthermore, his nephew John was said to be "the only sonne of my late fourth brother Humphrey Gayer," thus completely eliminating William." Mr. Gayre concluded that the parentage of the Governor and his brother William was completely unknown, even though they did come from Plymouth and very probably were distantly related in some way to the wealthy merchant family there.' Farewell to the Trelawneys, farewell to the Lord Mayor of London, farewell to Wirkeley Square, farewell to Stoke Poges! This fourth volume appeared in the same year as Adams' and d'Angerville's first volume, so perhaps they could not be expected to have read it before the publication of their own work, but it was certainly available before they repeated the false Gayer lineage in their next volume. Seldom has anyone's aristocratic pretensions been deflated so quickly and thoroughly. I went up to New York in the morning, still hoping that I was filled with blue blood, and I came back a complete plebian. Yet even Mr- Gayre did not nail down the falsity of the alleged Gayer pedigree as thoroughly as he might have done. He based his conclusions about Humphrey Gayer's children on the indirect evidence of his brother's will. But why not use Humphrey's own will? By this time I had discovered, by going through the index to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury's acts of probate, that it was in existence in London.' This would be the real clinching evidence, even though I now knew what it would be. I couldn't go off to London myself immediately, but I did the next best thing. Early in January, 1971, I wrote to my London genealogist (don't we all have one?), an estimable lady named Miss Mary Flower, who had been recommended to me .3 Ibid., IV, 62. Ibid., IV, 31. .Ibid., IV, 62, 64. ...John Matthews and George F. Matthews, Year Books of Probates. Abstracts of Probate Acts in the Prerogative Court of CanterbBM IV (London, 1906). 215. The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 27 originally by our former board member, Francis James Dallett, and asked for an abstract of Humphrey's 1647 will in time for the talk I was scheduled to give to the Genealogical Society on 25 February 1971. At this point there came a lengthy British mail strike, and I realized that this was one cause that was lost. But, three days before the meeting, in the best "Perils of Pauline" cliffhanger tradition, there came a letter from London telling me exactly what I wanted. Anxious for me to have the data in time for the talk, the resourceful Miss Flower had decided to try a special courier service that she had seen advertised in a newspaper. The letter was carried to Iceland, and then sent air mail from there, Humphrey's will said exactly what I knew it would. He mentioned a minor son John and daughters Elizabeth, Margaret, Alice, Mary and Anne, but no William, no additional brother and no Jane or Joan." While I was at it, I also had had Miss Flower look up another will that I had discovered in the same index, that of a Richard Gayer, a mariner who had died in Bombay Road in the East Indies in 1690, since I had a hunch that he was probably the unnamed brother of William and Sir John. And indeed he almost certainly was, I can report somewhat smugly, since the will turned out to be witnessed by Sir John (before he was knighted) and by his first wife, Priscilla. Once more, however, Richard, though a brother of William and Sir John, was obviously no child of Humphrey." But if William, Sir John and Richard were not the sons of Humphrey, whose sons were they? Poking around in the extensive English local history material in the stacks of the Historical Society, I discovered some printed but unbound records of St. Andrew's Church in Plymouth, but they stopped short of the years when William and Sir John would have been born or their parents married. It was too much to ask the estimable Miss Flower to travel all the way from London to Plymouth to examine the original register for me. The only thing left was to go to Plymouth myself, since I was planning a summer trip to England the following year anyway. In London I visited St. Katharine Cree to see for myself the swallow in the Gayer coat of arms on the baptismal font, presumably given by Humphrey Gayer, as well as the more recent tablet to his brother the Lord Mayor. I also inspected the plaque commemorating Sir Robert Gayer in St. James, Piccadilly. By now they seemed like such old friends that I could not abandon them. And, since by now I did have to make do with what little was left, I 87 Abstract of will of Humfrey Gayer, 18 March 1647, Prob- 11/201, 171 Fines, according to Mary Flower to Wallace Evan Davies, 6 February 1971. 38 Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills 1686 - 1693 (London, 1958), 109. Abstract of nuncupative will of Richard Gayer, 27 July 1690, Prob. 11/406. 28 The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine even went to Hastings to see the memorial to Archibald Hutcheson in St. Clement's there. The second husbands of the widows of remote great uncles, I realized, were not to be sniffed at. And then, at the end of May, 1972, I was off to Devonshire on the crack "Cornish Riviera," with an excellent but wistful view of the Courtenays' Powderham Castle shortly after the train left Exeter. After a respectful inspection of St. Andrew's itself, badly bombed in World War II but handsomely restored, I proceeded to Plymouth's Central Library. The staff in the local history room at once commented on what an important merchant family the Gayers had once been. but my customary candor required me to dispel Immediately any delusions that I could claim any such distinguished ancestry. The library proved to have a typewritten card index of all the names in the parish register through 1642. There was the marriage record of a William Gayer to Joane Lane on June 30, 1637; he was probably the same William Gayer who, according to the printed register, was baptized in 1618 as the son of an older William Gayer. And this couple had a son William, baptized September 16, 1638, and another son John, baptized October 23, 1639." Eureka! But once more I should have stopped when I was ahead. Alas, the card file also revealed that both these sons had died as infants. 0' So I was right back where I had started. By now I was positive that the couple had subsequent sons who were given the same names, but the card file stopped in 1642. At this point, to my delighted astonishment, the original register itself was brought out for me to continue my search. I was able to see for myself the actual entry of William Gayer's marriage in 1637." 1 Then came yet another frustration. I simply could not decipher the 17th century handwriting. The later baptismal records were there before my very eyes, but they might as well have been in Sanskrit. Through the courtesy of the City Librarian, Mr. W. Best Harris, I secured the name of a gentleman, Mr. C. A. Broomfield of Salcombe, Devon, who did have the requisite skill. His prompt report, however, once again was negative. There were no further entries after 1642 of children of William and Joane Gayer, nor did any appear in the register of the adjacent Charles Parish." Whether the family may have moved elsewhere during the vicissitudes of the Civil War is unknown. Card Index to Register of St. Andrew's, Plymouth, in the Central Library, Plymouth, Devon, England. cc William was buried 1 November 1638, and John on 5 April 1642. ui Register of Baptisms Marriages Burials 1618-1653. Parish Church of St. Andrew, Plymouth, Central Library, Plymouth. 42 C. A. Broomfield to Wallace Evan Davies, 25 August 1972- The Case of the Vanishing Ancestry 29 But even so, although William Gayer of Nantucket and Governor Sir John Gayer of Bombay really were brothers, they were not the sons and grandsons of prominent Plymouth merchants or scions of Cornish gentry in St. Keverne, or descendants of the noble Courtenays or remote offspring of King Edward I. Instead, more probably they were the sons and grandsons of the two William Gayers who are mentioned in the Plymouth town records as stone masons, one in the early 1600's and the other in the 1640's, whose antecedents are quite unknown but which presumably were quite humble." I could only console myself that honest labor in a skilled craft is just as honorable as coronets, armorial bearings and Lord Mayors. And so, despite the Rev. Mr. Gayer's family history, the Visitations of Cornwall, the Dictionary of National Biography and Living Descendants of Blood Royal, Don't Believe Everything You See in Print! Blue blood! Blue blood! Of what avail art thou To serve us now, Though dating from the Flood, Blue blood? ah, blue blood. W. S. Gilbert, lolant he. SR. N. Worthy, Calendar of the Plymouth Municipal Records (Plymouth, 1893), 163. Edwin Welch, ed.. Plymouth Building Accounts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Torquay, 1967), 20. 29, 34-35, 41, 44, 49-50, 54-58, 64, 79, 93, 98. Information Wanted Mrs. Martha Carnahan Gardner, 820 Florida, SE., Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108, is seeking information on the ancestors and descendants of ADAM CARNAHAN, b. 1743; d. 1815; m. SARAH KENNEDAY; Rev. War Cumberland Co., Pa. Also his brother DAVID CARNAHAN, b. 17451 d. 1825; m. 1st ELIZABETH KERR; 2nd JANE HUTCHISON. Both moved from Cumberland Co., Pa. to Westmoreland Co., Pa. about 1780. Interested in all CARNAHANS of Chester, Lancaster, Cumberlaad & York Cos., Ps.