Book Reviews

Book Reviews The Gareschi, De Bandsty, and Des Chapelles Families: History and Genealogy. By Dorothy Garesche Holland. (St. Louis, 1963. iii, 299 p. Charts, illustrations, bibliography, index. $10.00.) The interest of a genealogy to the members of a family is obvious but a really good family book is more than a compilation of names and dates, births, marriages, and deaths: it should recreate the persons gathered within its covers. Dorothy Garesche Holland's The Garesche, De Baxidny, and Des Chapelles Families: History and Genealogy is certainly in the latter class. Mrs. Holland has devoted nearly seventy close-packed pages to the listing of generations, the establishment of relationships, from the seventeenth century until the present day. She has had a wealth of family papers to draw upon, has spent years in search• ing inquiry with many of her cousins, and has examined thoroughly all pertinent published material so that her record is as complete and as accurate as one can hope to find in this most difficult kind of compilation. This accounting of persons she has embellished with more than seventy pictures of f arruly faces and places, and to make easily accessible the information with which her book is crowded, she has provided a twenty-six page index, and has supplied two charts and a bibliography of the printed and manuscript materials consulted. But all this f cross no more than an appendix to her volume. Having in hand so large a collection of letters, diaries, reminiscences, she has been able to construct a family history which is more than a family book, for it opens vistas of social and cultural life in three countries during four centuries. The story of these families begins in France. Because they were principally mercantile people, they became involved in the West Indies sugar trade and early in the eighteenth century we find them established in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) as merchants and planters. The Negro uprising in 1791 resulted in driving them from the island with many other French families which had been settled m the island from two to five generations. Some of those families -returned to France. Many with royalist sympathies emigrated to Philadelphia and Wilmington, chief gathering places for exiled French in the new republic. Among these were Mrs. Holland's three families, who became allied by marriage or business with the Keatings, the Du Ponceaus, the Du Fonts, and other well known Pennsylvanians. During the next five decades her people (as did others of the exiles) moved west to St. Louis, attracted by its French traditions and connections. Rich and charming in intimate details that should delight all members interested in family roots and in family ways, Mrs. Holland's book is also an epitome of life in the old French part of the island of Santo Domingo, of town and plantation life there in the eighteenth century, and of the disasters and hardships and miseries its people underwent, as well as a fresh and fascinating picture of the new life these families made for themselves in their new country. JOHN FRANCIS MCDERMOTT 144 Book Reviews 14$ Calendar of Sussex County Delaware Probate Records 1680-1800. Compiled by Leon deValinger, Jr (Dover, Del.: Public Archives Commission, State of Delaware, 1964. 397 p. Index. $6.00.) This newest publication of calendared probate records of Delaware residents is a welcome addition to the two previous calendars, issued in 1911, of New Castle County records by the Historical Research Conunission of the Colonial Dames of Delaware, and that in 1944, of Kent County records issued by the Delaware Public Archives Commission. Genealogists and historians now have available to them the basic probate references for the state's three counties. As noted in the preface of this present volume, probate records provide a rich source of information for those seeking genealogical information, or source material for social and economic history in the formative years of the state. Serving as a guide to the probate records in the Delaware Hall of Records at Dover, to the recorded copies in the Sussex County Court House at Georgetown, and to such Sussex County probate records as are in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Arn.201 3 ) , the Calendar frequently provides the researcher with a choice of depository if he wants to examine the complete record for additional information.* It is to be regretted that in this Calendar, as in the 1944 Kent County Calendar, dates which had been written according to the "Quaker method" in the original probate records, have been altered to form a consistent modern method of dating, i. e., 10th month has been changed to December, 1st month to March, etc. As a result, it is impossible for the researcher to determine whether a decedent was Quaker or churchman, and leads to confusion when the date of probate appears to be earlier than the date of writing. In explaining this unnecessary alteration (p. 6) a further confusion is found in the exposition of the Gregorian and "old Augustine (sic) Calendar." The Julian calendar was that which was in use in the English colonies until September 1752, when the Gregorian calendar — the one in use today — went into effect. It seems odd that between 1944, when the identical preface was first published, and 1964, no one ever caught up with this lapse. A further minor criticism relates to the explanation preceding the indexed names. The statement therein is made that an asterisk "before a name" (p. 1 of Index) indicates a decedent. No asterisks precede any names, but do precede page numbers referring to decedents whose wills or administrations are on record on those pages. In spite of these relatively unimportant faults, the Calendar fills a long felt void, and Mr. deValinger and his staff are to be commended on their diligence and persistence in collecting, collating and presenting this most useful work. If only more archival commissions could see their way clear to following the same route so ably outlined by the present volume! HANNAH BENNER ROACH • For a variant transcript of records in Liber A of Susses County Wills and Administrations ( 1681 1751), taken from the Note Book of the late 3. Granville Lech, with numerous supplementary annotations added, the searcher is referred to Volumes XI, XII and XIII of the Publkations of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.