#22 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: Notable Descendants of the Immigrant Stoughton Siblings of Massachusetts
Gary Boyd Roberts
Today and for another week
I shall regale you with some new discoveries about ancestors and kinsmen of my
own that are shared probably by more than 20 million Americans. I have known
since college that I was doubly descended from Samuel Lathrop/Lothrop of
Norwich, Conn., whose father, Reverend John Lothrop, 1584-1653, was a graduate
of Queen’s College, Cambridge, a founder of Barnstable, Mass., and a noted early
New England minister (and my only ancestor treated in both the Dictionary of
American Biography and the Dictionary of National Biography).Samuel’s first wife, the mother of his children, was Elizabeth Scudder, a
sister of John Scudder of Barnstable, and known through the will of an English
divine to be related somehow to the Scudders of Long Island. The new discoveries
and immigrant kinsmen that vastly expand this clan are through Elizabeth
Scudder, and the initial report of these discoveries appeared in the 75th
anniversary issue of The American Genealogist (October 1997) in an
article by Register editor Jane Fletcher Fiske.
Before
moving to these new discoveries I wish to list briefly some descendants of
Samuel and Elizabeth and suggest the extent to which they follow many of the
patterns common to Connecticut families and migrants from the Nutmeg State.
Samuel and Elizabeth’s descendants include two presidents--Grant and FDR;
Benedict Arnold and the wives of two other noted Revolutionary figures
--"signer" Samuel Huntington and General Israel Putnam; various modern political
figures --Thomas Edmund Dewey, the Dulleses, the last two Adlai Ewing Stevensons
(via Bordens), and the wife of Charles Joseph Bonaparte, "Teddy" Roosevelt’s
cabinet minister and Napoleon’s great-nephew; and various "tycoon" families --
the Scribners, publishers, of New York, the Marshall Fields and the chewing-gum
Wrigleys of Chicago, the King-Klebergs of the King Ranch in Texas, Charles
William Post of Post Toasties, and the wives of Levi Z. Leiter of Chicago and
Leland Stanford of California. Boston "Brahmins" among Samuel’s and Elizabeth’s
descendants include the two Oliver Wendell Holmeses and John Lothrop Motley,
whose daughter married British Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir William G.V.
Harcourt. Other British connections include the 1st Marquess Curzon of
Kedleston, Foreign Secretary and Indian Viceroy, son-in-law of Leiter and
father-in-law of Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley: European descendants include
the wife of Czeckoslovakian President Thomas Jan (later Garrigue) Masaryk and
mother of Jan Garrigue Masaryk, Czech Foreign Minister (Charlotte Garrigue,
whose mother was a New England Whiting).
Hollywood figures among
Lathrop/Scudder descendants include Dina Merrill, Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld
and a wife of director Preston Sturges. Mormon descendants include Mary Anne Van
Cott, one of the 16 wives of Brigham Young by whom he left children, 4th
president Wilford Woodruff, and leaders Orson and Parley Parker Pratt, plus
Parley’s great-grandson, political figure George Romney. Later intellectual
figures of Lathrop/Scudder descent include college presidents Daniel Coit Gilman
of Johns Hopkins, Frederick A.P. Barnard of Columbia and Charles Seymour of
Yale, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead of Central Park, poet Hart
Crane, critic William Lyon Phelps, composer Charles Ives, novelist Louis
Auchincloss, Soviet expert George Frost Kennan, and the wives of architect
Richard Morris Hunt, composer Edward Alexander MacDowell, and novelist Robert
Penn Warren, and the husband of anthropologist Ruth Benedict. Lastly among these
Lathrop/Scudder descendants, I wish to mention Serena Alleyne Stanhope
Armstrong-Jones, Viscountess Linley, Princess Margaret’s daughter-in-law and a
"minor royal", whose matrilineal great-grandmother was a Sumner of Boston.
Presidents, some Revolutionary and later political figures, tycoons (in New York
City and the midwest especially), some Boston Brahmin intellectuals, several
British or European figures (including some prime ministers, presidents, or
"royals") and Hollywood and Mormon figures from the West are all expected
descendants of Connecticut or Connecticut Valley pioneers.
Jane Fiske
discovered from Strood, Kent parish registers, the will of Reverend Henry
Scudder, a marriage record of John Scudder and Elizabeth Stoughton, and other
sources, some already published in TAG or in publications of the Scudder
Family Association, that Elizabeth Scudder, wife of Samuel Lathrop, was the
daughter of the above John Scudder and Elizabeth Stoughton, a sister of Thomas
and Israel Stoughton of Dorchester, Mass. John Scudder was a brother of Thomas
Scudder of Salem and an uncle of Thomas Scudder of L.I. I shall cover the
Scudders in my next column. Today, however, I wish to consider the Stoughtons, a
Kentish minor gentry family whose descendants include over 100 major figures in
American or Britsh history . Israel, a commander against the Pequot Indians in
1637, and later a lieutenant colonel in the English Parliamentary army, was a
founder of Dorchester, is treated in the Dictionary of National
Biography (British), and married Elizabeth Knight, an aunt of collegiate
benefactor Elihu Yale. Israel’s eldest brother, Reverend John Stoughton, was a
graduate of Emmanuel College, a London vicar, and a stepfather of noted divine
Ralph Cudworth and of the immigrant James Cudworth of Scituate, Mass. Thomas
Stoughton, younger than John but older than Israel, also came to Dorchester but
moved to Windsor, Ct., and married the widow of Simon Huntington (from whom
descends that noted Conn. family). Israel Stoughton was the father of Acting
Governor William Stoughton, 1631-1701, a graduate of Harvard in 1650 and of New
College, Oxford, in 1653, and chief justice "of oyer and
terminer" during the Salem witchcraft trials, for the cruelty of
which he is often held responsible. William died unmarried but his sister,
Rebecca Stoughton, married William Tailer and was the mother of William Tailer,
Jr., also a colonial governor of Massachusetts, and of Elizabeth Tailer, wife of
fur trader John Nelson, an immigrant of royal descent and a nephew of Acadian
governor Sir Thomas Temple, 1st Bt. Nelson figures in both the Dictionary of
National Biography and the Dictionary of American Biography (as
does William Stoughton) as the chief proponent of his generation for the
expulsion of the French from North America. Elizabeth Stoughton, who died in
Ipswich, Mass., in 1647, sister of Reverend John, Thomas and Israel, married not
only John Scudder, but also Reverend Robert Chamberlain of Strood, and left by
the latter a daughter Joanna, who migrated to Newtown, L.I., and married Richard
Betts. Lastly among these Stoughton siblings was Judith,1599-1639, also of
Dorchester, wife of John Denman and ___ Smead.
Later notable descendants
of the Stoughtons are derived through Mrs. Lathrop, as discussed above; Thomas
Stoughton, Jr., of Windsor, son of Thomas of Dorchester and Windsor; Elizabeth
Tailer and John Nelson, as above; three daughters of Joanna (Chamberlain)
Betts--Joanna, Mary, and Elizabeth, wives, respectively, of another John Scudder
(great nephew of Elizabeth Stoughton’s husband), Joseph Swazey and Joseph
Sackett; and two granddaughters of Judith (Stoughton) Smead -- Judith Smead,
wife of Eliezer Hawks, and Mehitabel Smead, wife of Jermiah Hull and Godfrey
Nims. Before listing these descendants note that those of Thomas, Jr. are
associated with Connecticut; of the Nelsons, with New York City and Brahmin
Boston; of the Scudders, Swazeys, and Sacketts, mostly with Long Island; and of
the Smead sisters, with Deerfield and western Massachusetts. Thomas Stoughton’s
descendants include Walter Loomis Newberry, founder of the Newberry Library in
Chicago; the sisters who married J.D. Rockefeller III and novelist John Phillips
Marquand; and the wife of novelist Louis Bromfield. Elizabeth Stoughton, a
great-great-granddaughter of Thomas, Jr., married Oliver Wolcott, Jr.,
1760-1833, the secretary of the Treasury, governor of Connecticut, and son of
"signer" Oliver Wolcott; among their descendants, via Gibbses, Tuckermans, and
Sedgwicks, was the first wife of architect Eero Saarinen, who built the skating
rink and new colleges at Yale.
A daughter of John Nelson married Robert
Temple and left three sons of interest to us, two of whom married respectively
daughters of Revolutionary statesman James Bowdoin and Governor William Shirley
of Massachusetts. Descendants of interest include Speaker of the House Robert
Charles Winthrop; the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Governor General of
Canada and Viceroy to India; and the second wife of historian and presidential
adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Daughters of the 1st Marquess married a governor
general of Australia and governor of New Zealand and a great-granddaughter of
the 1st Marquess is author (Lady) Caroline Blackwood, whose husbands include the
painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, and the American poet Robert Lowell.
A second daughter of John Nelson and Elizabeth Tailer married Henry Lloyd of the
manor of Queens Village, L.I. Two of their children are ancestors of the wife of
the late McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation; a third, Margaret Lloyd, married
William Henry Smith of St. George’s manor, Brookhaven, L.I. A daughter of these
last married John Aspinwall and was both the great-grandmother of Mrs. James
Renwick, Jr., wife of the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the
Smithsonian, and a great-great grandmother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Joanna Betts and John Scudder were great-grandparents of Sarah Scudder,
wife of New Jersey "signer" John Hart, and Mary Betts and Joseph Swazey were
great-great grandparents of William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under
Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Elizabeth Betts and Joseph Sackett left a large
notable progeny. Two children married Alsops and a daughter married a Moore of
Newtown. Joseph Sackett, Jr., and Hannah Alsop were great-grandparents of
Hamilton Fish, Seward’s successor as Secretary of State. Hamilton’s son was
railroad executive Stuyvesant Fish, whose wife "Mamie" was a leader of Newport
society. Hamilton’s sister, Susan Elizabeth Fish, married Daniel Le Roy, brother
of Mrs. Daniel Webster, and left granddaughters who married George Washington
Vanderbilt of Biltmore and John Nicholas Brown of Providence, head of the family
for whom Brown University is named and grandfather of J. Carter Brown, director
of the National Gallery of Art. Anne Sackett and Benjamin Moore were the
grandparents and great-grandparents of presidents of Columbia and
great-grandparents also of Clement Clarke Moore, Hebrew scholar and author of
"The Night Before Christmas." Abigail Sackett and John Alsop were ancestors of
political columnist Joseph and Stewart Alsop, and grandparents of Mary Alsop,
wife of Federalist statesman Rufus King, 1755-1827. King was the father of
another president of Columbia and the grandfather-in-law of a prime minister of
France. A great-great-granddaughter of King married a son of Comstock Lode
mining tycoon John W. Mackay, and their daughter married the composer Irving
Berlin.
Judith Smead and Eliezur Hawkes are ancestors of film director
Howard Hawkes--whose first wife was a sister of actress Norma Shearer--and his
brother Kenneth, first husband of actress Mary Astor. Mehitable Smead and
Jeremiah Hull had a daughter Elizabeth who married John Nims, her stepbrother;
among their descendants are actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Mehitable Smead
and Godfrey Nims, her second husband, left a daughter Abigail who was one of the
Deerfield captives to Canada. She married fellow captive Josiah Rising and they
left eight children who assumed the surname Raizenne. Two of these eight became
nuns and one a priest. A large number of French Canadians may well descend from
the remaining five, four of them daughters whose husbands bore the surnames
Seguin, Sabourin, Castonguay, and Chenier.
I hope this survey of some of
my recent work -- a product of English origins research by Jane Fiske, which
itself completed a family otherwise well covered in R.C. Anderson’s The
Great Migration Begins--has been of interest to many readers, including
descendants. Among NEHGS staff, Henry Hoff, Brenton Simons, and I are all
Lathrop-Scudder descendants, and David Dearborn is descended from Thomas Scudder
of Salem, an uncle of Mrs. Lathrop. Next week I shall treat the L.I. Scudder and
Salem Very and Giles immigrant kin of Mrs. Lathrop, also studied by Jane Fiske,
and after the holidays I shall return to general advice to readers and suggest
ways to use Society services to best advantage in finding new
ancestors.