#26 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: Western and Nantucket Figures
Gary Boyd Roberts
In my last column we
covered various figures in American folklore, plus a group of "mythic" Texans
more fully treated in my new Notable Kin Volume Two (NK2), still
available from Carl Boyer, 3rd or the Society’s Sales Department for
$30 plus $3.50 postage and handling. Today we begin with a third NK2
"folklore" chapter, on "Molders and Mythologizers of the American West". The
first four of these are gunmen Samuel Colt (b. 1814), Oliver Fisher Winchester
(b. 1810), and Eliphalet Remington, Jr. (b.1793) and his son Philo (b. 1816).
All four were distant kinsmen of two or more presidents – Colt through Lords of
Hartford, Loomises of Windsor, Smiths of South Hadley, Footes of Wethersfield,
and Stanleys of Hartford; Winchester via Whites of Brookline (ancestors of the
Adamses) and Aspinwalls (ancestors of Mrs. Monroe and FDR); and Remingtons via
Cookes of Windsor. Colt and the Remingtons shared descent with the late Princess
of Wales via Mrs. Elizabeth Charde Cooke Ford of Windsor. The Remingtons were of
royal descent via Samuel and Judith (Everard) Appleton of Ipswich and of
Mayflower descent through Edward Doty. Eliphalet Remington was a second
cousin of the grandfather of western painter and sculptor Frederic Remington,
also a Cooke descendant and distant kinsman of Princes William and Harry.
Hat manufacturer John Batterson Stetson was descended from the Crandalls
of Providence and Sarah Stetson, a sister of J.B.’s great-grandfather, married
James Bliven, Jr. of Westerly, Rhode Island, and was an ancestress of Charles
Stanley Gifford, possible father of Marilyn Monroe. Homestead champion Galusha
Aaron Grow was a Waite of Ipswich, a Lathrop of Barnstable, and a Hinckley
descendant; Waites were also ancestors of Emerson and Hawthorne, and Lathrops of
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, J.L. Motley and Presidents Grant, FDR and
Bush. And barbed wire improver Joseph Farwell Glidden shared Loomis ancestors
with Samuel Colt and Squire forebears with the two Presidents Adams, Fillmore,
Taft and Coolidge.
In addition to these "molders" of the west, I also
treat the painter George Catlin and writers Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jack London,
and Louis L’Amour. Catlin was descended from Connecticut Governors William Leete
and John Webster (and from a sister of Robert Treat), from Hartford founder Rev.
Thomas Hooker, and from the Ways of Lyme, ancestors also of Sir Winston
Churchill and John Wayne. Laura Ingalls Wilder was descended from Richard Warren
of the Mayflower and related to a variety of presidents; her closest
kinsman among these last was U.S Grant, a third cousin once removed via Delanos
of Tolland, Connecticut. Jack London was indeed illegitimate but was also
descended from kings – Edward I of England (d. 1307), via the immigrant Mrs Jane
Deighton Lugg Negus, a sister-in-law of Governor Thomas Dudley and of Taunton
ur-father Richard Williams. The mother of Louis L’Amour was a Dearborn
and our reference librarian, David Curtis Dearborn, got to know the novelist and
his sister and also revised their patrilineal descent. Like serial killer Herman
Webster Mudgett, L’Amour was descended from Dearborns, Sanborns and Batchelders
of Hampton, N.H.
I considered figures of Nanctucket ancestry "folkloric"
because of the island’s association with whaling and its almost incredible
endogomy, or cousin intermarriage. Of the eleven founding families of Nantucket,
two - Coffin and Starbuck - were in the ancestry of almost every notable figure
I traced with forebears on the island. Several other well-known families –
Bunker (from which diplomat Ellsworth Bunker and oil man Bunker Hunt), Macy
(from which the New York department store founder), Folger (from which the
Shakespeare Library donor and the coffee family), and Hussey (kinsmen of the
Husseys behind Quaker-derived James Dean, the actor, and President Richard
Nixon) – also appear in the ancestry of most whaling Nantucketers. My chapter
"Nantucket Soup" treats the island ancestry, in all cases including Coffin and
Starbuck, of historians Henry and Brooks Adams, Episcopal Bishop Phillips
Brooks, First Lady Edith Carow Roosevelt, historian Charles Beard, North
Carolina Senator Sam Ervin of Watergate fame, short story writer O. Henry, the
wife of Texas oil man H.L. Hunt (and mother of Bunker, Herbert, Lamar, Margaret
and Caroline), authoress Anne (Morrow) Lindbergh (wife of the aviator), and
reformer and feminist Lucretia Coffin Mott, an island native. In chapter 48 (pp.
196-97, 200) I note the Nantucket ancestry of Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s
Secretary of War, and of the wives of Panama Canal builder George Washington
Goethals, and novelist Owen Wister.
Other than Benjamin Franklin, whose
mother was a daughter of the first Nantucket Folger, one simply "swims" in this
Nantucket ancestry. Of the 32 great-great-great grandparents of O. Henry’s
paternal grandmother (Ruth Coffin Worth) two were Worths, two Macys, six
Gardners, two Husseys, four Bunkers, two Starbucks, two Coffins, one Folger, and
a daughter and grandson of Pilgrim John Howland. The great-great grandparents of
Nantucket-born Mrs. Mott included four Coffins, a Starbuck, a Macy, two
Gardners, a Folger, and a Bunker. Mrs. Hunt, whose family had moved from
Nantucket to Cincinnati to Arkansas, was the granddaughter of Charles Waldo
Bunker and Lydia Starbuck. Bunker’s sixteen great-great grandparents included
two Bunkers, four Gardners and two Coffins. Lydia Starbuck was over half
non-Nantucket in ancestry, but her 64 great-great-great-great grandparents
included two Starbucks, two Coffins, a Bunker, two Folgers, a Gardner, and a
Hussey. Nantucketers were almost all Quakers and in a recent lecture in
Washington, D.C. to Descendants of Early Quakers (a national hereditary society)
I spoke on the Quaker ancestry of Presidents Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,
Hoover, Nixon and Bush, these Nantucket Quakers and some of their notable
descendants, the noted descendants of two Rhode Island immigrants of royal
descent (RD) whose own progeny was largely Quaker (Mrs. Katherine Marbury Scott
of Providence, sister of the famed Anne Hutchinson, and Acting Gov. Jeremiah
Clarke of Newport), plus notable descendants of RD Welsh and English
Quakers to Pennsylvania and the Quaker New Jersey ancestry of the late Princess
of Wales.
In my next column I will comment on the descendants and "kin
of kin" of Pocahontas, and the literature on, and some descendants of, the Salem
witchcraft victims of 1692. Once more, I hope this summary of part of my new
book proves of interest. Late next month I lecture in Salt Lake City on
geographic divisions and major sources for the mid-Atlantic and southern states.
I undertook a brief survey of the southern states in three earlier columns; then
promised coverage of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware will
compose another column within the next several weeks.