THE ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN HARRISON PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1889-1893 IN CHART FORM SHOWING ALSO THE DESCENDANTS OF WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN 184i AND BY CHARLES P. KEITH AUTHOR OF "THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILLORS OF PENNSYLVANIA 1733-1776" ETC. PHILADELPHIA 1893 COPYRIGHT, 1893, RY CHARLES P. KEITH. PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY1 PHILADELPHIA. INTRODUCTION. THE following ,vork, for which the undersigned alone is responsible, it having proceeded neither fron1 the suggestion, nor under the supervision, of any one else, is published for its merits as ·an atten1pt to show, not merely the paternal line, but a11 the other forefathers of an individual. The actual forefathers being arranged in a chart, data "·h ich have been found as to the collateral branches of some of the families are included, with the evidence for the direct lines, in this Introduction and the notes which follow it, headed by the various names, and an effort has b~en made to give an ·account, complete to date, of the Irwin and of the Ramsey family. It is not pretended that the pedigree adds to the distinction of a man who has been President of the United States of America. That office, to be sure, is neither the apex of a system of caste, like a European king's, nor the object of eighteen centuries' veneration, like the Pope's, nor the control of the lives and property of millions, like the Czar's or the ruler of China's; but, at the head of such a nation as ours bas become, it is one of the very greatest positions on the earth. Its constitutional functions affect double the extent of territory that Charlemagne ruled. Surrounding the incumbent with no luxury, and rigidly subjecting him to Jaw, it nevertheless resembles, with its unpretentious title, its actual power, its operation through a Senate, its preponderance in a hemisphere, that of the early Ron1an emperors, before the abrogation of republican forms. Few contemporary lives are-as much studied as those culminating, or suggested to culminate, in the White House; and, as the ancestry of any man is a fact, important or otherwise, in his history, it is supposed that, while genealogists will value any work showing how far in each line, male and female, the ancestors of a living American can be traced, other people will he interested in such data concerning a President. The paternal line of the one whose te_rm ended on the 4th of last March is unique from the standing anterior to the Revolutionary War, and the service during it and since. Moreover, while it is rare, in this young country, to find, even among the Presidents, any person all of whose great-grandfathers were Americans, he descends from many families known to have been here nearly two hundred years before his birth. This makes such a ,vork relating to Benjamin Harrison a contribution to the genealogy of many of his fellow-citizens. All the known ancestors who lived in America are mentioned in the chart. An effort has been made to trace back of this country nearly every surname thus introduced; and each has been carried as far as appeared u•l 4 Introduction. certain, except that the Bedell pedigree, which can be found in the Visita­ tion of Huntingdonshire, has not been transcribed. The ancestral lines met with through the wives of men who never came to America, have been fol­ lowed where they seemed to lead to _interesting personages; and, indeed, as we advance into ancient times, ·we can be positive of the genealogy of those only who were so conspicuous that theirs was of public notoriety. I have succeeded in working out the ancestry, with a fair amount of ev·idence for every step, further than any other American's has been extended, as far as I am aware. In so doing, however, I must not be charged with furnishing a basis for pride of birth. Nothing could · be more den1ocratic than genealogy carried far enough to point out the descent or kinship between the most exalted and the humblest. As the number of a man's ancestors hack of a few centuries is enormous, having doubled with each generation, except where; being relatives, they had lines in common, s001e historical celebrities must be included. Three hundred years ago, no difference of caste separated the. poorer gentry of England from the yeomanry and trades­ people; and five hundred years ago, the royal family intermarried with sub­ jects as frequently as with foreign potentates. So a far-off king~ is likely to have descendants in all stations of life. There is nobody living except a Bourbon known to be a legitimate descendant of any king or emperor men­ tioned in this chart through males; but through females the blood of Clovis, of Charlemagne, and of Alfred must flow in the veins of vast numbers of people, while even that of the Conqueror or of the early Plan­ tagenets is probably in so many that it cannot be claimed as distinguishing. We mean by legitimate descent. Starting with fifteen grandchildren of King Edward I., which fifteen are known to have married and left lawful issue, and allowing to each of them two children married and having lawfui issue, and so on, assuming the number of such descendants to double in each generation, we obtain nearly 4,000,000 in the twentieth generation from the king. That this estimate is not too large, that, except when cut off by war, or narrowed by intermarriages, families spread more rapidly, there is an instance in the chart. The estimate would allow for four grand­ children of President William Henry Harrison having families: there are six times that many. No line in this work is carried through any person whose birth appears to have been illegitiinate. There is no suspicion of illegitimate birth as to any one mentioned in the work who lived in America, or in fact who was born since A.D. 1400. Where the legitimacy depends upon the validity of a marriage under peculiar circumstances, of which there are several cases in the older part, I have been controlled by the acquiescence or the decision of the contemporary ecclesiastical power, then the recognized arbiter of such n1atters. Thus the marriages of King Henry II. of England with the divorced Eleanor, and of the divorced Earl of Arun9el with a daughter of Introduction. 5 the Earl of Lancaster, and of the divorced Lord Mowbray with another daughter of the Earl of Lancaster, have been treated as valid; but the parents of I,jouis IV., "d'Outremer," l{ing of France, and of Ferdinand III., King of Castille, are not mentioned, because the marriages of the parents were not deen1ed lawful. But in popular language, and a layman's view, the only real bastards in the chart were Han1eline Plantagenet, William the Conqueror, and Bernard, l{ing of Italy, and possibly Charles Martel; and perhaps also the issue of Chilperic I., heathen I{ing of the Franks, and the abducted wife of a king of Thuringia, said issue being Clovis, the first Chr;~tian King of the Franks, would be so considered. Much of the American part of the chart will be found in either Bishop Meade's Old Chu1·ches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, ,vhich is authority for so much family history as may be supposed to have lain ,vithin the knowledge of his contemporaries, or Savage's Genealogical Dictionary of New England, Vinton's Symmes Memorial, or Tuttle's Descendants of Wil­ liam and Elizabeth Tuttle. I have derived my knowledge of the records in Virginia other than parochial, and of the tombstone inscriptions not taken from Bishop Meade's work, made use of either in the chart or in the accounts of families following this Introduction, from the publications of the Virginia Historical Society, or articles in periodicals by, and correspond­ ence with, Mrs. Ella Bassett Washington, Pres. Lyon G. Tyler, .Alexander Brown, W. G. Stanard, R. A. Brock, and others. In that part of the chart which consists of a table of the descendants of President William Henry Harrison, I have made use of much data collected by Frank Willing Leach for his projected work on the descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. In the absence of a contemporaneous statement, it is hard to discover and fix positively the parentage of a former emigrant, unless the date of his birth can be closely approximated, and he has left some memorandum of the parish in which he ,vas born, and the records of that parish are accessible. Despite the contrary notion somewhat prevalent, very few of those who ren1oved to Virginia, or any other part of North America, during the colonial period, figure in the peerage books or county his­ tories of the British Isles; and the herald's visitations which have been published, are too far from corn plete, and, even with the continuations made by the copyists, are mostly too early to be of assistance. The notes following this Introduction will explain how the respective fami­ lies have been traced back of this country. I will here give the authori­ ties for the longest line. The Colonial grandee, born about the end of the year 1663, who has been called "King Carter," who named one of his children Ludlow, was, it is agreed, the son of John Carter and Sarah Ludlow, his wife. The tombstone over that couple and three other wives tells us that Sarah's father was "~Ir.