TL;DR -- People. A proper focus. As we will show. The internet will allow this to come forth. On the other hand, records have been kept for centuries across the world. With respect to the U.S. which has its 250th coming up, we can go back to the 400th before. And, for some, back across the waters to the never peaceful Old World. We look at a couple of example families in which a tie-in with the 2nd President is featured. That type of threading can be done across many other countries. The computer? It's more than a seat for generating mania about "abstracted nonsense."
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This post continues the theme of the 400th and 250th which relates to the founding of the U.S. This year has a major date for the 250th: Lexington and Concord. This battle led to the Boston event a month later. But, leaping forward, the conflict continued until 1783: Treaty of Paris. This type of post will have three topics covered. One will be an event. Another will be some details with respect to people involved. The third will deal with family or as some might argue, genealogy. Now, fortunately, Wikipedia has kept improving over the years, so their pages will feature heavily. This link goes to a timeline that is remarkably demonstrative of how to do things (I may be an editor, but there is no bais here).
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When we started the Thomas Gardner Society in 2010, we knew a little about history and genealogy having started in the work in 2009 after retirement. Our first post was in 2011 (25 Sep 2010) after we had done some work, including a successful application to D.A.R. (DAR) (250th of the Revolution coming up in April) and for a few societies of the Heritage Society Community of the US (HSC) (400th of New England). One might say that we showed what we learned by going through the scrutiny of the organizations.
But, many HSC applications have more generations to cover than does that of DAR. By our count, we say that the Revolution was done by the fifth generation. Below, we will look at that generation after considering the second generation. Below we will look at two families: Gardner; Adams. For a while, we will do all of our charts using the female side. The reason for this will be apparent at some point.
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We have looked at the Adams family more than once:
- Adams cousins -- looks at President John Quincy Adams and his cousin from the frontier, Grizzly Adams.
- Another Adams -- looks at a generation or two later with respect to the development of Los Angeles and California as well as a tie into several modern firms, such as American Express. Business is a proper occupation of the New World.
Mentioning the Revolution, the first U.S. President was George Washington (whose birthday is celebrated in February). The second was John Adams. Later, John's son, John Quincy, was President. There will be time spent on looking at the pedigree of many prominent individual as we did with the Harvard President collection (see History of Harvard). We started that after reading of a cousin and decided to go through the list so as to know the lineage of eacn.
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Now, we would like to look at an example which includes several families. For each, the 1st generation would have come over the waters 400 years ago. Of course, there was a continual stream of immigrants over the centuries. We will look at the complete period from inception to now as we do these posts.
2nd Generation -- In the 2nd, there were two sisters in the Gardner of Roxbury family with other siblings. Here is a pointer to the WikiTree profile for each.
Mary was older and married a Boylston while Abigail married into the Wise family. Abigail's husband, Rev John Wise (1652 - 1725 -- Harvard graduate), is known as one inspiration of the Declaration of Independence.
5th Generation -- Coming forward in time to the 5th, Mary's line had John Adams (1735 - 1826. Her sister-in-law, Sarah (Boylston) Smith (1642 - 1711), was the forebear of Abigail Quincy (Smith) Adams (1744 - 1818) who was the well-known wife of John Adams.
In that same 5th generation of John and Abigail Adams, the family of Mary's sister, Abigail Gardner Wise, had Susanna (Wise) Swasey (1744 - 1821) who was married to Major Joseph Swasey (1750 - 1816). Their daughter, Abigail (Swasey) Hodgkins (1774 - 1822) married Joseph Hodgkins (1768 - 1825). His uncle, Joseph Hodgkins (1743 - 1829), was featured in several publications.
- Joseph Hodgkins - Wikipedia: The letters between Hodgkins and his wife, Sarah, have served as an important historical footnotes since the early 1900s[2] for understanding the Revolutionary War and have been featured in such books as the Library of America's The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence, David McCullough's 1776, and Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution.
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| Nine generations |
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With respect to the HSC, John Wise (1652 - 1725) was the grandson of Alice Freeman Thompson Parke who is the ancestor of many American families of note: Firestones, Fords, McCormicks, Rockefellers, Tiffanys, Whitneys, and J.P Morgan. In Alice's progeny, we can also note Princes William and Harry through their mother, Princess Diana.
We have an interest in technology which of late has filled the news space with advanced software which is, supposedly, heading toward an artificial general intelligence. Expect that theme to be regularly discussed. Genealogy and history are properly candidates for technology assists. We already see that. This example of a research paper on Alice's children and their offspring is a look at four generations.
An underlying lack of the sense of foundations is our prime concern where the mathematics involved in the modern systems needs more attention paid to its use. Making decisions about the future using systems and processes that are not understood ought to raise a flag not unlike what Ralph Nader did back in the 60s with regard to an automobile.
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We expect the next eight years to be fun. One hundred years ago with the 300th anniversay (see Remarks: 01/18/2025 - below), WWI was a damper. We will look at that further. Too, current technology has helped research to improve from what we saw 100 years ago. Hence, we have newer information to incorporate in our database which will necessitate updates of existing documention some of which can be 150 years old. There is no end to the work.
But, technology brings problems, too. This is an old theme which generates interminable interest.
With respect to the marketing of AI, there is a cultural split almost everywhere one looks. That is, bifurcations seem to be natural. An important one today is the gap between science/engineering of computing (which spawned GenAI in a troublesome manner) and marketing which has almost diametrically opposed views.
From a truth engineering sense, both are errant. What is the common ground that if defined can be spread around for more clarity on issues of a complex nature (such as, what's at the bottom? Chaos?).
Remarks: Modified: 09/11/2025
01/18/2025 -- Pageant of Salem is an exmple of the events from 1924. It provides a good view of the thinking at that time. Now, 100 years later, we know more since we have digitized copies of old documents coming on line. See this post: 250th and more.
09/11/2025 -- Did a summary post on Rev. John Wise.
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