Col. William J. Worth

May is about over, so it's time for a post. There are plenty of subjects to cover, but what if we look at another descendant (possible, stepson), William Jenkins Worth?

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General Worth (Wikipedia) is of interest, for several reasons. He was born in 1794 to Quaker parents. His military experience began with the War of 1812 (next Beacon theme) where he served as an aide to Winfred Scott. He was wounded but continued his military career.

Later, William was assigned to head the military department of Texas. He died in San Antonio in 1849. Fort Worth, among other places, is named after him.

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Being brief, William's forebears were William Worth and Sarah Macy. Both Worth and Macy were of Nantucket families (with Gardner/Coffin, et al).

Aside: John, son of William and Sarah, who was a forebear of the General, was married three times. The first wife was Miriam Gardner, a granddaughter of Thomas and Margaret. Which of John's sons was the forebear of the General? Some say John, Jr. whose mother was Dorcas Smith. Once we get this figured out, we'll update the descendants list.

Using WikiTree, we can work this out, provisionally (that is, until we review more thoroughly). John Worth (2nd ggp of the Col lived 1666-1732) married 1) Miriam Gardner (1665-1702), daughter of Richard Gardner and Sarah Shattuck. They had seven children. John married 2) Ann Platts (no children) and 3) Dorcas (Smith) Hawes (two Worth children - she had three children by Hawes). 

Now, some information on the Nantucket and Gardner connections, here are one of the immigrant ancestors of each with count of a Gardner relationship with a few generations: Worth (William Worth, 111) and Swift (Peter Folger, 160+; John Swain, 139).    

Remarks:

07/11/2012 -- A recent issue of Gardner's Beacon looks at the War of 1812. 

10/25/2020 -- Descendants, finally. We're getting back to work. General Worth is not a descendant of Thomas Gardner of Salem. 

09/24/2022 -- Used Col. Worth (WikiTree, Worth-719), with Col. Higginson and Brig. Gen. Swift to discuss the blended family that was so prominent through the 400 years of history. Worth and Swift had a lot of overlap in their lineage being of Nantucket. 

Modified: 09/24/2022

Maypole

The day almost got away from me, but I ran across a Bing photo of a maypole in Wolznach, Bavaria, Germany. As we know, May 1 is celebrated throughout the world.

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For this post, though, Nathaniel's tale (Maypole of Merry Mount) is the thing that we need to recall. Seems that some took their new-found freedom a bit too far. Oh, ever look at some college freshmen these days (as in, there being no 'in loco parentis')? The Johns, and others, did not like the 'so called' debauchery of the Merry Mount'rs.

The reason to bring this up here is that Rev White (uncle, of sorts) seems, from reading his stuff, to have characterized some at Cape Ann thusly. What? I always wondered about his motivation for this.

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In short, here was a guy (Rev John), across the pond, casting judgment against a group who were braving the elements, attempting to survive, and trying to produce for the "fat cats" back home. Ah, just like modern office workers and managers who drive production workers by computer (sheer idiocy, in the 'optimization' context, when we think of the 'near zero' aspects). So, those back at home were expecting  more production. Ah, again, modern views of management that seem to think of obtaining something from nothing (very much analogous to hoping for a perpetual motion affair -- look, folks, all types of colonialism are just that -- Steve, you didn't pay attention? -- suicides related to modes for producing your product?).

In other words, arm chair quarter- backing (17th century style).

As history tells us, the expectations (as in mis-planning) were way off base.  Yeah, blame the workers. Too, New England did produce when conditions were right, for a long time.

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In actuality, as said before, Thomas' character can be seen, in part, in his kids and progeny. Enuf said, for now, on that.

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So, Thomas was not a Merry Mount'r. We'll have to attempt to sketch the proper picture, as I have not seen the tale told yet. I've thought up plenty of scenarios, though, that could have unfolded in those times.

Nathaniel (cousin that he is) did cover Roger (see, as well, Poor Roger gets no respect -- ggp, by the way). We ought to do something analogous in some postings, here (for Thomas, these will be under the Backbone category). Perhaps, the house deal was a practice piece.

Remarks:

02/09/2021 -- Larger picture: True stories, Fur traders. 

06/19/2018 -- Maypole that infuriated the Puritans. A month late, but this post has been updated.

05/02/2016 -- Recently, I caught a PBS conversation. The author being interviewed mentioned this occasion about which Nathaniel wrote. We need to take another look, this year, with regard to the current situations.

05/01/2014 - So, there may not have been the first hippies at Merry Mount, however we can argue this point. Cape Ann was ideal for a couple of years, perhaps longer: (Not) far from idyllic, Beacon Vol. IV, No. 1. The theme will continue.

11/06/2013 -- While working on the next Beacon issue, I ran across some books. The one by Staloff was timely; imagine, I was wondering why the backbone series? Has the talented set ever allowed the lessors to have some semblance of a good life? Oh, you say yes? Winthrop, et al, were against this from the beginning. The stalwart of what could be (or could have been)? Thomas Gardner, of course.

11/27/2012 -- Let's itemize what we know, re-iterate some basics, and the proceed constructively.

09/21/2012 -- Another Backbone post. As an aside, we didn't hear Conant talk about finding a starving people. Rather, they were doing well, locally. Actually, they were quite rambunctious.

Modified: 02/09/2021

Great Migration sketches

We already have been using the six-pages about Thomas in the Great Migration books (NEHGS copy). There has been additional material published by the project.

Yesterday, I ran across this web site that is using Wiki technology to provide information about early entrants. Below is a link to the page dealing with Thomas. One of our goals will be to contribute to this site, especially on the Old Planters of Cape Ann. Notice the people who haven't been written up yet (Great Migration Study Project Sketches). This type of work represents how to apply technology to support genealogy via the web (On blogs and other modern means).

       http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Thomas_Gardner_%2818%29

We know that some old-world-based research will be required. For starters, we ought to look at work that has already been done (including mentioning that Frank left some notes -- where are those?). So, expect those findings to show up here.

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Not exactly an aside: Thomas' son, Richard, was said to have been considerably educated, and Thomas did do work that required literacy, etc. Richard must have gotten his learning from association with his parents. In fact, Thomas' son, Joseph, worked as a lawyer. There was no 'law' school here. No doubt, Thomas received some type of schooling. Where? But, the thing that looms largest is that Thomas was in an authority position in an endeavor that involved many families (about the investors). That type of responsibility being conveyed would not have happened with an unknown. Of course, Thomas was effective; there is more evidence for that than his descendants.

Remarks:

11/21/2019 -- We have used Dr. Frank as the focal for Gardner Research. There have been lots of updates on Dr. Frank: 1907 chart, WikiTree, Frank signed his father's copy of the 1907 book, and Dr. Frank's remains.

10/03/2014 -- Dr. Frank A. will feature in the future. Was he right about Thomas and Margaret (their marriage record found, recently)? Why did the Great Migration Project ignore him?

12/22/2012-- We need to differentiate between Old Planters of Beverly (see The Old Planters of Beverly in Massachusetts, 1930, Alice Gertrude Lapham, The Riverside Press) and the Old Planters of Massachusetts. One could even talk, Old Planters of New England.

11/28/2012 -- The above 'werelate' page has more information than that of Dr. Frank and the Great Migration Study which we'll have to scrutinize. The Wikipedia page, of course, is being edited by TGS, for the most part.

11/27/2012 -- Let's itemize what we know, re-iterate some basics, and the proceed constructively.

05/01/2012 -- We'll need to talk singularity in the context of Alan. The computer has as many holes as do we; however, we can cut out of the fog. Genealogy (historic, biologic, and more) will be a basis for looking at this concept and its importance. That is a forward look. Going backward, we'll find a way to adopt memes, as a necessity. We are, one might say, meme readers. Too, we express what they convey. That is supposed to suggest something that we need to understand: parallel to we being expressions of our genes. Now, within that framework, our look back at Thomas is apropos.

04/30/2012 -- Old Planters (seems to be one of the more popular posts) updated to use the list from the Winthrop Society.

Modified: 11/21/2019

Gardner's Beacon, Vol. II, No. 2

The sea has associations with the New England culture that are similar to those of the English culture. Whereas on the continent, people could move about on the land somewhat easily, and in a wider scope, those on an island have limited ways to move. Of course, technical and cultural factors inhibited movement even on land, depending upon the clime and situation. Yet, the existence of wandering peoples is sufficient to show that people need to, or must, move about; land movement has been going on for a long time.

Sea venturing, on the other hand, took awhile to become a feasible mode for more than the hearty few. We cannot look closely here at seagoing improvements though that would be of interest. And, given modern technology, travel by aircraft seems to have superseded that of land and sea as a natural progression, almost. That is, we find the use of movement by air for the longer haul with lighter loads and, perhaps, for greater comfort. However, there are many types of shipment that require crossing the waters.

So, we have the sea as barrier. But, too, the sea is a provider. There are many tales about this.

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See Vol. II, No. 2 of Gardner's Beacon for a brief look at one example of seafaring Gardners, namely those on Nantucket.

References: Wikipedia, Gardner (whaling family); Nantucket History

Remarks:

03/08/2019 -- Added image in order to add to index at our portal to truth.

12/05/2014 -- There was some discussion about "migrates" (2nd para, 1st sen) as to whether it was an error or a inappropriate usage. No, it was not an error. Perhaps, too much license was taken. Not. "migrates" is for the set of those who migrated (very big set). "migrants" has too many connotations of ill repute of late; as well, these folks were not migratory (in many cases, they stayed though we do find that some did do a little moving around in the territory). Our ancestors, in this case, were coming over for their purpose(s) and with great desire to succeed. Too, they left us quite a legacy. So, they just shifted their living quarters albeit with much hardship and effort. ... Ah, 1998 biochemical usage. 

Modified: 03/08/2019

Pointers to rootsweb

Note: See Remarks 04/08/2014 for status related to rootsweb trees.

-- Original post --

Many posts in this blog have pointers to work done by other families. For the most part, these were links right into an area of a database (via ID). Of course, that is not considered proper if one wants persistence. Why? As databases update, IDs can be re-assigned. Not always, but often enough so that following the link does not show what is expected.

Here is an example via images. The fix, which is a simple re-fresh of the search, is easy; the purpose of this post is to document the method. The example relates to an ancestor of the John Lowell Gardners.

The descendants list on the right was what was expected from picking the link. What came up was on the left. In the past, the blogger has been going back to update pointers when he runs across one of these ID changes. However, as we go along, we get more and more pointers. It's time to make a more permanent, and maintainable, edit. The newer pointers will have a new format; progress in the edit will be seen from the older pointers disappearing (no expected time for completion of the task).

In the meantime, here is how to recover the information (via ID) for the person for whom we have a pointer, assuming that they have not been removed from the database.

To set the context, see this page and look at son, Henry, and his wife, Jane. There were three descendants lists (different researchers) offered in the post: Standish, Dowling and Larson. In this case, it was the last one that had changed. The context tells what we're looking to see, namely Henry and Jane. If that does not appear, the first step is to go to Index and search.

The format is "lastname, first name" and will bring up a list starting with that name (or something close if the exact name is not found). So, in this case, we know that Henry was born about 1651. He's the second on this particular list. Pick the person to get the related page.

Now, across the page is a menu for Index, Descendancy, Pedigree, etc. The Pedigree chart is shown in many cases when the pointer is selected.

This is the text format. There is also a table format which is selected by a toggle. Above, there are a couple examples of the descendants list.

Now, the new format will include the database name, the person, and the birth year. That would allow search, plus help filter as, for any name, there can be many people. If the birth year is not known, there'll be the death year. If neither is known, we'll look for some other piece of information to distinguish the person.

Here is the pointer for John Lowell Gardner (Larson, b 1804). And, the pedigree showing Henry Lunt.

Remarks:

06/25,26/2014 -- rootsweb is back. Listing of 303 trees for Thomas (those with sources, showing descendants and providing the death year). ... Of the 303, 181 trees have parents for Thomas. ... Then, there are 43 trees with George being the grandfather of Thomas. ... See Whence came ...

04/09/2014 -- The problem has been corrected. There is no note on the status change (it would be nice to hear why this happened and what it might mean for a new thrust for ancestry.com).

04/08/2014 -- Today, the behavior of rootsweb is different than it has been until now. Yesterday, it was still allowing access to "world connect" page via the cgi-bin method. Is the change observed today permanent? The rootsweb status page says that there is a problem (does not give a time for fixing - also, points to Chrome and IE - says that Firefox is working - nope! - as well, Sea Monkey shows the same behavior). What does that tell us? In any case, the discussion of this post is now on the table again. Apologies are offered, in advance, for pointers embedded throughout the blog that, when picked, will cause the session to be directed to the ancestry.com site.

01/10/2013 -- The Bevan database was updated on 01/05/2013 which pushed pointers around (one of the risks of the rootsweb method). Will take awhile to follow all of these - the correction requires a simple adjustment of the pointer by 10s or a little more.

04/17/2012 -- This exercise will end up with a standard pointer that is more persistent than what we've used so far. We'll post the resulting formatted pointer here.

Modified: 06/26/2014

thomasgardnersociety.org

The site must move from OfficeLive by the end of next month, April. OfficeLive is being replaced by Office365 by Microsoft. MS did not provide an easy migration method, so we're evaluating our options for hosting servers. As soon as that analysis is done, we begin re-construction on the new site.

In the meantime, Gardner's Beacon is available at:  thomasgardnersociety.club.officelive.com/ (this site will disappear on 05/01/2012).

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We'll use this post to keep track of progress using the Remarks.

Remarks:

03/11/2019 -- Will be reviewing all of this due to our new thrust: Content management. What's new? Bringing in ecommerce, in the large and in a non-profit mode. So, we'll tweak things. If I were younger, we would roll our own. We might, if there is interest. As in, young folks, here is a chance to start afresh and to show the world a thing or two.

01/18/2019 --  CMS and more, continues. See TGSoc.org which is our new site and the discussion page.

02/11/2015 -- CMS, again and again.

04/30/2012 -- References to the news letter ought to be Gardner's Beacon.

04/18/2012 -- The new site is operative (thomasgardnersociety.org). References that point to 'aspx' will bring up the 404 page which then has a pointer to the new site. Content can then be read as before.

04/17/2012 -- The switch to the new server will occur within the next couple of days. The old site will be there through 04/30/12.

03/22/2012 -- Mostly there, in HTML, will be doing some tweaking.

03/20/2012 -- Figured out how to do pages, using HTML, that look pretty close to what was there on OfficeLive. So, will get that into place soon, as the starter position. Accomplished using SeaMonkey which has a nice WYSIWYG editor (using nested tables).

03/19/2012 -- A good overview of Content Management Systems and a review of the top few: Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Mambo. Before, the site used a builder provided by Microsoft OfficeLive. That tool will still be there with Office365, but the costs are going to be much greater which makes the pangs of a transition more palatable. Besides, it's a chance to look at technical issues.

03/19/2012 -- Domain now managed under WebHostingHub, after looking at this matrix and more. Considering, right now, either Drupal or Wordpress (ajswtlk[.]com/node/2 - gone) to handle the formatting. Taking time to review technical issues.

03/15/2012 -- An overview of the issues ('jewels' and squeezing of such).

Modified: 08/13/2019

Alan M. Turing

This is one of those posts that can be considered a diversion (earlier example) from our normal purpose. However, it does deal with an important theme and does relate to the context of the blog.

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Alan M. Turing was born 100 years ago in London. His work in computation was highly influential. The ACM gives an award yearly in his name that is the "Nobel" for computer scientists. In fact, this year, they're gathering thirty-three of the recipients at a meeting in San Francisco.

As an aside, let me note that computation will be important to genealogy in many ways. I have already made one comment about reluctance to adopt new technology (On blogs and other modern means). We could think of many ways that computation will be essential. Here is a very short list (for starters): immersion into gaming environments that unfold events with real characters -- not just those covered by history, extensions of augmented reality schemes to include facts from historic genealogy (verified by NEHGS, et al), ...

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As I was re-acquainting myself with Alan's work, I noticed that he went to the Sherborne School in Dorset. Remember that some on Nantucket say that Thomas' family came from that region. The school was established in 1550.

Running across that little tidbit reminds me that we need to learn more about this area, as we try to run down information about Thomas and Margaret from before their 1624 arrival at Cape Ann.


Remarks:

05/01/2012 -- We'll need to talk singularity in the context of Alan. The computer has as many holes as do we; however, we can cut out of the fog. Genealogy (historic, biologic, and more) will be a basis for looking at this concept and its importance. That is a forward look. Going backward, we'll find a way to adopt memes, as a necessity. We are, one might say, meme readers. Too, we express what they convey. That is supposed to suggest something that we need to understand: parallel to we being expressions of our genes. Now, within that framework, our look back at Thomas is apropos.

04/26/2012 -- Will need to do some Brit-based research, no doubt. For starters, we'll begin to look at work that is already done.

Modified: 05/01/2012