Our Predecessors and Their Descendants (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Our Predecessors and Their Descendants

The following sketches of our great-grandparents' families make no pretensions to genealogical method. Most of the material used was either ready at hand or else jotted down at long intervals with no appreciable waste of time. In almost every instance trans-atlantic origin is ignored as a matter of no consequence to so long settled an American family as our own. With no effort at tracing a lineage, but with the matter in his own possession or inherited by other members of his family, the writer has been able to extend the account of every branch of his family very near to the sixteenth century. This 'is not an isolated case, or even a rare one, in our country, where the majority of colonial families offer a like spectacle. It was said, by Franklin, about the time of our Revolution from England, that most of the inhabitants of the colonies were natives, and descended from immigrants of the prior century. The only excuse for printing, even for strictly private circu lation, these sketches of families not really distinguished in any particular walk of life, is the gratification that it must be to their descendants to recall, in these days of increased European migra tion, that they are among those who have the absolute right to regard themselves as Americans. In one respect, a purely American family has a characteristic which cannot be appreciated by Europeans; that is, the total inability of such a family to admit that any one is entitled by natural right, or excepting from age and education, to take precedence of them. It is this feeling which imparts solidity and dignity to the older types of American families.