Family Notes

 My earliest known Pittman ancestor in America is Richard Pitman (note the alternate spelling). He is my 8th great grandfather. According to many online family trees (FTs) he was born in 1618 in Rye, East Sussex. He was baptized there on 9 Nov 1618. His father was Thomas, his mother (possibly) Frances. Thomas died in 1647 in England.  When did Richard come to America? The short answer is, no one seems to know for sure. Most online FTs say that his son Richard (2) was born there in New Jersey in 1660. This places the family in the colony long before the the first Quaker settlements in Salem County (1675 and thereafter), where he would eventually come to settle. Later family evidence indicates that Richard may well have been a Quaker, but he is not on the ship's roster of the Griffin  or the Kent , the two earliest ships to bring Quaker settlers. All that we know is that both Richards, the father and the son, died in 1707.  There is a probate record for Richard (2) sho...

 The Spencer and Pittman lines are the two longest streams in my family river system, with other family names representing tributaries or feeder-streams in that system. The Spencer line starts with Abraham Spencer (my 9th great), an early settler in Virginia, while the Pittman line begins with Richard Pitman (aan 8th great), who came to New Jersey a little later in the 17th century. I don't know much about these two men, to tell you the truth, but I propose to begin a series of portraits of these Spencers and Pittmans, down through the generations, collecting together whatever I may know or suspect about them, their spouses, their children, etc. I hope these portraits will be interesting to anyone doing research in these family lines.

 As anyone who's played around with genealogy for a while soon learns, it's no great rarity to discover "royalty" in the family lineage. There are millions of descendants of Henry VIII (to take one example) walking around on American soil, all of them quite ordinary citizens with not a trace of royal airs . Nevertheless, it's kind of fun to poke around in those "noble" branches of the family tree. Getting back to that scoundrel Henry VIII, he would be my 3rd cousin, 15 times removed. There is absolutely no reason to be proud of this, it's just one of those "fun facts" one runs across in the ancestry game. I'd known for a while that I was also related in some way or another to several of Henry's six unfortunate wives. This morning I started looking into the others, only to discover that, yes, all six of them occupy a twig in my family tree. Here's the tally: Henry VIII (3rd cousin, 15x removed) Catherine of Aragon (4th cousin, 15...