Person Info
- Name: James TAYLOR
- Sex: M
- Birth: 14 Mar 1674/5 in King&Queen Co, Virginia b
- Death: 23 Jun 1729 in Orange Co, Virginia d
Parents:
Family:
Marriage:
Children:
- Zachary TAYLOR Birth: 17 Apr 1707 in Orange Co, Virginia
Death: 29 Mar 1768 in Orange Co, Virginia
Bibliography
-
Taylor, Nathaniel, TAYLOR: English origins. Posting to soc.genealogy.medieval (email list GEN-MEDIEVAL) on 11/22/1998. Subject: TAYLOR: English origins. Available at https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/gb1I4FknEvM/m/l4ePiF2SsIQJ. Author address: ntaylor at fas dot harvard dot edu. Information from this source tagged as [Ref: Nat Taylor SGM 11/22/1998].
-
Roberts, Gary Boyd, Ancestors of American Presidents, First Authoritative Edition. Santa Clarita, CA: Carl Boyer, 1995. Information from this source tagged as [Ref: Roberts USPres [A-Zp][A-Z0-9]*].
Sources for birth and parent Information
- date:
- [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR],
- place:
- prob King&Queen Co, Virginia [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR]
Sources for death Information
- date:
- [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR],
- place:
- prob Orange Co, Virginia [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR]
Sources with Information about marriage to Martha THOMPSON
- date:
- [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR],
- place:
- prob New Kent or King&Queen Co, Virginia [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR],
- child:
- [Ref: Roberts USPres TAYLOR]
Research Notes:
Ms. Bass said in one post that "The ancestry of James [Taylor, ancestor of
President Zachary] has 3 possible lines (sets of parents) - Rowland Taylor is
one." The second, she said, is "through Matthew Taylor"--essentially the
Shadockhurst line, which goes back, allegedly, to the minstrel "Taillefer."
While Ms. Bass didn't specify the third possibility (what is it?), these two
each need to be addressed separately, not least because they've each been
postulated for more than one American Taylor line.
I. "Taillefer" and Shadockhurst line
A descent of some modern Taylors from "Taillefer" (fictionalized Norman
minstrel/knight placed at the Battle of Hastings in the Norman poet Wace's
fictionalized epic _Roman de Rou_) appears in the 1838 edition of Burke's
_Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and
Ireland_ (4:237-241) detailing a Taylor family originally from Shadockhurst,
Kent, whose representative, Major Joseph Pringle Taylor of Pennington,
Hampshire, had received a grant of arms from the College of Heralds in 1823,
registering that descent to himself (see Thomas Woodcock and John Martin
Robinson, _The Oxford Guide to Heraldry_ [Oxford, 1988], 166).
The lineage deriving the Kentish Taylors (who are attested in late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century visitation pedigrees) from the Norman
'Taillefer' and an intervening landholder named 'Talefer' certainly predated
Burke. One distant relative of mine noted that she copied this Kentish Taylor
lineage out of a manuscript in the British Museum by Kentish antiquarian
Edward Hasted (1732-1812). It is probably BL MS Add. 5520, a folio volume "of
pedigrees of diverse families within the county of Kent" (to quote the
handwritten 19th-century MS catalogue) owned by (and partially in the hand of)
Mr. Hasted, in which is found "a pedigree of Taylor of Shadoxhurst and
Maidstone (including Hall) from one in the possession of the late Rev. Joseph
Milner of Preston Hall, Aylesford," at f. 96. I was not able to see this MS
when I was in London in July, because it had been sent out for reproduction. I
would not be surprised if the "Taillefer" link to the Kent pedigree can be
traced back through Hasted's source, Rev. Joseph Milner (1744-1797). Any
Londoner reading this would do me a great favor by looking it up sometime!
Major Joseph Pringle Taylor was noted by Woodcock and Robinson as being one
of the few men to receive British grants of arms in the nineteenth century
which recognized descent through Americans. His paternal line derived from
Edward Taylor of Middletown, New Jersey, allegedly a member of the
Shadockhurst Taylor family. The Kent / "Taillefer" lineage, plus the American
descendants of the New Jersey family, are treated in Elisha Taylor, _Genealogy
of Judge John Taylor and his Descendants_ (Detroit, 1886) (as well as the book
Cris Nash refers to, Christina Taylor Bass and Frank Nelson Bass, _Genealogy
Taylor-Snow_ [1935], which I haven't seen). Despite the recognition of Major
Joseph Pringle Taylor's pedigree by the College of Arms in 1823, the link
between the New Jersey Taylors and the armigerous Kent family of the
sixteenth-century Visitation pedigrees is, Cris Nash reminds us, apparently
false.
As for links of any of the Virginia Taylor families to the Shadockhurst
line, I can only say that no shred of evidence for it has ever come to my
attention. Ms. Bass' account of the Kent theory of the ancestry of James
Taylor shows "Matthew, the 2nd son [of John and Elizabeth (Chute) Taylor of
Shadockhurst], b abt 1555, and if Burke be correct the ancestor of the family
which settled in America." However there seems no room to infer Virginians in
Burke's account of this man and his family (op. cit. 4:239-40). Perhaps there
is another 'Burke' which does support this alleged Virginia connection?.
II. Dr. Rowland Taylor, Protestant Martyr
I first found the descent of many different Virginia Taylor families from
the Protestant Rowland Taylor, rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk (+1555) in print in
_From Log Cabins to the White House: a History of the Taylor Family_ by Mary
Taylor Brewer (Wooton, Kentucky, 1985). Brewer cites as sources John Foxe's
_Book of Martyrs_ (a.k.a. Acts and Monuments, first pub. in English 1563; for
the best ed. of which the 8-vol. version, 4th rev. ed. [1877] of the Religious
Tract Society serves well: Taylor's martyrdom is reprinted in full [with some
notes], 6:676-703) and William James Brown, _The Life of Rowland Taylor_
(London: Epworth Press, 1959: Brown was Dr. Taylor's distant successor as
rector of Hadleigh at that time). I have examined both works and neither gives
much useful information on Taylor's family. Brown was interested in
descendants of Rowland Taylor, but knew little. He did speculate about the
relationship between Rowland and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Bishop of Down,
Conner and Dromore, but doubted the veracity of the link and notes that
documents supporting it (including a pedigree) had been in the possession of
Jeremy's Irish descendants but had been burned in the early nineteenth
century.
And although Brown knew the statement of the botanist William Turner, Dean
of Wells (+1568) that Rowland Taylor had been born at Rothbury,
Northumberland, Brown was not aware of any specific parentage or baptismal
record for him; nor of the idea that Rowland's wife was a Tyndale; nor does he
provide any baptismal or marriage dates for Rowland's son Thomas Taylor (the
young son mentioned dramatically in Foxe's tale of his execution) who
allegedly, according to data posted here and also included (without reference)
in Brewer's book, had a family at Hadleigh (and perhaps another family at
Cambridge, resulting in the alleged descent to Bishop Jeremy Taylor).
It looks, from what's been circulated, as if there has since been some
fruitful research into Rowland Taylor's origins and descendants using parish
registers at Rothbury and Hadleigh (even though I find it odd that the rector
of Hadleigh himself should not have made use of his own registers if they
contained information on Rowland's son Thomas and his family). If so, who did
this original research and where has this data been published? I have not seen
it in any form in which it can be thoroughly assessed.
Whatever may become known about Rowland Taylor's ancestors and descendants
will no doubt be fascinating, but does it connect definitively to any of the
early Virginia Taylors? I will repeat that I've not seen a single element of a
compelling argument for any specific identity between a Virginia Taylor and a
specific English Taylor family. The data supplied in recent posts suggests a
breakdown in specificity of vital data (baptisms, etc.) in the crucial
generations linking immigrants with specific English families. In the absence
of such data, it is the reponsibility of those who put forward such a
hypothesis to faithfully reproduce any argument for the identity that may be
found: it is not the responsibility of others to 'disprove' the filiations.
Addendum: on the assumption of interrelationship among various Virginia
Taylors
I should just add a final note of concern about the book by Ms. Brewer, from
which some data seems to have made it into some of the recent posts (for
example Kenneth Harper Finton's post). It alleges that many different Virginia
Taylor lines can be traced to the John Taylor whose estate was probated in
1654 in Lancaster County, Virginia (the Northern Neck). There is no evidence
to support the idea that all the individuals Brewer lists (and Finton after
her) are his children. The estate records name as his heirs only the son
Richard (who died, childless, before 22 May 1669) and the daughter Elizabeth
Sallard. The temptation to clump the various other Virginia Taylor families
together with this one, or under any other single-family umbrella, has to be
avoided. The mortality rate in the Chesepeake and Virginia colonies was so
much higher than in New England in these crucial decades that the likelihood
that persons of the same name in subsequent generations were related is
relatively much smaller than in New England. See on this subject Henry
Gemmerey, "Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630-1700:
Inferences from Colonial Populations," _Research in Economic History_ 5
(1980), 179-232; and also James P. Horn, "Moving on in the New World:
migration and out-migration in the seventeenth-century Chesepeake", in
_Migration and Society in Early Modern England_, ed. Peter Clark & David
Souden (London, 1987), 172-212. [Ref: Nat Taylor SGM 11/22/1998]
Pedigree of James TAYLOR
James TAYLOR
Descendants of James TAYLOR
2nd generation
3rd generation
4th generation
5th generation