Individual Page

    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:
  1. Zachary TAYLOR Birth: 17 Apr 1707 in Orange Co, Virginia Death: 29 Mar 1768 in Orange Co, Virginia

Bibliography
  1. 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].
  2. 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
1. James TAYLOR m. Martha THOMPSON
m. Martha THOMPSON

2nd generation

2. Zachary TAYLOR m. Elizabeth LEE
m. Elizabeth LEE father: Hancock LEE mother: Sarah ALLERTON

3rd generation

3. Richard TAYLOR m. Sarah Dabney STROTHER
m. Sarah Dabney STROTHER father: William STROTHER mother: Sarah BAYLY

4th generation

4. Zachary TAYLOR m. Margaret Mackall SMITH
m. Margaret Mackall SMITH father: Walter SMITH mother: Ann MACKALL

5th generation

5. Ann Margaret TAYLOR m. Robert WOOD
m. Robert WOOD
10. Richard TAYLOR m. Louise Marie BRINGIER
m. Louise Marie BRINGIER