William Howard Taft and Me
William Howard Taft ran as the Republican nominee in 1908 because his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, fulfilled a promise he had made after winning the election in 1904. Because Roosevelt had first come to office when McKinley was assassinated, only six months into his second term, when Roosevelt won in 1904 he announced that he would abide by the precedent (not yet law) that Presidents should only serve two terms in office.
As the 1908 election neared, Roosevelt cast about for his successor. His Vice President, Charles Fairbanks, had worked against Roosevelt’s policies during his administration, so Roosevelt worked against his nomination. Instead, he endorsed his close friend and political ally, William Howard Taft, for the position – although Teddy began to regret his decision not to run because he felt he still had a lot he wanted to do. He was confident, however, that Taft (who had served as his secretary of war and trusted advisor) shared his views and would work toward their common goals. As we’ll see when we look at the 1912 election, Teddy was wrong about Taft.
Anyway.
Once again, I recognize this connection immediately. It goes through my Cody family line, which I’ve already written about in five of these essays –John Adams, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur. So here I am again. I don’t have to look at my tree back to my 5th great-grandmother, Mary Parmenter (1737-1817). I already have her sister Lois Parmenter (#8) on my tree.
It wasn’t hard to verify that she married James Hayward (#9) in Massachusetts in 1746 and that James had a sister named Patience (#10). The other connections also check out. This view of the connection makes it a little easier to understand, as several sibling/spouse connections link this together.
I’ve grown accustomed to connections that meander all over the place. This one is pretty straightforward: a straight shot back to my 5th great-grandmother Mary Parmenter, then from sibling to spouse to sibling to spouse to sibling, then a straight shot from John Chapin to William Taft. I think this is rather elegant.
This Geni connection looks promising. I recognize the names through Lettice Jenkins, on the right end of the second row.
I’ve had a chance to write about my Hunt family connection five times in this series – for Presidents Fillmore, Buchanan, Lincoln, Cleveland, and McKinley. But this time the connection is through a branch of my family in the South, rather than in New England, which makes this a bit more interesting.
I’ve previously written about Elizabeth Betsey Hunt, but not about her connection to my Jenkins family in New England. Elizabeth’s parents were John Hunt and Martha Jenkins, who met and married in South Carolina in 1781 (after John was released from a British prison camp where he was imprisoned after the fall of Charleston to the British in 1780). I’ve traced John’s Hunt family ancestors back to 17th-century Virginia. But Martha’s story is a bit different.
SIDE NOTE: This is as good a time as any to acknowledge the benefit of having ancestors who are connected to someone famous. John and Martha had a lot of children between 1790 and 1810 but in addition to Betsy, one of their children was my 4th great-uncle Jefferson Hunt (1804-1879), who was to become an important figure in the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois, and later when the Mormons moved to Salt Lake City. The Mormons have written extensively about Jefferson Hunt, and John gets a lot of attention in. these narratives. This is one reason I have this image, which is a hand-drawn map of the early life of John Hunt in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It is the frontispiece of a 1958 book Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion by Pauline Udall Smith. I retrieved this book from the Hathitrust website.
The right side of this map shows John’s early life in Virginia and North Carolina, which is what I’ve been talking about so far. The left side of the map shows John’s life in South Carolina. Nice of the author to provide us with this aid while we examine John’s life.
You can see that on the right side of the map, the author points out several places where the Martha Jenkins family lived. Martha has an interesting background. Her 2nd great-grandfather (and my 8th great-grandfather) Edward Jenkins (1618-1699) came to Massachusetts during the Puritan Great Migration in the 1630s. His grandson, Thomas Jenkins (1700-1775) appears to have been born in Massachusetts but then moved first to Pennsylvania and then to North Carolina. The family may have been Quakers – their names appear in areas in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina where Quakers settled, but I’m not sure about this.
One interesting genealogical side-note: I am connected to the Jenkins family in Massachusetts through another family line. This family tree chart shows this connection:
Mary Farnsworth (1637-1705) is the ancestor who provides this connection. You can see that Mary was married to Edward Jenkins. She was his second wife, and my Jenkins family is descended from his first wife, Lettice Hanford (1617-1691) through their son Thomas Jenkins (on the right of this chart). Mary’s first husband, Abraham Ripley (1684-1683), died in 1683, leaving Mary with a lot of children, including five who were less than 10 years old. Mary was 20 years younger than Lettice, and I can imagine that Edward married Mary to provide economic security to a widow with young children. The interesting part (well, at least I think it’s interesting) is that one of the children that Mary with her first husband Abraham Ripley was my 7th great-grandfather Joseph Ripley (1667-1737) (on the left side of the chart) on my father’s side. I’m descended from both of Mary’s husbands. This makes Mary both my paternal 8th great-grandmother AND my maternal 8th step-great-grandmother. I think.
Anyway. Back to the Geni connection. Here it is again in case you’ve lost track.
I can prove that Lettice married a man named Edward Foster before she married Edward Jenkins, and that they had a son named Timothy. I made my way through the rest of the connections, and they check out. I noticed something interesting, however. In the middle of the third row, you see the ‘Davenport’ surname. I recognized that name; I have Davenport ancestors in Massachusetts, which is also the home of these Davenports. I did a little looking around, and I realized that the John Davenport that Naomi Jones married was the brother of my 9th great-grandfather Jonathan Davenport. I have a few questions about this – like, how likely is it that a man named John would have a brother named Jonathan? I’m not going to explore this any further, however. I do have a life