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From: david greene <>
Subject: Southworth royal descent
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 13:35:50 -0800

Our server has been messing up. Apparently, my brief correction
"Southworth gaffe" was posted, the original was lost (at least on my
screen). Hence I'll try again, with a couple corrections.

I had wanted to get back to Jim Stevens's valuable comunications on the
Southworths earlier but got bogged down in completing the page proofs for
the January [sic] TAG, which will be published late this month.

A large part of the problem lies in the fact that the Southworth web site
is far out of date on the scholarship on this family's claimed origin.
The comments on that site were written in the 1930s by Mary J. Sibley for
the Boston Evening Transcript. They assume that an embroidery of the
Southworth arms was brought over by Alice Carpenter Southworth.
Unfortunately, that is a family legend that is certainly false.

In the -New England Historical and Genealogical Register- for October
1943 (Vol. 97, pp. 359-64), McClure Meredith Howland subjected this
embroidery of the Southworth arms to examination. He showed that its
ownership cannot be traced even problematically earlier than the middle
of the 18th century. He then had experts in textiles at the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City examine
photographs of the embroidery. They agreed that it almost certainly dated
from the middle of the 18th century. To those who argued that Gov.
William Bradford's estate inventory included a "crest," he pointed out
that the word is in a list of the governor's military arms and is either
"rest" or "westet" (for waistcoat). The article includes a very clear
photograph of the embroidery.

This should have been enough to disprove the heraldic evidence still
being presented fifty years later on the web site. But there was more. In
the -Register- for October 1955 (Vol. 109, p. 314), Harold Bowditch, who
was Secretary for the NEHGS's Committee on Heraldry, presented convincing
evidence that the embroidery was based upon a design by the Boston
heraldic artist Thomas Johnson, who was active around 1740. Though
Bowditch does not say so, it has been my experience that Johnson and
others of that day functioned rather like Halbert's: they found the arms
in a standard source (usually Gwillim) for the most prominent family of
the surname and appropriated them for their clients.

Hence, the Southworth arms were NOT brought over by Alice Southworth
Carpenter and instead date from the middle of the 18th century; they
were almost certainly appropriated from a standard book on arms because
of the prominence of the Salmesbury family. They have no value as
evidence for the origin of Edward Southworth of Leiden and his sons,
Constant and Thomas Southworth of Plymouth Colony.

This does not meant that these Southworths did not descend from the
Salmesbury gentry family. The best cirucmstantial case for that
hypothesis (though it contains some special pleading) is a pamphlet by
Frederick Lewis Weis: -The Ancestry of Ensign Constant and Captain Thomas
Southworth- (1958). Jacobus's comments on Weis case's appear in a review
in TAG 35:121: "It is a controversial matter, and, without undertaking an
independent study of it, the reviewer can say only that this
identification is entirely possible and even seems somewhat
likely"--which is hardly an unqualified endorsement.

In her Boston Transcript articles reproduced at length on the Southworth
web site and posted here by Jim Stevens, Mary Sibley proved that one
possible pair of Nottinghamshire brothers could not have been the ones in
Leiden, but she did not prove that the Leiden-Plymouth group did not
fit elsewhere into the Nottinghamshire family. The best circumstantial
case for that possibility is presented in an article by Robert L. French
in the February 1992 -Mayflower Quarterly- (Vol. 58, pp. 10-15). He shows
that much of Weis's circumstantial case applies equally well to the
Nottinghamshire Southworths and then shows connections of that group with
others among the Leiden-Plymouth immigrants. This Nottinghamshire family
may be a cadet line (though that is speculative) of the Salmesbury
Southworths, and they seem to have been minor gentry, on the cusp of the
yeomanry. Their social class was somewhat higher than that of Gov.
William Bradford, and they may have had still higher pretensions.

None of this takes into account the possibility that the immigrants
descended from other Southworths elsewhere in England. If I had to
choose, I'd call the Nottinghamshire circumstantial case slightly more
likely that the Salmesbury. But Henry Hoff, editor of the -New York
Genealogical and Biographical Record-, has come up with a fine word for
all such fuzzy circumstantial cases: "underproven."

Again, my appreciation to Jim Stevens for bringing this material before
the group. And I hope that I have not ended the discussion!

To the above, let me add in response to Richard Barney's question: there
has been a lot of speculation on Alice Carpenter Southworth Bradford's
connections, including some attempts to make all Carpenter families of
Plymouth colony related.

This is not a question that I have studied, but I suggest checking the
Southworths and Bradfords in Bob Anderson's Great Migration Begins. He
will, at least, provide a bibliography to start from.

DLG

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