Anyway, you will notice that our family record goes back clean to the definite date 1512, when William Danford died at Framingham, this makes interesting reading for one who reads between the lines, as my kiddie and I have been trying to do. In a family of long-lived people it’s considerably safe to guess that William was not younger than 50 at his death – probably considerably more. That figure would bring his birth back to 1462.
As social conditions were in England in those days, I can’t figure out a happy lot for William and Isabel and their five nestlings. There were 3 classes of people, the Churchmen, the Nobility and the Commonalty. The nobles owned the land, and the common people were tenants with only such rights as their superiors chose to allow. The commoner was loaded down with the burden of supporting the Huge Ecclesiastical machine, and the noble with all their military ambitions; and by the time the commoner paid his church tithes and duties and put up for the keep of a luxurious aristocracy, with a royal establishment at the head, he hadn’t a bounteous leaving for himself and family.
Anyway, William and Isabel lacked many things we deem everyday necessities of life. They never heard of coffee or tea, for it was only 150 years later, after his death, that the Arabian bean found its way only to England, and tea was a few years later still. Their great-great-grandson Nicholas, died in America 126 years later without a first cup of tea; but it is more probably that some of the said Nicholas’s seven children had some hundreds of great-great-grandchildren in and around Boston 136 years still later, when a Famous tea-party was pulled off: and you know it is a family trait to participate in everything that is going on.
Neither did William and Isabel have any corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, turkeys, or a host of other luxuries which the old world was to get from the new, since the new world was not discovered until William was some 30 years old, and little or nothing was ever known of it until long after his death. It was still India when he died. Neither he nor his good wife Isabel ever hear of Columbus or his discovery, for neither he nor she would read nor write, nor anyone else in Framingham, perhaps, excepting the parish priest. Why should they, since there was nothing to read and even less to write. True, printing had been invented: A German named Gutenberg, over on the Rhine, when William was a boy of about 12, had rigged up some wooden types and a press, and had worked off a book called the “Catholicon” and when he was about 24 an Englishman named Caxton had set up a press and run off the “History of Troy.”
(Illigible-DE)…hundreds of thousands of descendants many of whom we have probably met without either ourselves or themselves knowing who they were. We have only Nicholas rescued from the common oblivion.
Of Nicholas we need only observe that he lived through the short reign of Edward VI, and the bloody catholic re-action when poor deluded Mary undertook to turn back the tide, and died in the 25th year of “The Good Queen Bee” when the Faith of generations of his ancestors had been supplanted permanently by the new religion from Germany.
Nicholas saw common people develop from mere lieges to real men and women owning land in their own right, many of the men and possibly a few of the women able to read and write, and about all of them able and willing to take a hand in political affairs – which generally meant religious affairs – and all of them entitled to have opinions of their own on almost any subject, and quite ready and willing to express them. I imagine this Nicholas accumulated a patch of land in his own right, for we find that his eldest son, Thomas, a “Yeoman” – a free and lawful man” who owned “free land” of 40 shillings annual value, which made him a “free holder” competent to vote, to sit on juries, and do numerous things William and Paul could not do. In short, the Danford family is becoming interesting – especially the eldest sons.
Thomas Danford, Yeoman, is a real somebody, worthy to have the exact date of his marriage recorded, two years after the death of his father. We recognize him as a somebody of importance by the fact of his marriage to Jane, daughter of Thomas Sudbury of Kenshall – note the “of Kenshall.” It was a big thing to own land of your very own, in those days, quite an important matter if it was worth 40 shillings a year, we don’t think it any great matter in this country; but this is not England in Tudor times….
Nicholas Danford, son of Thomas and Jane, cut a considerable figure in the old world and in the new. Born in the brilliant period of English History, a contemporary of Burleigh, Raleigh, Shakespeare and that great age of giants which makes “The Elizabethan Era” memorable for all time, he lived through reign of the first thick – headed Stewarts, James, and into that of his stubborn, short-sighted son, Charles. Nicholas was doubtless an educated man, as I gather from his record on this side of the Atlantic, a Cambridge man. He was clear-visioned. He saw the gradual development of the contest between brave Englishmen went on preserving their rights and liberties and the royal chump who sought to set back the hands of the clock by restoring the despotism of the early tudors; and he noted that the back bone of that political resistance was the religious fanaticism called puritianism. So Nicholas was Puritan. He foresaw the coming storm, and 8 years before it broke, on the death of his wife, he gathered his flock of seven children, and emigrated to the Puritan Colony in the new world known as Massachusetts Bay Colony, wherein were the towns of Salem and Boston, and where there were growing Puritan settlements spreading back in land some miles and older one south called Plymouth Colony, only 14 years old…..
You will observe that I do not look upon this genealogy as being merely the history of a family…but I regard it as a history of American in skeleton, covering 316 years when American History was made in Europe, down to that fateful day in July 144 years ago, when our ancestors of that day ceased to be English and decreed that they and their posterity should henceforth be Americans – and still are, thank heaven, even if some of American birth but English minds, would tie us back again to the old world and its stogy ideals. In preserving our independence results in “breaking the heart of the world.” I am about heartless enough to let her break; although I am very skeptical about all this theoretical Tom Follery.
As far as I am able to observe, the supposed “heart of the world” beats very much as it had done for 5 centuries, and I am unable to perceive by what authority an American official sworn to support, maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States, thereby, becomes the guardian of this alleged world heart treasure. Indeed, there is quite a lot of rhetorical slush we have been fed upon for the past seven years which I am wholly unable to translate into Missourian – and it is a safe test that any language which will not translate into the showdown dialect of Missouri is short on common sense, and belongs in the class one Paul of Tarsus characterized as “sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.”
I am weary unto Nausea of “watchful waiting” “punitive expeditions” “self-determination” ”freedom of the seas” “open covenants” “Liberty” “Motors that fail to note, a world safe for Democracy” which is plainly headed for despotism, and all that long line of rhetorical flim-flam which commenced when one “Doctor” William Bayard Hale, later “My personal representative” and later German spy, published that :Batch” of beautiful slush under the heading “The New Freedom.” Do you remember it all? I am unable to foresee how historians will characterize this last 8 year period, but it would be hard to find a better name for it the “Era of tommy-rot”.
We are having real winter, nearly a foot of snowfall. This is the second one in October. The first occurrence of this time in my 30 years. Snow is said to be 4 ft deep at redmt. 12 south of here.
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