Two forgotten incidents of history have always been special to me. They are Wat Tyler's Rebellion in England in 1381 and the Jacquerie in France. Wat Tyler was far ahead of his time, resembling nothing as much as the French Revolution 400 years later, promoting ideas of equality that are still not practiced in the UK. He sought to curb the accumulation of land and wealth by the church and to end the influence of the nobility. He died for it, being run through by the lord mayor of London as he tried to dictate terms to Henry VI.
(We think of the Magna Carta as "guaranteeing the rights of Englishmen" and so on, but it didn't. The Magna Carta confirmed the power of the nobility versus the king and little more. Most Englishmen were in effect slaves.)
There were other rebellions, even less well known. My dabbling in genealogy has unearthed several touching my forebears.
The Borden family of Kent, England, may have participated in Jack Cade's Rebellion in 1450. Henry VI pardoned Cade and other leaders, then as the rebellion died down revoked the pardons and apprehended and executed Cade; royal prerogative. There was more to it than that; see http://www.warsoftheroses.co.uk/chapter_39.htm for a good discussion.
In 1645 in certain villages on Lake Zurich including Richterswil where the Bachmanns lived there occurred the Wädenswiler Steueraufstand, a tax revolt. One Rudolf Goldschmid who led the movement was executed. Was he related to the Anna Goldschmitt born 1655 who was the mother of Heinrich Bachmann?
In 1676 there was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. An uprising of indentured servants, the landless, and those unprotected on the frontier against the landed interests in power in the colony. Bacon himself cheated the hangman's rope by dying of malaria, but others were hanged.
From 1765-1771 in the western counties of North Carolina there occurred the War of the Regulation, a political and economic revolt against colonial officeholders and the wealthy families in the east, that presaged the American Revoluton.. Anson County was the heart of the movement. Quite a few of my ancestors were in North Carolina, in Anson, Mecklenburg, and Cabarrus counties around that time. That revolt ended in a mini-massacre as a trained militia fired on farmers and townsmen. And with the hanging of about 20 leaders.
It is a thesis of mine that the American Revolution was in part a revolt of class against class, or the poor and unenfranchised against the wealthy; an Occupy Wall Street movement with teeth. A broad generalization but there is truth in it.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Virginia Connections...
A casual bid at a book auction last October got me a first edition set of Douglas Southall Freeman's bio of George Washington, 7 vols. for $45. 5 of the 7 are first printings as well as being in excellent condition. Not a bad buy as it turned out.
Actually I was the only bidder, at the minimum bid, and to confess I bid only to prime the pump. It's happened before, my getting a phone call on Sunday notifying me that I had bought something I had forgotten about bidding on. Not knocking my Norman Rockwell folios or the tiny print OED, but this was the best yet. The best deal yet too.
Among other chapters, I've been reading about the Fairfax Proprietary. Freeman wrote an appendix of over 100 pages on the Proprietary besides some information within the text itself. Besides hundreds of pages on Virginia colony in the 1700s, its government, culture and history. Great stuff, especially when you've just learned that you had ancestors in Virginia around that time, which brings it all to life: what was it like then?
Well, early this week, I resumed genealogizing to the extent of googling a couple of names I had neglected before. One name was Heinrich Bachmann and the other was Benjamin Borden.
Heinrich Bachmann immigrated to the colonies about 1738 or '39 from Richterswil, Zurich Canton, Switzerland. My first Swiss! And that's not all. After spending about 20 years in the Shanandoah Valley of Virginia, he shows up in the records as the buyer of 257 acres in the Shenandoah of Frederick County, VA, from the Fairfax Proprietary and he died there about 20 years later.
Heinrich's mother had the name Dagan, which sources say is Hebraic. His father's mother was a Goldschmidt. Were they Jewish? If so, not for long.
Another Fairfax nexus or near nexus came up with Ben Borden, Jr. His grandfather was a Quaker and immigrated to the new colony of Rhode Island in the late 1630s, not as a founder but an early colonist. His son Benjamin moved to New Jersey, where his son Benjamin Borden, Jr., was born. All the Bordens had a knack for acquiring land, and that was a special calling for Ben Borden, Jr., who bought and sold thousands of acres in what is now New Jersey. Then Ben Borden, Jr., went to Virginia, perhaps after a spot of trouble over opposition to the hanging of a suspected pirate.
Somehow through persuasion or wheeling and dealing Borden obtained a patent on 91,000 acres in Rockbridge County, Virginia, near present day Lexington. Some say he was nicknamed "Fairfax Ben" because he was an agent of the Fairfax Proprietary. I think it was because with his control over 91,000 acres he was set up as a sort of mini Lord Fairfax with 1/50th the land and minus the titles.
He didn't lose the land through poor judgment the way a number of prominent Virginia plantation owners did. He left his daughters 5,000 acres each and his sons considerably more. His estate was inventoried for probate at some 120,000 acres, and litigation over claims to it was said to have continued for 154 years!
His granddaughter, Margaret Borden, married Nichodemus Keith in Bedford County, Va, the county just to the south of the Borden landholdings. After several children were born, Margaret and Nichodemus and it seems her father John Borden then migrated to Tennessee.
Why did John Borden, who ought to have been prosperous thanks to Ben Borden's will, leave Virginia for greater hardship and risk out on the frontier? That is one mystery. The usual reasons to migrate to Tennessee were economic: a quest for land or for more land away from the established economic hieratchy in the East.
Another mystery is where Nichodemus Keith came from. On the internet one finds various nonsense about him, that he was born in Tennessee in 1755 or that he lived in Tennessee before his marriage to Margaret. There are claims that he served in the Revolution: undocumented, plus his family grew so fast during the Revolution years that he surely stayed nearby. There are claims he was the son of Sir William Keith of Scotland, but the dates don't quite jibe. Others say he was the son of a William Butler Keith of Ireland.
Tennessee was a wild and wooly place before 1790. The British established a settlement at Ft. Loudon in 1757. It was under continual Indian attack and was abandoned three years later. Finally a group of settlers acted outside the law and treaties and established a community complete with its own constitution--the Wautaga Association. To be followed by efforts to create the new State of Franklin. Following the close of the Revolutionary War, there was significant immigration to Tennessee, which grew explosively in the1790s; after 1800, Tennessee was becoming settled and civilized. There is no way Nichodemus would have been born in Tennessee in 1755 or 1760, and no way he would have been married in Tennessee in 1776 as some would have it.
One might wish to connect Nichodemus Keith with the famous line of Keiths in Scotland, a 500+ year old line of marischals and earl-marischals of Scotland extending over 500 years from the late 1100s until 1716, when the clan head and marischal was outlawed and his titles and lands were confiscated by the Crown for supporting a Stuart claimant to the throne, some Keiths being descended from the Stuart king James I, king of Scotland 1406-1437, and some associated with the affairs of later Stuarts including Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James I, king of England, Scotland, and Wales for whom the "King James Bible" was named. [Or Queen James, which I call him to offend Christian fundamentalist homophobes who claim divine inspiration for the KJV.]
Most likely, Nichodemus Keith was Scots-Irish, meaning that he was descended from those impoverished Scots who were settled for a time in Ireland as colonists/buffers for the British Crown who then moved from Ireland to the colonies, and was not part of that famous line, at least not for some generations back. But it is not known.
Statements are made about Margaret Borden, that she was a poet and a Baptist preacher. Where did that come from? There was a book written about Nichodemus & Margaret Keith and their descendants that I have not seen; are these stories contained in that book? Were there female Baptist preachers in the 1700s? Seems a little early to me.
Was Nichodemus Keith descended from a settler on a tract of Ben Borden's land? Was he a neighbor of the Bordens? Don't know. Was he a grandson of wandering Baptist preacher Cornelius Keith who roamed the Virginia and North Carolina mountains in a wagon around 1715? A relative of George Keith, who was a Quaker associated with William Penn but who split with Penn and formed his own Quakerish sect called Keithians? Unknown, captain.
Why did a grandaughter of a major landowner marry Nichodemus? Don't know.
Why was Nichodemus referred to as "Judge" Nichodemus Keith in one record? Don't know.
Why did they all pull up stakes and go to Tennessee, including John Borden Margaret's father? Unknown.
So here is the state of my ancestors in Virginia:
(1) Bullock. William Bullock settled near Jamestown/Williamsburg about 1624 and died at Warwick, VA in 1650. His father Hugh, "master and owner of the Endeavor" and other ships, was a sometime resident of Virginia from the 1620s but primarily lived in London though he was a member of the House of Burgesses in 1631 by virtue of owning 2600 acres of Virginia land. Nevertheless, descent from Hugh qualfies one for membership in the Jamestown Society. In the late 1700s, Agnes Bullock born in North Carolina would marry into the Pool family of North Carolina and their daughter would be born in Georgia in 1800 and would marry a Smith and later die at the Smith enclave in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
(2) Mayes. The Mayes were in Virginia before moving to Kentucky in the 1800s. They lived in Halifax and Pittsylvania, Virginia in the 1700s and earlier. By some genealogies they trace back to Rev. William Mease who arrived in Virginia in 1610. In terms of early colonial ancestry Rev. Mease is paydirt. However, one must be cautious because some facts about Rev. Mease and his descendants are not certain. Descent appears to trace as follows: Rev, William Mease (1584-1636?) --> John Mays (1611-1673) --> William Mayes + ___ Newcombe --> William Mayes + Mary Mattox --> William Mayes (d. 1752) + Eliz. Gardiner --> William Mays (1724-1794) + Sarah Latham --> Drury Mays (1773-1820) --> Thomas David Mayes (1799-1852) + --> David N. Mayes (1831 TN-1886) + Martha Cloyes [who brings in Massachusetts Puritan ancestry] --> Ida Emma Eudora Frances Mayes (1858-1926) who married John Bachman Downing, my great-grandfather. 12 generations in all, some in Virginia.
(3) Brumbelow. Edward Brumbelow was born in Warsaw, Virginia, about 1675 and was the carpenter who built the Richmond County courthouse around 1706. A son or grandson was a local judge in Virginia. A descendant, Lewis Brumbelow, would migrate from Virginia to Tennessee, and his daughter, Elizabeth Brumbelow, would marry a later Nichodemus Keith and die in Texas in 1895; her mother was reputed to be Cherokee but this is unproven.
(4) Borden. Quaker and real estate wheeler-dealer Benjamin Borden, Jr., moved to Virginia from New Jersey about 1734 and then settled on his 91,000 acre tract in Rockbridge County where he died in 1743 near Winchester right after being appointed to a judgeship. It is told that Borden was wandering in the wilderness in western Virginia trying to find his land specified in the patent when he stopped for the night at a little cabin; John McDowell, the son of the family living there just happened to be trained as a surveyor, and Borden offered him a thousand acres to survey and stake out Borden's land and begin settling it; it was quickly surveyed though McDowell had to sue Borden to get his choice of land, which preserved the incident and the contract between te men. Here is more information and a transcription of the written agreement between Borden and McDowell dated 1737: http://leomcdowell.tripod.com/id28.htm
(5) Starnes. Frederick Starnes, Jr., migrated from New York to Pennsylvania and settled on the South Fork of the Holston River near present day Abington, Virginia, possibly before 1750, the Holston being a jump-off point for explorations of the Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness and an epicenter for "the longhunters" who were the first white explorers of Tennessee and Kentucky; Frederick was a constable and former militiaman, and while on a scouting expedition past Boonesborough, Kentucky, that Frederick and relatives undertook in 1779, was killed along with his brother and son-in-law by Shawnee stirred up by the British. It was reported that the son-in-law was a big man, and that his heart was missing when the bodies were found. A son and nephew were among settlers of Boonesborough and another son, "Capt. John," was killed in the Revolutionary War. His father, Frederick Starnes, Sr., also had moved to Virginia and was wounded by Indians while working in his field.
(6) Bachmann. In 1762 Heinrich Bachmann bought 257 acres of Fairfax Proprietary land in the Shanandoah Valley and some of his descendants lived on that tract in Virginia at least until the 1850s. At some point, a Bachmann -- or Bachman or Baughman -- would move on to Tennessee, where a daughter would marry a James Downing and give birth to a son, John Bachman Downing, who as a teenager out on his own would seek work in North Carolina, marry Ida Mayes, and move on to Dallas, Texas, in the 1870s.
(7) Keith. Margaret Borden and Nichodemus Keith married in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1776 and lived there for a few years as some of their children were born before moving to Tennessee by the 1790s along with John Borden. One of their daughters would marry Samuel Cowan in Tennessee where Cowan was a commissioner of Knox County, and then some descendants, Cowans and Keiths both, would migrate to Texas in the late 1830s.
Actually I was the only bidder, at the minimum bid, and to confess I bid only to prime the pump. It's happened before, my getting a phone call on Sunday notifying me that I had bought something I had forgotten about bidding on. Not knocking my Norman Rockwell folios or the tiny print OED, but this was the best yet. The best deal yet too.
Among other chapters, I've been reading about the Fairfax Proprietary. Freeman wrote an appendix of over 100 pages on the Proprietary besides some information within the text itself. Besides hundreds of pages on Virginia colony in the 1700s, its government, culture and history. Great stuff, especially when you've just learned that you had ancestors in Virginia around that time, which brings it all to life: what was it like then?
Well, early this week, I resumed genealogizing to the extent of googling a couple of names I had neglected before. One name was Heinrich Bachmann and the other was Benjamin Borden.
Heinrich Bachmann immigrated to the colonies about 1738 or '39 from Richterswil, Zurich Canton, Switzerland. My first Swiss! And that's not all. After spending about 20 years in the Shanandoah Valley of Virginia, he shows up in the records as the buyer of 257 acres in the Shenandoah of Frederick County, VA, from the Fairfax Proprietary and he died there about 20 years later.
Heinrich's mother had the name Dagan, which sources say is Hebraic. His father's mother was a Goldschmidt. Were they Jewish? If so, not for long.
Another Fairfax nexus or near nexus came up with Ben Borden, Jr. His grandfather was a Quaker and immigrated to the new colony of Rhode Island in the late 1630s, not as a founder but an early colonist. His son Benjamin moved to New Jersey, where his son Benjamin Borden, Jr., was born. All the Bordens had a knack for acquiring land, and that was a special calling for Ben Borden, Jr., who bought and sold thousands of acres in what is now New Jersey. Then Ben Borden, Jr., went to Virginia, perhaps after a spot of trouble over opposition to the hanging of a suspected pirate.
Somehow through persuasion or wheeling and dealing Borden obtained a patent on 91,000 acres in Rockbridge County, Virginia, near present day Lexington. Some say he was nicknamed "Fairfax Ben" because he was an agent of the Fairfax Proprietary. I think it was because with his control over 91,000 acres he was set up as a sort of mini Lord Fairfax with 1/50th the land and minus the titles.
He didn't lose the land through poor judgment the way a number of prominent Virginia plantation owners did. He left his daughters 5,000 acres each and his sons considerably more. His estate was inventoried for probate at some 120,000 acres, and litigation over claims to it was said to have continued for 154 years!
His granddaughter, Margaret Borden, married Nichodemus Keith in Bedford County, Va, the county just to the south of the Borden landholdings. After several children were born, Margaret and Nichodemus and it seems her father John Borden then migrated to Tennessee.
Why did John Borden, who ought to have been prosperous thanks to Ben Borden's will, leave Virginia for greater hardship and risk out on the frontier? That is one mystery. The usual reasons to migrate to Tennessee were economic: a quest for land or for more land away from the established economic hieratchy in the East.
Another mystery is where Nichodemus Keith came from. On the internet one finds various nonsense about him, that he was born in Tennessee in 1755 or that he lived in Tennessee before his marriage to Margaret. There are claims that he served in the Revolution: undocumented, plus his family grew so fast during the Revolution years that he surely stayed nearby. There are claims he was the son of Sir William Keith of Scotland, but the dates don't quite jibe. Others say he was the son of a William Butler Keith of Ireland.
Tennessee was a wild and wooly place before 1790. The British established a settlement at Ft. Loudon in 1757. It was under continual Indian attack and was abandoned three years later. Finally a group of settlers acted outside the law and treaties and established a community complete with its own constitution--the Wautaga Association. To be followed by efforts to create the new State of Franklin. Following the close of the Revolutionary War, there was significant immigration to Tennessee, which grew explosively in the1790s; after 1800, Tennessee was becoming settled and civilized. There is no way Nichodemus would have been born in Tennessee in 1755 or 1760, and no way he would have been married in Tennessee in 1776 as some would have it.
One might wish to connect Nichodemus Keith with the famous line of Keiths in Scotland, a 500+ year old line of marischals and earl-marischals of Scotland extending over 500 years from the late 1100s until 1716, when the clan head and marischal was outlawed and his titles and lands were confiscated by the Crown for supporting a Stuart claimant to the throne, some Keiths being descended from the Stuart king James I, king of Scotland 1406-1437, and some associated with the affairs of later Stuarts including Mary, Queen of Scots, and her son James I, king of England, Scotland, and Wales for whom the "King James Bible" was named. [Or Queen James, which I call him to offend Christian fundamentalist homophobes who claim divine inspiration for the KJV.]
Most likely, Nichodemus Keith was Scots-Irish, meaning that he was descended from those impoverished Scots who were settled for a time in Ireland as colonists/buffers for the British Crown who then moved from Ireland to the colonies, and was not part of that famous line, at least not for some generations back. But it is not known.
Statements are made about Margaret Borden, that she was a poet and a Baptist preacher. Where did that come from? There was a book written about Nichodemus & Margaret Keith and their descendants that I have not seen; are these stories contained in that book? Were there female Baptist preachers in the 1700s? Seems a little early to me.
Was Nichodemus Keith descended from a settler on a tract of Ben Borden's land? Was he a neighbor of the Bordens? Don't know. Was he a grandson of wandering Baptist preacher Cornelius Keith who roamed the Virginia and North Carolina mountains in a wagon around 1715? A relative of George Keith, who was a Quaker associated with William Penn but who split with Penn and formed his own Quakerish sect called Keithians? Unknown, captain.
Why did a grandaughter of a major landowner marry Nichodemus? Don't know.
Why was Nichodemus referred to as "Judge" Nichodemus Keith in one record? Don't know.
Why did they all pull up stakes and go to Tennessee, including John Borden Margaret's father? Unknown.
So here is the state of my ancestors in Virginia:
(1) Bullock. William Bullock settled near Jamestown/Williamsburg about 1624 and died at Warwick, VA in 1650. His father Hugh, "master and owner of the Endeavor" and other ships, was a sometime resident of Virginia from the 1620s but primarily lived in London though he was a member of the House of Burgesses in 1631 by virtue of owning 2600 acres of Virginia land. Nevertheless, descent from Hugh qualfies one for membership in the Jamestown Society. In the late 1700s, Agnes Bullock born in North Carolina would marry into the Pool family of North Carolina and their daughter would be born in Georgia in 1800 and would marry a Smith and later die at the Smith enclave in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
(2) Mayes. The Mayes were in Virginia before moving to Kentucky in the 1800s. They lived in Halifax and Pittsylvania, Virginia in the 1700s and earlier. By some genealogies they trace back to Rev. William Mease who arrived in Virginia in 1610. In terms of early colonial ancestry Rev. Mease is paydirt. However, one must be cautious because some facts about Rev. Mease and his descendants are not certain. Descent appears to trace as follows: Rev, William Mease (1584-1636?) --> John Mays (1611-1673) --> William Mayes + ___ Newcombe --> William Mayes + Mary Mattox --> William Mayes (d. 1752) + Eliz. Gardiner --> William Mays (1724-1794) + Sarah Latham --> Drury Mays (1773-1820) --> Thomas David Mayes (1799-1852) + --> David N. Mayes (1831 TN-1886) + Martha Cloyes [who brings in Massachusetts Puritan ancestry] --> Ida Emma Eudora Frances Mayes (1858-1926) who married John Bachman Downing, my great-grandfather. 12 generations in all, some in Virginia.
(3) Brumbelow. Edward Brumbelow was born in Warsaw, Virginia, about 1675 and was the carpenter who built the Richmond County courthouse around 1706. A son or grandson was a local judge in Virginia. A descendant, Lewis Brumbelow, would migrate from Virginia to Tennessee, and his daughter, Elizabeth Brumbelow, would marry a later Nichodemus Keith and die in Texas in 1895; her mother was reputed to be Cherokee but this is unproven.
(4) Borden. Quaker and real estate wheeler-dealer Benjamin Borden, Jr., moved to Virginia from New Jersey about 1734 and then settled on his 91,000 acre tract in Rockbridge County where he died in 1743 near Winchester right after being appointed to a judgeship. It is told that Borden was wandering in the wilderness in western Virginia trying to find his land specified in the patent when he stopped for the night at a little cabin; John McDowell, the son of the family living there just happened to be trained as a surveyor, and Borden offered him a thousand acres to survey and stake out Borden's land and begin settling it; it was quickly surveyed though McDowell had to sue Borden to get his choice of land, which preserved the incident and the contract between te men. Here is more information and a transcription of the written agreement between Borden and McDowell dated 1737: http://leomcdowell.tripod.com/id28.htm
(5) Starnes. Frederick Starnes, Jr., migrated from New York to Pennsylvania and settled on the South Fork of the Holston River near present day Abington, Virginia, possibly before 1750, the Holston being a jump-off point for explorations of the Tennessee and Kentucky wilderness and an epicenter for "the longhunters" who were the first white explorers of Tennessee and Kentucky; Frederick was a constable and former militiaman, and while on a scouting expedition past Boonesborough, Kentucky, that Frederick and relatives undertook in 1779, was killed along with his brother and son-in-law by Shawnee stirred up by the British. It was reported that the son-in-law was a big man, and that his heart was missing when the bodies were found. A son and nephew were among settlers of Boonesborough and another son, "Capt. John," was killed in the Revolutionary War. His father, Frederick Starnes, Sr., also had moved to Virginia and was wounded by Indians while working in his field.
(6) Bachmann. In 1762 Heinrich Bachmann bought 257 acres of Fairfax Proprietary land in the Shanandoah Valley and some of his descendants lived on that tract in Virginia at least until the 1850s. At some point, a Bachmann -- or Bachman or Baughman -- would move on to Tennessee, where a daughter would marry a James Downing and give birth to a son, John Bachman Downing, who as a teenager out on his own would seek work in North Carolina, marry Ida Mayes, and move on to Dallas, Texas, in the 1870s.
(7) Keith. Margaret Borden and Nichodemus Keith married in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1776 and lived there for a few years as some of their children were born before moving to Tennessee by the 1790s along with John Borden. One of their daughters would marry Samuel Cowan in Tennessee where Cowan was a commissioner of Knox County, and then some descendants, Cowans and Keiths both, would migrate to Texas in the late 1830s.
Monday, February 20, 2012
What's in a Name?
I noted in an earlier post that the middle name of my great grandfather John Downing was Bachman and that the name had transmuted from Baughman to Bachman.
H. L. Mencken had it otherwise in his book, The American Language, chapter about proper names. He quoted an article by Howard Barker, who wrote: "Bachmann was first 'improved' as Baughmann, promptly misunderstood as Boughman (pronounced to rhyme with ploughman), and then more easily spelled Bowman, which made possible one more shift in pronumciation." [The American Language, P. 479.]
This goes contrary to what I first learned of what the Bachmans/Boughmans in my family did sometime around 1800, as Johannes Baughman son of Heinrich Baughmann had a son born 1783 who called himself Daniel Bachman. On the other hand, some genealogies show only a change from Bachmann to Bachman and ignore the "Baughman" http://mykindred.com/cloud/TX/getperson.php?personID=I89290&tree=mykindred01 In that case, my sources have it wrong. But there is the pronunciation: my mother learned from John Bachman Downing (d. 1944) pronounced the name "Bawkman," not "Bockman."
The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Hanks and Hodges considers Bachman at least to be a variant of Bach, meaning perhaps, "baker" or possibly "one who lives by a river." But according to the genealogy I linked to above, the name was Bachmann at least as far back as the early 1600s in Richterswig Canton, Zurich, Switzerland, from whence the Bachmann's came to America and bought land in Virginia from the Fairfax Proprietary.
"Carriker" did come from "Karcher." Likely they are pronounced the same.
Changing gears. I have been accused of having two first names. This accusation shows a lack of history, because my last name dates from the late 1100s and was first used as a given name no more than 150 years ago. The name itself probably is taken from Gaelic meaning "woods" or even"wind" depending on which dictionary you look it up in.
Like many surnames it likely came from a location, in this case the grant of a barony and lands by King Malcolm to the family in recognition for fighting Danes (there is the usual story about the ancestor killing the Danish chieftain in single combat). There is a town in Scotland of that name, dating back to the time of Malcolm or earlier, which may mark the location of those lands. By this theory then, the place gave rise to the name.
But there was a charming story about how the family name originated, that it comes from the Germanic tribe known as the Catti, a poor tribe whose name may be preserved today in one of the poorer regions of Germany known as Hesse. The Catti were among the allied tribes who destroyed the three legions of Varus about 2003 years ago. ["My legions." moaned Augustus, in shock over the disaster, "Varus! Bring me back my legions!"] At some point, so the story goes, a number of the Catti in escaping from the soldiers of Tiberius (about the year 4) or those of Germanicus (about 20 years later when he wreaked a fearful vengeance over the loss of 20,000 of Varus' men) fled for their lives in boats across the North Sea to the coast of Scotland, where they were permitted to settle. My surname, so goes the story, comes straight from the tribal name Catti.
Now in fact at one point the family battle flag did feature a cat on it, but this may have been beause the story was then current and believed. It is said that the Catti flag was carried into the battle of Flodden Field in 1513, and that despite the death of a number of family members the flag was recovered and preserved.
This tale suggests that a tribal name came first, then a place name and a family name. Historically fascinating, even if not believed today.
Changing gears again: variations on "Gold." One branch (I think it is the Cloyes or the Gates or somebody back in the Mayes line but don't remember) is traced back to a Solomon Gould in England who had sons named Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, and so on. Was he Jewish? Who knows? The first Starnes to grow up in America married an Ann Goldman who like him came to New York in 1710. The mother of Heinrich Bachman who emigrated to the colonies from Switzerland was named Goldschmidt. Interesting.
H. L. Mencken had it otherwise in his book, The American Language, chapter about proper names. He quoted an article by Howard Barker, who wrote: "Bachmann was first 'improved' as Baughmann, promptly misunderstood as Boughman (pronounced to rhyme with ploughman), and then more easily spelled Bowman, which made possible one more shift in pronumciation." [The American Language, P. 479.]
This goes contrary to what I first learned of what the Bachmans/Boughmans in my family did sometime around 1800, as Johannes Baughman son of Heinrich Baughmann had a son born 1783 who called himself Daniel Bachman. On the other hand, some genealogies show only a change from Bachmann to Bachman and ignore the "Baughman" http://mykindred.com/cloud/TX/getperson.php?personID=I89290&tree=mykindred01 In that case, my sources have it wrong. But there is the pronunciation: my mother learned from John Bachman Downing (d. 1944) pronounced the name "Bawkman," not "Bockman."
The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames by Hanks and Hodges considers Bachman at least to be a variant of Bach, meaning perhaps, "baker" or possibly "one who lives by a river." But according to the genealogy I linked to above, the name was Bachmann at least as far back as the early 1600s in Richterswig Canton, Zurich, Switzerland, from whence the Bachmann's came to America and bought land in Virginia from the Fairfax Proprietary.
"Carriker" did come from "Karcher." Likely they are pronounced the same.
Changing gears. I have been accused of having two first names. This accusation shows a lack of history, because my last name dates from the late 1100s and was first used as a given name no more than 150 years ago. The name itself probably is taken from Gaelic meaning "woods" or even"wind" depending on which dictionary you look it up in.
Like many surnames it likely came from a location, in this case the grant of a barony and lands by King Malcolm to the family in recognition for fighting Danes (there is the usual story about the ancestor killing the Danish chieftain in single combat). There is a town in Scotland of that name, dating back to the time of Malcolm or earlier, which may mark the location of those lands. By this theory then, the place gave rise to the name.
But there was a charming story about how the family name originated, that it comes from the Germanic tribe known as the Catti, a poor tribe whose name may be preserved today in one of the poorer regions of Germany known as Hesse. The Catti were among the allied tribes who destroyed the three legions of Varus about 2003 years ago. ["My legions." moaned Augustus, in shock over the disaster, "Varus! Bring me back my legions!"] At some point, so the story goes, a number of the Catti in escaping from the soldiers of Tiberius (about the year 4) or those of Germanicus (about 20 years later when he wreaked a fearful vengeance over the loss of 20,000 of Varus' men) fled for their lives in boats across the North Sea to the coast of Scotland, where they were permitted to settle. My surname, so goes the story, comes straight from the tribal name Catti.
Now in fact at one point the family battle flag did feature a cat on it, but this may have been beause the story was then current and believed. It is said that the Catti flag was carried into the battle of Flodden Field in 1513, and that despite the death of a number of family members the flag was recovered and preserved.
This tale suggests that a tribal name came first, then a place name and a family name. Historically fascinating, even if not believed today.
Changing gears again: variations on "Gold." One branch (I think it is the Cloyes or the Gates or somebody back in the Mayes line but don't remember) is traced back to a Solomon Gould in England who had sons named Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, and so on. Was he Jewish? Who knows? The first Starnes to grow up in America married an Ann Goldman who like him came to New York in 1710. The mother of Heinrich Bachman who emigrated to the colonies from Switzerland was named Goldschmidt. Interesting.
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