Pitard.net: Notable Characters: Pitard.net: Genealogy

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Pitard.net: Notable Characters

One of the most enjoyable aspects of genealogy is using family stories as a way into larger historical events. This page is supposed to help with that. All of the people listed below are notable either because they accomplished notable things, or because we can identify their specific participation in notable events.

Please note that there are separate pages for Quaker ancestors, and for people who served in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and The Civil War.

To find out their relations, use the tools at the top of each person's page, especially the Pedigree, Descendancy, and Relationship buttons. One good way is to back up to an early direct ancestor of the person and hit "Descendancy." They are listed here in (approximate) chronological order.

Please get in touch if you can think of others on the tree who might be worth including, or if you know of any other information which might amplify an understanding of these folks!

Cornelia van Horne Lansdale,
painted by Rembrandt Peale

William Burgess was an early inhabitant of Anne Arundel County, MD, and gave the land on which the tobacco port of LondonTowne was founded.

Ann Waln and her husband James Dilworth were passengers on the "Lamb," one of the ships which brought the first Quaker colonists to Penn's new colony in the summer of 1682.

Maryland Governors on the tree include Charles Calvert, the 3rd Lord Baltimore (appointed 1661; Anne Arundel County is named after his mother, though she never visited America); Samuel Ogle (1732-35); William Paca (1782-85, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence); John Eager Howard (1788-91); Samuel Ogle's son Benjamin Ogle, Sr. (1798-1800); John Francis Mercer (1801-03); Robert Bowie (1803-1806); Charles Carnan Ridgely (1816-19); Samuel Sprigg, elected in 1819; Joseph Kent, elected in 1825; and Charles Ridgely's son-in-law George Howard (1831-33).

Margaret Stevenson was hung at Salem as a witch in November of 1692.

Carl Christophersson Springer was a Swedish diplomat taken against his will from the streets of London to Virginia where he worked as an indentured servant. When freed he walked all the way north to Delaware to be a founder of Old Swedes Church in what is now Wilmington.

Joseph Addison, the famous English politician, essayist, and playwright, appears on the tree as the nephew of John Addison, who immigrated to Maryland.

Andrew Moore was an immigrant and one of the founding members of Sadsbury Friends Meeting, established in 1725 in the southeastern corner of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Anne Webb, "Mistress Anne," was a Quaker preacher from West River.

Artridge Franklin is one of many women who bore many children. She had 15, between two husbands.

Justice Benjamin Chew was Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court from 1774-1777.

Mason Locke Weems, "Parson Weems," wrote one the first biographies of George Washington (in 1800). He was also a rector of All Hallows' Parish from 1784-89.

Cornelia van Horne had her portrait painted by Rembrandt Peale; she was the wife of Revolutionary War Maj. Thomas Lancaster Lansdale.

Captain Stephen Clough, the stories tell, sailed to France on his ship, the "Sally," to rescue Marie Antoinette from the guillotine and bring her back to Maine. A house was all prepared for her . . .

Abner Gilbert, with siblings, his parents Benjamin and Elizabeth, and other relatives, were captured by Indians on April 25th, 1780 from the Mahoning Creek area of the Lehigh River valley and held for over two years.

Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner in 1812 after watching the British bomb Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor.

Peter Carl Johann von Rosenberg was Baron von Rosenberg from what is now Lithuania, a veteran of Leipzig and Waterloo where he fought against Napoleon, and a pioneer of Texas.

Johns Hopkins, descended from Maryland and Virginia Quaker families, was the philanthropist who endowed the university in Baltimore.

Pres. James Knox Polk was the 11th President (1845-1849). He was a descendant of immigrant ancestor Robert Bruce Pollock, who was himself descended from the Lairds of Pollock, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

Jim Bowie. Famous for his knife, and defending the Alamo.

Johann Umland and his brother Heinrich were German immigrants and well-known cabinet makers in Bellville, Texas.

Dr. Richard Hyatt Lansdale was born in Maryland and raised in Ohio, but by 1849 was living in the Washington Territory. He served as the first postmaster for Vancouver, Washington in 1850-51, established the village of Coveland on Whidbey Island in 1852, and was an Indian agent for the Flathead Nation up to the Civil War.

Eleanor Hall McCaleb Burwell gave the endowment which founded Christ Episcopal Church in Owensville, West River, Maryland where many family members have been baptized, married, and buried.

John Gregg Fee was a minister, an ardent abolitionist, and the founder of Berea College in Kentucky.

Mary Louisa Walker is surely one of the more fascinating people on the tree. Born a Quaker in Pennsylvania, she took the side of the Confederacy, where as a nurse she traveled from the Caribbean to Canada to procure hospital supplies. In a Richmond hospital she met her husband, John C. Roberts, who had lost an arm at Gaines' Mill. After the war she settled in central Texas and with her husband started the Polish settlement at Bremond by giving land to immigrant Polish sharecroppers.

Gilbert Cope, the grandson of Abner Gilbert (above), was a prolific writer of genealogical histories, especially of Chester Co., Pennsylvania and the Quaker families there.

"El Cid," by Anna Hyatt Huntington

Joseph DeGrange and Ellen McMillan, left behind a small trove of documents which reveal much about their lives in mid-nineteenth century New Orleans. See the page on New Orleans family history for more about them.

Their daughter Helen DeGrange was one of the "Newcomb School" circle of artists in New Orleans around the turn to the twentieth century; she was an embroiderer. Her younger sister Beatrice, also an embroiderer, was another of this group.

Lt. Philip van Horne Lansdale was killed in 1899 in Samoa; two ships were named the U.S.S. Lansdale after him.

Orris McLellan was a member of the Louisiana State Senate for two terms just after 1900. He then enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1916, at age 62, to fight in WWI. He was buried in his uniform.

William Jennings Bryan was a progressive Democrat who entered Congress from Nebraska in 1890; ran for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908; served as Secretary of State from 1912-1915; and prosecuted the Scopes trial in the 1920s.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington was a well-known sculptor especially noted for her animals, both in life-sized and smaller versions. Her father, Alpheus Hyatt, was a noted zoologist at Harvard and MIT, and her husband was from the philanthropic Huntington family.

Lansdale Ghiselin Sasscer was a member of the Maryland Senate in the 1930s, and served in the House of Representatives from 1938 to 1952.

John Lansdale, Jr. was Chief of Security for the Los Alamos project during WWII. He was also a prominent trial attorney. One of his accompishments, as lobbyist for the American Society of Anesthesiologists, was to argue for the creation of anesthesiology as a distinct physician specialty.