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The man who owned Baltimore

The Story of Cole’s Harbor

Thomas Cole (1603-1679) was probably a passenger on the Transport, which sailed from London to Virginia in 1635. His age would have been about 32, which means that his wife Priscilla and their children Sarah, Rebecca, and Mary most likely traveled with him. Cole was the second son and third child of the Rev. Humphrey Cole, the Vicar of Tillingham in Essex. The Reverend’s oldest son, William, had already emigrated to Virginia in 1618, and would later move to Maryland.

Cole and his family settled first in Accomack County, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. By 1649 they had moved to Maryland, probably Baltimore County, and by 1656 they were in Anne Arundel County. By January 1657, Thomas, his brother William, and William’s son “William Coale” were all acknowledged Quakers, and the younger William was on his way to becoming a Quaker leader. The Reverend Humphrey had died in 1624, so we don’t know how he would have reacted to all this free thinking.[...] read more

Family history in England

B E D F O R D S H I R E Odell. All Saint’s Church. Home of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley until he was kicked out…
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The Vicar of Tillingham

The Rev. Humphrey Cole (1572-1624) first appears on record as a young man of 21 or 22, enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. There he came under the influence of the most advanced English learning of his day, as well as the new Puritan movement in the English Church. After graduating, he served nine years in two London parishes before moving to the quiet town of Tillingham, Essex, some forty miles to the northeast and close to the North Sea. And there he served as Vicar of Tillingham Parish the rest of his life.[...] read more

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Alice Wilson’s Ahnentafel

The first Ahnentafel, published by Michaël Eytzinger in Thesaurus principum hac aetate in Europa viventium, Cologne, 1590

An Anhentafel (German for “ancestor table”)  is a scheme for numbering ancestors in strict sequence so that one can easily calculate relationships. The base person is number 1. Each father is assigned a number exactly double that of his child. Mothers are assigned a number equal to that of their husbands, plus 1.

So to navigate through the list: pick any person, note the assigned number, and you can find his or her father by doubling that number. The mother, if known, will be one digit higher and right next door. Likewise, to find anyone’s child, halve their assigned number and ignore any remainder. (Numbers missing from the sequence mean that we haven’t found that ancestor.)[...] read more