Some time ago I had created a Wikipedia article on the Gilberts of Compton, based on the research and sources cited in this blog. Recently, a Wikipedia editor took it upon himself to delete whole paragraphs from that article saying they were ‘irrelevant’. Comically (and amateurishly) , in the process of ‘fixing’ the article, he conflated several facts that were correct in the earlier article – even switching the birth order of people without seeming to notice. Specifically, the editor deleted the entire three paragraph section called “Origins” that discussed the strengths and weaknesses of various sources because (sigh) some of the sources were unreliable. That was sort of the point of the discussion. Also, he deleted the entire section “Myths and Legends” because, you guessed it, they were myths and legends. Rather than have a back-and-forth of editing and re-editing Wikipedia (aside from fixing the birth order mistake he made), I’ll just publish the original here since it summarizes the research completely to-date:

The Gilberts of Compton

The Gilberts of Compton were a noted Anglo-Norman family of knightly class,[i] having seats at both Compton Castle and Greenway Estate, Devon, England, who were prominent in the British colonization of the Americas during the Elizabethan era.[ii] 

Origins

There are conflicting origin stories of the Gilberts of Compton among antiquarians.  A popular story is that the Gilberts descended from Gilbert, Count of Brionne, through his sons Richard Fitz-Gilbert and Baldwin Fitz-Gilbert.[iii][iv]  While the Fitz-Gilbert brothers were active in Devon, there is no evidence to suggest that their progeny became the Gilbert family.  This claim is especially dubious considering the name Fitz-Gilbert was not, at that time, a hereditary surname under the Norman naming system. 

A second claim is that the Gilberts “possessed lands in Manaton, (in or near Dartmoor,) in Edward the Confessors’ days”, placing the Gilbert family in Devon before 1066.[v][vi][vii] Though surnames at that time were rare in Europe, it is possible that the name Gilbert existed as a contemporary surname as evidenced by Guillaume I Gilbert, Bishop of Poitiers.[viii][ix][x][xi]  However, the quote was likely a misreading of a passage from an earlier work: “This riveret parts Manaton, alias Magneton, and Lustlegh. Many have possessed lands here: in the Confessor’s time Gilbert; after Sauls, Horton, Le Moyn, and others”, itself based on entries in the Domesday Book.[xii]  This passage simply states someone named Gilbert, a popular first name at the time, lived in Devon.

What is more demonstrable is that the male line leading to the Gilberts of Compton likely rose from obscurity with the marriage of a William Gilbert of Devon to Elizabeth Champernowne of Clist, a descendent of William the Conqueror, sometime in the first few decades of the 13^th century.  Their great grandson, Sir Geoffrey (Galfried) Gilbert (Member of Parliament for Totnes in 1326) married Lady Joan Compton, heiress of Compton Castle, thereby becoming “of Compton”.[xiii][xiv]

Notable Descendants

Little is known of the family’s activities during the Middle Ages aside from Sir Otho Gilbert of Compton serving as High Sheriff of Devon from 1475 to 1476.  It was descendants of this Otho Gilbert who would set out during the Elizabethan period on the family’s “hereditary scheme of peopling America with Englishmen”.[xv]  Most famous among these were the half brothers Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, both famous explorers of the New World and perhaps infamous military figures in Ireland. Their lesser-known brother, Sir Adrian Gilbert of Compton, was nonetheless of the same cloth, having an especially savage military reputation in Ireland while also seeking a Northwest Passage to China under a patent from Queen Elizabeth I.[xvi]  Another brother, Sir John Gilbert, was Sheriff of Devon, knighted by Elizabeth I in 1571, and was Vice Admiral of Devon – responsible for defense against the Spanish Armada.[xvii]

 In the following generation, Bartholomew Gilbert named Cape Cod during his 1602 expedition to establish a colony in New England.  He was killed by a group of Algonquians during a voyage the following year in search of the missing Roanoke Colony.  In 1607, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s son, Raleigh Gilbert, established a fortified storehouse he called Fort Saint George on the coast of Maine.  In the face of “nothing but extreme extremities”, this colony ultimately voted to return to England.  It is said that they were so resolute in this goal that they built a ship to facilitate the return voyage, which would probably have been the first oceangoing vessel built in America.[xviii]

Later, brothers Jonathan and John Gilbert would have a hand in establishing Hartford, Connecticut, acting as emissaries between the Governor in Hartford and the local indigenous tribes.  Jonathan was a skilled linguist of local tribal languages and served as a militia leader.[xix]  John’s young son, another John Gilbert, was famously captured by Narragansett, Wampanoag and Nashaway/Nipmuc tribes led by Monoco after their attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts.[xx]  In another unfortunate incident John’s sister-in-law, Lydia Gilbert, was sentenced to death for witchcraft in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1654.[xxi]  However Jonathan’s younger son, Captain Thomas Gilbert, was said to have been “a brave and successful officer, and a leading man in the primitive navy of the colony”.  Thomas commanded the twelve-gun ship, Swan, during King William’s War, capturing the French ship Saint Jacob.  He was captured in 1695, spending the rest of the war as a prisoner in France.[xxii]

Current Day

Compton Castle is still today in the hands of the Gilbert family.  Geoffrey Gilbert, a modern descendant, resides at Compton and administers the estate for the National Trust.  His wife, Angela Gilbert, was appointed High Sheriff of Devon in 2016.[xxiii]

Myths and Legends

According to one of the many purported versions of the Battle Abby Roll, a T. Gilbard (Gilbert) fought alongside William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.  This claim comes from a 1655 work called The church-history of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year M.DC.XLVIII, written by Thomas Fuller.  Fuller relied on source material provided by an antiquarian named Thomas Scriven, who was operating under the alias Mr. Fox. There is no evidence so far to corroborate this claim.[xxiv]

Another, more modern legend, is based in Adrian Gilbert’s noted intelligence and love for mathematics and alchemy, having served as laboratory assistant to Mary, Countess of Pembroke.  This new claim from the 2000 book Following the Ark of the Covenant, by Kerry and Lisa Boren, claims that the famous mathematician John Dee entrusted to Adrian the Arc of the Covenant to carry to the New World on one of his voyages.[xxv]

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[i] A view of Devonshire in MDCXXX, with a pedigree of most of its gentry, Thomas Westcote, Exeter, 1845

[ii] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[iii] An historical survey of the County of Cornwall : to which is added, a complete heraldry of the same / by C. S. Gilbert., v.2 pt.1, Plymouth-Dock :J. Congdon,1817-1820

[iv] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[v] Burkes Landed Gentry

[vi] Magna Britannia

[vii] An historical survey of the County of Cornwall : to which is added, a complete heraldry of the same / by C. S. Gilbert., v.2 pt.1, Plymouth-Dock :J. Congdon,1817-1820

[viii] Dictionnaire universel, dogmatique, canonique, historique, géographique et chronologique, des sciences ecclésiastiques, Volume 6, 1765

[ix] Bibliothèque sacrée, ou Dictionnaire universel, historique, dogmatique, canonique, géographique et chronologique des sciences ecclésiastiques, 1827

[x] Archives historiques du Poitou, Volume 25, 1895, Societe des Archives Historiques du Poitou

[xi] Acte n° 3637  dans Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France , Cédric GIRAUD, Jean-Baptiste RENAULT et Benoît-Michel TOCK, éds., Nancy : Centre de Médiévistique Jean Schneider ; éds électronique : Orléans : Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, 2010. (Telma). En abrégé, citer : « Charte Artem/CMJS n°3637

[xii] A view of Devonshire in MDCXXX, with a pedigree of most of its gentry, Thomas Westcote, Exeter, 1845

[xiii] Devonshire wills: a collection of annotated testamentary abstracts, together with the family history and genealogy of many of the most ancient gentle houses of the west of England, Charles Worthy, Bemrose (.V Sons, LTD, 23, Old Bailey and Derby, 1896

[xiv] The visitations of the county of Devon : Comprising the herald’s visitations of 1531, 1564, & 1620 /

With additions by Lieutenant-Colonel J. L. Vivian. Vivian, J. L. 1830-1896. Exeter, 1895.

[xv] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[xvi] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[xvii] https://www.rammuseum.org.uk/elizabethan-silver-spoon-saved-for-devon/,  Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council, Elizabethan Silver Spoon Saved for Devon, 19 September 2013

[xviii] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[xix] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[xx] Tragedies of the Wilderness, by Samuel Gardner Drake, 1844

[xxi] Taylor, John M.; The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647-1697; Grafton Press, New York, 1908.

[xxii] Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England, J. Wingate Thornton, Boston, 1850

[xxiii] http://www.englishrivieramagazine.co.uk/riviera-people-angela-gilbert-lady-castle/, English Riviera Magazine, Riviera People – Angela Gilbert, Lady of the Castle, Julian Rees, Aug. 9, 2016

[xxiv] The church-history of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year M.DC.XLVIII, written by Thomas Fuller

[xxv] Following the Ark of the Covenant, Kerry Boren, Lisa Boren, Cedar Fort, 2000

The miracle of the Internet, combined with the hard work already done by genealogists for their own projects, has enabled me to take a deep dive into my family tree – one that wouldn’t have been possible only scant years before.  The things that I’ve learned have been amazing: that I’m descendant of William the Conqueror; that I have Bohemian heritage; that my surname may be as old as 1000 years; and much more.  Most of this overlies nicely with the 23&Me results I have in hand, as well as with the various historical documents my family possesses.  Most surprisingly however, the main lessons I’ve taken from these last few years of research have had little to do with my particular genetics, my surname, or any claims of famous ancestry.  There are three of these lessons:

Lesson One:  Your surname has next to nothing to do with your heritage.  I know that’s surprising, and possibly sacrilegious among genealogists, but it’s true.  Unless your family has spent its entire history having marriages only between people of the same surname, your actual heritage spreads out exponentially with every preceding generation.  Take my own case, for example.  Surely Gilbert is a Norman surname, but my mother’s surname is likely of Pictish origin.  So, fifty-percent Norman you might say?  Well, one move up the rung to my four grandparents reveals surnames of Norman (my father’s father, of course), German, Pictish (mom’s dad), and another German.  So now the preponderance of my heritage is, if not now German, at least non-Norman.  How about great-grandparents?  Norman, Bohemian, German, Anglo-Saxon, Pictish, German, German, Scottish (probably Orkney).  So, just going back a mere three generations I went from “being” Norman to “being” three-eighths German, one-quarter Scottish-ish, and with a bare smattering of other origins to include now only one-eighth Norman. 

I say ‘being’ in quotes there because that is the central question:  What does it mean to ‘be’ something?  For example, Americans have the habit (annoying to some Europeans who don’t understand the context) of saying something like “I’m Irish” if they have an Irish surname.  Of course, this is American shorthand for saying “My family immigrated from…” but even that has less and less meaning the farther one moves away from the first generation of immigrants bearing the surname.  My Gilbert ancestors arrived in North America as early as the 1640s but the male line has been married into by something like a dozen other families – each varying between “just off the boat” recently immigrated to being in America since colonial times.  Those marrying-in families have had just as many generations of marriage with other families as the Gilbert line has had, and so on. Therefore, in 12 generations of Americans, an individual has 4,096 direct ancestors.  Of my 4,000 or so American ancestors, I know 12 were Gilberts.  Therefore, to say “I am Norman” is a bit of a stretch.  That leads us to the next lesson:

Lesson Two:  Your ancestors’ homelands don’t really say much about your or their genetic makeup.  Going back to the “I’m Irish” example, a lot of people (sometimes jokingly, other times more seriously) say things like “I found out I’m German, that’s why I’m so organized,” or like sauerkraut, or whatever stereotype fits.  Looking at my own Norman heritage, I used to think Gilbert was an English surname – which it is, but what makes up ‘English’?  Normans, Angles, Saxons, Romans, various Celtic tribes, Norse, and many other ethnicities.  Go back a bit earlier and you have a land inhabited by peoples such as the Dumnonii, Durotriges, Belgae, Atrebates, Dobunni, Catuvellauni, and a score of others.  Focusing just on the Anglo-Norman origin of Gilbert, one has to further ask “Well, what is Norman?”  These people were from Normandy, but the nobility at least was descended from Vikings – but also experiencing the same in-marrying effect from the year 911 to the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066.  This made Norman heritage Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Anglo-Saxon, Italo-Roman, Gaulic, Celtic, Frankish, Visigoth – and a ton more you’ve likely never heard of like the Suebi and Occitans.  The point is that early Europeans were far more highly mobile, intermarrying easily and absorbing migratory cultures over and over again, than one might think. 

The impact all this has on genetic makeup is dazzling.  I remember my time in the Balkans, a place of highly charged emotions regarding heritage, identity, race, and religion.  There, a person of one particular nationality described to me another of the Baltic peoples as being less-than-human, another race, and inferior in all ways due to their ethnicity.  Of course, his culture (like everyone’s of any culture I spoke to there) possessed “the original” culture, and therefore superior institutions – and most importantly the right to rule over their inferior neighbors.  My response was “You all look white to me.”  That’s the point, there is no ‘race gene’, only a collection of phenotypes that have been tossed into a millennia-old blender that sometimes produces vaguely recognizable physical characteristics in certain geographical regions.  Simply put, at some point about 800 to 1000 years ago, one of my 30,000 to 100,000 direct ancestors who happened to be speaking French and living around the English Channel said “my surname is Gilbert” – bringing with him a million years of tribal history back to the dawn of our species.

Lesson Three:  The good news – your family can be as large as you want.  Language, culture, geography, and genetics do not map to each other perfectly, or at all in some cases.  Look at my Bohemian ancestry:  Bohemia is named after a tribe known as the Boii, but they were pushed out and supplanted by a series of tribes.  The last of these tribes were a group a Slavs.  Who knows how many of each tribe remained and became absorbed into the new ones?  Also, what does ‘Slav’ mean?  Well, it turns out that nobody really knows.  No doubt there is a Slavic language group, but scholars point out this might even have arisen from ancient Thracian, a people mentioned in ancient Greek texts.  Certainly, linguists agree, that going back even farther one finds that the Slavs and indeed all Europeans spoke a single, ancient, lost Indo-European language akin to Sanskrit.  So, you may “be Irish”, but you can also celebrate your Indian ancestry.

While all of this may be disconcerting and bewildering to someone trying to find their roots, take heart!  The math makes it clear.  At the start of the American Colonial Period, about 400 years ago, each of us statistically have about 65,000 direct ancestors living at that time.  Going back to the time most Europeans started taking surnames, say 1000 years ago, each of us should have about 1.2 TRILLION unique, individual, direct ancestors at that time!  Of course, that is impossible as the total population of the Earth at that time was only about 275 million.  This clearly shows us that every single one of us is closely, very closely, related.  One can very nearly just pick a culture from history they want to celebrate as theirs and it is likely he or she has at least SOME connection.  In fact, mitochondrial DNA studies show that every single person alive today shares a single many-great grandmother between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.  Maybe we should start considering trading in “I’m Irish” for “I’m human”.

On October 14^th, in the year 1066, an army from Normandy fought a single battle against the Anglo-Saxon defenders of England near Hastings in East Sussex.  By that very afternoon, the English king was dead, William the Bastard became William the Conqueror, and the Normans were in England to stay.  What followed was the wholesale dispossession of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class in favor of Norman aristocracy.  The newest among this class were Normans of relatively humble birth who had accompanied William during his great victory.  While it is certain that hundreds of high-born Normans (as well as Flemish, Breton, French, and others) were among William’s companions that day, thousands of much more humble origins served in the rank and file.  To share in such glory was to immediately propel one’s family into high status and new opportunity.  To this day, 953 years later, studies show that English families bearing Anglo-Norman last names are financially slightly better off than their Anglo-Saxon-named countrymen.  The names of some of these men who were there on that fateful 11^th century day were said to have been written on a list. Called the Battle Abbey Roll, it supposedly hung in an abbey William had erected on the very spot King Harold was killed during the battle.  The original (if not a complete fiction) has been lost since the 16^th century.  What we have are incongruent and partial lists of varying reliability.  On one of those lists is the name T. Gilbard.

There is a fantastic renaissance work called The church-history of Britain from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year M.DC.XLVIII, written in 1655 by Thomas Fuller.  In it, Fuller pulls together a collection of supposed Battle Abbey Rolls and other references to the companions of William.  It is on the list provided by one Mr. Fox, an alias of an antiquarian named Thomas Scriven, we see T. Gilbard astride 243 other names.  Gilbard, of course, is one of the many early spellings of Gilbert (pronounced something like jeel-BARE then and in France today).  Immediately there appear to be several problems with the claim that someone with a Gilbert surname was on the Battle Abbey Roll.  First, hereditary family names in such a first-name-last-name format were rare in 1066 Europe.  Second, this is the only mention of a Gilbert on any of the other versions of the rolls I have seen (outside of the well-known and probably-not-related Richard and Baldwin Fits-Gilberts).  Third, construction of the Battle Abbey itself took until 1094, so any list would have been at least 18 years after the battle.  Finally, any remnants of rolls we have can only be sourced to the 1500s at best. 

The last of the two problems cannot be well addressed here because of the immutability of the facts.  However, scholars have established beyond doubt that between 20 and 40 individuals appearing on the various lists were indeed at Hastings.  That suggests the rolls contain at least some measure of truth.  The problem of only a single mention of Gilbard from among the several versions of the lists is a bit of a tough one, but not insurmountable.  Again I point to the very low numbers (scores out of hundreds) of named individuals who have actually been verified as having been at Hastings.  This only points to the importance of those individuals, being mentioned elsewhere in contemporary accounts and rosters – such venerable names as Robert de Beaumont, Walter Giffard, and Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.  It is entirely possible that the combination of nonstandard spellings and lack of fame could cause individual names to fall off of some lists and be included in others.  Either way, a lesser-known or lower-born member of the soldiery would not be as likely to show up in other records of the time.

Looking into the problem of hereditary names brought to light some surprising lessons, modifying my own view of when the usage of such took place.  Studies strongly suggest that the oldest true heritable surname in Europe is O’Brien, having origins in the early to mid-1000’s in Ireland.  Even Fuller notes that, while not universal in Europe until the late 1100s, these kinds of family names predate Hastings buy as much as 40 years.  Importantly, he asserts that this new widespread use of surnames was a French invention.  The claim seems to be supported, at least a little, by my earlier studies of William Gilbert de Ragoles, Bishop of Poitiers from 1117 to 1124, whose siblings shared the last name Gilbert.  To further investigate the matter, I counted up how many ‘modern’ surnames appeared on Mr. Fox’s list.  I found that 46 out of 244 had surnames without the older-fashioned ‘d’, ‘de’, ‘de la’, ‘Fitz’, or other titular and place references.  That amounted to about 19%.  Studies of other near-contemporary lists of names showed similarly small, yet definitely real, percentages that we might consider modern surnames.  Therefore, it is at least possible that someone with a name like T. Gilbard could have been at Hastings in 1066 without being an anachronism. 

Briefly onto the first name, the initial ‘T’ is tantalizingly without explanation in Fox’s list.  Luckily for our research, French first names at the time seldom started with ‘T’, so it is easier to narrow down.  Typical of the era are Thomas, Thosetus, Trutgaudus, Tassilo, Theoderic, Theudebald, Thorismund, and Toustan among a few obscure others and variations of each.  Out of pure popularity, Thomas seems the most likely candidate for our T. Gilbard. 

So, while not verifiable, it is at least plausible that a Norman-French warrior of lower status named Thomas Gilbard came over with William the Conqueror in 1066.  This Thomas would be of about the same generation of Bishop William Gilbert’s parents, possibly being at least distant kin of this Parthenay family.  Whereas there is no evidence of name-bearing progeny from the Bishop or his siblings, it is some fraction of possible that Thomas established himself and the Gilbert line in England after Hastings.  Thirty years thereafter, tax records start showing Gilberts like Richard, Walter, Robert, and William transacting around Wiltshire and Devonshire.  Eventually, some of this clan may have started marrying up into the venerable Champernowne family beginning in the early 1200’s, establishing the Gilberts of Compton.  Acknowledging this has as many points of data as your typical conspiracy theory, it is at least not out of the realm of possibilities.  Whether or not even being in the line leading to the Gilberts of Compton, the existence of Thomas Gilbard would push the origin of the surname back to about 950 years ago.

I was recently delighted to find that a small company out of Markham, Virginia, would print me a hard copy of J. Wingate Thornton’s 1850 Genealogical Memoir of the Gilbert Family in both Old and New England.  Setting aside the forgivable retransmissions of errors found in earlier works by Westcote and Prince, this little 23 page gem inspired me to compile a brief sketch of some of the lesser-known, but still notable Gilberts from history.  In doing so, I consciously decided to omit the more famous Sir Humphrey Gilbert (who claimed Canada for England) and his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh (who hardly needs introduction here).  Further, Thornton’s enthusiastic view of the bravery and industry of the Gilbert family tempted me to produce a romanticized rescript of past nobility.  This I also resolved to avoid, leaving in the sometimes savage and sometimes sorry behavior that still follows our little clan and marks us as human.

Among the more ‘human’ of us, and the one I feel most akin to, was Sir Adrian Gilbert of Compton (1541-1628).  At his lowest low, he was called “the greatest buffoon in England” and “cared not what he said to man or woman of what quality soever”.  Like his brothers Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh (especially when they were in Ireland), Adrian was accused of “great fury” and “savage cruelty”.  Nonetheless, he was noted for his intelligence in mathematics and alchemy, something he shared with noted mathematician John Dee.  In the 2000 book Following the Ark of the Covenant, authors Kerry and Lisa Boren go so far as to say Dee charged Adrian with carrying the Ark of the Covenant to the Americas!  Less far-fetched is that Adrian became “a great favorite of Mary, Countess of Pembroke” due to their shared interest in alchemy, he becoming her laboratory assistant.  What is certain is that Adrian was of the same ilk of Devon explorers as his many Gilbert relatives, having received a patent from Queen Elizabeth I for the discovery of a northwest passage to China, the document being titled “The Colleagues of the Fellowship for the Discovery of the North-west Passage”.

Another of these Devonshire explorers was the sea captain Bartholomew Gilbert, who arrived in America in 1602.  His mission was to establish a colony in the New World, which he did in Cape Cod (named by him).  Captain Bartholomew apparently did not inherit his uncle Adrian’s mathematical acumen.  The colony failed after a few weeks when it was discovered that he had miscalculated the overwinter provisions, having brought only six weeks’ worth of food.  The entire party packed up and was back in England by late July.  Captain Gilbert cannot, however, be discredited for lack of bravery.  The very next year, on May 10^th, he set sail from Plymouth, England, determined to discover the fate of brother Walter Raleigh’s famously-vanished Roanoke Colony.  Upon anchoring off the desolate former site of Roanoke on July 29, Captain Gilbert and four of his men formed a landing party.  Once ashore, they were attacked by a band of Algonquians and killed.  The seal of Northampton County, Virginia, today bears the date 1603 in commemoration of Captain Bartholomew Gilbert’s courage.

Another Gilbert, a son of Sir Humphrey, also engaged in what Thornton called the Gilbert’s, “hereditary scheme of peopling America with Englishmen” in 1607.  In that year, two ships under the command of Sir George Popham and Captain Raleigh Gilbert, set out from Plymouth, England.  They arrived with one hundred men, weapons, and supplies at the mouth of the Sagadahock, or Kennebeck River, on the coast of Maine.  They built a fortified store-house they called Fort Saint George, and the two ships returned to England for supplies.  The forty-five men who remained were under the presidency of Popham and the admiralty of Raleigh Gilbert.   Over a harsh winter Popham died, leaving Raleigh as president.  At some point, news reached the colony that Raleigh’s older brother, Sir John Gilbert (another son of Sir Humphrey) had died.  With that news, and in the face of “nothing but extreme extremities”, the colony unanimously voted to return to England.  It is said that they were so resolute in this goal that they built a ship to facilitate the return voyage, which would probably be the first oceangoing vessel built in America – built under the direction of a Gilbert.

These stories are a reminder that European colonization in Native American lands immediately locked the two cultures in a complex, brutal war that came in waves of violence lasting nearly 300 years.  An example of this comes from the tale of Mrs. Rowlandson’s captivity from the book Tragedies of the Wilderness, by Samuel Gardner Drake, 1844.  Mrs. Rowlandson and her three children were made slaves for eleven weeks by Narragansett, Wampanoag and Nashaway/Nipmuc Indians led by Monoco after their attack on Lancaster, Massachusetts. Later, after being purchased out of slavery for 20 pounds sterling, she wrote about her encounter with young John Gilbert, son of my many-great grandfather Captain John Gilbert (first of my line to come to America).  Mrs. Rowlandson writes, “I went to see an English youth in this place, one John Gilbert, of Springfield.  I found him laying without doors upon the ground.  I asked him how he did; he told me he was very sick of a flux with eating so much blood.  They had turned him out of the wigwam, and with him an Indian papoos, almost dead, (whose parents had been killed,) in a bitter cold day, without fire or clothes; the young man himself had nothing on but his shirt and waistcoat.  This sight was enough to melt the heart of flint.  There they lay quivering in the cold, the youth round like a dog, the papoos stretched out, with his eyes, nose, and mouth full of dirt, and yet alive, and groaning.  I advised John to go get to some fire; he told me he could not stand, but I persuaded him still, lest he should lie there and die.  And with much ado I got him to a fire, and went myself home.”  I have found no further record of the fate of young John Gilbert.

The unfortunate young John Gilbert’s father, Captain John Gilbert (1626 – 1690, and one of many with that name), soldiered on along with his brother, Jonathan Gilbert, in establishing Hartford, Connecticut.  Of John we know he married Amy Lord, daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Lord, on May 6, 1647, and had probably arrived from Yardley, England, in about 1645.  He and his brother Jonathan, the latter being a linguist of Native American languages of the region, are recorded as acting as emissaries between the Governor in Hartford and the local tribes.  In 1653, Jonathan was even so important as to be made a ‘marshal’ of sorts, receiving a special warrant from the Colony to “rayse such considerable forces as hee sees meete”. 

It was Jonathan’s younger son, Captain Thomas Gilbert, who rekindled the maritime adventurism of his recent ancestors.  Born about 1655, Thomas was said to have been “a brave and successful officer, and a leading man in the primitive navy of the colony”.  For several years, Thomas commanded the twelve-gun Swan during a turbulent time of war on the high seas.  During King William’s War, Thomas and his associates captured the French ship Saint Jacob.  The Swan’s luck ran out in 1695 when it was overtaken by a French privateer of 20 guns.  Even in this defeat, a witness’s account prompted Thornton to write that Thomas displayed, “fortitude and self-possession in difficulty, manly and generous heart, and desperate and unflinching defense against superior force”.  This Captain Gilbert was said to be self-confident enough to freely weep when moved by the scene of two companions being joyously reunited after the Swan went down.  He spent the rest of the war a prisoner in France, released afterwards during a prisoner exchange.

Captain Thomas Gilbert’s uncle, Captain John Gilbert (1626-1690), is from where my American line descends.  What follows is what I consider to be typically and woefully American:  eight or so generations of virtually no family history.  I know very little about the men and women of my line from Captain John’s son Joseph through my grandfather, Robert.  However, despite my earlier self-admonitions against romanticism, I cannot resist putting the stars of my father and my grandfather up among the constellation formed by my ancestors.  Notable to me, and just as bravely, my grandfather Robert James Gilbert recrossed the Atlantic to help defeat the Nazis as an infantryman in Europe.  The best I can tell he fought in some of the most harrowing battles in Italy – and had the artillery-shrapnel scars to prove it.  My father, Bernard James Gilbert, spent eight years in the Army and National Guard during the Cold War, only to spring back into volunteer service to rescue victims and recover bodies during the lethal Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak.  After that, he spent fifteen more years in the Civil Defense helping flood and disaster victims without taking a dime.  Precious little is known about my female ancestors, and I do not mean to neglect them here.  I submit that whoever and wherever a Gilbert may be, man or woman, we belong to a family of singular daring.

My quest to discover the origins of the Gilbert family of Compton has been, so far, mostly comprised of proving the null hypothesis –that is, I’ve been debunking largely unchallenged legends and unsupported hypotheses.  (Chief among these was finding that there was probably no Gilbert of Manadon alive (apart from a guy’s first name) in 1066, and that the Gilberts of Compton likely did not descend from Gilbert Crispin of Brionne.)  However, the net result has been zero progress on actually identifying who the ancestors of William Gilbert (b.1204) might be, aside from generally lower nobility of Norman heritage.  I did, though, identify some slightly older references to the Gilbert surname in Wiltshire. Considering the source of William Gilbert is claimed by the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland to be found in the Curia Regis Roles of Wilts as Willelmus Gilberti, the Devon line might just originate in Wiltshire.  Though I have not yet found the exact reference above, I did find in the 1916 Wiltshire Notes and Queries, under the heading ‘Sum of the Fees of the Abbess of Wilton’, the following entry:

“Will’us Gilberti et Marg’ Balun tenent in Swaleweclive duas partes feodi unius militis de Rob’to de Mandevill et ipse de Rege.”

Though the entry wasn’t dated, I cross referenced it with the Registers of the Board of Chalke, 1538-1780, and examined the other names in the text, and concluded the entry looks to be a snippet from a much older document called the Testa Nevill, covering transactions from 1198 to 1292.  I then did, in fact, find the exact entry in the Testa Nevill.  It is hard to be certain, but this William Gilbert from Wiltshire could be an ancestor of the one cited in the Curia Regis Rolls of Wiltshire, too.  (My Latin is crap, but I think the entry reads “William Gilbert and Margaret Balun held, in Swaleweclive, two knights fees of Robert de Mandeville and from the King.”) 

 Having seemingly exhausted my leads in Devon and Wilts, I decided to start looking for the Gilbert surname in Normandy and try to work from old-to-new to make family connections. After the above reference to Gilberts in England, this Testa Nevill entry being around 1235 or 1236, I was stunned to find even more and older uses of the surname in France.  Here are the ones I have found so far, bearing in mind that there is no connection to the Gilberts of Compton yet:

Ricardus Gillebertus (Richard Gilbert) – Mentioned in an 1198 Pipe Roll from Normandy and, according to another book, probably as early as 1180 in another Roll.

Willelmus Giselbertus (William Gilbert) – Mentioned in the same Pipe Roll as Ricardus Gillebertus, making him living in 1198.

 Galterius Gislebertus (Walter Gilbert) – He is mentioned in a short entry in the 1198 Pipe Roll, along with Ricardus and Willelmus, above.

 A fantastic find, and so far the oldest use of the Gilbert surname I’ve ever seen, was that of Guillaume I Gilbert de Ragoles, Bishop of Poitiers from 1117 to 1124.  Not to be confused with the more famous Gilbert of Poitiers (also Bishop of Poitiers 1142-1154), this Guillaume (William) Gilbert was said by at least one source to have been archbishop in Thouars, France, in 1098!  According to this same source, Archives Historiquesdu Poitou, 1895, Guillaume had a brother, Geoffroi (Geffrey) Gilbert, and came from a family in Parthenay, France. Not only did I not expect to find a reference to the Gilbert surname 100 years earlier than the last, but I did not expect such a well-documented find.  His rescue from obscurity was due to the meticulous record keeping of the early Catholic Church, referenced in sources I used such as the Dictionnaire universel, dogmatique, canonique,historique, géographique et chronologique, des sciences ecclésiastiques, Volume 6, 1765, a similar volume from 1827, and Chartes originales antérieuresà 1121 conservées en France. 

My next enterprise will be to see if the decedents of any of these very early Gilberts can be traced. I’m suspecting that the father of William Gilbert, born 1204 according to Wiltshire records, may have been the William Gilbert mentioned in Testa Nevill around 1236, or at least a close relative. It’s also possible that these two are one and the same, the first not being born in 1204, but being mentioned in 1204. It may even be possible that Willelmus Gislebertus of Normandy, mentioned in 1198, was the same as the other 1198 William in Wiltshire, owning lands on each side of the English Channel.  My working hypothesis now is that the Gilberts of Compton descend from a line of Gilberts that moved from Normandy to Wiltshire sometime around the late 1100’s and eventually marrying into the Champernowne family in the early 1200’s in Devon.  There is some evidence suggesting that at least Roberto Gerebert (Robert Gilbert) was conducting business in both Wiltshire and Devon during that period (1189-1216), so it is entirely possible that the family had strong connections in both places, and likely across the Channel too.  It is even possible that Robert is the progenitor of the line.  All of these are possible leads, but for now I’m happy to have found a Gilbert (relative or no) alive as far back as 1098.

I’m pretty sure I upset an English genealogist, who specializes in the Gilberts of Compton, by strongly suggesting that the dearly-held theory that the family descends from the Fits-Gilbert brothers of Devon is probably untrue.  I know he was upset because he stopped responding to my email!  This might be just one way we students of the Gilbert line have been tricked by earlier sources who, well, just didn’t have the tools that we have today.  One way in which I’ve been misled over the last year or so of research is that some Gilberts are referred to as ‘of Greenway’.  A pretty simple search reveals that Otho and Katherine (Champernowne) Gilbert (this Otho not being the Otho who was Sheriff of Devon) had built a home on this height overlooking the River Dart.  Famously, this manor, if not the original Tudor structure, became the home of Agatha Christie in 1938.  Also famously, half-brother adventurers Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert (both Katherine’s sons) resided there.

However, books such as the 1866 A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain & Ireland, drawing from much older sources, state “This Otis or Otho Gilbert [High Sheriff of Devonshire] inherited Greenway, about four miles from Dartmouth.”  This was obviously erroneous as the text goes on to identify this same man as the father of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which he was not.  Nonetheless, I kept seeing older Gilberts, whose lives predated the earliest mention of Greenway, as named ‘of Greenway’.  Ascribing this obvious anachronism to the aforementioned mistaken 1866 text, repeated throughout later sources, I ignored all pre-1493 mentions of Greenway (1493 being where sources place the first mention of Greenway on Dart).  This was my own mistake.

My lovely theory started to unravel in another somewhat conflated but ultimately hard to ignore text.  This was the Magna Britannia (1806-1822) which stated “The manor of Greenway, which had been given by William the Conqueror to Walter de Douay, was for many descents in the family of Gilbert” and “The ancestor of this ancient family [Gilbert], who was of Greenway in the reign of Edward II…”  That would have placed Greenway in the hands of the Gilbert family between 1308 and 1327.  I puzzled over this entry because it didn’t seem to be a simple repeat of the usual mistake.  This seemed like a claim I had never seen before.  I decided to track own the source.

To me it was clear that any reference to land grants by William the Conqueror to one of his knights (in this case, Walter de Douay who likely accompanied him at Hastings) would be recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.  A relatively simple search of electronic versions of Domesday revealed that the Conqueror had, in fact, dispossessed one unfortunate Anglo-Saxon by the name of Athelsige of Greenway Manor and handed it to Walter de Douay.  That substantiated a bit of the Britannica’s claim, and immediately seemed to make other claims to the earliest mention of Greenway moot.  However, I noticed that this Greenway was listed in Domesday under Axminster Hundred (a ‘hundred’ being an ancient administrative district).  The Greenway overlooking the River Dart was clearly located in the Haytor Hundred, while Axminster would be in the vicinity of modern day Luppitt in Devon.  These two places are about 60 miles apart.  A perusal of The Manors & Origin of the Name Luppitt: An Extract from the book ‘Luppitt: Parish, Church and People‘ and Nikolaus Pevsner & Bridget Cherry’s The Buildings of England confirmed, however, that there is indeed a second Greenway near Luppitt, it was called Grenoveia in Domesday, it was owned by de Douai, and that it is still represented in the name of a large farm  there.

So, it turns out that there are, in fact, two Greenways located in Devon.  One, near Dartmouth in the old Hundred of Haytor, is well documented to have been in Gilbert hands around Tudor times.  The other, represented by a country farm and estate near Luppitt in the old Axminster Hundred, was handed to a Norman knight by William the Conqueror just after 1066.  The latter, while not definitively tied to the Gilbert name, may be crucial in identifying the family’s origins.  An examination of the deeds, taxes, and owners of this less-famous Greenway may provide clues to where William Gilbert (b.1204) came from.

’ve recently received an ancestry composition report from 23&Me and, much as I expected based on earlier paper-based research, my genetics are mostly Northwestern European in origin – to the tune of about 83%. Of course, English/Irish ancestry dominates the scene, the venerable old Gilbert line being of English origin 800 years ago. Naturally, Scandinavian and French weigh in, the Gilberts being of Norman French, and therefore some Viking, descent. And, perhaps ho-humedly, German comprises a huge chunk of my DNA, with families recently contributing to my line having names like Scheetz, Krouse, and Kahl – pretty standard for Northern Indiana. However, just as some white supremacists have recently discovered African or Jewish ancestors in their DNA, I had several surprises of my own: no Native American showed up, but I’m probably 15% Bohemian!

Like many Americans, we presume to have at least some trace ancestry that links us with the extirpated-yet-not-gone Native American peoples. These days, since the reexamination of race relations throughout the 60s and 70s, it is not only acceptable but downright a matter of pride to be of Native blood. However, this was not always the case. Apparently, in some circles anyway, Native ancestry was something to conceal as a social stigma. Weirder yet, it may have been the case that descendants of immigrants from poorer countries would actually tell their children that they were of Native American stock to conceal their humble or embarrassing roots in the Old World. While it might be the case that today’s genetic testing services self-select to exclude Native DNA samples from their databases due to cost, and therefore cannot identify such in my own sample, the family legend was that Great Grandma Tarant was Blackfoot. The significant Balkans/Central European component to my genetic profile, however, along with the absence of Native American ancestry, compelled me to track down where that came from and where the Native American went. As it turns out, Coni possessed the document written in Great Grandma’s hand that lists her parents as having both been born in Bohemia. So, surprisingly, I have Slavic ancestry – news to me.

A little cherry on top of all this genetic testing came as I searched 23&Me’s quite useful ‘Genetic Relatives’ database. This is an opt-in database where people can share their 23&Me results with whomever else is on the same database and shares at least some component of their DNA. Most of the 1056 people sharing my genes on there are people I never heard of and have no idea of how we would be related. I did come upon one Ulrich surname on there, which intrigued me since one of my oldest and closest friends shares that name. From chatting with this person, I found out her family is originally from Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan. Happily, then, I am likely distant cousins with the woman I’ve been calling “Little Sis” all these years! This, along with all my other genealogy research has really enlightened me to a single important fact: the farther back you go, the bigger your family gets!