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Show GENEALOGY 6 simple. I knew every town and could cross the day. Mr. Arnold, the historian of Rhode Island, had done a great work for the state. There is a printed list of the births, marriages and deaths, and the church membership of every town in the. state.' This was a great help for the earlier families. Genealogy printing is a faculty, it requires a keenness of mind, as it were, to trace' out step by step in our changing population a family line. I have followed the Tanners from the Atlantic to the was made more state in half a Pacific. In some instances there has been a romance about results that thrills one with the unexpected. I cannot go into this at length. I have visited many town records, historical societies, and have examined several hundred other genealogies to find inter-married Tanners. I have examined genealogical registers and every available means of information during the fifteen years or so in which I have been engaged in this work. The work is not perfect, occasionally information is received of value and incorporated in my private copy, I am now too far advanced in years to publish a second edition. Such as it is, the result is a contribution to genealogical history, and has been a. labor of love, a record of a family truly democratic in its sympathies, content to do their duty in that state of life in which their lot has fallen. Lmay here add as a result of my later study, that I would think that William Tanner, Senior, came to Rhode Island about 1678, when he was not far from twenty-one years of age, that he came over as an attendant of Mr. Francis Houlding who at that time went to England on Colonial business. In his History of New England mat ters, Mr. Fisk says that the early settlers of New England came largely from the East of England, and the name of William Tanner in Great Coggerhall in the East of England, seems to agree in date with the subject of our genealogy. There is much to favor this opinion, though nothing that is of record beyond the fact given. We are certain from character, etc., that the Tanners were of what we may call the great middle class of England, of good intellect and high ideals, devoted there, as always here, to their country in peace as in war, as indicated by the "coat of arms" against the Saracens, or Turks "Three Moors." |
