“Are We Related to Anybody Famous?”

Matthew’s son, Cooper Taylor, posed this question to me in 2016 when he was ten. I asked “What do you mean by “famous”? He responded: “Prominent or well known.” I could have simply answered, “Your father, Matthew Taylor, was on the Olympic White Water team that competed in Sydney in 2000 and in Athens in 2004.”

However, I decided that this was an opportunity to share some interesting family stories that my father and others have passed on to me. I saw continuing his project as a way to honor him and preserve the history he discovered. The short answer to Cooper’s question is, “Yes, we are related to some persons who were prominent in their time and place, but maybe not famous enough to be remembered today.”

The book includes a genealogy with family trees, but much more interesting are the stories and history of the times.

Some of my favorite stories include:

• William Fox (1497-1558), our earliest known ancestor whose ancestor, in turn, may have been Robert de Vaux (b. 1030) who was part of the Norman Invasion of England in 1066.
• Susanne Rochet (1667-1744), a young Huguenot girl who was smuggled out of France to Holland in a barrel and later immigrated to Virginia.
• Hans Justus Heydt (1685-1760) was Americanized to Jost Hite. He came to be the single largest private landholder in the Colony of Virginia. His grandson, Isaac Hite Jr., married Nelly Conway Madison, sister of President James Madison.
• Simon Carson Sr.’s (1720-1795) grandfather was in Derry, Ireland when besieged by the Catholics in 1692. He watched a rat hole for half a day that he might shoot its occupant for food; and the entrails of horses were sold by the yard to satisfy the cravings of hunger.
• Emily Virginia Compton , a southerner , who fell in love with a wounded Yankee soldier during the Civil War. However , he died and she eventually moved to Missouri where she met and married my great grandfather , Joseph Franklin Taylor