FAMILY LINEAGE
Our American Davenports
In 1620 our first identified ancestor who came to the New World arrived aboard the ship Mayflower to found a colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts. His name was Francis Cooke. It was not until 20 years after that in 1640 that the first known direct ancestor with our name appeared in a Massachusetts village named Dorchester that was located just south of Boston and is today a part of that city. There are no records yet discovered telling of that first Davenport ancestor's prior history.
By 1676, five
separate Davenport families had settled within
the present limits of Boston: Francis, Humphrey, the Reverend John, Captain
Richard, and Thomas Davenport. It is this Thomas Davenport of Dorchester
who began our American lineage. However, we now have DNA data that our Thomas was
also a
close relative of the Reverend John Davenport who later founded the colony of New
Haven, Connecticut. No written evidence of a relationship between the three others has
yet been found, but they all, or at least their immediate descendants, used the same coat-of-arms on
their seals. This seal was the same as that granted to Vivian de Daven-port 1206-1226 of
Cheshire England, a known descendent of Orme Davenport, born 1034, who was the first of our
English - Norman line and a reputed relative of William the Conqueror.
The lineage of Reverend John Davenport has been reliably traced from these remote beginnings, and thus our own personal lineage back as far as Orme Davenport, is certain. DNA evidence now also supports a close family connection to other more distant clans of Davenports including groups in North Carolina and on the James River in Virginia.
It is uncertain at this time which of the eight groups of Davenports who lived in Cheshire during the first 500 years of the last millennium included the forefathers of our Thomas of Dorchester, however in 1330, a John Davenport [sometimes written as Damport] married an Alice Bramhall, the heir to Bramhall Manor in Cheshire, and in the years afterwards their hereditary family home was here.
A near perfect DNA match with the one tested descendent of the Reverend John Davenport makes it equally likely that our ancestors were from another nearby group living in Henbury village , which today is a suburb of Chester, England.
Although the exact lineage is still in question , a Thomas Davenport, from whom we know our American family descends, is known to have been in Dorchester Massachusetts on May 18, 1642. Thomas was a soldier in the King Phillip War and later became Constable of Dorchester. Thomas had ten children by Mary, his wife. Of these, Jonathon, their eighth child and third son, is in our line directly. However, descending from Charles, the second son, was to be in years to come, another famous Thomas Davenport who invented the first useful electric motor and the electric telegraph [before Samuel Morse]. He is often called the 'Brandon Blacksmith' from his home town name in Vermont. Other sons of Thomas, who have descendents today, were John and Ebenezer. DNA tests on these have confirmed Thomas as our common ancestor.
Thomas's son Jonathon Davenport, married a Hannah Maynard of Sudbury Mass. and after the birth in Dorchester of their first child, named Thomas after his grandfather, the family in about 1682 moved to Little Compton, Rhode Island, then a part of Massachusetts. This town and the nearby village of Tiverton were to be the home of all those in the family until about 1810. Today, Jonathon's large grave stone and that of wife Hannah's are side by side in the Little Compton cemetery. Together they had produced nine children in total, the last of which was John Davenport born 1694. Scores of Jonathon's descendents and our ancestors now lie silently in this quiet country setting.
Little
Compton, RI
John Davenport married Elizabeth Taylor and their son Ephraim Davenport was born in 1736. This Ephraim later married Rhoda Tabor. It is of note that Rhoda's great great great Grandfather was the same Francis Cooke who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620. Ephraim's and Rhoda's son Borden, the sixth of seven children, was born in 1775. Borden is my great great grandfather.
In about 1798 Borden married Jane Sisson, a daughter of the prominent Sisson family of Newport. There in Rhode Island, two sons were born. The second of these boys was Job Davenport, my great grandfather. After the western New York regions opened for settlement in early 1800, Borden and Jane left Rhode Island and moved first to the town of Madison in Madison County New York. Later their final home would be in nearby Georgetown village. In New York State three additional sons were born.
Great Grandfather Job became a cordwainer [or shoemaker] and married Harriet Nichols, a new emigrant from Devon in England. They had four children, and among these was Myron Davenport, my grandfather, born in 1849. Harriet died between 1855 and 1860 and Job immediately married her sister Caroline [or Caroline moved in to assist]. Except for Myron, there is no record for this family after 1860.
Myron, who in later life, would assume the name of Hiram Myron Davenport, took as his wife, my grandmother, Frances Ella Gates of Rome, New York. Frances Ella, in my memory, a small waspish woman, was the daughter of Ira A. Gates a grocer and farmer living in Rome and a Martha A. Roberts of Oneida, New York. Ira had been born in the settlement of Ridge Mills, part of Rome where his parents were employed on a farm owned by the Huntington family. Martha's parents had been John and Martha Roberts originally from Saratoga County, NY.
Myron Davenport and Frances Ella Gates, following their marriage in 1874, began a protracted odyssey punctuated with births. After a first son Francis, in Rome, New York, they moved in about 1877 to Ilion, New York where, Stella, a second child was born. Finally, after leaving New York State in about 1879, they traveled west to settle briefly first in Duluth and then in Aitken, Minnesota, the latter a timber logging and nearly lawless town on the upper Mississippi River. In Aiken, Frances and Myron produced three more children, [Fred, William, and Albert] but were eventually forced to leave Aitkin in about 1887 when Hiram was accused of murdering an Indian.
Fleeing east across the state border to Wisconsin, they settled for two years near the home of Myron's uncle, Borden Davenport, Jr., who had purchased, in 1856, from the Federal Bureau of Land Management, 120 acres near La Crosse. Soon two more children were born there, Ethyl and Hiram M. Davenport.
In 1890, they left La Crosse and going south, probably by the Mississippi river, they finally got to Pensacola, Florida. The reason for the selection of Pensacola for their new home is uncertain, but it is probable that it was because Frances's sister Isabella Johnson [nee Gates] had moved there first. In Pensacola, Walter Davenport was born, and then finally my father, Robert Earl Davenport, the last offspring, who arrived in 1894.
Grandfather Myron deserted his big family in 1900 and went to Los Angeles. His second son, Fred joined him there. Myron died in 1911 and is buried in LA's Forest Lawn cemetery.
Following husband Myron's departure, Frances moved her family from Pensacola Florida to Montgomery, Alabama to where her eldest son Francis had gone after he had married a widow named Emma Williams Flannigan. That city became my father's home during the next ten years of his childhood before running away to join the Navy. Grandmother Frances would remain in Montgomery until about 1920 when she returned to Pensacola. This return to Pensacola was probably because her youngest son, my father, had been transferred there by the US Navy, however her sister still lived there too. It was then, in Pensacola Florida, that my sister and I were born.
A general comment on the above...... Our family story shows a characteristic trait that the males were all of an adventurous nature and thus ready to strike out in new directions. During the time from the early 1600's until today there was only one brief period when succeeding generations didn't move out after puberty in search of their fortune.