Re: Sir Thomas Merry knight in 1630 Will
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In reply to:
Sir Thomas Merry knight in 1630 Will
Jill Bhar 1/02/07
Dr. Poe, like Sir Thomas Merry, was an investor in the 1609 Virginia Company.They both were employed in the Royal Household (King James I, and King Charles I).
I have been browsing a number of books available through Google Books, and finding many medieval Merrys.I think it can be documented that Maires, Meeres, Meere, Mere, Meares, Mery, and others are all different spellings of the same family name.To which family group do the original Merry colonists in New England and Virginia belong?Perhaps in a decade or so, we will have better clues, from researchers digging through the UK archives and from DNA testing.
There does not seem to be a direct lineal connection between Sir Thomas Merry (or Sir Thomas Meeres, who came along later in the 1600s) and the American Merrys.But I think they were all part of a greater family.Sir Thomas Merry had connections, by marriage at least, to Cheshire.The Virginia Merrys seem to have had connections to Wales, and perhaps the Welsh counties just west of Cheshire.
Merry researchers can regret that our early English ancestors did not leave better traces, but we can also be proud that this was because the family was not rooted in the soil, but lived on the sea, and off domestic and international trade, since early times.In 1580, there were fewer than 200 three-masted ships in England.The Merry coat of arms of about that time, featured one of them.
Sir Thomas Merry, and perhaps his ancestors, had a different coat of arms:One that featured cloves (a spice usually imported from what we would now call the Mideast) and coins called bezants (from Byzantium, again the Mideast).The cloves are also found in the coat of arms of London's Grocers Company, the leading merchant guild of the day and to which some early Merrys belonged.This is the coat of arms that also featured "water bougets" -- twin buckets on a yolk, which are depicted in roughly the shape of the letter M.