Odd this day
Well, it might be the 302nd anniversary of one Samuel Baldwin of Lymington in Hampshire being buried at sea, despite being a landlubber.
Or it may be complete balls, of course. It certainly sounds too good to be true, but it pops up on That Internet occasionally, looking all official and genuine because it’s in that old-fashioned typeface and looks like it might have appeared in a newspaper. So, obviously, I had to find out.
To begin with, it did appear in a newspaper: the Manchester Guardian of 12 July 1864.
Here’s a close-up of the section in question:
This seems to suggest that it’s in a section of trivia and oddities — which itself suggests less than rigorous fact-checking.
The snippet also appears, somewhat oddly, in the Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography, which anthologises the lives of people (men, probably; let’s be realistic here) who were in some way significant in the state’s history. According to the Ancestry website says, the great tome covers:
its colonization up to the War for Southern Independence in 1861. Therefore, the types of people found in this database include the founders, colonial presidents and governors, colonial councilors of the state, the burgesses, the fathers of the Revolution, governors of the state, judges of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Presidents of the United States, judges of the United States Supreme Court, United States senators, members of the House of Representatives, and other prominent citizens.
So, what the hell is this on p.525 of vol.4?
Here’s a close-up:
The section on famous Baldwins connected to Virginia also includes
Baldwin, son of Gan, a young French knight, killed at the battle of Roncenvalles, A. D. 778
…which is, frankly, not much of a connection with the US state first settled in 1607. In fact, the book seems to be just a long list of names, presumably associated with Virginia in some respect, and of anyone ever associated with that name. Why genealogist Lyon Gardiner Tyler would have compiled all this guff into a book in 1915 is anyone’s guess. One can only assume he found the Guardian cutting and took it at face value.
So, rather like the adage about analysing comedy being like dissecting a frog (“nobody laughs and the frog dies” — Barry Cryer, adapting the work of E. B. White and Katharine S. White), none of us has really learnt anything here. I haven’t been able to trace the ‘story’ any further back than the 1864 newspaper, where it appears immediately after a couple of columns of HORRIBLE MURDER IN A RAILWAY CARRIAGE and just before the Paris papers regarding the resignation of Lord Russell as “highly probable”. There is nothing to indicate that this is the work of a Victorian humorist.
You may not be surprised to hear that some idiot blogger in Essex does not have the time or budget to visit Hampshire to examine early 18th century parish records, so this will have to remain a mystery.
Until such time as I do: happy anniversary, Samuel. I hope the afterlife is everything you wished for.
(Yes, this one is a bit silly, isn’t it?)
