With the patient assistance of Mildred Ellyson, my not-too-patient wife of fifty years, and the enthusiastic editorial input of my youngest child Helen Glenn, I (John Martine Court) here undertake to assemble for the possible edification of succeeding generations of the Court family, an outline of their genealogy and an anecdotal account of their predecessors' trials and tribulations, errors and accomplishments over the last few hundred years. Some among you may find in it some helpful perspectives.
As some wise ancient observed, those who ignore history may be condemned to repeat it.
My father, Alvah Breaker Court, assembled a rather fragmented file of family history. My mother's younger brother, Lawrance Brooks Martine, maintained a more thorough and documented genealogical record begun by his grandfather (my great-grandfather) Williams Barker Brooks. Mimi's antecedents kept more comprehensive records. The object here is to piece together a selection of those fragments and to include with them recollections of our most felicitous life in and out of the Navy.
In 1961, on my graduation from law school at William and Mary, my parents gave me a copy of Webster's Third International Dictionary, perhaps in the hope it might improve the precision of my use of the English language. Though I was tempted to call this effort a family history, Webster tells me that history is a "systematic written account comprising a chronological record of events". What follows is hardly systematic and only intermittently chronological. I am a poor note-taker, an erratic listener, and have kept no diaries. The source of this discourse lies entirely in old correspondence, fragmentary records and personal recollections, often prompted by extensive photographic coverage in the last hundred years. To put the genealogy in perspective, however, it is well to reflect on the observation made by son John when Mimi, proudly adopting her Aunt Isa's pedigree from Browning's Colonial Dames of Royal Descent, proclaimed Charlemagne as her antecedent. Consequent to the intervening forty-odd generations, Joe noted, there are now approximately three billion who can make that claim.
Preface | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | Postscript
© 1993-2008 Helen Glenn Court | All rights reserved