Daniel Clemens

GEDCOM Note

But the family from which came Mark Twain antedates every other branch of the tribe, and the earliest date is 1611, when the first Clemens stepped on American soil in Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. And here we can correct some history and unfortunately take away no little of the gloss and gilt that covers the ever-worshipped Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth. The cradle of this great republic was Jamestown, where four thousand sours were congregated before the first landing of the historic Mayflower. John Smith, leader of the Virginia colony, was the discoverer of New England and of Plymouth, and it was he who advised the Pilgrims to make their settlement there. And the first gentlewoman to land on American soil was the widow Elizabeth Clemens, with her three sons and one daughter, in the year 1611, and her son Jeremiah was the ancestor of Samuel L. Clemens, the greatest of his race, from the standpoint of literary achievement and popularity. Elizabeth Clemens lived and died unheralded and unsung, while the Priscillas and the Thankfuls and the Abigails have overflowed our New England literature, and figure in the school books as a part of American history. VISUALIZE, if you will, the begrimed and smoky London of the year 1590, when Jeffrey Clemens, small factor in wools and linens, had his little shop far down in one of the narrow lanes of the city. A short, slight young man, ambitious in trade. Whether over the garden wall, or on the highway, young Jeffrey first glimpsed the fair-haired Elizabeth Fuller we can but conjecture. But Elizabeth was a young dame of parls, the daughter of a merchant, Cuthbert Fuller, whose brother Nicholas, of Chamberhouse, Berks, had been knighted by the King. A sister Elizabeth had married a title and was Lady Layghton. The young Elizabeth was an only child, and when her father Cuthbert died she was at once the ward and lavorite niece of her uncle, Sir Nicholas Fuller. Jeffrey Clemens, the linen factor, and Elizabeth Fuller were married in a chapel under the shadow or Bow Bells with small ceremony. Where they lived as newlyweds, how they lived, and what their station in the ever changing social life of London we have no way of knowing. We do know, by the parish records, that on 7 November, 1604, their first child, Thomas, was born, and that he died less than a vear later, 3 August, 6 1605. Nicholas was the second son, born 7 December, 1606, and named after Sir Nicholas. Then came Jeremiah, the direct ancestor of Mark Twain, born 8 November, 1607. Then came Ezekiel in 1608, and Elizabeth in 1609. And then Jeffrey Clemens, father of this small family, fell a victim to a prevailing epidemic and passed ou, leaving a chit of a widow, and four babies, the youngest only a few months of age. Jeffrey left his widow nothing in worldly goods. Her only patrimony was a few shares in the Virginia company, handed over by her father a few days before he died. The shares in that problematic Eldorado in the New World was as a rainbow to the widow, and nothing else offering so much, she sought passage to America on The George, then about to make a second voyage to Virginia, with a regiment of soldiers under command of a dashing and handsome young officer, Captain Ralph Hamor, who was later to become a giant figure in the colonial history of Virginia. She was the only gentlewoman, the only passenger, in that small company, setting sail in the slight tonned barkentine, with only the soldiers for company, save perhaps a few female slavies Avho went along as servants for the colonists already in Jamestown. Picture the voyage of Elizabeth with her babes, Nicholas, aged 5, Jeremiah 4, Ezekiel 3, and the tiny Elizabeth of a few months. Visualize the long and tedious sail, with these human cares and burdens, but always with the hope thai in the colony her rights in the Virginia company would compensate for' the fatigue of the long voyage and the discomforts she shared with her little ones. , Thus with the arrival upon the ship, The George, at Jamestown, in 1611, Elizabeth Clemens set foot on Virginia soil, the first of her name in the New World. Later she was to rear her children, and still later was to marry again—to become the wife of the dashing Captain Ralph Hamor.

Genealogy magazine a journal of American ancestry - v. 11, 1923-1924. No. 1