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Richard "Dick" Derby (1881-1963) Surgeon M.D. Birth: Apr. 7, 1881 New York, USA Death: Jul. 21, 1963 Brattleboro Windham County Vermont, USA Ethel Roosevelt and Richard "Dick" Derby married On April 4, 1913
Dick's Father Dr. Richard Henry Derby born 1844 Boston, Massachusetts married Sarah Coleman Alden1 November 1877 (Age 33) Manhattan, New York died 4 July 1907
[DERBY GENEALOGY BEING A RECORD OF THE DESCENDANTS OF THOMAS DERBY OF STOW, MASSACHUSETTS] http://archive.org/stream/derbygenealogybe00byubrom/derbygenealogyb...
George Horatio Derby was born on 3 Apr 1823 in Derby, Dedham, Massachusetts. He died on 15 May 1861. He married Mary Angeline Coons on 14 Feb 1854 in San Francisco, San Francisco, California.
Mary Angeline Coons [Parents] was born in 1827 in St Louis, St Louis, Missouri. She died in 1906 in Saint Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota. She was buried in , , New York. She married George Horatio Derby on 14 Feb 1854 in San Francisco, San Francisco, California.
They had the following children:
F i Daisy Peyton Derby was born on 3 Dec 1854 in San Francisco, San Francisco, California. She died in 1888.
M ii George McClennan Derby was born on 1 Nov 1856 in on board Ship.
F iii Mary Townsend Derby was born in 1858. She died in 1893.
Captain George Horatio Derby, born in Dedham, Massachusetts, April 3, 1823, sprang from a line of distinguished ancestry. From the first emigrant of the name to this country (Roger Derby, who came in 167 1) down to the subject of the present sketch, the Derbys were superior men ; some among them being adventurous sea- farers ; others, conspicuous figures in business and public affairs ; others still, lovers and pro- moters of the arts and polite literature. The best-known of the family is our author's great- grandfather, Elias Hasket Derby, the " mer- chant prince" of Salem, Massachusetts. John Barton Derby, Captain Derby's father, was a graduate of Bowdoin, a lawyer and an author. Undoubtedly our militant humorist inherited certain eccentricities of character and tempera- ment from his father ; his literary gift coming rather from his mother, Mary (Townsend)
George Derby was born 1823 in Dedham, Massachusetts, son of John B. and Mary Townsend Derby. His father deserted the family mercantile business to be a poet, spending the family's money on self publishing. He graduated from West Point in 1846 and first served at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo. Derby married Mary A. Coons on January 14, 1854 in San Francisco. Lieutenant George Derby of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, whose professional contributions to the opening of the West can stand alone Of Derby's three children, Daisy, a noted beauty, married William H. Black, became a Washington socialite -- and committed suicide when her little son Roger was four years old.52 Mary Townsend, or Mamie, as her family called her, died, unmarried, at the age of thirty-five.53 Derby's only son, George McClelland, graduated first in his class at West Point and had a distinguished military career.
George Horatio Derby (1823-1861) of Massachusetts graduated from West Point in 1846 and served in the Army Topographical Engineers at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo before being sent to California in 1856.
He remained there for seven years, leading three exploring expeditions and winning a place as one of the state’s first humorists with pieces published in the San Diego Herald and republished around the nation. Phoenixiana was published in 1855. It contains Derby’s pieces as “Professor John Phoenixiana” and “Squibob,” poking fun at such topics as military surveyors and explorers; contemporary travel accounts of the Mission Dolores, Benecia, Sonoma, San Francisco, and San Diego; literary societies and women’s clubs; astronomy; and Army life.
"JOHN BARTON DERBY, born in 1793, was the eldest son of John Derby, a Salem merchant. In college he was musical, poetical, and wild. He studied law in Northampton, Mass., and settled as a lawyer in Dedham. His first wife was a Miss Barrell of Northampton. After her death he married a daughter of Horatio Townsend. They soon separated. A son by this marriage, Lieut. George Derby of the United States army, became well known as a humorous writer under the signature of 'John Phoenix.' For many years before his death Mr. Derby lived in Boston. At one time he held a subordinate office in the custom-house Then he became a familiar object in State Street, gaining a precarious living by the sale of razors and other small wares. He was now strictly temperate, and having but little else to do, often found amusement and solace in those rhyming habits which he had formed in earlier and brighter years, His Sundays were religiously spent -- so at least he told me -- in the composition of hymns The sad life which began so gayly came to a close in 1867." [Nehemiah Cleaveland & Alpheus Spring Packard, History of Bowdoin College With Biographical Sketches of Its Graduates, from 1806 to 1879, Inclusive 165 (J.R. Osgood & Co., 1882)
John Derby, Prominent Salem Merchant Developed Derby Square in Salem John Derby, Esq., graduated from Harvard in 1786. (Historical collections of the Essex Institute, Vol. IV. Essex Institute, 1862.) John Derby was a director of the Salem Bank between 1819 and 1828.
Now there dwelt in Salem one of the great men of his time, Elias Hasket Derby, the first American millionaire, and very much more than this. He was a shipping merchant with a vision and with the hard-headed sagacity to make his dreams come true. His was a notable seafaring family, to begin with. His father, Captain Richard Derby, born in 1712, had dispatched his small vessels to the West Indies and Virginia and with the returns from these voyages he had loaded assorted cargoes for Spain and Madeira and had the proceeds remitted in bills of exchange to London or in wine, salt, fruit, oil, lead, and handkerchiefs to America. Richard Derby’s vessels had eluded or banged away at the privateers during the French War from 1756 to 1763, mounting from eight to twelve guns, “with four cannon below decks for close quarters.” Of such a temper was this old sea-dog who led the militia and defiantly halted General Gage’s regulars at the North River bridge in Salem, two full months before the skirmish at Lexington. Eight of the nineteen cannon which it was proposed to seize from the patriots had been taken from the ships of Captain Richard Derby and stored in his warehouse for the use of the Provincial Congress.
It was Richard’s son, Captain John Derby, who carried to England in the swift schooner Quero the first news of the affair at Lexington, ahead of the King’s messenger. A sensational arrival, if ever there was one! This Salem shipmaster, cracking on sail like a proper son of his sire, making the passage in twenty-nine days and handsomely beating the lubberly Royal Express Packet Sukey which left Boston four days sooner, and startling the British nation with the tidings which meant the loss of an American empire! A singular coincidence was that this same Captain John Derby should have been the first mariner to inform the United States that peace had come, when he arrived from France in 1783 with the message that a treaty had been signed.
Elias Hasket Derby was another son of Richard. When his manifold energies were crippled by the war, he diverted his ability and abundant resources into privateering. He was interested in at least eighty of the privateers out of Salem, invariably subscribing for such shares as might not be taken up by his fellow-townsmen. He soon perceived that many of these craft were wretchedly unfit for the purpose and were easily captured or wrecked. It was characteristic of his genius that he should establish shipyards of his own, turn his attention to naval architecture, and begin to build a class of vessels vastly superior in size, model, and speed to any previously launched in the colonies. They were designed to meet the small cruiser of the British Navy on even terms and were remarkably successful, both in enriching their owner and in defying the enemy.
At the end of the war Elias Hasket Derby discovered that these fine ships were too large and costly to ply up and down the coast. Instead of bewailing his hard lot, he resolved to send them to the other side of the globe. At a time when the British and the Dutch East India companies insolently claimed a monopoly of the trade of the Orient, when American merchant seamen had never ventured beyond the two Atlantics, this was a conception which made of commerce a surpassing romance and heralded the golden era of the nation’s life upon the sea.