User talk:S Marshall/Ancestry of John Seymour (Semer) of Sawbridgeworth

Appreciation from a descendant of John Seymour

As an American amateur genealogist who, based on information in A History of the Seymour Family by GD Seymour and DL Jacobus, is an 11th great grandson of John Seymour/Semer, I find the hypothesis on your User Page extremely interesting, and I greatly appreciate the work you have done to document the evidence that supports it.

Fortunately I failed to discover your wiki until late in my own effort to investigate many of the same ideas--fortunate because that let me enjoy each of ‘my own’ discoveries, like a detective hot on the trail of a criminal, or like the professor of medicine I was before I retired, pursuing an obscure diagnosis. (Alas, however, I failed to suspect the significance of rumors about Katherine Fillol, and that slightly tarnished my ultimate eureka moment.)

When I took up genealogy about three years ago to replace my former vocation and the sailboat racing that had been my other passion, one of my goals was to pursue my mother’s romantic idea that she was related to Jane Seymour--which I had dismissed, partly because she had a similar notion about Cleopatra. Early on I discovered the Seymour-Jacobus book and realized that she probably had heard about the Seymour Bible. The more I read that book, beyond just the chapter in which GDS took such pride in helping to prove that Bible had been a fraud, the more he impressed me as a pompous aristocratic amateur. I came to feel that, far from being an unbiased seeker of historical truth, he probably had two hidden agendas: to one-up his aunt, the genealogist Mary Kingsbury Talcott; and to wallow in the glory of having become a wealthy and famous philanthropist on his own, from a humble background rather than genes handed down from English nobility.

I suppose that makes me subject to accusations of bias as well, but, always a skeptic and an iconoclast, I hoped to find evidence that the widespread acceptance by American Seymours of their origin from a humble cobbler, simply because the Seymour Bible had been a fake, had resulted from jumping to a conclusion. A conclusion that chose to ignore the significance of the wings conjoined in lure on the seal of the will of Thomas Seymour, the son of Richard Seymour the Colonist.

Luckily, I next found Malcolm Seymour’s Puritan Migration to Connecticut, in which he reported the Pishiobury Manor connection but misattributed it to Pishiobury’s former association with Alice Lisle St. Maur. Later I came across Horace Walpole’s 1750 letter to Horace Mann and his gossip about Katherine Fillol’s infidelity, but I failed to see the obvious implication. And then I discovered, on an obscure Ukrainian website, bloggings by a Paul Carleton Seymour about the incestuous conception of John Semer/Seymour. And finally I came across your Wikipedia User Page.

This Saga of the ‘Noble’ Seymours is a magnificent story (even if it isn’t true--but I agree with your impression that, with multiple lines of evidence including that impressive association between the Seymour name and military/political leadership on both sides of the pond, it very probably is). I am curious about its priority.

The only data I can find suggests that credit belongs to Paul Carleton Seymour (PCS) who, from what I can glean from the Internet, is a 12th great grandson of John Semer/Seymour and an American accountant who lived in Florida and then appears to have became a somewhat mysterious soldier of fortune (a sojourn in the middle east, later a citizen of Medellin, Colombia and Director of Client Services for a small company there called Global wealth Protection, where he is no longer listed on its website).

I cannot determine when PCS first posted his material about John Semer/Seymour on those Ukrainian website pages (e.g., http://ua.convdocs.org/ docs/index-123252.html), but he posted similar writings on http://www.s560.com/dokuwiki, a wiki-like website dedicated to American Seymour genealogy, on 9 September, 2011, as far as I can tell a little more than a month before your wikipedia user page first appeared. And it appears that the first edit of your Ancestry of John Seymour (Semer) of Sawbridgeworth essay, on 20 October 2011 by “Pablocombiano,” was a verbatim dump of a large amount of PCS’s material on those two websites.

This credit seems to me to be a fairly big deal, since whoever it was--PCS, you, or someone else (or perhaps you and PCS independently, ala Newton and Leibnitz)--who first put together the pieces of this puzzle appear(s) to have succeeded where numerous amateurs and expert genealogists had failed, over more than a century, to solve this intriguing mystery. I hope you can help me understand the dynamics of this solution.

rhmartin (talk) 16:13, 11 October 2014 (UTC) Richard H. Martin 1206 Castle Bay Drive Columbia, Missouri 65203 richard.h.martin22@gmail.com