PART II

Special Confusions

The following situations go beyond simple repetition. Each one created genuine uncertainty about who was being referred to, and most of them remain sources of confusion at family gatherings today.

The Miscounted Johns

The Davenport family produced eight consecutive generations of college-educated men across three centuries, including six Yale graduates and multiple members of the Connecticut bar. Somewhere along the way, someone lost count of the Johns.

John Sidney Davenport (1846–1937), son of Rev. John Sidney Davenport (1808–1900), should properly have been "Jr." He did not use the suffix. When his own son was born in 1877, the son took the name John Sidney Davenport Jr., a designation that was technically off by one, as he should have been the third. When that son and Marguerite had their eldest child in 1905, they named him John Sidney Davenport III, which should have been IV.

A NOTE WORTH MAKING

A family that produced more than fifty Harvard and Yale graduates over eight generations, and kept meticulous track of ancestors back to Norman Cheshire, miscounted the Johns. This seems like exactly the kind of thing Abraham Davenport would have wanted candles brought to sort out.

The Jr. Problem: The Double John Sidney Davenport Jr.

John Sidney Davenport Jr. (b. 1846) named his own son John Sidney Davenport Jr. (b. 1877), the same suffix, father to son. The 1877 man was the father of all five brothers and should logically have been "III." The family resolved the numbering going forward, counting the 1905 son as JSD III and the 1941 son as JSD IV. The 1846 man lived to ninety, dying in 1937, meaning the second "Jr." was already sixty when his father died.

There is a second layer to the confusion, and it has nothing to do with numerals. The 1877 man went by Sidney. His wife, Louise Marguerite Warwick, went by Marguerite. Which means the couple at the center of this entire family, the parents of all five brothers, were known to everyone who actually knew them as Sidney and Marguerite, not John and Louise. A stranger reading "John and Louise Davenport" on a marriage record and a relative remembering "Sidney and Marguerite" at the dinner table would have no reason to suspect they were describing the same two people. The names on the certificate and the names spoken aloud did not match, and that gap has quietly confused descendants ever since.

A THEOLOGICAL NOTE ON NUMERALS

One might charitably observe that this family produced generations of ministers and theologians, and that in certain strands of Christian thought, worldly accounting (of time, sequence, ordinal rank) matters rather less than the eternal. Perhaps Rev. John Sidney Davenport simply had his priorities in order when he declined to track his suffix with any precision. Less charitably: it was a lawyer who perpetuated the error. JSD 1846 was an attorney, a man whose entire profession depends on exact language and the precise meaning of words. That son grew up to be an actuary. A man whose job was, literally, to count things. He went through his entire professional life with the wrong number attached to his name and apparently never moved to correct it. The theologians can be forgiven. The lawyer and the actuary have no such excuse.

Two Brothers, Two Gibsons

Roswell Burrows Davenport (1911) married Jane Gibson. Stephen Rintoul Davenport II (1915) married Susan Gibson, a different woman from a completely different family. Susan Gibson's family is referred to as the Kentucky Gibson line to distinguish the two. Both families then independently used Gibson as a middle name for their children, which is why Gibson appears across both branches of the tree, honoring two completely different women with the same surname.

For the record: Jane Gibson and Susan Gibson were not meaningfully related. If one traces far enough back through British parish records there may be a fifteenth-cousin connection somewhere, but in any practical sense they were strangers who happened to share a surname and each happened to marry a Davenport. In this family, that passes for coincidence.

Byrd Who Married a Byrd

Byrd Warwick Davenport (1908) was named for his maternal grandfather Byrd Warwick (1848–1894), whose family descended from William Byrd II of Westover. He then married Alice Byrd, whose maiden name traces to the same Byrd line, making them 4th cousins. Their son Byrd Warwick Davenport Jr. (1941) therefore carries Byrd on both sides of his name.

Reduce, Reuse, Rename

Susan Stuart Davenport (b. 1948), daughter of Stephen Rintoul Davenport II and Susan Stuart Gibson, has always gone by her middle name, Stuart. Her full married name is Susan Stuart (Davenport) Simrill.

For many years, I misunderstood this branch of the family entirely. I thought I had a cousin named Spenser Davenport Simrill who was married to a woman named Susan, and separately, a male cousin named Stuart who had married into the Gibson family. In reality, I had conflated several people. Stuart Davenport is herself a Gibson descendant, and Spenser is my cousin by marriage. My confusion was compounded by the fact that Spenser later incorporated “Davenport” into his own name.

Stuart married The Rev. Spenser Currell Simrill, though I still hesitate over whether “Spenser” is spelled with a “c” or an “s,” and how many r’s and l’s belong in “Currell.” At some point, either as a gesture of affection or principle, Spenser legally added Davenport to his name. Family lore holds that Stephen Rintoul Davenport II responded bluntly, “You ain’t no damn Davenport, Spenser!” That moment may explain why I spent years unsure which of them was actually my blood relative.

Spenser himself was named, in part, for an ancestor, William Spenser Currell. He later went by “Bill” for a time after inheriting a family Bible bearing that ancestor’s inscription. As an Episcopal priest, he may also appreciate the long tradition of meaningful name changes, from Abram to Abraham, Saul to Paul, and Jacob to Israel, and seems to have taken that theme to heart.

Stuart and Spenser continued the naming tradition by giving their son the same name, Spenser Simrill. Rather than introducing something new, the family distinguished them in practice, with Rev. Spenser for the father, and “son Spenser,” “PhD Spenser,” or informally, “Big Spenser” and “Little Spenser,” for the son. Their other son, Stephen, adds yet another familiar name to the family repertoire.

In a further twist and complete coincidence, the younger Spenser, perhaps seeking a clearer identity, adopted the name Bill himself. Both Spenser’s eventually landed back at the name Spenser.

Stuart also married into a family with its own complex naming history. The Simril(l) family traces back to York County, South Carolina, where it split into two branches, a white branch descended from slaveholders and a Black branch descended from those enslaved on the same land. Over time, the surnames diverged slightly. The white branch adopted the spelling “Simrill,” while the Black branch retained “Simril.” Their shared history and eventual reconnection are explored in the CNN documentary The Simril(l)s: A Family in Black and White (2025).