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 twenty 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.

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.

The Stuart Situation

Susan Stuart Davenport (b. 1948), daughter of SRD II and Susan Gibson, goes by Stuart, which is her middle name. Stuart married Spenser Curell Simrill. Legend has it that Spenser tried to take the Davenport surname as his own, a lovely feminist gesture that only confused me further.

Stuart also married into a family with naming conventions as tangled as ours. The Simrill name splits two ways: two branches, one white and descended from slaveholders in York County, South Carolina, and one Black and descended from people enslaved on the same plantation, were separated for over a century, and the spelling diverged into "Simril" and "Simrill." Their story is the subject of the CNN documentary "The Simril(l)s: A Family in Black and White."

Reference: "The Simril(l)s: A Family in Black and White." The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, CNN, 2025.

Three Marias, Three Centuries

Maria Taylor (1698–1771) married William Byrd II of Westover, the man who founded Richmond in 1737. Their daughter Maria Byrd (b. 1786) carried both names forward. Nearly 300 years later, Maria Byrd Davenport (b. 1991), the family's current editor, carries them still: the Byrd of Westover line compressed into a middle name, the Warwick-Byrd connection that runs through every branch of this tree compressed into two words that, to anyone who doesn't know the history, sound like Mariah Bird.

To a stranger at a coffee shop, the name requires explanation. To a genealogist, it is a compressed family history requiring a full fifteen minutes minimum. The name is not confusing. It is simply doing a great deal of work.