Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 329 pages of information about Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe.

Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 329 pages of information about Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe.

“Charissimo utriusque marmor hoc, amantissima conjux et mater possuit, Domina Eleonora Oglethorpe.”

II.  THEOPHILUS, born 1682.  He was Aid-de-camp to the Duke of Ormond; and member of Parliament for Haslemere in 1708 and 1710.  The time of his death is not recorded.  He must have died young.

III.  ELEONORA, born 1684; married the Marquis de Mezieres on the 5th of March, 1707-8, and deceased June 28, 1775, aged 91.  The son of this lady was heir to the estate of General Oglethorpe.  He is mentioned, in the correspondence of Mr. Jefferson, as highly meritorious and popular in France, (1785.)

IV.  ANN [mentioned in Shaftoe’s narrative.]

V. SUTTON, born 1686; and died in November, 1693.

VI.  HENRIETTA, [of whom we have no account.]

VII.  JAMES, [see the next article.]

VIII.  FRANCES-CHARLOTTE ...  Married the Marquis de Bellegarde, a Savoyard.[1] To a son of this union is a letter of General Washington, dated January 15, 1790, in the 9th volume of Sparks’s Writings of Washington, p. 70.

[Footnote 1:  Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol.  LVII. p. 1123.]

IX.  MARY, who died single.

The ARMS of the family are thus described:  “Argent, a chevron, between three boar’s heads, erased, sable armed, or, lingued proper.”

CREST.  “A boar’s head, as before, holding an oaken branch, vert, fructed or.”

II

DISCUSSION RESPECTING THE BIRTH-DAY OF OGLETHORPE.

There are great difficulties in ascertaining the age of Oglethorpe.  The newspapers, soon after his decease, in 1785. and the Gentleman’s and London Magazine, contain several articles about it.

While these inquiries, investigations, and statements were going the round of all the periodicals of the day, it is unaccountably strange that the family did not produce the desired rectification, and yet more surprising that in the inscription on the monument erected to his memory by his widow, and which was drawn up by her request, she should not have furnished the writer with the date of his birth, and the years of age to which he had arrived.

The London Gazette, first announcing his death, stated it one hundred and four years.  The Westminster Magazine for July 1785, (a periodical published in the very neighborhood of the old family mansion,) in the monthly notice of deaths, has “June 30th, General Oglethorpe, aged 102.  He was the oldest general in England.”  And I have a fine engraved portrait of him taken in February preceding his decease, or which is inscribed “he died 30th of June, 1785, aged 102.”  A writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for September, 1785 p. 701, who was one of the first emigrants to Georgia, and personally and intimately acquainted with the General, declares that “he lived to be near a hundred years old, but was not one hundred and two, as has been asserted.”

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