This book tells of a voyage of discovery by the author, a retired
Bechtel chief process engineer and chemical engineering society
director, whose previous writings concerned Methane Valorization
and Fischer-Tropsch Reactor Design. Trying to explain why a
thirteen year old boy would join a Quaker expedition to
Philadelphia in 1686 he devises a fictionalized account that is
eventually supported by genetic testing. Along the way he
discovers, among his ancestors, a master carpenter turned
politician, America's first golf club owner and a doctor of whom it
was written, "There was a popular notion that he cured his
patients." He finds a "Young Squire" who taunts the British with
school pamphlets during the Revolutionary War and several Quakers
who were sent off to Virginia during that war - much as we locked
up the Japanese during World War II.
While written as a family history, the reader will find tie-ins to
Benjamin Franklin's papers, to Shakespeare's The Tempest, to a
British diarist who wrote about William Wordsworth and to an
anti-slavery tract by Fanny Kemble. The book sheds light on
family's papers kept under wraps at historical libraries but leaves
the final answers up to future generations.
In the authors own words, "I became interested in Fox family
genealogy as a result of a business trip to Bechtel's London Office
in 1974. While there as the process design manager for an Algerian
Liquified Natural Gas project, I took the opportunity to visit the
Friends' Library on Euston Road. There I found a family tree called
Descendants of Francis Fox of St. German's, by Joseph Foster and
also Anne Cresson's biography of my own ancestor, Joseph Fox, who
had been Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly during the Stamp Act
uproar. I also located several books that seemed of immediate
interest: The Journals of Caroline Fox 1835-1871, edited by Wendy
Monk, and a biography, Caroline Fox, by Wilson Harris. These gave
the approximate locations of several family estates out in Cornwall
near Falmouth. There had been many famous visitors to these
estates; men such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Mill and Carlyle, and
Caroline Fox had described their conversations in her Journals.
"I then convinced a fellow process design engineer, Bob Chu, to
drive with me out to Falmouth over a weekend. There we found the
closed offices of G. C. Fox & Company, shipbrokers, and the Fox
Rosehill Gardens but no other sign of Fox activity. I was a little
discouraged. Bob was intrigued, however, and insisted we
investigate further. So on Sunday morning we drove further west and
found the Glendurgan estate, with foxes on the gateposts and Mrs.
Philip Hamilton (Rona) Fox about to start up a lawnmower in the
garage. She immediately dropped what she was doing and led us into
her house where notes were compared on family connections. One of
Francis Fox's sons had sailed to Philadelphia in 1686 on the same
ship as Justinian Fox, my own ancestor.
"Bob and I then had a chance to tour the fabulous Glendurgan
Gardens, just recently added to the National Trust. We also stopped
off at Catchfrench, an estate in St. German's, near Plymouth, where
I sat in the ruins of the house where Francis Fox had lived in the
mid-1600s. This was enough to send a chill up my spine and got me
to thinking about recording all of this history. Back in London,
Rona's second son, Charles Lloyd Fox, introduced me to more
relatives. As is described in this book, our families have
maintained this relationship ever since then.
"Work on this book actually started in 1992 after I retired from
Bechtel and my wife, Betty, died of Lupus, both in rapid
succession. I joined a Creative Writing Extension Class run by U.
C. Berkeley and, for my project, started the fictionalized account
recorded in the first two chapters of this book. I had learned that
Justinian had only been 13 years old when he joined the Plymouth F
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