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    Palmer In History
    Palmer In History
    Palmer In History
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Palmer In History

    By JDKeith Palmer

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    About this ebook

    This book is no boring listing of legal documents of descent, but intended as a good general read.

    The foreword and introduction show how genealogy, DNA, and published historical quotations can be combined to illuminate the origin and roles of individuals bearing a particular family name .
    There are statistics of recent World distribution and migration of the Palmers.
    The investigative value and limitations of the three types of family background sources used in genealogy are discussed.

    The book begins with the earliest Palmer Viking oral tradition in Wales and Sweden, and moves to the story of a Welsh mediaeval knight, decorated by Richard the Lionhearted, King of England, in the Third Crusade. This and later literary origin versions of the Name in Western Europe are examined.
    Throughout, the current historical background of the world stage at the time is displayed as a general interest, over and above the tracing of family name.
    Heraldry and noble titles of Palmer individuals in Europe and the New World, along with many accomplishments in public service, commerce and the arts appear. There are a few who achieved fame in tales of notoriety.
    Some later racial admixture of bearers of the Palmer name is seen, part of a growing world population trend, and quoted from a notable
    colored author of genealogy books and films.

    The book ends with a penetrating question on the role of Homo Sapiens and the future of our species.

    The Palmer history theme is illustrated by many colored images, and some pieces of original verse on genealogy and the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJDKeith Palmer
    Release dateJan 28, 2010
    ISBN9781458129345
    Palmer In History
    Author

    JDKeith Palmer

    A lifetime amateur sailor, likes travel, music, poetry, fine art, cosmology, humanities.forestry, gardening, small-arms-shooting (National Champion 1944), jiujitsu, cybernetics, archaeology.(Aw, jeez if its worth doing, try it out!)Work? Retired professor, health services practise and education.Lives in Tidewater Virginia.

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      Book preview

      Palmer In History - JDKeith Palmer

      Palmer In History

      by J.D.Keith Palmer

      Smashwords Edition, 2010.

      Copyright 2010 by J.D.Keith Palmer

      First Published April 2008 in Paperback Lulu Edition

      Smashwords License Note.

      The author thanks you the reader for employing him and Smashwords to bring out this book and for respecting their effort. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should log in to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

      PREFACE:

      Palmers? How many are there?

      As of 1995, the World Book of Palmers, (Pub: Halberts Family Heritage Inc.) listed 89,856 Palmer households on Planet Earth, estimated to represent about 212,000 individuals distributed over 15 countries as follows:

      USA 50,272

      UK 27,066

      Australia 5,028

      Canada 3,964

      New Zealand 1,074

      Germany 729

      S Africa 625

      Ireland 582

      France 229

      Spain 184

      Italy 56

      Netherlands 42

      Switzerland 26

      Austria 14

      (These do not include variants such as Palmore, Pallamore, Parmer, Palme, which would nevertheless be of interest to genealogists.)

      Is the Palmer name scarce? In the two main locations, UK and USA it is found in 0.045% of the population of Britain, and in more populous USA where numerically, more Palmers are found, they are proportionately fewer, at 0.008%.In "The World Book of Palmers (1995), the 89,856 households was distributed as follows:

      USA 55%

      UK and Ireland 30%

      Australia 8%

      Canada 6%

      Europe, New Zealand S Africa etc 2%.

      FOREWORD 

      Some thoughts on writing about Genealogy.

      There must be more interesting tales to write on family history, than the customary stern legalistic recitals of family tree research.. Birth-, death-, and emigration-registers; and wills, bring no warmth, unless perhaps some old newspaper clipping breathes of the life song of real folk.

      We already know that in the family story quest, family names have proved less watertight than the pursuit of genetic or DNA exclusivity will bear, and their origins more multiform than expected from the supposedly ironclad renderings of strict genealogy.

      Recently DNA pattern testing, at first cautiously used as a legal identity tool, and later to confirm direct family relationships in genealogy, has shown more flow between genealogic compartments than was previously realized.

      This is confirmed if, as is done for this book, one follows a family name wherever it goes in historical sources without always insisting on firm but scarce legal documentation of relationship.

      The new science of DNA has revealed humbling vistas of great past migrations, of ethnic separations and reunifications, going back to events some 100,000 years ago, when We the People, alias Homo Sapiens Sapiens , the Cro-Magnon type, or AMH (anatomically modern humans) came as northerly migrations of a few adventurous small tribes, out of East Africa, in search of peace and plenty. Back there, fossils show that we had evolved through hominin ancestors, few but constantly adapting, over as much as six million years.

      We first straggled out into a warming Middle East in a migrant flow of only, by some DNA-based estimates, a few thousand people. That was long before the last Ice Age, at its coldest 20,000 years ago. First, we turned right, and walked east into Asia, crossing the steppes, or moving along the comforting seashores where the living was easy. We moved perhaps twenty miles in each generation, driven by that pace at which babies grow to be parents and start anew.

      Until we arrived in (yes! across a short sea passage) Australia, where our truly aboriginal descendants still abound…

      Then, millennia later, we turned left, walking walk West to populate Europe. In both directions, we grew in numbers and power, segregating, re-mixing, and segregating again. It was a leisurely multi-millennial hunting and gathering trek, in Asia and Europe taking refuge in warm southern corners through the coldest years of the last Ice Age.

      In that period, sea levels fell 120 meters or 60 fathoms because the water was locked up frozen in the Polar ice caps. South of the glaciers, dry land bridges allowed subsistence and travel on coastal land which is now deep seabed. Then came global rewarming, favoring expansion in numbers, bringing farming, herding, technology and civilization. In that relatively recent 10,000-year marathon, we reached our present self-threatening subjugation of Planet Earth.

      Some tribes that had made the Eastern trudge moved onward to pause in south Siberia, until 15,000 years ago, they crossed a Beringian land bridge, or paddled Inuit-style along its icy shores, to Alaska. They began populating the Americas; the Siberian Khakan tribe of today still bears DNA which is ancestral to many Native Americans.

      Millennia later, these Amerindians from Siberia met their long lost Western cousins coming the other way from Europe, as Vikings, Basque fishermen, Conquistadores, Virginians or Pilgrim Fathers.

      In what was a New World to both of those ancient migrations, the two directions of flow finally met, completing an encirclement of the planet. Genetically speaking, the American Thanksgiving marked the beginning of a new melding, of heredities not seen together since the long-distant African exodus.

      In that mix, DNA testing is striving, almost too late to distinguish individual genealogies and their journeys. Easy travel has created an increasingly jumbled trail of heredity on the shifting sands of a newly re-forming worldwide genetic database.

      So, in the end, the conclusion will appear to be:

      We were first Africans, and now again related.

      PALMER?

      Where did the name come from?

      Its basis is from the Latin name of the widely known palm tree, Palma. Its collective application to family comes from more than one time and place.

      Beginning perhaps as a jocular Nordic sailor’s nickname it achieved family status ashore in the Norman farming hinterland of a rich Welsh trading port.

      Later, as owned by Dante’s palmieri and Chaucer’s palmeres, in Italy and England it attained honorific meaning for an alternative or informal holy or numinous minister, The Palmer.

      Possibly an even older origin, is from a farming designation in Spanish-speaking countries. Palmer is a crop-field designation, a producing grove of palm-trees. The family owning such a property might come to be called Palmer, a derivation which must have spread separately from the Norse-Italic-English versions of the Name which this book primarily addresses.

      At first quite rare in Europe, as the Italian Palmieri, the ecclesiaistic name moved to expanding Britain there to flourish and to be carried by many migrants to America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere, from the 15thCentury onward

      I started these writings intending to do a formal family tree, but found that pedestrian legalistic road, no doubt necessary when distributing property, too heavy for enjoyable reading, even for readers named Palmer!

      Dwarfed by the vast millennia of human presence, the paper trail of family names thins out a few centuries ago. Wills, deeds, family-bible entries, indeed the everyday use of writing itself, and the use of proper surnames, all become scarce. In searching historical accounts, a stroke of luck will name perhaps a noble, a churchman, philanthropic merchant , an active man of bravery or notoriety, and very few women. The two oldest documented Palmers named in this book are rarities, Hugh de Palmer the Crusader, and Richard de Palmer, the Norman-Sicilian Archbishop, both of nine centuries ago.

      No wonder; in Britain particularly, from the end of Rome to the Norman Conquest (excepting for surviving bardic Celtic or Germanic lineage recitations) a genealogic dusk prevails. Rome eliminated the Druidic oral repository, and high civil standards known to 4th Century Britain were not to be regained for a thousand years.

      Noble family history attracted new attention from 12th Century colleges of heraldry, that began to practice more meticulous genealogy, culminating in the 1400’s with strict Heraldry inspections, like Henry Tudor’s Statutes of Livery and Maintenance, and Henry the Eighth’s Livery Visitations.

      The Domesday Book by 1070 had begun, and Norman land courts continued, a British inventory of land wealth; abbeys kept cartularies, or verbal mappings of deeds and bounds, with names and dates of owners and testifiers.

      Most of Britain’s oldest genealogically useful documents are in Latin, or its demotic forms. In my genealogical wanderings, I have yet to meet a person whose lineage records include a Romano-Celtic or Anglo-Saxon document from Britain, unlike Europe’s Latin literary scene, where the written trails are surprisingly well preserved. Oral tradition sometimes gives us personal names; but the ancient Irish and Welsh oral genealogies, Norse sagas, and more recent priestly sources, like the Annales Cambriae and Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, were not committed to writing until the 8th Century.

      Elsewhere, impressive trimillennial Egyptian and Asian family name records are coming forward. For Jews the Cohanim teaching caste, linked by oral tradition to a Biblical date 3400 years ago, bequeath a persistent DNA-supported label to some bearers of the modern name Cohen.

      Conventional family tree retracement has a particular discouragement, that the mathematics of exponential retrogression makes everyone seem related a few centuries ago. Disappointingly, a mathematically naïve 19thC study of (then) socially desirable Norman Blood in England, computed a number of ancestors several times the known population of Britain in 1066.

      Therefore, not neglecting family tree interest, the hunt for published historical connections definitely beckons! Thus liberated, we follow the Palmer historic links, Norse nicknames, the crusaders from Dyfed, Sicilian Bishops, sensitively connected Restoration royalty, documented awards of honors or riches; and on to dreams of how they may

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