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Book Review: A Taylor Double Ancestry

13 May 2021 8:04 PM | Anonymous

The following book review was written by this newsletter’s Book Review Editor, Bobbi King:

A Taylor Double Ancestry

By Arthur Orison Taylor (1923); edited by E.F. Vogt (2021).
Self-published. 2021. 215 pages.

It’s a generous person who edits and publishes another author’s work. Particularly when the original manuscript was typed and handwritten nearly a century ago, crafted onto one hundred fifty-eight fragile onionskin papers, spent decades in storage, with an expansive hand-notated diagram that charts twenty-eight generations of ancestors. The chart is reprinted in the back of the book with its meticulous hand lettering and rigorously-drawn connecting lines, truly a family gem of a document.

The original author of this Taylor genealogy is Arthur Orison Taylor, born in 1858 and died in 1948. He assembled the ancestries of his father’s and his mother’s families, both his parents being born coincidentally with the same surname; hence the title of the book: A Taylor Double Ancestry. The record was safeguarded by his family, passed down to his granddaughter, then to her daughter and husband Lynn Munroe Vogt and Eugene Francis Vogt, who thus became the curators of the family genealogy.

The Vogts have painstakingly edited through all the material, checked as many sources as they could, and published A Taylor Double Ancestry. The book is divided into two parts: Part I is about the paternal Taylors, and Part II is about the maternal Taylors. The two parts are divided into chapters, with each chapter devoted to one surname. There are fifty-two surname-chapters with descriptive narrative, charts, and reference notes.

All the book’s content is of the author’s 1923 work, none of the editors’ own, except for the editing and footnoting. So the information reflects work done in 1923, and backwards from that date. The only current information is a genealogy descendant chart for the author, Arthur Orison Taylor, which illustrates his descendants up to today. So you won’t find much information about the Taylors after 1923, but there is plenty to read about for all the generations previous to this time.

The fruition of the Vogts’ work honors the original author and contributes to an enduring Taylor legacy.

A Taylor Double Ancestry, written by Arthur Orison Taylor with editing and updates by E.F. Vogt, is available from a number of online book stores. You can find many of them by starting at: https://bit.ly/2RScHRY.


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