Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

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of Connecticut which he had from the first, as has been shown ;
his elder
brother, who was thirty-two years old at the time of his emigration, and
already married, with a family of children, could have had no such prepara-
tion for public life, but must have become one of the leading men of the
colony, as we have seen he was, by right of birth and previous culture.
Both brothers were eminently "men of affairs." In the first settlement
of New England, as is well known, the colonists took there the rank which
had belonged to them in England, the old English distinctions being
rigidly maintained, not only by titles of respect, but by all forms of defer-
ence to social distinction, including a preference of men who ranked high
socially to fill pubhc offices. Our two emigrant brothers Edward and
Matthew Griswold were evidently "born to rule." Besides, if it be a
principle of heredity that the characteristics, physical, intellectual, moral
and social, of a strongly marked ancestor are repeated in his descendants,
so that from the offspring may be inferred what was the progenitor, then,
apart from all we know of the first generation of the Griswolds of New
England, the qualities developed by succeeding generations of the family
have been an accumulating proof that its emigrant ancestors were high-
minded, intelligent. Christian "gentlemen."
We agree with the late Colonel Chester of London that our emigrant
Griswolds came from a younger branch of the ancient heraldic family of
Greswold ;
although
our proofs are only circumstantial, owing to the loss
or imperfection of records, the early records of Kenilworth, as we have
said, having been destroyed, and no Wills containing the names of the
brothers having been found thus far, and no general pedigree of the family
having yet rewarded our diligent search. The brief pedigrees given in
Visitations being really intended, chiefly, to show the lines of eldest sons,
the heirs to landed estates, the lines of the younger ones are not filled
out. As we have before said, the early home of the heraldic Greswolds
was at Kenilworth ; after a marriage which we have already referred to,
they became seated at Solihull near by ; later they acquired Langdon Hall