"Trial of George Jacobs, August 5, 1692" Thomkins H. Matteson (1813–1884)

Rembrandt, Waterhouse, Bierstadt

Apotheosis

This painting includes two ancestors, Esek Hopkins (seated to the right of the chap smoking a pipe) and his brother, Stephen Hopkins (pouring the libation on the slumbering fellow).  Greenwood painted this humorous scene between 1752 and 1758, and depicts a tavern full of Rhode Island merchants and sea captains in Surinam (A Dutch plantation colony on the Atlantic coast of South America).  Esek Hopkins would become the Supreme Commander of the Continental Navy during the War for American Independence (and an ignominious fellow in many respects).  Stephen Hopkins became Governor of Rhode Island, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  I share an ancestor with the Hopkins Brothers, Thomas Hopkins I (1616 - 1684), making them my Second Cousins, Eight Times Removed.  

This famous painting was part of a series of poker playing dogs created by C.M. Coolidge (1844 - 1934) as part of an ad campaign for Brown & Bigelow cigars.  Cassius Coolidge shares a direct ancestor with me.  John Coolidge (1604 - 1691) is my 10X Great-Grandfather, who immigrated from Cambridgeshire, England to Watertown, Massachusetts during the "Great Migration" to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  John Coolidge is C.M. Coolidge's 4X Great-Grandfather.

Grant Wood