My ancestor may have killed Richard III

After getting feedback from good friends, I've decided not to use this public blog as a therapeutic tool but instead to use it only as a communication tool.  I will journal privately about private issues and share those thoughts and feelings with friends and family in a more intimate way.  But this blog can be used to discuss genealogy, travel, career developments, etc.  and everyone is welcome to check back for posts and make comments.  Please!

After my trip to the National Archives in Washington DC last month to research my Grandpa Cheshire's death at Pearl Harbor, I felt a little deflated not to have found anything new.  But I did get some promising leads and I plan to follow up those leads.  To be continued....

And then who should pop in the news but my Tudor ancestors' old nemesis Richard III!  The discovery of his remains in a parking lot in England reminded me of the fascinating story of how my ancestor William John Gardiner was reportedly the man who struck the fatal blow to Richard III.  

From recent news reports:

“Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.”

The search for Richard III’s final resting place was organized by screenwriter Philippa Langley of the Richard III society.  As far as she is concerned, Richard was the true king, the last king of the north, a worthy and brave leader who became a victim of some of the most brilliant propaganda in history, in the hands of the Tudors' image-maker, Shakespeare.

My ancestor was a Welshman named William John Gardiner (1450 – 1495) who married Helen Tudor – the illegitimate first cousin of Henry VII.  Why William John (Gardynyr) Gardiner was allowed to marry into the Royal Family remains unclear, but historians have hinted that it was because of his aid to Henry VII, then Earl of Richmond, in defeating Richard III, in the Battle of Bosworth Field, near Leicester.  According to the book, THE MAKING OF THE TUDOR DYNASTY, by Roger Thomas, William killed Richard III, on August 22, 1485, allowing Henry VII to proclaim himself King of England.  William and Helen Tudor were allowed to marry a few months later.  His future wife Helen Tudor was the illegitimate daughter of Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry VII.

After The Church of England was formed under the reign of Henry VIII in the 1500’s, the Gardiners remained loyal to the Catholic Church.  Eventually, our Gardiner ancestors moved to Maryland in 1637.  Maryland had been founded in 1634 as a colony where Catholics could enjoy freedom from religious persecution.  Janette Gardiner (1740 - 1799) married Richard Mudd (1735 - 1794) and some of their many children immigrated to the Catholic Holy Lands of Kentucky around 1800 for land and religious freedom.  Our ancestor Nicholas Mudd’s daughter Susanna Mudd married Thomas J. Cheshire in 1834 in Nelson County, KY.

A Tale of Two Grandfathers

James Thomas Cheshire (1901 - 1941)

Yesterday I spent the day at the Bahia Hotel on Mission Bay with about one hundred family members of POW/Missing Military Personnel.  We all received a briefing from dozens of dedicated employees of the US Military and the Department of Defense whose mission is to identify and bring home the remains of American servicemen and women.  Of the 359,000 US fatalities during World War II, 73,000 bodies were never found or identified.  My grandfather James Thomas Cheshire USN CPHM  is one of those Americans.

I have been an amateur genealogist since 1991 when I visited my grandfather's home town of New Hope, KY in an effort to honor his life by researching his family history.  Standing at a Xerox machine in the public library in Bardstown, KY, I looked up to see a plaque on the wall with my grandfather's name on it.  It was a memorial to the servicemen from Nelson County, KY who had lost their lives in WWII.

Years later, I returned to Kentucky to do more research and I found a book compiled by local historians to honor the fallen servicemen of Nelson County, KY.  I was stunned to find the illustration to the left in the book.  I contacted the authors and they confirmed that the illustration was commissioned for the book after finding local newspaper reports from 1942 that referenced a letter from the USS Oklahoma captain explaining the circumstances of my grandfather's death.  I am working with DoD historian Heather Harris (who I met yesterday) to locate this letter.  I will be traveling to Washington DC on Thursday with my great friend Myles Thurman to attend the presidential inauguration and to search for records pertaining to my grandfather's death at the National Archives.  Confirming this story is one of the ways I can honor his sacrifice and preserve his memory.  But it also contributes to a more complete portrait of his personality and how his character may have infuenced my father and his sister and how their family dynamic may have influenced the lives of his nine grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.

One of the reasons my Grandpa Cheshire's personality is so intriguing to me is because my maternal grandpa - William Jasmagy - was also an American hero but in an entirely different way.  He bravely followed his conscience as a pacifist and was sent to prison as a conscientious objector during World War I.  A piano teacher by profession, after he was imprisoned with fellow CO's at Fort Riley, KS in 1918, my 21-year-old grandmother Frieda Ledermann set out from Brooklyn to Kansas to support her fiancee, the other CO's and their philosophy of non-violence.  Their marriage license (right) documents their wedding ceremony in the guard shack of the prison.  Grandma Frieda is also a brave American hero.  Her letters home are preserved as part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.  In a book titled "A World Without War: How U.S Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I"by Frances H. Early, my grandma's efforts to support the WWI CO's are documented and she is described by a fellow pacifist as "a lovely girl....plucky and resourceful."  My Grandpa Jasmagy's beliefs are also documented in this book in his own words: "The present temporary lapse into hatred, viciousness and passionate intolerance, festered by a subjugation of the people and stimulated through a perversion of truth and ideals, may cause my position to be misjudged, but in this I will experience no feelings of resentment; instead I will rest content in that inward compensation, knowing I retained my manhood and had lived to help promote among mankind the kingdom of love and good will, and that in time, my stand will be vindicated by posterity."

William Jasmagy (# 8, Ft. Douglas)