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Keokuk County, Iowa, Hollingsworth Marriages, Book A.


William Lingle          and  Jane Hollingsworth        27 May 1845
Horace Bagley           and  Cynthia Ann Hollingsworth 29 Jul 1846
Benjamin Hollingsworth  and  Sarah Petre                3 Sug 1846
Elias Hollingsworth     and  Sarah Ward                17 Apr 1851
Joseph M. Casey         and  Sarah Hollingsworth       12 Aug 1855
William Hollingsworth   and  Frances Peck              25 Dec 1860
Coverage: 1844-1860

NOTE: Some of the above were Quakers and more detailed records of the weddings would be in the Monthly Meeting records. In 1960 your editor visited a very old man, Mr. William Hollingsworth, of Inglewood, California, whose wife managed a trailer park across from Hollywood Park Race Track on Century Blvd. He was about 90. He was a son of the above William and Frances Peck Hollingsworth. He described to me "the Hollingsworth thumb joint," which, as he showed me, at the first joint behind the nail, could bend unusually far backwards in a curve like a double-joint. He said only the Hollingsworths had that! Folk tale, of course, but apparently this genetic difference did pop up in his Hollingsworth family, and it may be a feature of Valentine's lineage here and there. (See Stewart, "Descendants of Valentine Hollingsworth, Sr." (1925), page 103. William (above) was a son of Elisha and first wife Sarah Heald, 6 generations from Valentine. The line is not carried down, William stated to have had 5 sons and 2 daughters, Mr. Hollingsworth, the son, mentioned an uncle Err, who used another given name "Alasco" in later life.)

Letter from Samuel Hollingsworth to Samuel Hollingsworth - 1964.
Samuel S. Hollingsworth
Attorney at Law
1100 H Street N.W. Ijamsville, Md.
Washington 5, D.C.

June 30, 1964
Mr. Samuel W. Hollingsworth
810 South 58th Street
Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19143

(READER BEWARE; SPURIOUS DATA
IN THIS LETTER. SEE COMMENTS
Dear Mr. Hollingsworth;

Last month you wrote to my uncle, John P. Hollingsworth, of Radnor, Penna., wanting to know something about our branch of the Hollingsworths. I do not have too much information. (As I understand it, the Hollingsworths were an old Saxon family settled in Cheshire, England somewhere around 900 A.D. The first record of the Hollingsworths was in 1022. The Hollingsworth mansion is still located in Cheshire, England, although it passed out of the Hollingsworth family in the last century. The name is derived from Xaxon. "ING" is the Saxon word for "sons"; "Worth" is the Saxon word for "guarded enclosure"; and "Hol" apparently was the name of the ancestor, so that the meaning of the word in Saxon is "the guarded enclosure of the sons of Hol."

(My branch of the Hollingsworth family left Cheshire, England around 1600 and settled in Ireland. The first Hollingsworth in America, Valentine Hollingsworth, was born in Ireland in 1632. He was a Quaker and a friend of William Penn. He came to this country in 1682 on the ship Welcome. We are descended from the oldest son of the oldest son. Valentine's oldest son was named Samuel; his oldest son was Enoch; his oldest son was Jehu; his oldest son was Samuel; and his oldest son was Jehu, my great-grandfather. My grandfather's name was Samuel. My father's name was Israel Pemberton Pleasants Hollingsworth.

(A number of books have been written on the Hollingsworth family. I have a short one entitled "The Hollingsworth Family" by Mary Hollingsworth Jamar. It was published by the Historical Publications Society of Philadelphia in 1944. I am sure you could look at a copy in the files of the Historical Society or perhaps in a public library.

( I understand that Valentine Hollingsworth has at least ten thousand descendants in this country, though, obviously, only a relatively small portion of the descendants are named Hollingsworth.

( I hope I have been of some help.
Sincerely,
(signed) Samuel S. Hollingsworth

P.S. (Valentine Hollingsworth is buried at Brandywine Hundred which is in Delaware, just over the Pennsylvania-Delaware line -- this originally was part of Pennsylvania. His sons and grandsons are buried near West Chester. The rest of the famly from which I am descended is buried in Philadelphia. (SSH))

Editor's comments on above letter: The addressee was one of our charter subscribers, Mr. Samuel W. Hollingsworth. His ancestors were not the ones so carefully described. His family was from Rathfryland, Co. Down, (now in Northern) Ireland, a largely Presbyterian family with no known connexion to the Quakers. They emigrated directly to Philadelphia in the mid 1800s. We published extensive data on the family in Ireland under the general serial title, "The Rathfryland Family" in our early numbers. Samuel has been dead about 20 years. We never had contact with the letter writer. The statements between the brackets beginning on the 3rd line of the letter to the end of the postscript are so terribly incorrect that this is our "mark" to warn you readers not to take any of it seriously. We publish it as an example of the hogwash that was being circulated in those days, mainly on account of Mary Jamar's work. In her letters to Joseph A. Stewart, after he published his 1925 work, she insisted that the Cornish myth had to be true, and was determined to get round Myers' and Stewart's findings! In short, she liked the phony crap more than the truth.

We never before, nor afterward, saw the explanation of the meaning of the name in that way. The Welcome story is obviously wrong. The lineage given from Valentine, to the attorney is probably correct or nearly so. It can be verified (?) in Stewart, p. 137-138 covering the 5 generations, Valentine, Samuel, Enoch, Jehu, Samuel. Apparently a namesake Samuel S. Hollingsworth was an attorney in Philadelphia in 1884, (p. 140) whose lineage reads Valentine, Samuel, Enoch, Jehu, Jehu, Samuel, Jehu, Samuel S. Hollingsworth! Samuel2 was the eldest son of Valentine by the second wife Anne Calvert. Henry2 ws the eldest son and heir-at-law, by the first wife Ann Wray: under British law, an eldest son from a second marriage is not an eldest son! (Unless the first marriage produced no (surviving) sons.)

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