Tu ne cede malis
Every pre-1750 claim the two family histories make, laid out as one map and graded against the record.
The sources both compilers were copying have now been found and read, including Vivian's Devon pedigree, which names the man who built the graft and prints it in a different typeface so you can see the join. Scope: origins to c.1750.
primary record
strong inference
placement unproven
shown to be another family
The grade marks the strength of a link, not whether the person existed. ✗ extends the site's three grades for claims that have been actively refuted.
The finding
The pre-1750 material has always looked like one long descent. It is not. It is four separate bodies of evidence - two of them genuinely good - connected by four joins that nobody ever documented. Verification has now settled three of those joins, and the middle one turns out not merely to be unproven but positively blocked: the Oxfordshire barons had no surviving male in 1375 to send to Gloucestershire, and no land left to send him with.
The good news is real and worth stating first. Both underlying Visitation pedigrees exist, have been located, and have been read - Gloucestershire and Devon. Both families are real, both held real property, and the 1592 grant of arms is confirmed in an independent index. What collapses is not the families. It is the wiring between them.
Structure of the claimed descent
Frisia → Normandy → Doumeray
Paul only · c.700–1066 · invented
Damery-sur-Marne · Champagne
Paul only · real vassals c.1150–1230, then fails
d'Amory of Oxfordshire
Both · c.1138–1375 · documented, and extinct
Damery of Yate & Codrington, Glos.
Both · found: Harl. Soc. 21, p.244 · genuine
Amory of Chapple, Bishops Nympton, Devon
Both · found: Vivian p.15 & Harl. Soc. VI, p.7 · genuine, ends in daughters
Damery of Bandon & Ballineen
My ground · Amary bond 1669, then 1750 → · weavers, shoemakers, labourers, cottiers
How this is graded
Nothing here demands proof beyond doubt - that standard would empty the tree. What it demands is that a claim be more likely true than not, that it not be contradicted by the record, and that where it rests on inference the inference be stated rather than smuggled. A grade B is a perfectly respectable resting place. An E is reserved for claims that have been actively disproved, not merely left unproven.
Documented. A named, dated, checkable record says so. Cite it and move on.
Probable. No direct record, but the circumstantial fit is strong, nothing contradicts it, and the alternatives are worse. Stands on balance of probability.
Open. Plausible, nothing found either way, and a specific test exists that would settle it. Not a failure - a task.
Doubtful. Internally inconsistent, chronologically strained, or dependent on something already failing. Needs positive evidence to survive; assume against it meanwhile.
Disproved. Contradicted by record, or shown to belong to a different family. Cut it - and note what it was doing there.
✓ Documented
30
Confirmed against a named source, many verbatim.
~ Probable & ? Open
14
Standing or open, with a defined next test.
! Doubtful
8
Doubtful - chronology, spelling, or a failed joint.
✗ Disproved
22
Disproved. Including all three load-bearing joints.
Segment 1 · c.700–1139 · Frisia, Normandy, Salisbury
The name descends from Dammritter, "knight of the dykes", through six Frisian generations from c.700
PaulDisproved. A Germanic compound noun cannot yield a French toponymic, and Paul's own chain runs Dammritter → Damrit → Damry → D'aimery → Damory → Doumeray → Damery - swallowing Ted's derivation and demoting it to a late stage. That is the signature of a story built around an existing story. The 2026 transcription also flags Order of Zion material: the Prieuré de Sion is a 1956 French hoax, which places part of the sourcing in the post-war pseudo-genealogy circuit - exactly the circuit that manufactures Frankish origin lines to order.
The surname derives from Daumeray in Maine-et-Loire
TedProbable - and this is Ted's best call. Unexpectedly, the current OUP authority backs him. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (2016), s.n. Damary: "from Daumeray (Maine-et-Loire) France. The initial D- was often regarded as a preposition and the name wrongly divided as De Aumari." Daumeray exists (in Anjou, not Normandy; merged into Morannes sur Sarthe-Daumeray in 2017). "Doumeray" does not exist - no such place is on any map. Two cautions: FaNBI is describing the modern surname, not the medieval barony; and a shared name origin is a fact about a word, not a descent.
Roger, Bishop of Salisbury (d.1139) was a Damery / d'Amory / of Doumeray
Ted + PaulDisproved. No source, medieval or modern, gives Roger of Salisbury a surname of any kind. Searched: the DNB, Greenway's Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, Gesta Stephani, William of Newburgh, and the Complete Peerage's own Damory articles. Zero hits. His formal designation in his lifetime is a church, not a family: "Roger, priest of the church of Avranches." His entire attested family - brother Humphrey, nephews Alexander and Nigel, son Roger, Matilda of Ramsbury - is likewise surname-less, identified by office or by kinship.
Ted's "he brought his brother and two nephews to England" is a real memory of the historical bishop
TedDocumented - which is exactly why it matters. Roger's nepotism is famous: nephews Alexander became Bishop of Lincoln and Nigel Bishop of Ely; his son Roger le Poer was Chancellor to Stephen. Ted's detail is garbled but genuine, and it proves the point: whoever built this pedigree had read an account of the real bishop and attached the family name to him. The graft is deliberate, not accidental.
A circulating pseudo-surname for the bishop does exist - but it is "le Poer", not Damery
-Greenway's Fasti heads his entry "Roger le Poer" as a modern editorial convention, and genealogy sites have picked it up. But "le Poer" means the pauper, was applied only to his son, and only after the family's fall in 1139 - a non-hereditary nickname marking the loss of everything. A byname like that is evidence against a family name, not for one.
Joint 1 · verdict
Everything above this line in both documents - Frisia, the Somme, Thouars, Doumeray, the Hastings generations - hangs from the attachment of the family name to Roger of Salisbury. The attachment does not hold, so the whole stratum detaches. It takes nothing with it: the documented Oxfordshire family begins independently, on its own evidence, immediately below.
Note the timing, which is almost comic. Roger of Salisbury died in December 1139. The documented d'Amory family begins with Robert Damory's grant to Godstow Nunnery about 1138. The family's real founder and its invented ancestor overlap by a year - as a knightly sub-tenant in Oxfordshire and a dying royal minister in Wiltshire, with nothing between them but a name somebody added eight hundred years later.
Segment 2 · c.1138–1375 · Oxfordshire
The best-documented material in either typescript, and both men are broadly right about it. It is also the segment that ends - and the ending is what settles Joint 2.
The family's documented ladder: Robert d'Amaury → Robert (m. Joan, d.1236) → Roger (living 1281) → Sir Robert (d.1285) → Sir Richard (d.1330) & Sir Roger (d.1322)
Ted + PaulDocumented. Printed verbatim in the Complete Peerage vol. IV, p.46 n.(c), from the Close, Charter and Inquisition rolls. Note the terminus: CP goes no higher than "Robert d'Amaury", undated, with no father, no place, no wife. There is nothing above him in the peerage record - no bishop, no Normandy, no Frisia. Also settled: Ted's typescript loop (Robert d.1285 → son Roger d.1281 → son Robert d.1285) is a drafting error; and CP demolishes an old phantom, "a Nicholas, who never existed", invented by Dugdale misreading a roll.
Sir Roger d'Amory d. 13/14 March 1322 at Tutbury, condemned for treason but respited; buried St Mary's, Ware
Ted + PaulDocumented. He fought at Burton Bridge, was left behind sick or mortally wounded at Tutbury, captured, tried, condemned - and respited because, as the judgment itself says, the King "vous ad en temps moult amez… et auez sa Nyece esposee". Both documents have this substantially right.
Roger d'Amory had sons
Ted + PaulDisproved. His heir was Elizabeth, his only surviving legitimate child, who married Sir John Bardolf; the 1360 inquisition names her "propinquior heres predicti Rogeri". A second daughter, Margaret, died young. Fourteenth-century inheritance law makes the point unanswerable: had there been a legitimate son, he would have been sole heir. The surname cannot descend from Roger - and Roger's is the coat both later families difference.
Roger's royal kinships - nephew of Edward II, cousin of Castile, nephew of the Duke of Bar
Ted + PaulTrue but misleading. All are affinal - they run through his wife Elizabeth de Clare, granddaughter of Edward I. Not one is a blood connection to a Damery. Both documents present them as family grandeur; they are his wife's family's grandeur.
Sir Richard d'Amory (d.1375) was a founder Knight of the Garter
PaulDisproved - and the error is traceable. No Damory appears anywhere in the published list of the 25 founder knights of 1348. Founder knight no. 20 was Sir John Chandos - precisely the man to whom Richard Damory was forced to enfeoff Woodperry and Headington in 1358–60 to clear his debts, and whose name is threaded through the Damory footnotes for that reason. The Garter migrated to the wrong man across a shared document.
Corrections to the offices: Sheriff of Oxon and Berks, and Keeper of Whittlewood
Ted + PaulDocumented. Sir Richard (d.1330) was Sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire 1308–10, not Buckinghamshire; Forester of Whittlewood for life from 1309 and Keeper of Salcey from 1325. Wychwood appears nowhere. Ted pencilled a query over Wychwood/Whittlewood in his own margin and left it unresolved - he was right to hesitate, and right about which way to go.
The Oxfordshire male line continued past 1375
Ted + PaulDisproved, and this is the decisive finding. Complete Peerage on Sir Richard: "He d. s.p., 29 Mar. 1375. His heirs are unknown." The line simply stops. The proof is the 1347 entail: licensed to settle his manors on himself and the heirs male of his body, "rem. to John his br., rem. to Joan his sister and the heirs male of her body, rem. to his own right heirs." When Richard's lawyers sat down to name every Damory male who might carry the estates, they could name exactly one - his brother John, who died without children. After that the entail falls onto a sister. Had there been an uncle, a cousin, a nephew, they would be in that document; naming them is what the instrument is for.
Every manor left the family - none to a Damory heir male
-Ubley sold 1341/2; Thornborough sold 1346; Woodperry and Headington enfeoffed to Chandos 1358–60; Bucknell surrendered to Edward III in 1354 and granted away to his squire John Beverley in 1366. Bletchingdon is the only one that may have passed by blood - and it passed through a woman, Katherine Damory, to the Poures, with VCH thinking purchase "from his needy kinsman" at least as likely.
The last man of the name dies in 1381 naming no relation
-Sir Nicholas Dammory, "probably his first cousin", made his will at Depden, Suffolk in Feb 1381. Complete Peerage: "he mentions this Joan [his wife], but no other relation." No son, no brother, no nephew, no cousin. A testator at the end of his line.
The most glamorous branch in both documents is the one branch that provably produced no later Damery at all.
Joint 2 · verdict
Both documents move without comment from Sir Richard d'Amory in Oxfordshire to Henry Damery of Tortworth in Gloucestershire, a hundred miles away. That transition now fails three ways at once. There was no surviving Damory male in 1375 to make the journey. There was no land left to endow a cadet with - it had all been sold, mortgaged or granted away by 1366. And no cadet branch is recorded anywhere: Atkyns, Rudder and Smyth between them cover Gloucestershire from Domesday to 1712 and contain not one Gloucestershire Damery landholder, tenant, juror or officeholder in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
Meanwhile the ordinary explanation was under everyone's nose the whole time. Damery is a place in Tortworth parish. There is a hamlet of Damery on Tortworth Road; there is Damery Bridge, recorded by John Smyth of Nibley in the Berkeley manuscripts; there is Damery Mill in the Gloucestershire Archives; there is Damery Camp, a scheduled monument above the Little Avon crossing. Atkyns lists the hamlets of Tortworth parish in 1712: "1. Tavern. 2. Bath. 3. Aven's Green. 4. Damery. 5. Crocksey."
So "Henry Damery of Tortworth" is most economically a man surnamed from the hamlet he lived in - a locative surname of the most ordinary kind, formed exactly where the family histories say he was. That is not a demotion. It is a better-evidenced origin than the baronial one, and it is testable in a way the baronial one never was.
Segment 3 · c.1400–1592 · Yate and Codrington, Gloucestershire
This is the segment that always looked like independent corroboration, because both documents carry it with the same dense, odd, specific detail. The source has now been located and read, and it explains everything - including why they agree.
The source
Sir John Maclean & W. C. Heane (eds.), The Visitation of the County of Gloucester taken in the year 1623, Harleian Society vol. 21 (1885), p. 244, headed "Damory". From Harl. MSS 1041 f.84b and 1543 f.64. It sits in the volume's Miscellaneous Pedigrees section, and dates itself internally: Nicholas "unmarid 1591", grant 1592. archive.org/details/visitationofcoun00inchit
P. Rob. Cook Clar. to Gyles Damory of Cotherington in com. Glouc. 1592.
Robert or Roger Damory - Thomas Damory of Yatt in com. Gloc., sonn and heire - William Damory of Yatte = Elizabeth d. of …. Martin of Chawkley - Morris Damory of Yatte = Catherine d. of Edmond Blunt of Mangersfeild - 1. Morrice Damory of Yatte · 2. Thom. Damory of Yatte = Allice da. of Wm. Webb of Taterig (?) - Gyles Damory of Cotherington = Sibell d. of Nic. Walwin of Lanware in com. Hereford - Nicholas Damory of Cotherington unmarid 1591 · Elizabeth · Allice
Harleian Society vol. 21, p. 244 - the whole pedigree, seven generations
Both typescripts are transcribing this one printed page
-Documented, and the proof is elegant. Both documents reproduce the herald's own hesitation - "Robert or Roger". That ambiguity is a feature of this printed page and nowhere else. No two men working independently arrive at the same recorded uncertainty. Neither typescript cites the Visitation among its sources.
The one-generation offset: Elizabeth Martin of Chawkley married WILLIAM, not Thomas
Ted + PaulSettled. Ted is right; Paul slipped her up a generation. The printed pedigree is unambiguous: Thomas of Yatt is shown with no wife, and the marriage bracket belongs to his son William.
The pedigree reaches back to Henry and Walter Damery of Tortworth
Ted + PaulDisproved. It does not. It begins with a bare "Robert or Roger Damory" - no father, no place, no date, no county. There is no Henry. There is no Walter. There is no Tortworth anywhere in it. Those two generations are somebody's later addition, and the 1365 date Ted reads as a birth and Paul as a death is attached to a man who is not in the source at all.
Every date in the Gloucestershire section of both documents
Ted + PaulDisproved - all of them. Thomas b. c.1415, William b.1450 "died in the Wars of the Roses", the 1513 marriage, Morrice b.1521, Thomas b.1525, Gyles b.1551, Nicholas b.1581. The source carries exactly two dates: 1591 and 1592. Everything else was inferred by someone spacing the generations out and then written down as fact.
The 1592 grant of arms to Gyles Damory by Robert Cooke, Clarenceux
Ted + PaulDocumented, and independently indexed. Foster & Rylands, Grantees of Arms to the end of the seventeenth century (Harl. Soc. 66): "Amorye, or St. Amorye, Giles, Cotherington, co. Glouc., 1592, by Cooke." Ted's hand-correction from 1590 to 1592, crediting Robert Cooke, is right on both counts - a genuine piece of self-correction that deserves noting.
Gyles Damery married Sibell Walwyn - corroborated in a second, earlier visitation
Ted + PaulDocumented, twice. Robert Cooke's Visitation of Herefordshire 1569, p.70, Walwyn of Longford pedigree, lists among the daughters of Nycholas Walwin: "Sybill, maried to Giles Demery." That is twenty-three years earlier, in a different county, in a different manuscript. This is the one genuinely independent corroboration in the whole pre-1750 tree. It also corrects a place: "Lanware" is Longford in Lugwardine, Herefordshire - not Llanwarne.
The places, identified
-Yatt/Yatte = Yate, South Gloucestershire. Mangersfeild = Mangotsfield - and the volume independently carries a "Johan Blount of Mangersfeild". Cotherington = Codrington, a hamlet in Wapley about three miles ENE of Yate; the volume's own index prints the cross-reference "Cotherington. See Codrington." Gyles was a resident freeholder there, not the lord - the manor ran Stanley Abbey → Codrington → Bamfylde. Still unidentified: Chawkley and Taterig, the latter marked with a query by the 1885 editors themselves.
The 1592 arms assert descent from the barons
-Doubtful - and revealing. Cooke granted Gyles barry nebulee of six argent and gules, a bend engrailed azure, in chief a crescent for difference - that is Roger d'Amory's coat, doubly differenced, the heraldic language of a cadet branch. So the Oxfordshire graft is not Ted's or Paul's invention: it was asserted by a King of Arms in 1592, on evidence we cannot see, and everyone since has been following the coat. Two problems. A grant is the heralds creating a coat for a client, not certifying a proven descent - and Cooke was notorious among later heralds for generosity. And of the two brothers, the coat chosen differences Roger's - the one from whom male-line cadency is provably impossible.
Segment 4 · c.1500–1666 · South Molton, Bishops Nympton, Devon
The same story again: a real family, a real estate, a real printed pedigree - and a layer of invented dates on top of it.
The sources - both now read
F. T. Colby (ed.), The Visitation of the County of Devon in the year 1620, Harleian Society vol. VI (1872), p. 7, headed "Amory" - the index at p.371 reads "DAMERY. See AMORY."
And J. L. Vivian, The Visitations of the County of Devon (Exeter, 1895), p. 15, "AMORY OF CHAPELL" - a far fuller version, with parish-register dates and probate references, and one piece of editorial honesty that changes everything below. Vivian's own note at the foot: "The portion of this pedigree printed in italic is a copy of the Original Visitation of Devon 1620, Harl. MS. 1163, fo. 194, signed John Amory." And footnote 1: "This descent to the italics is from Sir William Pole's Collections."
Joint 2a · the graft has an author
Vivian's page opens with four generations in roman type, above the italics:
Sir Richard Damorie, ob. 1376 - Robert Damorie - Roger Damorie - Robert Damorie, held lands in Oxford and Bucks - John Damerie of South Moulton
Vivian, p. 15 - roman down to the italics, i.e. Pole's, not the heralds'
Those four generations are not in the Visitation. The heralds' record - the part John Amory himself signed in 1620 - begins at John Damerie of South Molton and goes no higher. Everything above it is Sir William Pole of Colcombe and Shute (1561–1635), the Devon antiquary, whose Collections Towards a Description of the County of Devon were first printed from his autograph in 1791. Vivian knew it was a different order of evidence and typeset it accordingly.
Two consequences, and both are large.
First, the graft is refuted at its own apex. Pole hangs the whole Devon family from "Sir Richard Damorie, ob. 1376" - who is the last Sir Richard d'Amory, and of whom the Complete Peerage says "He d. s.p., 29 Mar. 1375. His heirs are unknown." Pole gave a son to the one man in the pedigree who provably had none.
Second - and this is the part worth sitting with - Pole's four names look like the real ladder printed upside down. Going up from Sir Richard (d.1375) the Complete Peerage gives: Richard (d.1330), then Robert (d.1285), then Roger (living 1281), then Robert (d.1236). Going down from Sir Richard, Pole gives: Robert, then Roger, then Robert - and pins to that last Robert the descriptor "held lands in Oxford and Bucks", which belongs to Robert d.1285, the man who really did hold Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Somerset. Same names, same order, the identifying detail attached to the same man - running the wrong way.
On that reading the Devon graft was not invented out of nothing. Somebody had a genuine ascending pedigree of the Oxfordshire barons, read it as a descent, and hooked John Damerie of South Molton onto what he took to be the bottom. Offered as a strong hypothesis rather than a certainty - but the names, the order and the descriptor all line up, and an inverted ladder is a far commoner antiquarian error than a fabrication from scratch.
Note also where Pole's route goes: Oxfordshire straight to Devon. Gloucestershire is not in it. So the typescripts' chain - Oxfordshire → Gloucestershire → Devon - is a conflation of two separate assertions made a generation apart by different men: Robert Cooke's heraldic grant of 1592 in Gloucestershire, and Pole's paper descent into Devon.
The core line: John Damerey of South Molton → George D'Amerey → John D'Amerie of Chappall → John Amerey of Chappell → John Amory, aged 5 in 1620
Ted + PaulDocumented. And the wives are in the record verbatim: "Emmett d. & h. of John Thomas of Bishop's Nimet", "Prudence d. & coh. of Rich. Robarts of Comb Martin". Marjery Eyre is confirmed too, though from the parish register rather than the Visitation - "1570. George Amorye marries Margery Ayer at Bishop's Nymet" - with his will proved 1598 naming sons John, Anthonie and William.
Chappell in Bishops Nympton is a real estate the family really held
Ted + PaulDocumented, and it still stands. Chapple is Whitechapel, an ancient manor of the Peverells then the Bassetts; Grade I listed since 1952. Sir Robert Bassett sold it in 1603 to pay his fine; the Amorys bought it and held it to about 1660, along with Reeds, Hammetts and West Berwill in the same parish. Westcote, writing c.1630: "In the farmhouse is the remainder of the tribe of Amory seated."
A grant of arms in 1620
Ted + PaulDisproved. There is no Devon Damery/Amery/Amory grant in any year - Foster & Rylands' index runs the whole alphabet and has nothing. What happened in 1620 is that the family's arms were recorded and allowed at the heralds' visitation of Devon and the pedigree entered and signed. Both documents have converted "arms recorded" into "arms granted".
Sons John b.1651 and William b.1652
PaulDisproved, and Vivian shows exactly how the error was made. John Amory was baptised 9 June 1616 at Bishops Nympton - "æt. 5 annoru. 1620", matching the Visitation. William Amory was baptised 25 January 1626-7, and is described as "4 son and heir to his bro. John". So where does 1652 come from? Two places, neither of them a birth. William married Cissel Molford on 7 January 1652; and his father was buried 26 March 1652. Two 1652 events, collapsed into birth years for two sons. This matters directly - William "b.1652" is the man the red-ink annotator was trying to send to Cork.
John Amerey of Chappell was buried 26 March 1652 at Bishops Nympton
Ted + PaulDocumented - Ted's 1652 confirmed, and it is a burial date. Vivian: "named in the will of his grandfather Nimet, bur. 26 Mar. 1652 at Bishops Nympton. Admon. granted 18 May 1652 to John Amory his son." His wife Prudence, daughter and coheir of Richard Roberts of Combe Martin, was buried 24 Nov. 1622 - thirty years before him.
November 1622 at Bishops Nympton
-Worth reading in sequence, because it is a family being taken apart in a month. William Amory, second son, baptised 15 October 1622, buried 1 November. Prudence the daughter, aged 2 in 1620, buried 24 November. Prudence the mother, buried 24 November. Mother and small daughter on the same day, three weeks after the baby. The William who survives to inherit is a later child of the same name, baptised in 1627.
John Damerie of South Molton died c.1500
Ted + PaulDoubtful - and Vivian now dates the generation. His third son Anthonie Damorie had a grant of the next presentation to Ashwater from Sir Peter Carew on 12 October 5 Edw. VI (1551), and administration of his goods was granted to his widow Frances on 22 June 1561. So Anthonie was an adult in 1551 and dead by 1561 - putting his father's activity around the 1490s to 1530s and his death well after 1500. The c.1500 date is somebody's guess, and a poor one.
The Chapple line ends in daughters
-Documented - and this is what settles Joint 4. William Amory (bap. 1627) and Cissel Molford had three daughters and no surviving son: Frances (b. 21 June 1654, died young); Frances (b. 3 June 1656), who married Edmund Gibbon of Exeter; and Prudence (b. 7 May 1657), who married Gabriel Barnes, then Samuel Cudmore, and died without issue. His elder brother John (bap. 1616) was dead by 1674-5. The administrations tell the rest: "de bonis non" granted 13 March 1674-5 to Frances Gibbon alias Amory… grand-daughter to deceased, John Amory the son and administrator being also deceased, and the grandmother's estate to Prudence Barnes alias Amory in April 1675. Frances sold her right of presentation to Berrynarbor to Humphry Sydenham on 14 October 1709.
Anthony Amery, parson of Aisholt, Somerset
TedDocumented richly - the best-evidenced individual in either typescript. Instituted to Aisholt 2 October 1577; the 1606 Aisholt register copy at Wells signed "Anthonie Amorie psonn"; and a chancel stone recorded by Collinson: "Anthony Amory, decessid July 20, 1620, parson here 42 yeeres; who gave to the poor £30 for ever, whereof 15l. to Aysholt, & 15l. to Bishop's Nymet in Devonshire where he was borne." A fragment of that slab survived against the tower in 1895. But Ted misplaces him: he was George's son, brother of John of Chappell - not a son of John of South Molton.
John Amerie d.1652 was buried at Bishops Nympton with a recorded donation
TedDoubtful - probably Anthony's benefaction, moved. No Amory monument is listed among the church's recorded monuments. The one documented Amory benefaction to Bishops Nympton is Anthony's £15, 1620. The parish registers and the benefaction boards themselves have not been checked - this could still resolve either way.
"Buscombe-Emery" granted arms 1880; Thomas the ancestor of the Emerys
TedDisproved. No Thomas appears in the Devon pedigree at all. "Buscombe-Emery" returns zero hits in Foster's Grantees of Arms 1687–1898 and zero in Burke's General Armory.
Joint 3 - the Devon and Gloucestershire families are one family
Ted + PaulDoubtful - and one of the arguments for separation has just weakened. Meredith in 1901 separated them partly on the tincture of the bend - Devon sable, Gloucestershire azure - and Colby's 1872 printing gives Devon sable. But Vivian's 1895 blazon, from Harl. MS 1163, reads "Barry nebulée of six, Arg. and Gu., over all a bend Az." Azure, the same as Gloucestershire. So the two printings of the same visitation disagree, and the distinction Meredith leaned on may not be there. What survives of his argument is the stronger half, and it still stands: "The pedigrees recorded by the heralds in 1592 and 1620 prove that these two families, if they had a common ancestor at all, had been separate for at least three generations before Giles." Devon also added no crest or motto where Gloucestershire had one. Live question: check the manuscript blazon.
The St Loe / Dorchester graft · verdict
Both documents claim that Joseph Damery of Chappell married Joan St Loe, daughter of Sir William St Loe, and that his great-grandson was created Earl of Dorchester in 1792 with a son George who died unmarried in 1808.
The St Loe half fails on its own. Sir William St Loe's two daughters, by his first wife Jane Baynton, were Mary and Margaret; no marriages are recorded for either; his will names no daughters; and the 1623 visitation says he died without issue. There was never a Joan.
The Dorchester half is Joseph Damer (1718–1798), created Earl of Dorchester 1792, whose son George Damer, 2nd Earl (1746–1808), died unmarried in 1808 and the earldom went extinct - a Dorset family of Irish money, Damer of Shronehill in Tipperary. One letter apart, and no connection whatever.
But here is what makes this worth more than a deletion. The graft was manufactured deliberately, and it was exposed in print in 1901. It comes from the Damer peerage pedigree printed in Collins, Lodge and Hutchins's History of Dorset, which invented a descent for Lord Milton through "Anthony Damory, Rector of Asholt" - the real parson of Aisholt - down through a "Joseph Damory of Chapel who marries Jane St. Loe". Gertrude Meredith took it apart generation by generation in The Descendants of Hugh Amory (1901), noting among much else that the invented Robert born 1571 would have been sixteen before his supposed grandfather's elder brother married, and that the grandfather would have had to die at 109.
"You know my lord Milton, from nephew of the old usurer Damer of Dublin, has endeavoured to erect himself into the representative of the ancient barons Damory."
Horace Walpole, letter of 22 October 1766 - quoted by Meredith
So a Dorset peer bought himself an ancient pedigree in the 1760s, the peerages printed it, Burke repeated it, and two hundred years later it arrived in a Melbourne typescript and a French one as family history. Cut the passage - and note that the family it was stolen from is my own.
Joint 4 · verdict
The red-ink annotator on Paul's typescript was looking for a bridge, and picked the only candidate the printed page offered: "WHERE DID HE GO TO!? MAY BE THE FATHER OR GRAND FATHER OF 'RICHARD.'" - written against William, b.1652.
Vivian closes that door twice over. There is no William born in 1652: the William who inherited was baptised 25 January 1626-7, and 1652 is the year he married and the year his father was buried. And we now know exactly where he went - nowhere. He stayed at Chapple and had three daughters. One died young; Frances married Edmund Gibbon of Exeter; Prudence married Gabriel Barnes and then Samuel Cudmore and died childless. His elder brother John died without issue before 1675. The granddaughters administered both estates in 1674–5, and Frances sold the family's last right of presentation in 1709.
So the Devon line ends the same way the Oxfordshire line ended, three hundred years apart and for the same reason: it runs out of sons. Every route from Devon to Cork now requires a male who is not in the record - and this pedigree is unusually well recorded, because the parish register and the P.C.C. act books have been worked through it.
That does not make a Devon origin impossible. It makes it impossible by this line. If a Damery went from Devon to Cork he came from some other branch of the family - a younger son of an earlier generation, a South Molton cousin, someone who never appeared before a herald. Which is a completely different search, and a harder one. Meanwhile the annotator's own alternative - "Richard was born Co. Cork the son of William Damery" - is looking better every time we test it.
Segment 5 · 1151–1803 · Damery-sur-Marne
Paul only, and the most surprising result of the whole exercise. There really were people called de Dameri at Damery on the Marne - with very nearly the names given. They were not lords, the line does not continue, and everything after about 1300 belongs to somebody else.
Girard, Garin, Hugh and Philippe de Dameri are real people, c.1150–1230
PaulDocumented. They appear in d'Arbois de Jubainville's Champagne corpus and in the Feoda Campanie of c.1222. And Paul's "Garnier and Girard, sons of Herluin" is right: the 1151 charter's witness list reads "Gyrardus et Garinus filii Herluini", and the same brothers appear as "Girard de Damery, Garin son frère" at the count's court in 1171. The byname "Branlarde" is real too - as the wife of Odard de Dameri, a cleric.
They were seigneurs of Damery
PaulDisproved. Damery belonged to the Abbey of Saint-Médard de Soissons from a diploma of 870 until the 1560s–70s; the abbot presented to the cure until the Revolution. What Garin de Damery actually held, in 1175, was half the mairie and a share of the bakehouse - a ministerial serjeanty under the abbey, held in fief of the count. Real, respectable, and not a lordship.
The 1151 charter of Henry the Liberal names three brothers Garnier, Girard and Robert
PaulDisproved as described. It is a charter of Thibaut II - Henri consents only as "filius meus", and could not have issued it, having become count in 1152. And the "brothers" are four unrelated men welded from one witness list: Robert de Dameriaco is a monk of Saint-Médard, and Hugo dictus major is one of the abbey's serjeants.
The method behind the French dates
-Paul's medieval dates track, almost item for item, Longnon's published list of dated attestations of the place-name in the Dictionnaire topographique de la Marne - 1151, 1171, 1198, 1200, c.1222, 1230 - supplemented by the church's published history for 1242 and c.1250. The method appears to have been: take the documented dates of the place, and attach a person to each one.
The continuation: Robert Seigneur de Marne 1274, Baron Damery m. Louise de Bar 1491, Henri Damery shot at Épernay, Admiral Damery at Lorient 1694
Paul (+ Ted, the Admiral)Disproved or unfindable, every one. Across all six volumes of d'Arbois the complete index of persons "de Damery" is Garin, Girard, Guiard, Philippe, Simon, Hue and Odard - no Robert, no William, no Hodierne, no Thibault, no Baudoin. There is no "seigneurie de Marne"; the Marne is a river, and Longnon records the place-form "Damery-sur-Marne" in 1403. No Damery appears in French naval records - and Lorient in 1694 was a Compagnie des Indes yard, not a squadron station. What is documented at Épernay is that Marshal Biron was killed by a cannonball there on 26 July 1592, in Henri IV's service: a famous royalist headshot at Épernay exists; a Damery there does not.
Damery passed to de Baradat in 1598
PaulDocumented - the single hardest, most falsifiable claim in the French section, and it is correct. Guillaume de Baradat bought in 1576 and became seigneur de Damery, probably in 1598; his son Henri de Baradat became Bishop-Count of Noyon; a painted plaque of 1643 bearing the Baradat arms and a view of the château still hangs in the sacristy of Saint-Georges de Damery. (His other son François was Louis XIII's favourite, disgraced by Richelieu.) But the transfer was from the abbey, not from a Damery. No family was dispossessed. That Paul got this right strongly suggests he had a genuine local history of Damery - very likely abbé Bourgeois's Recherches historiques sur Damery (1905) - and built the family into it.
Jean de Damery, Marquis de Damery, born Paris 1758, executed in the Revolution
Ted + PaulDisproved - but the man is real, and his real life is better. He is Jean Louis Antoine le Vaillant de Damery, the Chevalier de Damery, born 7 June 1723, one of the most respected print and drawing collectors of eighteenth-century France. Lieutenant of grenadiers in the Gardes Françaises; Knight of the Order of Saint-Louis 1746 - a decoration, not a peerage, and the likely source of "Marquis". Greuze painted him in 1765. He sold his collections off in stages from 1764, and from 1785, impoverished, lived at Les Invalides. He died in 1803, not on a scaffold. Edmond de Goncourt on his taste: "elle n'est jamais sur un dessin médiocre."
"The Young Physicist" - the drawing with the arms of the Marquis
Ted + PaulA real practice, misremembered. The Chevalier's fame rests on his cabinet gravé: engravers printed his ownership at the foot of prints after drawings he owned - "Ce Deßein est au Cabinet de Mr. Damery Chevalier de l'Ordre Royal Militaire de St. Louis." A name at the foot of a plate, not a coat of arms. And Gilles Demarteau, literally graveur du Roi, engraved "Les Enfants physiciens" after Boucher. Every element of the claim maps onto this documented genre; only the marquisate is imported.
The French line · verdict
Girard, Garin, Hugh and Philippe de Dameri - holding the mairie and the bakehouse of Damery under the abbey of Saint-Médard, c.1150–1230 - are documented, and worth keeping as what they are. They are also not seigneurial, and they reach the English tree only through Joint 1, which has failed.
One caution that undercuts even the possibility of a link: the Chevalier de Damery's family, le Vaillant de Damery, cannot be shown to come from Damery-sur-Marne at all. Le Vaillant is a Picard/Norman name, and there is a second Damery, in the Somme. The French line may not even be internally continuous, let alone connected to Cork.
My question
Because the Monmouth premise makes Holland compulsory. Once you say your ancestor fought for Monmouth in 1685 and lived to found a family in Cork, Holland is the only door left open - and it is the answer to my question that the story needed a door at all.
Take the premise as given and count the historically real outcomes for a Monmouth rebel. Killed at Sedgemoor or executed in the Bloody Assizes - about 320 of them: no descendants, story over. Transported to the West Indies - 800 to 890 of them, ten years' indenture, half still unreleased in 1691 and no passage home: story ends in Barbados. Lay low at home under James II's general pardon of 10 March 1686, which explicitly covered the "poor Labourers and Handicraftsmen who were drawn and seduced into the rebellion" - survives, but produces no journey, no foreign wife, no reason to be in Ireland and no status. Narratively inert.
That leaves flight abroad. And the destination is not a free choice either: France was the enemy and James's patron, the Spanish Netherlands Catholic and treaty-bound. The Dutch Republic was Protestant, was where Monmouth had launched from, was where the English exile community already lived - Amsterdam and Rotterdam simply declining to enforce the expulsion proclamations - and was where the alternative Protestant court sat. Holland is the only door.
Then Holland pays a dividend nothing else can buy: 5 November 1688. The exile comes home not as a pardoned fugitive but as a returning liberator, and the attainder becomes a credential. After 1691 that credential is the recognised currency for Irish land. Two real men did exactly this - Robert Ferguson, Monmouth's own chaplain, who fled to the Netherlands and "landed in England with William III of Orange in 1688"; and John Trenchard MP, who "prudently withdrew to Holland", bought his pardon, and was appointed by William within weeks of the landing.
The Holland leg is not decoration bolted onto the Monmouth claim. It is the load-bearing member.
It performs four jobs in one move: survival, the exotic marriage that explains an unfamiliar name in the family, political rehabilitation, and a moral title to Irish property. A detail doing four jobs at once is almost never a memory. Memories are lumpy and useless; invented connective tissue is efficient. And the tell is that the rebel did not need to leave England at all - the 1686 pardon covered exactly the sort of man the family would have been. The Holland leg is unnecessary in history and necessary only in narrative. That asymmetry is the diagnosis.
Bandon has its own documented flight-and-return story from precisely those years - and it runs the opposite way.
Bennett's History of Bandon records that after Tyrconnell's appointment as Lord Deputy "a great many of the Protestant inhabitants had, by this time, left Ireland… Several of them fled from this (Bandon) locality", and names them: Bernard, Beecher, Cox, Crofts, Daunt, Freke, Gillman, Honner, Jervis, Lucas, Moore, Riggs, Synge, Stawell, Travers, Wade, Warner. They fled to England, from a Catholic regime, in 1685–88, and came back under William.
Now look at the Damery family's own documented Cork connections, from their own list of sources: Burke's Irish Family Records for Travers and Lucas; a 1719 deed involving Honner; the Beamish and Bernard material. Travers, Lucas, Honner, Bernard, Beecher - those are Bennett's 1685 refugees.
So the hypothesis, offered as a hypothesis: the motif "our people fled abroad in 1685 and came back under William of Orange" may be genuinely ancestral to this family - but it belongs to the Bandon Protestant in-law families, the flight was to England, and it was a flight from James II, not a rebellion against him. Somewhere in transmission the polarity flipped: refugee became rebel. And once the ancestor is a Monmouth rebel, England is precisely where he is being hunted - so England has to become Holland, and the Dutch wife, the return with William and the Irish land all follow automatically. On that reading the tradition is not fabricated wholesale. It is a true family memory with one hinge reversed, and the Holland leg is the repair the reversal required.
The West Cork tree, and what it shows about what these people did for a living, opens a third reading that needs no reversal at all.
Bandon was a cloth town, and Bandon cloth went to Holland. That is not inference. O'Flanagan's Irish Historic Towns Atlas on the seventeenth-century town: "Much of the cloth made in the town was sent to the Netherlands or the Bristol Channel ports." Bennett on the 1640s: "By far the greater portion of what was manufactured here was sent to foreign markets - principally Holland."
So a Bandon weaving family could have a real, continuous, unremarkable Dutch connection - buyers, factors, voyages, possibly a marriage - with no rebellion anywhere in it. On that reading the corruption is a single small one: we had dealings in Holland becoming we fled to Holland. Everything else in the story is then downstream scaffolding, added later to explain why anyone would have fled.
That is a much smaller thing to have gone wrong than the Monmouth version requires.
Verdict on the question as asked
From England: yes, and that is not seriously in doubt. The surname is English, the religion is English, Bandon was an English plantation town whose settlers came from the Bristol Channel counties, and no Irish origin has ever been proposed for the name.
Via Holland: unlikely. Not impossible - but every load-bearing part of the version we were given has failed. The Monmouth premise fails on chronology, on three published rebel lists totalling some 4,000 names, and on geography (recruitment was East Devon; the claimed home parishes are North Devon). The rebel did not need to leave England at all, because the pardon of March 1686 covered exactly his class. And "Hougendt" exists nowhere on earth outside that one typescript.
What is likely is a Holland connection rather than a Holland leg. Bandon's cloth went to the Netherlands from the town's foundation. A family in that trade would have Dutch dealings as an ordinary fact of business - and one hinge turns we had dealings in Holland into we fled to Holland. That reading needs no rebellion, no exile, no pardon and no Dutch bride, and it survives everything that killed the other version.
Richard Damery bought Irish property for the Duke of Devonshire in 1752
PaulDisproved on a clean date. In 1752 the Duke of Devonshire owned no land in County Cork. The Boyle/Burlington Irish estates passed to the Cavendishes when the 3rd Earl of Burlington died on 4 December 1753. The Duke of Devonshire first appears as a Cork landlord in the Registry of Deeds in 1769, and every Cork entry thereafter is a Bandon town tenement. The tradition is wrong about when and who - though right about where: Kinalmeaky did become Devonshire territory, one generation later.
Tullyglass was a Devonshire property Richard purchased
PaulDisproved. Registry of Deeds memorials across the eighteenth century show Tullyglass in the hands of the Coughlan/Coghlan family, with the Good family as substantial occupiers, and other residents Sullivan, Morgan, McCarthy, Baldwin. No Damery appears in any Tullyglass or Murragh deed, and no Devonshire interest in Tullyglass appears at all.
Tullyglass and Murragh are correctly described
PaulProbable - and it tells us something about the compiler. Tullyglass is a townland inside Murragh civil parish, barony of Kinalmeaky, about six miles NW by W of Bandon. So "first purchased in Murragh, later bought Tullyglass" is internally coherent as a local progression within one parish. Whoever wrote that passage knew the ground - which is worth remembering when discounting the rest.
Richard Damery was a Monmouth rebel
PaulDoubtful, and failing on four counts. Arithmetic: 1685 to 1752 is 67 years - a man of 18 at Sedgemoor is 85 in 1752, with a wife and a property-buying career ahead of him. Absence: no Dam-, Amer- or Emer- surname appears in three published rebel lists covering some 4,000 names. Geography: Devon's recruitment was overwhelmingly East Devon - Colyton, Axminster, Honiton - and South Molton and Bishops Nympton are North Devon, thirty miles and a moor away from the recruiting ground. Provenance: the typescript itself only says "it is believed that he could have been." Note also that 1752 is the year the documented pedigree begins - this is a bridge thrown backwards from the documentary floor, not a record carried across it.
He married a "Hougendt girl" in Holland
PaulOpen, with three readings. The string "Hougendt" returns zero results anywhere on the open web - it exists in this typescript and nowhere else. Reading (a): a garbled Dutch surname - Hoogendijk, Hoogendoorn, Hoogendam are all real. Reading (b): a corruption of HUGUENOT - contemporary English spellings included Hugenott, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was October 1685, some 35,000 French refugees reached the Dutch Republic, and there was a Huguenot presence in Bandon itself (Paul Duclos, Vicar of Ballymodan, d.1717). Reading (b) does narrative work; a bare unsourced surname does none. Reading (c), and the one I'd weigh: Paul's typescript already manufactures Netherlandish detail as house style - the whole Frisian "Dammritter" stratum - so "Hougendt" may simply have been generated to furnish the Holland leg, in which case there is nothing to find.
The annotator's correction: "Richard was born Co. Cork the son of William Damery"
red inkProbable, and better supported than the story it corrects. No Damery appears in Bandon's settler lists, its 1641 depositions, or its 1685 refugee list. The earliest Damery in the Registry of Deeds anywhere in Ireland is John Damery, weaver, of East Gully, Ballymodan (Bandon), 1778 - with a second entry in 1792. Griffith's Valuation later finds Damerys at Ballymoney, Desertserges, Inishannon and Kilbrittain - and none at Murragh. That is the shape of an obscure Bandon artisan family already in place, not a gentleman purchaser arriving in 1752.
Correction to the family's own source list
The 1719 Registry of Deeds memorial (13570) cited in the family's Appendix D is a marriage settlement of Honners / Lambley / Jones of Drombegg and contains no Damery. So does memorial 105594 (1752) - Edward Jones of Droumbegg and Ann Ellis. If 1719 has been treated anywhere as the earliest Damery date, that should be corrected.
Segment 6 · the Cork end - dates and names only
The Cork research is done and is not mine to redo. Two things there bear on the English end and nothing else does: a floor date, and the forename stock. This section is confined to those.
Correction · 24 Aug 2026
My first pass concluded that "every documented Damery is an artisan or labourer" and used it to argue the gentry pedigree was a costume. That was wrong, and the mistake was structural.
The West Cork web page is a list of unplaced records requiring further research - the loose ends, which will always skew poor, because a cottier is hard to place precisely because he is a cottier. The placed core line is in the GEDCOM. The family owned Tullyglass and leased several other substantial farms among the sons. Ted's own document independently has Edward Damery owning it in 1978 and selling in 1988.
Two further retractions. "No Damery in any Tullyglass deed" came from the volunteer Registry of Deeds index, which covers a fraction of the filmed memorials - a claim about an index, not a record. And the West Cork page carries notations now superseded by later work; nothing on it should be treated as current except where corroborated here.
Norman Damery was the red-ink annotator
confirmedConfirmed by Aynsley. Which raises the standing of every red-ink note considerably. Norman was working from the Cork registers when he wrote "EXTREMELY UNLIKELY!" against the Monmouth story and "Richard was born Co. Cork the son of William Damery" beside it. He was not guessing; he was reading a different and better body of evidence than the typescript he was annotating.
Richard bought Tullyglass for the Duke of Devonshire in 1752
PaulStill disproved - but on the date, not the status. The hard fact is unaffected by the correction above: in 1752 there was no Devonshire Cork estate to buy for. The Boyle/Burlington lands passed to the Cavendishes when the 3rd Earl of Burlington died on 4 December 1753, and the Duke's first Cork deed is 1769. That the family later held Tullyglass is not in question; acquiring it in 1752 as the Duke's agent is chronologically impossible.
The Coughlans as head landlord is also compatible with the family holding a long lease beneath them and buying out later - the ordinary Irish middleman structure. The acquisition date and mechanism are now open (grade C), not settled.
The 1669 bond is real, and reads exactly as the tree says
West Cork treeDocumented verbatim. Gillman's Index to the Marriage Licence Bonds of the Diocese of Cork and Ross, 1623–1750 (JCHAS, 1896–7) prints it twice, in both alphabetical runs: "Amary, William, and Anne Davies - 1669". The date and the spelling are both correct.
The bond itself burned in 1922. Gillman notes that the originals gave the parties' residences, parishes and sureties, and "occasionally other particulars" - the three things that would settle everything. The index is the ceiling.
And the surrounding silence is itself evidence
-A sweep of the whole 1623–1750 index returns: Amary - one entry. Emery - one entry. Damery, Dammery, Damary, Damory, Amery, Amory, Amerie - zero. In 127 years of Cork and Ross marriage licence bonds there is not a single Damery.
And the correction above improves this record's standing rather than weakening it. I had filed an objection: a licence bond needed two solvent sureties and a sum "proportioned to the status of the parties", so the 1669 bondsman was probably a man of means and therefore probably not the ancestor of a family of labourers. Once the family is understood as landholding, that objection dissolves - a bond is exactly what such a family would take out. The 1669 Amary gets better, not worse.
The loose ends will always skew poor. A cottier is hard to place precisely because he is a cottier.
This is where the Cork evidence earns its place in an English argument. Under the standard British and Irish pattern - first son for the paternal grandfather, second for the maternal grandfather, third for the father; first daughter for the maternal grandmother, second for the paternal grandmother, third for the mother - a family's forename stock is a fossil of the generation above it.
Richard is absent from the Devon Amorys and present in the Essex Amerys
-Documented, and it is the sharpest discriminator we have. The Cork line's founding name is Richard. But there is no Richard in the Devon Amory family between 1593 and 1758 - no baptism, no burial, no will, in an index of some 300,000 Devon probate entries from ~550 sources. The Devon stock is John (four generations running), George, Anthony, Robert, William, Peter.
In Essex, Richard is a house name: Richard Amery senior at Easthorpe fathering children 1606–20, with a son Richard baptised 1610/11; Richard of Layer Marney; Richard of Little Clacton. A family that leads with Richard did not come from a family that never used it.
The distinctive Devon female names are missing from Cork entirely
-Probable, and this is the test I would run first in the GEDCOM. The Devon Chapple family carries three unusual female names hard: Emmot, Prudence and Cissel. Prudence is the strongest - Prudence Roberts, her daughter Prudence, her granddaughter Prudence Barnes alias Amory - precisely the pattern a naming convention perpetuates. None of the three appears anywhere in the West Cork material. Cork's female stock is Ann, Margaret, Mary, Elizabeth, Jane, Grace, Ellen, Rebecca. Under the convention, an absence that complete is not neutral.
The convention independently supports Norman's correction
-Probable - a small argument, but it runs the right way. Paul gives Richard and Ann four sons, the eldest dying in infancy, with William born 1754 next. Norman's correction says Richard was "the son of William Damery".
Under the convention the first son takes the paternal grandfather's name. If Richard's father was William, the eldest son should have been William - and he was, and he died, and the name was immediately reused on the next boy. Reusing a dead infant's name is one of the most reliable behaviours in the whole system, precisely because the grandfather's name has to be carried. Paul's own birth order, which he had no reason to invent, quietly corroborates Norman's reading of Richard's parentage.
Three Cork names that belong to neither English family
-Open, and worth a thought. Andrew (Ballineen, 1750), Abraham (Ballymoney burial, 1808) and Samuel appear in Cork and in neither the Devon nor the Essex stock. Abraham and Samuel have a dissenting flavour; Andrew reads Scottish or Ulster. They may simply be in-law names entering by the convention's maternal side - which is exactly what the convention predicts, and exactly why the wives' families matter as much as the Damerys.
What I would ask the GEDCOM
Four questions, all answerable from my own data, all of which sharpen or kill the English candidates:
1. The full names and birth order of Richard and Ann's children - sons and daughters. Under the convention that names Richard's father, Ann's father, and both grandmothers.
2. Does Prudence, Emmot, Cissel, Margery or Salathiel appear anywhere in the Cork line, at any date? Any one of them would be a strong Devon signal. Their absence is a weak but real argument against.
3. Where does Margaret first appear, and in which daughter-position? If it is a first or second daughter in the earliest generation, it names a grandmother.
4. Does Richard recur, and where in the order? A name that keeps returning as an eldest son is a name that came in from above.
If the family did come from Devon, the Monmouth story is the wrong vehicle. There is an ordinary, heavily-trafficked, well-documented route that fits the occupations exactly.
Bandon was founded as a woollen town by West Country clothworkers
-Documented - and a professional economic historian states the hypothesis outright. Andy Bielenberg, JCHAS 97 (1992): "The manufacture of woollen goods had been carried on in Bandon since its foundation in the early seventeenth century. The early settlers exported cloth to south-west England (where many of them had come from) and to the Netherlands." O'Flanagan's Irish Historic Towns Atlas lists the early trades - clothworkers, dyers, feltmakers, weavers, shoemakers, tanners - and says the settlers "had come to Munster after 1601 from the counties adjoining the Bristol Channel." By c.1780 Bennett counts 1,800 looms in one department of the trade alone.
And Bennett puts wool-combing and dyeing at Enniskeane - the Ballineen district. My labourers of 1750 and my shoemaker of 1816 are not near the textile trade. They are inside it.
North Devon's overseas trade ran to Ireland, and South Molton was a serge town
-Documented. Barnstaple and Bideford: trade with Ireland was under a fifth of the total early in the seventeenth century and around three-quarters by its end. The 1640 Barnstaple port book shows Cork 17 voyages, Youghal 17, Kinsale 10 - carrying "Barnstaple single baise", which is woollen cloth. And Lysons names South Molton among the five principal manufacturing towns of Devon; Bishops Nympton adjoins it and had its own woollen factory. South Molton sits about ten miles from Barnstaple.
There was a North Devon Amery family in the cloth trade, on the Irish route
-Probable, and specific. Symon Amery appears in the Barnstaple port book of 1606 as master of the Trinitie of Barnstaple; Symon Amory appears in the book of 1640 as a merchant, shipping woad - the dyer's staple - to Dublin and Carrickfergus in Bideford and Barnstaple bottoms, and importing Spanish cloth wool. Two generations of a North Devon Amery family inside the woollen trade on the Irish route. Not proof of anything about my line, but precisely the person the hypothesis requires to exist.
And one of them died in Ireland in 1629
-Documented twice over, independently. Meredith's appendix: at Abbotsham - the parish immediately west of Bideford - "Henry Amery, a mariner, with sons Henry, Gabriel, and Salathiel, of whom Gabriel died at Dublin in 1629, leaving all he had to his brother Salathiel." And Vicars's Index to the Prerogative Wills of Ireland confirms it from the other side: "1629 - Amory, Gabriel, mariner." A North Devon maritime Amery family that had already buried a son in Ireland by 1629. The most promising unexplored lead of the whole exercise.
The South Molton Amerys were far more numerous than the gentry line
-Documented - and this is my search population. Meredith: "In Devonshire, beside large groups at South Molton and Bishop's Nymet…" Her appendix gives non-gentry examples: William and John Amere assessed to the subsidy at Bishop's Nymet in 1524; Hugh Amerye married there 1567; the will of William Amorye of South Molton, husbandman, 1591; Richard Amorye of South Molton, 1593. The Chapple line ran out of sons. These people did not.
The Amorys who demonstrably went to Ireland were the wrong ones
-Doubtful for our purposes - worth knowing so it isn't chased twice. Meredith has an entire chapter titled "Ireland, 1660–1695." Thomas Amory the elder, merchant of Bristol, moved to Ireland c.1660–62, became Victualler General of the Navy in Ireland, MP for Ardfert, held Galy near Listowel, married a daughter of the 19th Baron Kerry, and died at Dingle. His sons were merchants of Dublin, Clare and Galway. Kerry, Dublin, Clare and Galway - not Cork. Merchant-gentry - not artisans. From Somerset and Bristol - not Devon. Meredith mentions no Cork branch and no Damery at all.
The spelling runs the wrong way - and this is the sharpest objection
-A real problem, stated plainly. Vivian's Devon pedigree shows the D being lost across generations: John Damerie → George Damerie → John Damerie → John Amerey → John Amory. The Cork sequence shows the D being gained: Amary 1669 → Damery/Dammery from 1750. Opposite directions. A Devon offshoot arriving in the seventeenth century should arrive already de-D'd and stay that way. A family that acquires a D is more economically explained by local re-analysis in Ireland - or by being a different name altogether.
The 1750 Ballineen proclamation - and a striking alternative candidate
West Cork treeOpen - the record class is right, the document has not been produced. This would be a printed broadside of the Lords Justices and Council of Ireland, naming persons by residence and occupation with a reward for apprehension. That format matches "labourers of Ballineen" exactly, so the claim is formally credible. But Appendix D cites it with no shelfmark or repository, traceable to Norman's 1994 family history rather than to an examined document.
The calendar's only 1750 Cork-plausible entry concerns the murder of Darby Cullinane, names not reproduced. But look at 1754: "Proclamations against the persons who waylaid Jeremiah Delany and others who were carrying manufactured linen and woolen goods from Brandon Bridge [Bandon] to Cork, and most cruelly beat the said Delany." If the family's "1750" is approximate - and family dates usually are - that is the outstanding candidate. It would put named Damerys not merely beside the cloth trade but in violent conflict with it.
The honest verdict on the trade route
Half A - "an artisan Damery family reached Bandon through the West Country cloth trade" - is strong. It is close to being the default explanation for any Bandon artisan family, it fits every documented occupation, and it explains Holland commercially. Call it grade B.
Half B - "and that family was the Amerys of South Molton and Bishops Nympton" - currently rests on the surname alone. Grade C. Four difficulties: the documented recruitment stream points to Somerset first (Bennett: "principally from Taunton and Kingston, in Somersetshire"); North Devon's Irish trade ran mainly to Waterford and Dublin, with Cork secondary; the spelling moves the wrong way; and 1669 to 1750 is an 81-year void - the same structural defect as the Monmouth story, merely anchored sixteen years earlier.
Put bluntly: we have replaced an implausible untestable story with a plausible untested one. That is real progress, and it is not the same as an answer. Moving the floor from 1752 to 1669 without filling the span between does not yet buy a lineage.
Asked · a Richard and a Margaret in England, c.1600–1660
Devon and Somerset produce no such couple. Essex produces two, in exactly the window, and the county turns out to be independently interesting.
Richard Amery, husbandman of Layer Marney, married Margaret Wade - 11 March 1653/54
-Documented. Solemnised at Colchester, St Mary at the Walls, under the Commonwealth civil-marriage regime - which is the only reason it survives in a searchable transcript at all; Layer Marney's own register is not transcribed. She is recorded as single, of Layer Marney.
"Margret Amery, wife of Richard Amery" - buried Little Clacton, 19 March 1665/6
-Documented. Whether this is the same Richard is unproven - Layer Marney and Little Clacton are about eleven miles apart. And there is a detail worth attention: a Richard Amery of Little Clacton had a wife named ANNE in December 1652, at the baptism of their daughter Sarah. If the two Richards are one man, the sequence runs Anne, then Margaret - and Anne is the name of the Irish Richard Damery's wife in 1752.
Essex is where the surname Damery actually lives - and where it turns into Amery
-Probable, and it converts a problem into a mechanism. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names localises DAMERY to Essex. A Richard Damery is documented at Much Dunmow and Newport Pond in Chancery, 1486–1500. After that the Damery spelling vanishes from Essex records - while an Amery family continues in the Colchester hundreds: Easthorpe, Copford, Chappel, Aldham, Birch, Layer Marney, Little Clacton, Halstead, Colne Engaine, Littlebury, Saffron Walden.
Recall the objection I raised last time: Devon loses the D, Cork gains it, so the directions don't match. Essex shows the same drift Devon shows - Damery becoming Amery - in a county where the Damery form is native. That gives the D somewhere real to come back from.
A Richard-and-Margaret in Devon or Somerset
-Not there, and the negative is strong. Richard is essentially absent as a forename from the Devon Amory family in the seventeenth century - no baptism, no burial, no will between 1593 and 1758 in the Devon Wills Project's consolidated index (~300,000 entries from ~550 sources). And the one strong West Country Richard, Richard Ammery of Stogumber, clothier (will 1639, proved 1646), names no wife and no children - only his mother Alice, sisters Elizabeth and Alice, and brothers William, Henry and Hugh. He was almost certainly unmarried. That candidate closes.
⚠ And a contamination risk to hold in mind
-Flagged, because it would be easy to walk into. The one famous, endlessly-reprinted "Richard and Margaret" of this surname is Sir Richard Damory of Bucknell and Margaret his wife, c.1313–1330 - Bucknell was assigned to her as dower. She is in Burke, in Meredith, in every armorial and in the Complete Peerage material we have already been through. If a "Richard and Margaret" is circulating in family tradition without a source, that medieval couple is the overwhelmingly likely origin, transplanted three hundred years forward - exactly the move Pole and Cooke each made in their own way. Worth knowing where the pairing came from before chasing it.
A Devon Margaret nobody has looked at
-Open, and new. Margaret Amory, widow, of South Molton - will 1637, Archdeaconry Court of Barnstaple. Her husband is unidentified; she was a widow by 1637. The will itself was destroyed in the Exeter blitz of 1942 and only the index entry survives, in three independent index sources. Meredith never saw this record - her agent Somerby appears not to have worked the Barnstaple archdeaconry index. The male South Molton testators around her are a joiner, a labourer, a yeoman, a weaver and a fuller - no Richard among them.
And the 1593 "Richard of South Molton" may not be a Richard at all
-Open - needs the register image. The will at TNA PROB 11/82/519 is catalogued by TNA itself as "Richard Amry, Widow, of South Molton". Richord was a live female forename in Devon - FreeREG has a bride "Richorde Amery" marrying at Uffculme in 1561/2. Meredith and Waters read the testator as a man. If it is a woman, the last Devon Richard evaporates and the Devon negative becomes total.
⭐ And a different Richard entirely - much closer to my problem
Meredith, p. 316. James H. Amory of Clifton, Bristol told the American genealogist T. C. Amory that his father Robert, a naval officer, had brothers Richard, Walter and James - and that Richard emigrated about 1750 and was never heard of again. Their family tradition was that they "had for many generations lived on the borders of Devon and Somerset" - the Stogumber, Brompton Ralph and Monksilver country where the Amerys demonstrably were.
Set that beside my own floor: Richard Damery, in Ireland by 1752. A Richard Amory of a Devon–Somerset border family vanishing abroad around 1750, against a Richard Damery appearing in Cork two years later, is a tighter fit than anything the seventeenth century has offered.
Two cautions, both real. Meredith says the Clifton family "had no records" - this is a tradition, not a document, and traditions are what this whole exercise has been dismantling. And it is a different mechanism from everything above: not a seventeenth-century settler line but a single mid-eighteenth-century migrant, which would leave the 1669 Amary bond belonging to somebody else entirely.
But it is testable, which the Monmouth story never was. And it has the great virtue of matching my documentary floor exactly rather than being thrown backwards from it.
Two clean negatives worth banking
Bristol servant registers, 1654–1686 - 10,573 indentured servants leaving Bristol, with home parishes. This was the strongest a-priori source for a West Country artisan family going overseas. Not one Amery, Amory, Ammery, Damery or Damary in the entire register. Hotten's Original Lists of Emigrants: the same, zero.
And a warning: there is no surname DAMERY, DAMARY, DAMERIE or DAMMERY anywhere in the Devon probate record, at any date. The Devon "Dam-" names are DAMERELL / DAMREL - a common, entirely distinct South Devon name from Stoke Damerel. Do not let those be conflated.
What this exercise actually established
The question I started with was where a certain depth of information came from. It came from four places, and now they all have names and page numbers.
Harleian Society vol. 21 (1885), p. 244 - the Gloucestershire pedigree
-Seven generations, Robert-or-Roger to Nicholas. Two dates in the whole thing. Neither typescript cites it.
Harleian Society vol. VI (1872), p. 7 - the Devon pedigree
-Five generations, signed by John Amory in 1620. Indexed as "DAMERY. See AMORY." Neither typescript cites it.
The Complete Peerage vol. IV, pp. 42–48 - the Oxfordshire barons
-Accurate in both documents, because it has been in print for centuries. It also ends the line in 1375 in a sentence neither man quotes.
The Duchess of Cleveland, The Battle Abbey Roll (1889), vol. I, pp. 321–3
-Probably the single common source. Its "Damry" article contains, in one continuous narrative, the entire English spine of both typescripts: "first seated in Oxfordshire… then we find them at South Molton and Chappel in Devon… Joseph… was created Earl of Dorchester and Viscount Milton in 1792… George, who succeeded him as second and last Earl, in 1808… 'One branch of this ancient house was long seated at Yatt, co. Gloucester.'" Oxfordshire → Yate → Devon → Damer → Dorchester → George 1808, in a single paragraph. That is Joints 1 to 3 and the graft, in one book, forty years before Ted was born.
Which reframes the whole thing. Ted and Paul are not two witnesses who happened to agree. They are two careful, honest men transcribing a Victorian antiquarian compilation - one built on the Battle Abbey Roll, which Freeman called "a transparent fiction" and Egerton Brydges "a disgusting forgery" - and supplementing it from published visitations they did not name. What they could not reach was the refutation. Meredith demolished the Damer graft in 1901 using the wills at Somerset House, the Bishop's Nymet registers and the College of Arms. Ted was writing in 1978 with the fabrication in hand and no access to the correction.
Next
Vivian's roman-type generations came from Pole. The Collections are on archive.org. Reading Pole's own Damorie/Amory passage would show whether he cited anything, and would confirm or kill the inverted-ladder hypothesis. Now the highest-value single check, because it identifies the origin of the oldest graft in the whole tree.
Trace Salathiel and Henry Amery, brothers of the Gabriel who died at Dublin in 1629. A North Devon mariner family that has already buried a son in Ireland is the likeliest of all to have left someone there. Registers, apprenticeship indentures, freemen's rolls.
Only seven years are transcribed on GENUKI; the rest are unindexed at Kew. This is the one place a named Amery and a Cork or Kinsale destination could meet on a single line. Start after 1640 and follow Symon Amory.
Not the Chapple line, which ends in daughters, but the "large groups" Meredith names - the husbandman of 1591, the subsidy men of 1524. Registers, wills, subsidy and Protestation returns. Find the ones who disappear, and in which decade.
Essex Record Office (Seax), D/P series, plus the Archdeaconry and Commissary court wills that TNA's PCC-only view misses. Establish whether the Layer Marney and Little Clacton Richards are one man, find his children by Margaret, and look for a will naming "Margaret my wife". The Easthorpe Richard senior fathering children 1606–20 is the likely father - the register names no mothers, but the bishop's transcripts may.
PROB 11/82/519 - is the 1593 South Molton testator a man Richard or a woman Richord, widow? PROB 11/197/474 - confirm Richard Ammery of Stogumber names no wife. Both are five-minute checks that close or reopen the West Country entirely.
Every adult male by parish. The single most useful unsearched source: it would show conclusively whether any Richard Amery was living at South Molton, Bishops Nympton, Chulmleigh or Stogumber. Stoate's printed editions; not digitised.
Cheap, and it cuts the knot. Test a documented male-line Cork Damery against documented Devon Amerys, the Somerset/Bristol Amorys, and now the Essex Amerys. The only test that can positively confirm an attachment rather than merely failing to refute it.
The volunteer index covers a fraction of the scanned films; FamilySearch has now OCR'd the whole run. The single best test for a Damery in Cork before 1752 - and therefore for the annotator's correction, currently at grade B.
The standard consolidated list, not online. Cheap to obtain, and it closes the Monmouth question definitively either way.
Lists every able-bodied man by parish. Would show whether Damerys were still at Yate and Codrington in 1608, and give the Gloucestershire family a floor as well as a ceiling.
A Bandon weaver family in the 1690s–1770s is here or nowhere. This is where Joint 4 gets decided.
AD Marne, cote Ch 178, not digitised. Almost certainly Paul's real source for the French section, and it carries the full seigneurial succession.