1824 – 1986: Too many Daniels

One of the aspects of this project that makes it a little easier for me to get started is that I did some work on the Anthony family last summer as an intern at the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. It was during this work that I first encountered one of the challenges of research on this family; there are a lot of Daniels.

Daniel Read Anthony (the subject of this website) was the son of Daniel Anthony, who was a quaker from Adams, MA. Daniel Anthony married Lucy Read (hence my subject’s middle name). Lucy Read’s father was Daniel Read, and his mother was Susannah. This caused some confusion last summer. To further complicate matters, Daniel Read Anthony named his son Daniel Read Anthony Jr. D.R.A Jr in turn named his son D.R.A III (born in 1900). According to D.R.A. III’s Son’s of the Revolution membership

(courtesy, Ancestry.com)

application card (image above), his son, was D.R.A. IV, born in 1925. What we have is 6 generations of men all named Daniel, (5 of them Daniel Read Anthony) that stretches from before the Revolutionary war (in which Daniel Read served), all the way to when D.R.A. III died in 1986. (ancestry.com) D.R.A. IV died young in 1959. Its an amazing family saga, one that deserves extensive study. It also leads to errors, among both scholars and amateurs. I already noted the one I encountered last summer. Last week I noted another. On the wikipedia page for Daniel Read Anthony (this website’s subject) I noticed Lucy Read was listed as his spouse, when she was in fact his mother. I corrected this to list his true spouse, Annie (or Anna) Osborne.

The image below is of a Census entry from 1880 that lists the Anthony household. Included are Col. D.R. Anthony, who was 55, his wife Annie, and his son, D.R.A. Jr. listed as “Danl R”. As you can see, Little D.R.A was 10, and “at school”