Family History
Welcome to my Genealogy Pages
These pages dedicated to my father's first cousins, three brothers who died in
World War One.

  • John Frederic Johnson (1896-1916)
  • Alec Cuthbert Johnson (1898-1916)
  • Alfred Andrew Johnson (1899-1918)
Read the wonderful Graphic Novel made by three students from Carnforth, Lancashire, England about one of the three brothers, John Frederic Johnson (1896-1916).
Learn more about the three Johnson brothers.

This Family History section of my website contains nearly 60 separate pages of information about a number of subjects, but primarily the ancestry of my parents, Ruth Harriet Mott and The Rev. William James Spicer. The pages are a result of digging into the history of my father’s ancestry in Dorset, England and his Quaker ancestors in New England. My mother’s ancestry traces back to not only a Continental Soldier, but also to the Palatine immigrants to New York in the early 1700s.



My Grandmother Anabel Thurston Spicer with her sisters.

The Parish of Affpuddle in the 19th Century.

Talbots, Hennings, and Warham of Dorset branch of the family tree.
The Talbot of Broadmayne crest.
My 3rd Great-grandfather, Robert Talbot Spicer (1772-1839), who is buried in Owermoigne, Dorset, was the son of Mary Talbot, whose pedigree stretches back eight generations in the manor of Little Mayne in Dorset to the first William Talbot (ca 1520-1574). This fascinating family has been traced through wills, land transactions and parish registers by a distant cousin in Reading, England, Dan Talbot. Together we have developed two pages dealing with the Talbots of Broadmayne and Little Mayne:
Hennings crest.
Crest of Archbishop Warham.
The Talbot line continues back with the marriage of the second William, who died in 1615, to Alice Henning, the daughter of John Henning and Dorothy Warham, herself the great-grand niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, who had crowned Henry VIII in 1509 and solemnized his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, in 1533. That pedigree is on Alice's separate page:
Warham ancestry of Alice Henning,
my 11th great-grandmother.
This line, and the development of the crests from various descriptions and drawings, also is primarily the work of cousin Dan Talbot.

My Great Grandmother, Harriet Lavinia Porter Mott with her sisters identified L-R: Elizabeth | Harriet | Jane | Mary

"3rd New Jersey Battalion 1776 - by Keith Rocco" from DP Main's Pinterest Pin
Perhaps I’ve spent more time on separating the identities of the two Revolutionary War Captains named John Mott of New Jersey than anything, a confusion caused by the “Official” registers of the Adjutant General in the 1860s which didn’t realize there were two – one a Militia Captain, the other, a Continental Soldier, he my 3rd great-grandfather. Finally able to separate them resulted in somewhat involved set of web pages which begin at

John Mott of the Revolution.

Other ancestors and descendant charts:


My Quaker Ancestry.

June, 2021

While I've known about Quaker ancestors on my mother's side, it wasn't until I began really exploring some lines on my father's side that I realized how deep - back to Pilgrims - ran the Quaker ancestors of my 3rd great-grandmother, Rachel Field (1780-1851), perhaps the last of the Quaker line, but with generations of Quaker ancestors.

And she married a man, Levi Willets, with a deep Quaker background himself, although his father had been disowned by the Friends in 1757.That has led to research and five web pages on those Quaker lines:

These are not genealogies or lineages of the various individual ancestors. That may come.
It is a family history through and from those individuals.


David Hackett Fischer, in his marvelous book Albion's Seed, estimates that there are 16 million Americans who can trace their ancestry to one or more of the 20-25,000 Puritans who came to this country during the Great Migration. In my studies over the last two years I've discovered, by rough count, about 30 ancestors who were Puritan emigrants, and many of them involved in the fascinating beginnings of this country in New England.

One of the reasons I invested in a computer was to use it to organize the papers and findings of my Great Aunt 'Bessie', a woman I was always scared of as a youth, but who did a lot of study on the origins of her Mott name and left me a starting point for further research.

Putting these ancestors into the historical context of their time is the most interest I get out of these studies, and so I have sought to document as much as possible, and to read and search the local histories of the places they came to and lived in. Besides Puritans I've discovered German Palatine emigrants to the Hudson River Valley who almost starved to death their first winter here in 1710, four of my ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, one who set up the first 'fulling-mill' in America in 1643 before the British made it illegal to 'do' textiles in the colonies, and two who were in the Civil war, one a surgeon. Perhaps there were more, for the search goes on, and there are many limbs of my family tree that I just haven't seen yet. I hope you enjoy these pages.

Additional studies and individuals in my line of special interest:

Feel free to contact me about anything.

The Pease Genealogy Pages -
An examination into the English Ancestry and first five generations of the American descent of John and Robert Pease who emigrated from Great Baddow, Essex, England aboard the Francis in 1634. There's also a page on Sarah Pease, the wife of a first cousin eight times removed, who spent a year in irons as an accused witch in Salem in 1692-3.

My cousin Cyril B. Spicer, Jr., was a decorated WWII soldier who fought in the Battle of the Bulge with the 117th Infantry Division. This page is about that Division and Cyril junior. His father was a Colonel in Patton's Third Army.

There's a Gallery of pictures of ancestors.

My direct line ancestry pages generated from my database, Legacy Family Tree.

Mary Wager Mott, my 2nd great grandmother is an ongoing project trying to tie her into the Wager families of Rensselaer County, New York. It's been a dead end with only one clue: an 1868 letter from her sister which mentions a number of people, but without relationships.

Special thanks to:

  • I'm indebted to the Commonwealth War Graves Comminssion in Marblehead, England for providing me with information about the three brothers, 2nd Lieut. John Frederic Johnson, Private Alec Cuthbert Johnson, and Private Alfred Andrew Johnson, to whom these pages are dedicated. They were three sons of my great Aunt, Kate Spicer Johnson. May they rest in peace.
  • I'd like to thank the folks at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Special thanks to Anne and Cynthia who run the Interlibrary Loan at Indiana University Northwest for getting me so many sources after I've located them in far flung libraries whose catalogs I accessed right here from home on the internet. Also thanks to Frank Leister at Leister Productions for writing the "Rolls-Royce" (MacUsers Magazine) of genealogy software programs. While I don't use his program any more, it made getting into organizing easy and fun.
  • As an added note, I put these pages on the internet first back in 1995. Over the years I've been more than delighted to make contact with distant cousins, and not so distant cousins, including an 11th cousin in Scotland as well as a second cousin in England who helped wonderfully in adding a couple of generations to my Spicer ancestry. To all the cousins out there: THANKS
  • Genealogy has its rewards. The mom of a sixth grader wrote to me thanking me for my Pease Genealogy pages saying that her daughter, Brittney, was working on a genealogy project at school. There are many places on the web to find how to do genealogy, but this one, that Brittney's mom sent, is a good starting place for young and old. It's from HomeAdvisor.com: "History at Home: A Guide to Genealogy." Maybe Brittney will find out she's related to Grace Kelly after all! Good Luck!


Pages began in 1995. Updated last: September, 2022.

© Text copyright: Steve Spicer

Feel free contact me about this page.