Pursuing the Identities of Sterne’s Subscribers Down Genealogy’s Garden Path

Abstract

The 297-page ‘Sterne’s Subscribers, An Identification List’ within the ninth volume of the Florida Sterne (2014) aroused my curiosity about those subscribers as yet unidentified or only partially so, despite the wealth of information this list provided. I early discovered what might have been obvious to others: subscription in the middle of the eighteenth century was often a function of social connections—some regional or professional, some personal, or familial. Genealogical information, especially, has helped to locate connections between certain or almost certain subscribers and other, more doubtful ones. To an American, tracing genealogies amidst the British peerage and landed gentry presents problems of terminology, to say the least. Changes in rank and title that could occur during a person’s lifetime, let alone at the person’s death, added other obstacles. Online family genealogies sometimes provided starting points but were unreliable enough to be excluded without independent confirmation from printed sources. What...