[Alexander Gordon (1685–1722) – 19th Century Manuscript and Biographical Sketch of this Merchant and Sea Captain; a Scotland Native who emigrated to Philadelphia, with Anecdotes of Him and His American Descendants.

“Capt. Alexander Gordon the first of our American ancestors was indentured to a Lawyer by his Father a Scottish gentleman…”

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Eight-page handwritten “Recollections of the Gordon Family,” providing biographical and anecdotal information about the Gordon Family of Philadelphia, descendants of merchant and sea captain Alexander Gordon (1685–1722), a native of Scotland who emigrated to Philadelphia. From internal evidence, the narrative appears to have been composed by Captain Gordon’s great-granddaughter, Frances “Fanny” Saltar (c.1790–1880), and is possibly written out in her hand.

The narrative is fragmentary—six continuous pages plus two additional continuous pages; the manuscript contains many emendations and corrections. Fanny Saltar here refers to “my grandfather Thomas Gordon” (p1), son of Captain Gordon, and to “Mr. John Lardner who had married my [half] sister Margaret” (p5). Some, but no no means all, of the anecdotes Saltar relates here were published, with some textual differences, in “Fanny Saltar’s Reminiscences of Colonial Days in Philadelphia.”¹

The manuscript makes a brief notice of African servants, possibly enslaved. Other family names mentioned herein include McMurtrie, Tilghman, and Morgan, the latter being New Jersey relations who later settled on lands near Fort Pitt or Pittsburgh.

The “Recollections” are accompanied by four additional leaves providing genealogical data on Captain Gordon, his children, and extended family.

Price: $250.00