First, there were too many Henrys, but I hope we have that straight now. Now we have too many Catherines. John Rector, the eldest son of Hans Jacob Richter, was born in Germany in 1711, and left with his parents in 1713 for Virginia, arriving in 1714. He married, first, (Anna) Catherine Fishback. The evidence for this comes from the will of her father, written in 1733/34, who left her land.
When John Rector died in 1773, his wife was Catherine. She was not the same Catherine; she was not even the same nationality as the first Catherine. When John Rector died, his wife then was the Catherine who was born a Taylor, the daughter of Charles and Anne Taylor, and was born 2 Jul 1707 [George H. S. King, "Register of the North Farnham Parish, 1663-1814"]. At some unspecified time, Catherine Taylor married William Robinson and had five children. William Robinson died and Catherine married John Rector, by whom, it appears, she had eight more children.
There is a lesson here for all families and for all genealogists. In the situation where a man marries a woman whose name is Given, and when he dies his wife is Given, how many times do we say that she is the same woman? And, that, if she is the same woman, then she was the mother of all of the children? This is exactly what happened in the case of John Rector. Since he married a Catherine, and his will mentioned his wife Catherine, we had been saying that he was married once and the first Catherine, whose maiden name was known, was the mother of all of his children. But in this case, it simply was not true.
In how many other cases does this occur? Over and over, we say that a man married Mary in Germany, and since he and Mary were signing deeds late in life, then it must the same Mary. There are lots of cases of this nature. We just happen to know, because of an incomplete lawsuit written on "scraps of paper", that it was not true in the case of John Rector. So, before one starts saying his "tree" is true and valid, he should start looking at the probabilities at each step of the way. It might cause him to temper the claims, and be a little more modest about what he thinks he has found.
There were some other problems in the Rector history, and we will continue in future notes with some of these.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.