family tree

The family recently donated a painting of one ancestor to the Alamo Museum, in San Antonio, Texas. When Davy Crockett was a Senator of Tennessee and politicking on the east coast, he stopped in to see his longtime friends, and convinced the son, John Hayes, to travel south with him, to Texas, for the dry air and adventure. The Battle of the Alamo became the men's unintended final destination, and the painting of Hayes one of the few remaining painted images of the men who died there.  It is from this man that I get my middle name, Hayes.

My first name is neither Godfrey nor Rowland.  It is Nathaniel, from the great mathematician and navigator Nathaniel Bowditch. This is perhaps my father’s greatest gift to me – to try, if only by name, to stop a cycle that has plagued his own relationships, including his and mine, again and again. Of course it only partially worked. My own history has been marked by situations almost laughably similar to those of the men who preceded me. It is my hope that this work will simultaneously pay homage to that which has broken us apart in the past, and brace the next generations against the threat of it happening again.  It will bring together this odd collection of careful killers and broken analysts for a few moments, if only as images flickering on the wall.

The second thing to know is that these men hail from a very old family, nearly four centuries of men in which have been named some variation of Godfrey or Rowland: as in Godfrey Rowland or Rowland Godfrey. The men of our focus, the remaining men, are examples of the latter, both named Rowland Godfrey, in this case the Third and the Fourth.  The First was a Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician; the Second, an Officer and Psychiatrist of Note during WWII.  According to the mother of RGF III, this family had a man in uniform for every war in American history.