... freeholders or freemen who were entitled to a vote in the crucial election of that year. My 4-greats grandfather, Governor Lewis Morris II, was the grandfather of one man who was one of the 39 signers of the U.S. Constitution, and of another man who signed the Declaration of Independance. My 4-greats grandfather, Cadwallader Colden, was Lieutenant Governor of New York, and was in fact the last man to hold that office before the Revolution.
I believe the reader will enjoy with me the dignity of the letter written by Chief Justice Morris to Governor Cosby, in 1733, and will reflect on the poignancy of the cry wrung from the heart in the letter Eliza Hope Colden wrote to her brother: "Oh that you and your dear family will never know what it is to want that rest that poverty requires".
In my earlier books I paid tribute to Jamie McFadden, whose ideas on bloodstock pedigrees enabled me to evolve what I believe is the simplest and clearest method yet devised for recording family trees. It will be seen that the Antill tree is an enormous one: before I consulted Jamie it stretched 26 feet across our living-room floor, and I could see no practical method of putting it into book form.
In closing, let me thank Dr John Antill Pockley for again undertaking the painstaking task of proof-reading this manuscript, and all those who have sent me so much of what is contained herein. This is, of course, in no way a complete record of the family, but it is a record not previously compiled, about a family which played a notable part in English, American and Australian history. I hope posterity may find it interesting.
Sydney. November, 1977.