Theodore Palmer

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Genetic haplogroups at end. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1935 and lived in a house within the Arnold Arboretum until I was almost 13. In 1948 my father retired and moved back to a house he owned in Webb City, Missouri. My father and his father had built this house with their own hands in the late 19th Century. Webb City is an old lead and zinc mining district. Before my father became a professional botanical collector and taxonomist (and later moved to the Arnold Arboretum in 1921) he had collected minerals and Mississippian fossils from these mines and published about them.

Thus I quickly learned a lot about mines and mining. This enabled me to secure summer jobs in 1955 and 1956 as a prospector and mining engineer in Utah (White Canyon Desert) and Colorado (Summitville in the San Juan Mountains).

I graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA and MA in biochemistry in 1959. In 1966, I earned a Ph. D. from Harvard University in Mathematics. My thesis was in operator theory. While writing the thesis, I was able to dramatically shorten and simplify a formerly very complicated proof by using ideas from the theory of Banach algebras. Thus most of my professional publications since then have been about Banach algebras.

I summarized my research and put it into context in the two volume work: Banach Algebras and the General Theory of *-Algebras; Volume I: Algebras and Banach Algebras, [xii], 794 pp., 1994; Volume II: *-Algebras, [xii], 795 - 1617 pp., 2001, Cambridge University Press.

Laramie Phillips and I married in 1961 and have three children (Jesse David 1968, Abraham Amos 1970, and Ruth Elizabeth 1972). Our family moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1970 where I am now a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and former dean.

In 1973 I was a founder of Mount Pisgah Arboretum near Eugene. I have been an officer, Executive Committee or Board member almost continuously since then. I was in charge of the site for most of this time and have designed and helped build most of the trails. In addition, I have done over 20,000 hours of physical work on site. The present Board of Directors recently rejected the original purpose of MPA. Since then my grief and bitterness over this treachery has prevented me from working there. When I offered to renew my work my offer was rejected. I am now too old and too busy to wish to return to the hard physical work I used to enjoy so much. I know this site more deeply than anyone else and love it intensely.

My other interests are classical music; Chinese art, culture and history; historical cartography, the history of the scientific exploration of America, most particularly the American West; hiking; mountain climbing (now largely in the past); and wood working.

I inherited most of my genealogical information, but am learning to expand it by using the internet. I am extremely supportive of the idea behind Wikitree.

My father , Ernest Jesse Palmer (4/8/1875 to 2/25/1962) who came to the United Staes in 1878 corresponded all his life with as many English relatives as he could identify and collected their genealogical information. My third cousin twice removed Valerie Tatley Ethridge (May 28, 1937, living in Gloucester, England) and I have considerably extended the information he found using primarily the England Census.

My mother's family has had an interest in genealogy for many generations. From about 1960 I have had a copy of all the genealogical research of James McDougall Craven (March 17, 1894 to June 3, 1970) which was used as a basis for my branch of the McDougall family by Richardson Dougall (see below). Various relatives and I have extended this information but mainly in relation to collateral relatives rather than ancestors. Two genealogical books have added large amounts of information:

Richardson Dougall, "James Dougall of Glasgow (1699-1760) and his descendants through Dougall an McDougall lines in the United States and Canada", Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973.

George Chalmers McCormick, " John Kitchel and Esther Peck: Their ancestors, descendants and some kindred families", Fort Collins, Colorado, 1913

Richardson Dougall is a fifth cousin once removed and was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on February 22, 1917. He retired to Portland, Oregon and we became friends. I am unable to find the date of his death.

I have a number of privately published books on modern branches of my family not covered in the above references and a large archive of old records and pictures and other mementos. Several of these trace the families back quite far.

23 andMe has sequenced a substantial part of my genome. My maternal haplogroup is H2A3 (in my mitochrondial DNA) My Paternal haplogroup is R1b1b2a1a2d3* in my Y chromosome. I am interested in information from relatives who have been partially or fully sequenced. These should be stable over many generations if each ancestor is a mother (maternal) or father (paternal).

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Theodore Palmer.