As Jeremy Warner came face-to-face with his 10th great grandfather, a meeting he’d been looking forward to for years, he had just one word.
“Cool!”
He smiled at the room full of onlookers. “It’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.”
The California native has followed a trail of clues around the dustier corners of the internet for some five years – and traveled more than 3,000 miles – to see this painting propped against a wall in a small, neat office in Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library. The rediscovery of the portrait solves a mystery the Courant first wrote about back in June.
Harriet Jones
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Jeremy Warner gets to see the portrait of his ancestor Andrew Warner for the first time in the director's office at the Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, CT
“All these roads lead to this little point,” he said later. “I like to follow synchronicity. Like, everything happens for a reason.”
The almost 400-year-old oil painting is a portrait of Andrew Warner: puritan, church deacon, maltster and one of the founders of the city of Hartford. Warner sailed from England in 1633, bringing with him this likeness, an expensive token of his wealth and status. He would remain in North America for the rest of his life, traveling with the Rev. Thomas Hooker to settle in the Connecticut River valley, then moving north once again to a new homestead, and finally passing away in 1684 in Hadley, Mass.
In that time Andrew fathered 11 children, who in turn had many, many descendants.
And as it turns out, Jeremy was not the only offshoot of the dynasty arriving at the library for this family reunion. As he was taking in the portrait for the first time, Jessica Warner and Sarah Warner Phillips arrived, unannounced. Having read about Jeremy’s quest, and his appointment with the painting, the sisters decided to come meet their distant cousin.
Sarah and Jessica grew up in neighboring Sharon, part of a numerous Warner clan in this corner of the state.
“I had seen the picture at some point in my life,” said Sarah Warner, who now lives in Vermont. “I think it was at Ingleside, at the family home. So that was when I was little.”
She said her puritan ancestor was part of family lore.
“We always knew about it. My dad would talk about it. It was sort of baked into our history.”
“It really brings the history to life,” said Jessica Warner, now a resident of Washington, D.C. “It’s so easy to feel disconnected and separate in our world as it is today, and yet here we are with a distant relative from California and here in this small town in Connecticut, it’s like people are more connected than you might think.”
Internet mystery
This connecting of threads began for Jeremy Warner back in 2018 when he first learned there was – or had been – a portrait of his ancestor. Warner is a sculptor, and as an artist it appealed to him to know there was a likeness of such a distant relative.
“I knew it existed because on Find-a-Grave there was a photo of it,” he said.
The genealogy website had a tiny, sepia-toned reproduction of the portrait. He found out the digital image had been uploaded by one Mary Warner of Michigan, but when he went looking for her, he discovered she had passed away. He could find no indication of where the portrait itself might be located, or if it even still existed.
Still, it intrigued him, and inspired his own artistic creation. He began some preparatory renderings with the intention of sculpting a 3-D bust of Andrew, based on the digital image. He uploaded these renderings to his own website, attracting the attention of yet another distant cousin, amateur genealogist Tim Davis in Washington State, a 9th great grandson of Andrew who had also been in search of the original painting.
The two pooled the information they had. Davis had already contacted every historical association and art institution he could find in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but none had any clues as to where the painting might be. They contacted the Courant, hoping an article might jog someone’s memory.
Meanwhile, Jeremy managed to track down Mary Warner’s eldest daughter via Facebook. Sarah Barnes had inherited all of her mother’s genealogy papers, and promised to look through them, seeking the source of Mary’s image of the missing portrait. Still nothing. Jeremy thought that he had reached yet another dead end.
But it turned out Sarah Barnes wasn’t done looking.
“I’m on a road trip to Colorado,” said Warner, “and I am outside of, what, Shiprock, New Mexico, and she sent me this piece of paper that said – the Scoville Memorial Library.”
Barnes had found that piece of paper in her grandfather’s archive. In 1976 he had visited the library and had a professional photographer take the image of the portrait, the one Mary Warner later uploaded to the internet.
A find in the vault
The portrait seems to have remained in a Litchfield County branch of the Warner family until the late 20th Century. It was eventually donated to the Scoville Memorial Library by Elizabeth Warner Fulton, the daughter of Judge Donald T. Warner. It’s not clear exactly when it arrived there, but it was documented as a donation in the mid-1970s.
But when Jeremy Warner contacted the library in June of this year, excited that he might finally be on the right track, it was nowhere to be found on the walls.
Then Salisbury town historian Jean McMillen takes up the story.
“When he asked if we had the portrait, I didn’t know because I don’t do art,” she said.
McMillen checked with the previous historian, who she knew had done a project on local art history.
“The portrait had been hung in the reading room, but with one of the renovations he got put in the vault,” she learned.
McMillen and her summer intern, Hotchkiss School student Annie Prinz, headed to the vault.
“We found it, and Annie, bless her heart, took pictures of it and I sent them to Jeremy and I get back – ‘Holy cow!’”
The mystery was solved, and now, just over a month later, Jeremy Warner was finally standing in front of the portrait of his ancestor, Andrew.
Historical detail
“Art is all we have left of history,” said Warner. “This is it.”
He was moved to be able to see so many more details in the portrait, things that hadn’t been clear from the degraded image that he’d previously relied on.
For instance, a swoop over Andrew Warner’s shoulder turns out to be a cape that he’s holding with his right hand. An examination of his dark hair shows many more details of the Puritan style. And a red ribbon on his sleeve, a splash of bold color on the dark picture, prompts more questions. Is this perhaps a signature of rank?
Warner set the painting up in a darkened room to remove the possibility of glare and set about taking high quality photographs. These will provide a much better prompt for the 3-D rendering he’s still working to sculpt.
The painting isn’t signed, but as Warner turned it around he saw there’s a second, older frame, clipped inside of the current mounting, something that might yield more information about the origins of the picture.
In the coming days he intends to visit Hadley, where Andrew Warner eventually settled, to see if he can track down more clues about his life, and perhaps meet more distant cousins.
“The end of a journey,” he said, “but the beginning of another one.”
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