The Patrick Matthew Family Tree

                                                     

Alexander Duncan I

                                                                         to
   
                 Alexander Duncan  II                          George Duncan ( P.M.'s G.G.Grandfather)
                                        to                                                         to

      1st Viscount Admiral Adam Duncan          Francis Duncan ( P.M."s G. Grandfather)
                                                                                                    to
                                                                              Alexander Duncan  (P. M.'s Grandfather)    
                                                                                                    to
                                                                              Agnes Duncan  (Patrick Matthew's Mother)
                                                                                                    to
                                                                                   Patrick Matthew  
                                                                                                    to
           (P.M.'s 5th son) James Matthew   ***            Alexander Matthew  (P.M.'s 3rd Son)
                                        to                                                         to

                         Jones & Smith families                     The Minnick & Macy families
                                   in New Zealand                            in the United States
                                                                                                   &                                                          
                                                                                   The Gerdts family in Germany


This  family tree has been provided by the original research conducted by Major Howard Minnick US Army (retired) who is the third great grandson of Patrick Matthew. Please note: Dates are forthcoming.

   References:

• Alexander Hastie Millar. The Historical Castles and Mansions of Scotland: Perthshire and Forfarshire (here).
• W. Gerdts.: ‘Die Matthew Saga 1 (1790 – 1918) and Die Matthew Saga 2 (1918-2003). Self published history of the Matthew family.

Please note: This is the first definitive evidence that Patrick Matthew was related to the great British naval hero Admiral Duncan.

 The dual themes and title of Patrick Matthew's (1831) book 'On Naval Timber and Arboriculture' was most likely influenced by his bloodline to Admiral Duncan. As the opening words of his book indicate....

... the importance of understanding the principle of natural selection with regards to where and how to grow the best naval timber was fully and originally understood by Matthew (1831) and then some others after they read and cited his book. Those others - such as Jameson (1853) of the East India Company (a regular correspondent of William Hooker) - cited Matthew and wrote of his original ideas that timber could fare better in a non-native environment if native species were kept at bay by human interference with nature before Darwin and Wallace replicated Matthew's original discoveries and explanatory examples without citation to their source. Jameson understood it perfectly. Alternately, Selby (1842), the editor of Wallace's 1855 Sarawak paper, read it also, but he wrote that he did not understand it.

Appendix A of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (Matthew 1831) 

Matthew's original ideas about the difference between trees grown in nurseries and those in the wild were replicated by both Darwin and Wallace. Darwin had the precise example in his private 1844 essay. Wallace replicated the same example in his Ternate paper of 1858 with Matthew's general original analogy of differences between natural and artificial selection. Darwin opened Chapter One of the Origin of Species with the exact same thing.

Once again the "real facts" are news to Darwin scholars, who have a 155 year long legacy of credulously maintaining Darwin's self-serving fallacy that Matthew's original ideas were unrelated to the title and related theme of his book. Of late, one of the worst propagators of this ludicrous myth is Richard Dawkins (2010) whose pseudo scholarly history, context and "real fact-free" biased Darwin worship proclamations include the following line about Matthew's On Naval Timber and Arboriculture - a book he surely can't have bothered himself to read before implying expertise on it:

Dawkins (2010. p.209):

‘Did he see the explanation for all of life, the destroyer of the argument for design? If he had, wouldn’t he have put it in a more prominent place than the appendix to a manual on silviculture?

In the real world of immortal great ideas, as opposed to Darwin Myth Land, where Dawkin's credulously resides, Matthew's ideas were not merely contained in his book's Appendix. Matthew's (1860) letter to Darwin explained as much, and Darwin's (1860) private letter to Joseph Hooker acknowledged the truth. But Darwin. like his acolytes after him, pretended otherwise to successfully punterize the rest of the world in order to rob Matthew of his right to be considered an immortal great thinker and influencer in science. Visit the Appendix Myth page of PatrickMatthew.com for the fact-based details, as opposed to the unevidenced Darwin Worship Industry rhetoric.

More on Richard Dawkins's history and context free pseudo-scholarship here.

A more detailed account of the new findings regarding Patrick Matthew's genealogical links to Admiral Duncan can be found on the Family Tree page of PatrickMatthew.com. Here