f June came to hand, my
increasing age and continued maladies, with the many attentions due from
me, had caused a delay in acknowledging it, for which these
circumstances must be an apology, in your case, as I have been obliged
to make them in others.

You wish me to refer you to sources of printed information on my career
in life, and it would afford me pleasure to do so; but my recollection
on the subject is very defective. It occurs [to me] that there was a
biographical volume in an enlarged edition compiled by General or Judge
Rodgers of Pennsylvania, and which may perhaps have included my name,
among others. When or where it was published I cannot say. To this
reference I can only add generally the newspapers at the seat of
government and elsewhere during the electioneering periods, when I was
one of the objects under review. I need scarcely remark that a life,
which has been so much a public life, must of course be traced in the
public transactions in which it was involved, and that the most
important of them are to be found in documents already in print, or soon
to be so.

With friendly respects, JAMES MADISON.

LYMAN C. DRAPER, Lockport, N. Y.

The genealogical statement, it will be observed, does not go farther
back than Mr. Madison's great-grandfather, John. Mr. Rives supposes that
this John was the son of another John who, as "the pious researches of
kindred have ascertained," took out a patent for land about 1653 between
the North and York rivers on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The same
writer further assumes that this John was descended from Captain Isaac
Madison, whose name appears "in a document in the State Paper Office at
London containing a list of the Colonists in 1623." From Sainsbury's
Calendar[2] we learn something more of this Captain Isaac than this mere
mention. Under date of January 24, 1623, there is this record: "Captain
Powell, gunner, of James City, is dead; Capt. Nuce (?), Capt. Maddison,
Lieut. Craddock's brother, and divers more of the chief men reported
dead." But either the report was not altogether true or there was
another Isaac Maddison, for the name appears among the signatures to a
letter dated about a month later--February 20--from the governor,
council, and Assembly of Virginia to the king. It is of record, also,
that four months later still, on June 4, "Capt. Isaac and Mary Maddison"
were before the governor and council as witnesses in the case of
Greville Pooley an