Letter to Henry Lewis Woodruff, 13 December 1892
HENRY LEWIS WOODRUFF,
Dear Sir:—
I have received your letter of Dec. 2nd, with geneological
history enclosed; and I feel under great obligation to you for them, as I,
like yourself, am deeply interested in the Woodruff genealogy. And I
wish to say, it does not require an apology on your part for making the
corrections you offer concerning what I wrote you, as I very much desire
to have everything pertaining to this matter as correct as it is possible
to get it; and I am satisfied that you are as near correct as a person can
be by searching the records and works at your command. In regard to what
I said concerning the lineage of the two English Woodruffs and the spell-
ing of their names, I acted upon what was before me; but you, doubtless,
have better sources of information that I.
With regard to Matthew and John Woodruff who settled in Hartford and
Farmington, what I wrote you regarding them I took from the History of
Hartford County, by J. Hammond Trumbull; and I should, of course, have men-
tioned the source of my information.
As to the spelling of the Woodruff name in so many different ways,
I do not wonder so much at that, for the reason, as you yourself have
doubtless learned, that it is quite a common thing for a name in the course
of generations to undergo a variety of changes in spelling without in the
least affecting the lineage. As to whether Matthew and John Woodruff
were brothers or not I really do not know myself; I have come to regard
them as such more by way of taking it for granted than from actual gene-
alogical or historical knowledge.
