Returning from this digression, as I have spoken of Mrs. Goddard, I cannot refrain from saying a word about her brother, Capt. George Simmons, the father of the late George Simmons. He sailed for my father and grandfather many years in command of the brig Pilgrim in foreign trade, and was one of their most efficient and trustworthy captains. My father was in Boston in 1824, fitting the brig for a voyage, when he was taken sick, and Captain Simmons brought him home in a chaise, to die two days later. He named his second son Wm. Davis Simmons, born in 1811, the master of the ill-fated packet Russell, after my grandfather, and a daughter, Joanna White, born in 1826, after my mother. It always gave me pleasure to meet and talk with him when in later years, enfeebled by lameness, he was employed as weigher of coal at the pockets on the wharves. He died, July 26, 1863, at the age of eighty-one years. I know no family with more marked physical traits than the family of which he and Mrs. Goddard and Lemuel Simmons were conspicuous members. I have noticed these traits in other families in Plymouth, not always the same, sometimes in figure, sometimes in walk, and again in voice, in mould of features, and in ways of doing things. They are such that neither time nor marriage can extinguish, and any close observer may have seen them in the Jackson, Kendall, Warren, Russell, Spooner and Simmons families, and in the Perkins family of Newfields street. Not many years ago I was in the Town Clerk’s office, and seeing a man dismounting from a wagon in the Square, I said to the clerk, “I never saw that man before but I feel sure that his name is Simmons, or he has Simmons blood in his veins.” When I went out and addressed him as Mr. Simmons, I asked him if I was right in so calling him, and he said, “yes, that is my name.” “Where do you live?” I asked him. “In West Duxbury,” he replied. “Are you connected with the Plymouth Simmons family?” and he said he supposed he was distantly, but he was not acquainted with any of them. It has always been interesting to me to observe and study these family traits. David Drew, the other sail maker, learned his trade of Mr. Goddard, and began business about 1840. He lived many years on Pleasant street, opposite Training Green, and died within a year or two, more than ninety years of age. The old fashioned coopers who in the first half of the 19th century were numerous on Water street, have entirely disappeared. Mr. John C. Barnes now buys shooks and puts together twenty thousand barrels for cranberries annually. The coopers whom I recall were David and Heman Churchill, Otis Churchill, Winslow Cole, David Dickson, Ansel H. and Abner H. Harlow, Perez Pool and Gideon Holbrook.