Thank You, Chuck, I am trying to connect and establish some coherence with several unsourced stories that I have read about Mary de Vere. I had heard about the Mary Seymour story, and the Willoughby connection, which indeed could eventually place her with her first husband. There is also another story connecting her to second husband Hart, which needs further investigating, as the timing and location appears off. According to this story "Mary was removed to Wexford, Ireland, and raised under the care of a Protestant family there, the Harts, who had been engaged in piracy off the Irish coast under the protection of a profit sharing arrangement with Thomas Seymour.[citation needed] A lozenge-shaped ring inscribed "What I have I hold" was reputed to have been an early gift to Thomas by his brother Edward, and was passed down through generations of the Seymour-Harts until at least 1927.[citation needed] " Yet another story is that Mary and Eustace Hart are supposed to have had a son, John Hart, but critics point to the 1634 will of Eustace, which mentions no children, though there is listed a nephew John Hart, son of his younger half-brother Henry Hart, who was an English officer stationed in Ireland, and later retired to the north of that country. The presumed son of Mary and Eustace, John Hart, was the progenitor of an American branch of this family (one of his direct descendants signed the Declaration of Independence, another was an associate of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company). IF Mary and Edward de Vere were actually the secret children of Thomas Seymour (and John Hart was a secret son of Mary and Eustace), they would still have de Vere ancestry through the Seymours. Obviously a lot more work needs to be done to piece together these separate strands of this family story, if that is possible.
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