Family of Harris Dunscomb COLT and Teresa STRICKLAND

Husband:	Harris Dunscomb COLT (1901-1973)
Wife:	Teresa STRICKLAND (c. 1904-1955)
Children:	Harris George Charles Strickland COLT (1935-2004)
Marriage	26 Nov 1927	Villa Bologna, Malta

Husband: Harris Dunscomb COLT

Name:	Harris Dunscomb COLT
Sex:	Male
Father:	Harris Douglas Dunscomb COLT (1861-1959)
Mother:	Elizabeth Haggerty BOWNE (1866-1929)
Note:	https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Colt-116
Birth	29 Jan 1901	Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Death	8 Nov 1973 (age 72)	London, England
Burial		Streat Churchyard Streat Lewes District East Sussex, England

Wife: Teresa STRICKLAND

Name:	Teresa STRICKLAND
Sex:	Female
Father:	-
Mother:	-
Note 1:	https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Strickland-7939
Note 2:	52 PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY impossible that Colt was in Oxford when on IJune 1920 the honorary degree of DLitt was conferred on Themistocles Zammit by the university, and that Colt heard Zammit lecture on Malta's antiquities in London. On 26 November 1927, Colt married a Maltese girl, Teresa Strickland. It is in circumstances related to the archaeology of the island that Harris and Teresa seem to have met, for Margaret Murray mentions them as her helpers in the Valletta museum during her archaeological activity on Malta, noting that only 'later' was Teresa to become Mrs Harris Colt (1963, 129). Indeed, it is very likely that Murray introduced Colt to Petrie, her colleague at University College in London, after meeting him in Malta. It is also a possibility that Colt came to Malta with Murray's expedition. The friendship with Teresa, and his breadth of vision, must have allowed the young Harris to move within archaeological circles with ease and to nurture further his childhood interests. By the end of his second visit to the island, at the age of twenty-one, he had already delivered a lecture on the archaeology of Malta at the King Edward VII social club on 28 February 1922, advertised in the columns of the Daily Malta Chronicle. The contents of the lecture can be surmised from a letter Colt wrote to the New York Tribune from Malta a day later in which he informs Americans, in a most succinct way, of the most interesting remains of this 'dot in the Mediterranean' (Colt 1922). His knowledge of the archipelago's antiquities was sound and in tune with the latest discoveries being made by Themistocles Zammit. The date of 300 B.C. for the island's Stone Age remains is surely a misprint as if the newspaper editor was obliged to·knock a zero off the unrealistic 3000 years which was Zammit's estimated age for the Maltese prehistoric temples, proven correct by radiocarbon dating more than thirty years later. Through Teresa, a long-standing friendship with Themistocles Zammit was also estab- lished. Teresa's father, Charles, had been a good friend of Zammit and with him he shared a passion for Malta's ancient past that was instilled in Charles at a very tender age through his parents, both active in the promotion and study of Malta's ancient remains (de Trafford 1998, 39). Charles' death in 1918, and of his wife a few years later, meant that Teresa had tobe given away in marriage by her uncle the Prime Minister of Malta Sir Gerald Strickland, the sixth Count della Catena, later elected to peerage (Hornyold 1928, 20 I). This ensured for Colt a swift entry into the highest echelons of Maltese society and an entry in the island's Who)s Who ([ I 930], 13I). The newspapers of the time describe the lavish wedding reception attended by 1500 guests, including Zammit himself, held within the walls of Villa Bologna, Gerald Strickland's aristocratic home (Daily Malta Chronicle, 30 November 1927)
Birth	c. 1904	Valetta, Malta
Death	18 May 1955 (age 50-51)	Ciancarelli Hospital, Rome, Italy

Child 1: Harris George Charles Strickland COLT

Name:	Harris George Charles Strickland COLT
Sex:	Male
Note:	https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Colt-115
Birth	17 Jun 1935
Death	25 Jun 2004 (age 69)	New York City

Note on Marriage

Archeologist and R. Kipling documents collector. He was the son of Harris D. and Elizabeth Bowne Colt, he entered St. Paul's in 1915. Although frail health forced him to withdraw from the School in 1918 and to continue his schooling in Arizona, he never lost a deep love for St. Paul's. Subsequently, he studied at Oxford University. The focus of his career was on archaeology: he worked in Egypt under the noted British Egyptologist, W. M. Flinders Pet-rie, and took part in excavations in Malta. For four years in the thirties, he directed his own archaeological "dig" at Auja el Hafir in the Negev. He inherited a love of collecting from his father, who had assembled a fine series of historical views of New York City, and from this grew his own unfinished work on an encyclopedia of all prints and engravings by American artists up to about the year 1880. In addition, he was a collector of coins and had made a notable collection of Kipling first editions. He is survived by his wife, Armida B. Colt; a son, Harris S. Colt, '53, and three grandsons. (obituary provided by Dyane (#47184694) [1]

 

Harris Dunscombe Colt died November 8, 1973, in the London Clinic, aged seventy-two. He lies buried in an old country churchyard in Sussex, overlooking the South Downs in England. His wife survives him, as does a son by his first marriage. [2]

 

wrote: Excavations at Nessana (1950) by Harris Dunscombe Colt

 

From a publication called The Naturegazer (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Dec. 26, 2016:

 

H. Dunscombe Colt: Archaeologist of the Desert The historic Peter Parley house on High Ridge was home to not only its namesake author and his minister father, but another man who shared with them an interest in history, literature and religion. H. Dunscombe Colt was an internationally known archaeologist and an expert on Rudyard Kipling. Together with his father he lived in the 1920s, 30s and 40s where S.G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), son of the third minister of the First Congregational Church, grew up. Harris Dunscombe Colt II was born in 1901 in New York City, son of Harris Dunscomb and Elizabeth Bowne Colt. (Unlike his father, he ended his middle name with an E.) His dad, a Yale-educated lawyer, and his mother, great-granddaughter of a New York City mayor, came here in the late 1910s and for a while, owned the Bluebird Apartments, located across the street from the West Lane Inn (though they never lived there). The Peter Parley property was much bigger when they bought it and around 1920, the Colts sold a triangular piece at High Ridge and Shadow Lane to the Hyde sisters from New Jersey, who then built the English-style cottages and cobblestone courtyard, surrounded by high stone walls, that are a landmark at the south end of High Ridge today. The Colts sent their son to England for his schooling. He studied at St. Paul’s and Oxford University, which he did not complete but at which he became interested in archaeology, the focus of his future career. His first dig was in 1922, excavating an ancient Roman site in Kent, England, with a team from London’s Society of Antiquaries. He then worked in Egypt under the noted British Egyptologist, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and took part in excavations on Malta. From 1929 through 1935, he directed digs at Auja el Hafir and other locations in the Negev desert. According to a three-volume report on his archaeological excavations in Palestine published years later by Princeton University Press, the expedition “uncovered the remains of an ancient village in the Negeb. Among the ruins was found a hoard of Greek papyrus documents dating from A.D. 500 to A.D. 700, which are a welcome addition to the mere handful of such documents found outside of Egypt and are the first to come out of Palestine.” The excavation found that “the little Palestinian town went in heavily for religious literature but, what is more surprising, that at least some of the people in this Greek-speaking community had copies of Virgil and glossaries to help them read him. Among the finds is a Latin-Greek glossary of the Aeneid, to be dated in the 6th Century, which is by far more extensive than any similar Latin-Greek glossary thus far published.” Also found were fragments of the Gospel of John. “These show that even at a late date in a comparatively obscure place, an astonishingly pure text of the New Testament was in common use.” Colt ended his field work around 1940, “I think a contributory factor may have been a realization that his personality prevented him from having some of the toughness which directing excavations needs,” wrote Crystal-Marie Bennett, a pioneering woman archaeologist and friend of Colt. Bennett said Colt later admitted to her “that the rigours of field archaeology were not for him and that he had preferred to use his talents in other ways to help archaeology.” To that end he established the Colt Archaeological Institute, which financed archaeological digs but especially focused on publication of archaeological findings. “To be published by Colt was a sought after honour among archaeologists,” Bennett wrote in a 1974 tribute to her friend. Colt also inherited a love of collecting from his father, who had assembled an extensive series of engraved, historical views of New York City. For years he worked on updating an encyclopedia of American engravers. The work was done in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, of which he was a longtime member. For much of his life, Colt would spend the warmer half of the year in London and the colder six months in the United States. Here he would usually focus on researching engravers while in London, it would be archaeology and Kipling. Besides Ridgefield, he had homes in New York and Washington. “Colt may have been shy and diffident, almost retiring, but he was completely cosmopolitan, equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, with a truly global approach to life and a breadth of vision which brooked no limitations, particularly in archaeology,” Crystal-Marie Bennett wrote. His first wife, Theresa Strickland Colt, died in 1955. In 1957 he married Armida Maria-Theresa Bologna Walsh, a native of Trieste, who later donated thousands of items in her husband’s archaeological, engraving and Kipling collections to museums and libraries in the U.S. and Europe. Many ancient pieces were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1984 and 1987, she donated 2,500 Kipling items to the Library of Congress which established the H. Dunscombe Colt Kipling Collection. It includes Kipling first editions, periodicals, books about Kipling, books Kipling owned, photographs of Kipling and his family, and drawings, manuscripts, letters, and clippings. Colt died in 1973 in London at the age of 72 and is buried in an old country churchyard in Sussex, overlooking the South Downs in England.

 

Armida died in Washington, D.C., in 2011 at the age of 99. According to her obituary, she “loved entertaining both in Georgetown and in London, where she lived part of the year.”

Note on Husband: Harris Dunscomb COLT

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Colt-116

Note on Wife: Teresa STRICKLAND (1)

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Strickland-7939

Note on Wife: Teresa STRICKLAND (2)

52 PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY impossible that Colt was in Oxford when on IJune 1920 the honorary degree of DLitt was conferred on Themistocles Zammit by the university, and that Colt heard Zammit lecture on Malta's antiquities in London. On 26 November 1927, Colt married a Maltese girl, Teresa Strickland. It is in circumstances related to the archaeology of the island that Harris and Teresa seem to have met, for Margaret Murray mentions them as her helpers in the Valletta museum during her archaeological activity on Malta, noting that only 'later' was Teresa to become Mrs Harris Colt (1963, 129). Indeed, it is very likely that Murray introduced Colt to Petrie, her colleague at University College in London, after meeting him in Malta. It is also a possibility that Colt came to Malta with Murray's expedition. The friendship with Teresa, and his breadth of vision, must have allowed the young Harris to move within archaeological circles with ease and to nurture further his childhood interests. By the end of his second visit to the island, at the age of twenty-one, he had already delivered a lecture on the archaeology of Malta at the King Edward VII social club on 28 February 1922, advertised in the columns of the Daily Malta Chronicle. The contents of the lecture can be surmised from a letter Colt wrote to the New York Tribune from Malta a day later in which he informs Americans, in a most succinct way, of the most interesting remains of this 'dot in the Mediterranean' (Colt 1922). His knowledge of the archipelago's antiquities was sound and in tune with the latest discoveries being made by Themistocles Zammit. The date of 300 B.C. for the island's Stone Age remains is surely a misprint as if the newspaper editor was obliged to·knock a zero off the unrealistic 3000 years which was Zammit's estimated age for the Maltese prehistoric temples, proven correct by radiocarbon dating more than thirty years later. Through Teresa, a long-standing friendship with Themistocles Zammit was also estab- lished. Teresa's father, Charles, had been a good friend of Zammit and with him he shared a passion for Malta's ancient past that was instilled in Charles at a very tender age through his parents, both active in the promotion and study of Malta's ancient remains (de Trafford 1998, 39). Charles' death in 1918, and of his wife a few years later, meant that Teresa had tobe given away in marriage by her uncle the Prime Minister of Malta Sir Gerald Strickland, the sixth Count della Catena, later elected to peerage (Hornyold 1928, 20 I). This ensured for Colt a swift entry into the highest echelons of Maltese society and an entry in the island's Who)s Who ([ I 930], 13I). The newspapers of the time describe the lavish wedding reception attended by 1500 guests, including Zammit himself, held within the walls of Villa Bologna, Gerald Strickland's aristocratic home (Daily Malta Chronicle, 30 November 1927)

Note on Child 1: Harris George Charles Strickland COLT

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Colt-115