Recently when C.A. Carpenter presented Gene C. Zubrinky’s fine article on the net, I was more than intrigued by it. Of particular interest to me was the Robert Carpenter data, which even a meticulous, family historian like Gene, finds “tantalizing”. Robert (b. 1494) I understand was a known sheep rancher who then put his children into trades. The whole area of Wiltshire and Hampshire had become an enormous sheep raising area for England, which then exported finished cloth. All through the late 1400s and early 1500s the population exploded, while private land (enclosure) found its way into fewer and fewer hands. Finally in the mid 1500s the wool and cloth market itself suffered a severe collapse. The resulting social conditions, as you can imagine, were pitiful with people with poor prospects wandering around in search of work. I was always puzzled by the father and son William, who were themselves trade carpenters, with a pattern of frequent change of address. My own study of the medieval Carpenter family convinces me that the previously known Carpenter Herefordshire line was just a part of a greater family, with many more members than was previously supposed. It seems to me that a great many Carpenters (if not most) in the Wiltshire/Hampshire region could easily have a family tie in the 1500s. Added to this is the traditional Carpenter connection to wool and cloth, a tradition the Carpenters brought to New England and one that some family members carried on. The apparent wanderings of the father and son Williams should not in any sense bewilder, but rather fit right into to the social history patterns of the 1500s. I think we need to abandon the traditional notion of a thin thread of Carpenters twisting its way back through time. At any rate, I hope to investigate this problem more. Sincerely, Bruce E. Carpenter