Leaving the Baker genealogy for Mrs. Eddy’s maternal ancestry, in the same history of New Hampshire families it is stated that Mark Baker married Abigail Ambrose of Pembroke. She was the daughter of Deacon Nathaniel Ambrose, a man at once pious and public-spirited. He gave the money for the first Congregational church built in Pembroke. Mrs. Eddy’s mother and the grandmother of Hoke Smith, ex-governor of Georgia, and later, United States Senator from Georgia, were sisters. Governor Smith’s father wrote the following letter at the time of a public discussion of Mrs. Eddy’s family, a discussion which lacked a proper comprehension of the family’s standing in its community and its honorable connections. Mr. Smith sent the letter to the Committee on Publication of The Mother Church, which allows this reprint:
I have known the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy from childhood. She is my first cousin. Her mother
through a long line to her. It is: Vincere aut Mori. The crest was carved in the mahogany of the lintel above the inner vestibule entrance of her beautiful home on Commonwealth avenue, Boston, where she resided before her retirement to Pleasant View. She also used the crest as a seal and expressed her pleasure in the sentiment of the Scotch strain by having the coat of arms embroidered on white silk and hung in her library.
But a sudden denial to her rights so to enjoy this connection with the Scotch McNeils came through a Scottish descendant of the McNeils living in Aberdeen. Whereupon Mrs. Eddy had a thorough investigation of her genealogy made and being unable to establish the accuracy of Fannie McNeil’s genealogical claims, upon which she had hitherto rested, she requested that all biographers refrain from connecting her with the Rt. Honorable Sir John McNeil, G.C.B., of Edinburgh, sometime ambassador to Persia. It is therefore sufficient to state that Mary Baker Eddy’s great-grandparents were McNeils; that General John McNeil, the American hero, was her grandmother’s cousin.
