How They Keep the Secrets

What can be learned from studying the list below which sets out the dates of beginning and ending service (we assume, since the columns are undefined) of the entire list of trustees of Yale since 1701? There's no way to know the answer unless we do the work. See research below on these names. Many sources to assist are now available through Google Books, including:

• Biographical Sketches and Annals of Yale College by Franklin Bowditch Dexter, 1745, where the index begins at page 767, but the easiest way to search is to use the online search engine.
• The organization of American culture, 1700-1900: private institutions ... By Peter Dobkin Hall, is not a free e-book, but nevertheless quite interesting and available in libraries: Publisher: New York : New York University Press, 1984.

Original Bonesman's Family Helped Found Yale

In Search of Yale's Roots

The story of Yale, as told by Edwin Oviatt, in The beginnings of Yale (1701-1726), published in 1916, began in England where John Davenport, John Cotton, Thomas Mather and Theophilus Eaton lived in fear of their lives if they continued to practice the religious faith they shared. The four men would meet up once again in "the new world" in 1637 at Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which Davenport had fled into the arms of his old friends. There Harvard College would be founded, which remained the only upper level educational institution until the establishment of Yale in 1701.

It is the purpose of this post to determine who were the men most responsible in those early days for creating the university now known as Yale. Eventually, we will also connect those original founders to the secret society known as Skull and Bones.


Rev. John Davenport soon became dissatisfied in the Puritan colony in Massachusetts and desired to dominate his own group, which he set up the following year at New Haven on land acquired from some friendly Indians. 

Life and Ancestry of William Huntington Russell

From: Genealogical and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation. Volume I

William Huntington Russell

General Russell was born August 12, 1809 , in Middletown, Connecticut , where three of his ancestors had been pastors of the First Congregational Church, a continuous period of one hundred and eighteen years, and his father, deacon for thirty years. Before entering Yale he was for several years a cadet in the famous military academy founded and conducted by Captain Alden Partridge (U.S.A.), a graduate of West Point, and for twelve years previously professor and military superintendent at the National Academy at West Point.  This academy [Russell's] was similar to West Point, having as an object the preparation of young men "to command in time of need the hastily raised troops of a great and growing nation," and General Sherman stated that it at one time almost rivaled the National Academy at West Point. It was these years of strict military discipline that gave General Russell such a knowledge of military affairs and influenced his life work. The death of his father [Matthew Talcott Russell], aged sixty-eight, from acute erysipelas, and changes in the fortunes of the family threw the care of his mother (who had vigorous health to the age of eighty-seven) upon him, and he subsequently entered Yale under circumstances of severe financial adversity. He was self-supporting in college, and in all his frequent journeys between New Haven and his home in Middletown (twenty-six miles) was obliged to go on foot, owing to financial necessity. Such was his ability and industry that, in spite of these impediments, he graduated as valedictorian in 1833, at the head of a class which in sophomore year numbered one hundred and twenty-two students, among whom were many who attained much distinction in their life work. He had hoped to enter the ministry. Urgent financial necessity, and the need of assuming responsibilities left by the death of his father, forced him to give up his earnest desire to study theology, and he then began teaching, to obtain immediate income. In September, 1836 , he opened in a small dwelling house, a new private school for boys, preparatory for college. With only a few pupils at first, and no assistance from any one, and owing only to his personality and scholarship, his school rapidly became large and famous, and when it closed at his death, May 19, 1885 , there were said to have been four thousand young men from all parts of this and some foreign countries under his care as pupils. During about half a century there were at Yale young men who had prepared for college under his care. Never seeking to lay up riches, giving away freely of what he had, he was ever ready to assist many young men who without means sought an education.

Following the Forbes Money Trail

Rosemary Forbes Kerry

We now return to the family of Rosemary Forbes, wife of Fred Kerry's son, Richard, John Forbes Kerry's father. John Kerry would go to Yale and be inducted into Skull and Bones in the class of 1966. He became a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, running against another member of Skull and Bones, George Walker Bush, class of 1968.

Small world!

The Forbes Family Tree

Richard Kerry's Father-in-Law

Clarence Hatry of Austin Friars' Trust

After his stint at AIC, James Grant Forbes (Rosemary's father) was, according to Alistair Tayler’s description of him in his book--The House of Forbes, published in Aberdeen in 1937--a director of Austin Friars Trust. This so-called trust was merely a ponzi scheme, built by Londoner Clarence Hatry with fraudulent assets, and set up in 1927 which led to the stock collapse in 1929, triggering the great depression in the United States. [10]  The public outcry in the aftermath of this scandal led to creation of the Bank for International Settlements--further centralization of the global banking industry.  

Forbes was also a director of Blair & Co., Ltd., a large investment banking company—often associated with the Boston investment bank of Lee, Higginson & Co.—which played a central role in financing the Dawes Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War I. [11] This relationship with Blair & Co. would place him in contact with the central players who devised the means of creating and financing a global one-world government.

Control by a "Hidden Hand"

Is it a mere coincidence so much of today's wealth can be traced back to opium barons of the past? This blog is about Gold--the symbol of political, financial and global power--and our primary interest is in tracking the historical roots of today's power. In 2004 I was fascinated by my electoral choice for the American Presidency coming down to two men inducted into a secret society that annually "taps" only 15 new members. What are the odds of that? Would we learn something about how our world is controlled--and by whom--to look into the background of one of these men? Thinking at the time that those who supported George W. Bush were so embarrassed by his policies that they would switch to his opponent, I chose to research John Forbes Kerry. His ancestry is equally illustrious and even more shocking.

Who "Controls" Our World?

"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand."

    Benjamin Disraeli, speaking through fictional character

    Sidonia, based on Lord Rothschild, in Coningsby 

Rosemary Forbes Kerry's Ancestors

Born in Paris in 1913, Rosemary Forbes Kerry overlooked her husband's parentage, finding him acceptable perhaps because he had attended Phillips Academy and had just graduated from Yale in 1937 when they met at her parents' summer home in Brittany. They married in 1941, shortly after he received a degree from Harvard Law School. 

The Untitled Aristocracy

 © 2004 by Linda Minor

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste, not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy....A scholar is almost always the son of scholars or scholarly persons. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will at once acknowledge.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Elsie Venner (1859) [1]

The Call to Arms

John Forbes Kerry accepted the Presidential nomination at a speech at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2004 amid rousing oratory praising him as a patriotic veteran who volunteered to serve his country in the war in Vietnam. The details of what inspired his decision, however, were not revealed. Identifying the forces that motivated Kerry to enlist in the Navy in 1966 reveals much more about him than the fact that he served on combat duty in the war. Let's go back to 1966 to find out.

Kerry was recruited by William Putnam Bundy (Yale, Skull and Bones 1939), John F. Kennedy's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who made a speech at Yale University in 1966. Three years after Kerry's "hero," President Kennedy, had been violently murdered while beginning his plan to withdraw all American forces from Indochina, Bundy arrived at Yale to support the war Kennedy had vowed to end. Immediately after JFK's assassination, Lyndon Johnson had reversed Kennedy's National Security Memorandum 263 and kept Bundy on in the same position as before.

Following the Yale speech, where he was "greeted as a legacy of the slain president," Bundy paid a visit to his own nephew, Harvey Bundy III, a resident of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, who shared a large suite complete with fireplace with roommates including John Kerry. Bundy remained there "into the wee hours of the morning." [2] Bundy's advice to the young men was to be trained as officers for the war in Vietnam—to serve where their country needed men of their calibre and breeding.  He meant, of course, men from that class of “untitled aristocracy,” who were bred to lead the masses and control events.