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ENGRAVERS JOHN GREGORY HANCOCK AND HIS SONJulia Casey submitted these notes on engravers John Gregory Hancock and his son. -Editor 
Clarifying Biographical Detail for John Gregory Hancock and his son In last week's E-Sylum, Allan Davisson wrote about the "DIE ENGRAVING PRODIGY JOHN GREGORY HANCOCK." While there does exist a charming series of tokens made by the young John Gregory Hancock (born c. 1791), the fine work attributed to J.G. Hancock was done by his highly skilled artistic father. As I wrote in a footnote to my article "John Harper, J.G. Hancock, and the Washington Cents," which was published in the Journal of Early American Numismatics (December 2004) and republished in Penny-Wise earlier this year: Unfortunately, John Gregory Hancock's biographical details have been misreported in numismatic references with an erroneous date of birth of 1775, which was instead the first year he is estimated to have been active as a diesinker. J.G. Hancock has also been conflated with his son, John Gregory Hancock, Junior (born c. 1791), who, as a pre-teen, produced charming tokens while working in his father's shop. See Pete Smith "The Hancocks, Die Engravers Part II: John Gregory Hancock, Jr.," The Conder Token Collectors Journal, vol. VIII, no 3, Fall 2003, 20–9. Even with Smith's attempt to correct the record, these errors are now seemingly embedded in numismatic references. In preparing for this article, I spent much time poring through baptismal records before I was able to find information about the elder John Gregory Hancock and his family in Wales. John Gregory Hancock (1750–1805) and his older brother, William, had been apprenticed to Matthew Boulton's Soho shop in their early teens in the mid-1760s. Their father was Robert Hancock (1714–1792), who worked for Boulton as an engraver at Soho. The Hancock family moved to Birmingham from Kerry, Montgomeryshire, Wales, sometime in the mid-1750s. John Gregory Hancock is shown in the Montgomeryshire records with a baptismal date of June 27, 1750. He was the son of Robert and Anne, and the surname was recorded as Hancox. Also shown in the Montgomeryshire records are the baptisms of his older brothers, Robert, on November 20, 1740, and William, on September 9, 1747. J.G. Hancock's elder brother, Robert Hancock, immigrated to Philadelphia and was involved there with John Harper and Harper's brother Richard. This creates a link between John Gregory Hancock and the early history of the U.S. Mint. 
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
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