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present counties of Clare, Galway, and Mayo, whence came the family name, in a contraction of Connaught-Galway to Connelly, Conly, Cory, Coddy, Coidy, and, finally, "Cod " Y•
All this almost makes sense. However, it is only one of the legends Mrs. Wetmore offers up as fact in her book, despite her disclaimer in the preface that "embarrassed with riches of fact, I have had no thought of fiction."
For the truth about William Cody's lineage, we must turn to Don Russell's authoritative biography, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Russell's research was thorough and exemplary; the notes for his book in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, are proof of that.
According to Russell, "Buffalo Bill's most remote definitely known ancestor was one Philip, whose surname appears in various surviving records as Legody, Lagody, McCody, Mocody, Micody ... as well as Codie, Gody, Coady, and Cody."
Russell traces Philip to Philippe Le Caude of the Isle of Jersey, who married Marthe Le Brocq of Guernsey in the parish of St. Brelades, Isle of Jersey, on September 15, 1692. Although the family names are French, the Channel Islands have been British possessions since the Middle Ages. No Irish or Spanish in sight; just good English stock.
The Cody Family Association's book The Descendants of Philip and Martha Cody carries the line down to the present day. Buffalo Bill was sixth in descent from Philip. Philip and Martha purchased a home in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1698, and occupied it for twenty-five years, farming six acres of adjacent land. In 1720 Philip bought land in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and he and his family moved there, probably in 1722 or 1723. When he died in 1743, his will was probated under the name of Coady.
The spelling of the family name had stabilized by the time Bill's father, Isaac, the son of Philip and Lydia Martin Cody, was born on September 15, 1811, in Toronto Township, Peel County, Upper Canada. It is Lydia Martin Cody who may have been responsible for the report of an Irish king in the family genealogy; she boasted that her ancestors were of Irish royal birth.
When Isaac Cody was seventeen years old, his family moved to a farm near Cleveland, Ohio, in the vicinity of what is today Eighty-third Street and Euclid Avenue. That move would ultimately embroil William Cody in a lawsuit many years later, one of several suits he was destined to lose.
Six years after arriving in Ohio, Isaac married Martha Miranda
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Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)