Lawyers, diplomats, journalists, industrialists, and artists, of Delaware. Family members include Martin W. Bates (1786-1869), physician, merchant, and lawyer, of Dover, Del., who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1857; his adopted son Daniel Moore Bates (1821-1879, originally the son of Rev. Jacob and Mary Jane Moore, and adopted by Bates in 1829 after the death of his parents), a lawyer, of Wilmington, who served as U.S. district attorney for Delaware (1852-1861) and chancellor of Delaware (1865-1873); Daniel Moore Bates, Jr. (1849-1899), son of Daniel Moore and Margaret Handy Bates, Episcopal priest and missionary, who served in China and later at churches in New York and Pennsylvania; George Handy Bates (1845-1916), eldest son of Daniel Moore and Margaret Handy Bates, who moved to Michigan in 1864 pursuing a business career but, because of ill health, was forced to return to Delaware in 1866 where he became a lawyer and expert in constitutional and international law and subsequently was appointed by Pres. Grover Cleveland, as special agent to investigate affairs in Samoa, later practicing law in Wilmington and Philadelphia; Charles Theodore Russell Bates (1871-1895), son of George Handy Bates and Elizabeth Ballister (Russell) Bates, graduate of Harvard (1892) and was involved in the study of law when he died of a gunshot wound; Daniel Moore Bates, Jr. (1876-1953), second son of George Handy Bates, chemical engineer who lived in Maine and later Wilmington where he pursued a career in manufacturing, particularly in the textile industry, and later played a leading role in the study and preservation of the town of New Castle; Bertha Corson (Day) Bates (1875-1968), wife of George H. Bates and daughter of Richard H. And Frances Corson Day, originally of Philadelphia, an artist who studied with Howard Pyle and became an illustrator, giving up her career after her marriage, but continued to remain involved in art as well as social and cultural affairs in Wilmington; Frances Corson (Bates) Muir (1909-1953), daughter of Daniel Moore Bates, Jr., and Bertha Corson (Day) Bates, who was married first to Frank Schoonmaker (1932-1940) and second to Peter Muir (b. ca. 1898) in 1941; and her husband Peter Muir, a journalist who worked for several humanitarian organizations and as a foreign correspondent in India and elsewhere, living in Europe and Bermuda after World War II.
From the description of Bates family papers, 1830-1970. (Historical Society of Delaware). WorldCat record id: 123945343
