relatively new on The Crying of Lot 49 wiki. (maybe by former Plister, Robin? )

[Mark Kohut]

There is a statue in Springfield's Stearns Square named The Pilgrim,
that 'honors one of the town's founders, the Deacon Samuel Chapin. I
have seen in some older histories of Springfield the name of Thomas
Pynchon's direct ancestor [great-grandfather back ten generations]
William Pynchon as the subject of that statue. But you all know how
unreliable history can be. William Pynchon was part of the first
British expeditions to the New World. William Pynchon is also
distinguished as the first writer to have a book---The Meritorious
Price of our Redemption, Iustification, &c.---burned in Boston, an
exile from the Puritans. a heretic among heretics.

But the number 49 has an additional meaning, very deeply buried in
Pynchon family history. Popular Law Library, Albert Hutchinson Putney'
has Pynchon v. Stearns, a court case concerning estates and property
rights in the legal concept generally known as the Waste Doctrine. The
'Pynchons' in this case were direct descendants of William Pynchon
whose establishment of Springfield had grown over the passing two
hundred years, abbuting into the interests of the Stearns Family who
set up in Salem the same time William Pynchon founded Springfield. And
for some reason, page 95, citing 'Pynchon v. Stearns', has the ominous
heading: Section 49: Who May Commit Waste.

The Stearns family were, like the Pynchon Family, among the first
settlers in New England, beneficiaries of John Dee's cartography,
becoming a force to be reckoned with as the lands they aquired as
early settlers became a center for American investment banking
services and the insurance industry.

Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929) was a social worker, a poet and
the mother of T.S. Eliot. She wrote two long poems concerning Giordano
Bruno, published in the The Unitarian - A Monthly Magazine of Liberal
Christianity, look for pages 320 and 564 in the link. Giordano Bruno
was famously burned at the stake, and his demise echos a number of
scenes in The Courier's Tragedy.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l