Recently I posted a question about my ancestor John White. In order to find out a little more about him, I read some of the descriptions of him more carefully and came across the following quote (from his service history in the DAR Lineage book).

John White, (1758-1845), was a substitute for his uncle Amos Grosvenor.

A little more research (back to the Barbour Records) shows that there was an Amos Grosvenor of Pomfret, Connecticut, who married a Mary Hutchins in 1755. This would imply that he is one (or at most two) generations older than John. Is it reasonably likely then that Amos was really the uncle of John, or has the usage of the term uncle changed over time?

Here I define an uncle as someone who is a brother of a parent or married to the sister of a parent. If the former, this would imply that John's mother's maiden name was Grosvenor. If the latter, it would be Hutchins. In either case, it would eliminate the Jacob White/Dinah Cutler possibility from John's possible parents.

If Amos is two generations ahead of John, then we can still glean some info from this, though I haven't gone through that effort quite yet.