Is it Robert's Rules or Roberts' Rules? Where does that pesky apostrophe go? Both appear on the Internet, as does Roberts Rules. Robert's Rules is correct, for their author was General Henry Martyn Robert.

Henry M Robert was born in Robertville, Jasper County, in the southeast corner of South Carolina on 2 May 1837. His family were Huguenots and emigrated from Switzerland to the then Colony of South Carolina with the great Huguenot exodus of the late seventeenth century. They settled in the French Santee part of Charleston. The nature of their connection with Robertville is not known. Henry's grandfather, James Jehu Robert was born there in 1781. About the middle of the eighteenth century they changed from French to English first names. Henry Robert's descent can be traced back to a great x 9 grandfather Guillaume Robert, born about 1544 in Lelocle, Neufchatel, Switzerland.

At age 16 he was sent to West Point Academy and from there graduated into the US Corps of Engineers. His first assignment was to Washington Territory in charge of engineering operations. During the Civil War he helped plan the defences of Washington DC, Philadelphia Harbour and New Bedford,. Massachusetts. During his long military career he served in many parts of the United States. He was promoted Brigadier General a few days before his retirement in 1901.

He was married twice: first, in 1860, to Helen Marie Thresher of Dayton, Ohio, by whom he had four daughters and a son; then, a few days after his retirement, to Isabel Livingstone Hoagland.

Henry M Robert is described as 'sparingly built, gregarious and determined'. It is difficult to deduce much about him from these cryptic remarks. His two life interests were the army and the church. In 1863 he was asked to chair a church meeting in New Bedford which became turbulent and to which he was unable to bring order. Subsequently he discovered that there was no accepted set of rules for running such meetings and he began a study of parliamentary law and in 1869 published his first pamphlet on the subject in San Francisco. A few years later, in Milwaukee he wrote the manuscript of Robert's Rules of Order and in 1875 four thousand copies were printed. Two further editions were published the following year. In 1915 Robert's Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies, usually just known as Robert's Rules (Revised) were published and these remained the standard work for many years. In 1921 and 1922 Robert published two manuals on Parliamentary Practice and Parliamentary Law. These were still in print in the 1970s. General Robert died on 23 May 1923 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The 1915 edition is now out of copyright but subsequent editions with various changes have been produced and these are copyright. These editions were produced by a team headed by the General's daughter-in-law, Sarah Corbin Robert, in which her son, Henry M Robert III, collaborated. The big surprise about the author of Robert's Rules is that apparently no biography exists; at least the writer, despite Internet searches and enquiries in libraries, has been unable to find one. Robertville is not mentioned in BCAA's Tour Guide; South Carolina tourist sites mention briefly that General Robert was born there and list the only historic building as the Baptist church. A telephone directory check failed to find a single Robert resident there-but many in South Carolina. Robert, with his Rules, devised one of the important lubricants of society and his name is, and will be, remembered long after the names of more eminent contemporaries have been lost in dusty records. Army and church records surely contain much information about him. If there is a plaque to his memory it was not mentioned in any of the websites consulted. Perhaps General Robert's lack of recognition is partly due to his service in the Union army during the Civil War. He must have been regarded as a renegade in his home state especially since less than ten years before the War he had been nominated to a West Point cadetship probably by one of South Carolina's political leaders.

Material for this article has been obtained from the Internet, the International Genealogical Index and from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ron Dowle.