Showing posts with label Palmer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palmer. Show all posts

Friday, December 21, 2018

New England Weddings in my Ancestral Line: December 1st through 7th

Three of my direct ancestral couples married during the first week of December: 6X great grandparents Jonathan Palmer and Mercy Manwaring were united in Stonington, Connecticut, on December 1, 1706; 8X great grandparents John West and Renew Carpenter married in Rehoboth, Massachusetts on December 4, 1703; and 7X great grandparents Jonathan Aldrich and Mary Wilson wed on December 4, 1740 in Smithfield, Rhode Island.

The first paragraph of Old-Time Marriage Customs in New England by Alice Morse Earle published in The Journal of American Folklore in 1893 sets the stage for a wedding:



This excerpt from  Pamela McArthur Cole's article on New England Marriages,* gives us an idea of the traditional setting for weddings.*



Also my 7X great grandmother Sarah Nutting, left widowed by my ancestor Jonathan Farnsworth five years earlier, married John Stone on December 7, 1698, in Concord, Massachusetts.

*These two articles were originally published one after the other in the same issue of The Journal of American Folklore. Both are worth reading although I don't think either would meet modern standards of scholarship.


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Where Were My Ancestors About 1796? Abraham Bradley's Map of the United States: Part 2

This is a continuation of my post earlier this week using Abraham Bradley's postal map of 1796.  This is just an exercise to get a handle on where all of my American ancestors were during the Federalist Era.  I can already see the fatal flaw of adding ancestors by going up and down my tree as opposed to grouping by location--for instance, I actually have a lot of people who were in the western Pennsylvania area, but there will be separate maps for the family groups in this iteration because they are on different branches of my tree.  I will put together a more concise version at a later date.


In Bertie County, North Carolina, possibly in the Salmon Creek area, John H Hardy, 23, was married to his first wife, Jamima Wilson, and they had a toddler Etheldred.  Jamima would die in the next year.  John's mother Sarah Sowell, 63, had been widowed 3 years before when her husband William Hardy died, and she would be listed in the 1800 Federal Census as head of household in Bertie County, North Carolina.   John's future second wife, Elizabeth Ward, 21, daughter of Thomas Ward (who had died the year before at about age 60) and Pheraby Sowell, about 47.  John Hardy and Elizabeth Ward were distant cousins--their mothers were both descendants of Richard Sowell (born c. 1659).


John Chappell, 33, had moved to Georgia probably in the mid to late 1780's from Sussex County, Virginia, likely with his parents, Revolutionary veteran John C Chappell, 58, and Nancy "Nannie" Harrison, 55.  Like Jesse Warren Sr he was in the area that would become Hancock County, Georgia. John and his wife, Sarah "Sallie" P Heath, 25, had several small children by the time the map was made.  Sallie was the daughter of Valley Forge veteran Abraham Heath, 56, and Winnifred "Winny" (??), 50, who had moved from Surry County, Virginia to Burke/Warren County, Georgia 10 years earlier.
Josiah Freeman, 33, was likely in Oglethorpe County, Georgia with his first wife, Susannah Hawkins, and at least 5 small children.  He had likely moved to Georgia sometime between 1786 and 1790.  He was originally from Virginia, possibly Sussex or Surry counties.  His parents William Freeman, 58, and Sarah Williams(??), about 56, were in Surry County, North Carolina, and may have originally been from Surry County, Virginia.  All these Surry counties!!  It gets confusing.  Elizabeth Jordan, Josiah's second wife, was only about 9 in 1796.  I have not yet figured out who Elizabeth's parents were.  Elizabeth was born in either Georgia or possibly South Carolina.
Richard Turner, 17, had been born in Cascade, Pittsylvania, Virginia, and had moved with his family to Wilkes County, Georgia (part of which became Lincoln County) when he was about 5.  His parents, Shadrack Turner and Margaret Hill, were both about 45.  Mary Henderson, 15, would marry Richard about 3 years later in Wilkes or Lincoln County.  She had Virginia as place of birth on the 1850 and 1860 Censuses, but I have not yet been able to determine who her parents were, although there were numerous Henderson families in Elbert County (neighbor county to both Wilkes and Lincoln) at the time she would have married Richard.



William Porter was born in May 1796 in Sheffield, Caledonia, Vermont, to Benjamin Porter, 24, and Lydia Wilcox, 21.  It is not clear why they were there, as they had married in Surry, Cheshire, New Hampshire the year before, and were back there by the 1800 federal census.  Benjamin's widowed mother Esther Carpenter, 57, allegedly didn't die until 1827 in Lyme, Grafton, NH, but apparently didn't head a household in the censuses and probably lived with one of her adult children.  Lydia's parents, physician Obediah Willcox, 72, and Sarah Talcott, 61, were likely living in Surry, Cheshire, New Hampshire.
Joshua Shepard, 43, and Lucia "Lucy" Farnsworth, 34, were living in Alstead, Cheshire, New Hampshire.  Joshua's parents, Jonathan Shepard, 87, and Love Palmer, 79, had divorced 32 years earlier (about 1764), and had both subsequently remarried.  Love had married a Mr. Heard or Herrick (date unknown), and she died 23 July 1796 in Alstead, Cheshire, New Hampshire.  Jonathan had married Mary Underwood in 1765 and lived in Windsor, Windsor, Vermont, where he died 2 years after this map was made (26 March 1798).  Lucy's parents, Thomas Farnsworth, 65, and Elizabeth Davis, 68, also lived in Alstead (they had moved there sometime between 1776 and 1790).








© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Monday Is for Mothers: Mercy Manwaring/Mannering (1685 - 1739)

A life-long resident of the Connecticut Colony,* this paternal sixth great grandmother was born in New London in 1685. She was the daughter of Oliver Manwaring and Hannah Raymond.
[Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova by Willem Janszoon Blaeu, ca. 1635. Based on the 1614 explorations of Adrian Block
Boston Public Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center]

Since the first record (in transcription) we have of Mercy is her profession of faith and baptism on October 5, 1702, it's clear that her family belonged to a sect that didn't believe in infant baptism. The same source documents her marriage to Jonathan Palmer of Stonington on December 1, 1706 and presumably the couple settled there.
[Ancestry.com. Connecticut, Church Record Abstracts, 1630-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: 2013.
Original data: Connecticut. Church Records Index. Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut.]

Six years later there's another mention of Mercy (called Mary here in the transcription) on June 2, 1712, in church records for Stonington, which is the last mention of her in the records.**
[Stonington, CT: First Congregational Church Records, 1674-1874. (Online Database. AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2008), Originally published as: History of the First Congregational Church, Stonington, Conn., 1674-1874 with the Report of the Bi-centennial Proceedings, June 3, 1874. Richard A. Wheeler, T. A. David and Co., Norwich, CT, 1875.]

We believe that Mercy and Jonathan had nine children, seven daughters and two sons. I descend from their daughter Love (1717-1796) whose great great great granddaughter was my father's mother, Letta Estella Porter Warren Williams Turnbull.

While Stonington church records give us the date of death for her husband on August 26, 1726, I haven't found a similar listing for Mercy. There is an unsourced claim that she survived Jonathan for 13 years, dying on March 4, 1739.

*Originally settled by the Dutch which is why I've chosen the above map.
**Birth records only list the father of the child.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Monday is for Mothers: Love Palmer (1717-1796)

My paternal fifth great grandmother Love Palmer was baptized in the First Congregational Church in Stonington, Connecticut, on June 2, 1717. When she was actually born depends on which source you refer to, but it was mostly likely in March of that year.


[Stonington, CT: First Congregational Church Records, 1674-1874. (Online Database. AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2008), Originally published as: History of the First Congregational Church, Stonington, Conn., 1674-1874 with the Report of the Bi-centennial Proceedings, June 3, 1874. Richard A. Wheeler, T. A. David and Co., Norwich, CT, 1875.]

On December 23, 1736, she married Jonathan Shepard in North Stonington.

[Ancestry.com. Early Connecticut Marriages [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.
Original data: Bailey, Frederic W. Early Connecticut Marriages as Found on Ancient Church Records Prior to 1800. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1997.]

In October of 1758 their tenth child, a daughter also named Love, was born to the couple and that's the end of the records we've found for Love Palmer Shepard.

Some accounts say that Jonathan and Love divorced around 1765 but I haven't found anything to either confirm or refute that assertion. In New England, divorce was a civil, not religious, matter and most common in Connecticut and Massachusetts. So it's not as unlikely as if these ancestors were living in Virginia or South Carolina.

Those same accounts declare that Love Palmer Shepard was married a second time to a man with the surname Hearick (given name unknown) and died in Alstead in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, on July 23, 1796. Once again, there's no documentary evidence to support these claims. There's certainly a gravestone in Alstead Center Cemetery with the name Love Hearick on it and many of Love and Jonathan's children settled in Alstead, but is this really the grave of my fifth great grandmother or did she die in Connecticut around 1765?

[Source: Find A Grave Memorial# 38144881; Photo by Kristin Jones (#47028934)]

Jonathan Shepard and Mary Underwood were married in Tolland County, Connecticut, on January 31, 1765, and by the first U.S. Census in 1790 was living in Vermont, where he died on March 26, 1798.


© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.