Naebody in Particular

You won't find them on a shortbread tin, but our ancestors live on so long as we keep telling their stories. Scots, Yanks, Canucks and the Auld Enemy. Newest posts are the ancestors, but scroll for the living.

In Case She Return: Bethia Payne (~1680–1724) and Dorothy Milbury (fl. 1692–1702)

August 18, 2026

In June 1695 an old man at York sat down to write his will, and somewhere in the middle of the bequests he had to make a decision most people never have to make.

Henry Milbury had to decide what to leave a daughter he could not prove was alive.

Henry was baptized at Stoke-in-Teignhead, in Devon, on 7 August 1625, son of a William Milbury about whom the record knows nothing but the name. He crossed the way half of coastal New England crossed — undramatically, unrecorded. He turned up at York, Maine, and married a daughter of one William Dixon.

(Dixon is worth ten seconds on his own. He came over in 1630 as a servant to Governor Winthrop, and by 1635 he had jumped his bail. In January 1636/7 he bought a house at York and lived in it for thirty years — cooper, juryman, name on the tax lists, dead in bed with a will.

Whatever the governor of Massachusetts wanted him for, nobody in Maine appears to have cared. If these people kept diaries about their feelings, they neglected to leave them somewhere I could read them.)

Then Henry settled into the business of being one of a few thousand people living on the Maine frontier. He farmed on Alcock’s Neck. He took the oath of allegiance in the spring of 1680. He was granted twenty acres in 1691. That is very nearly the complete public record of sixty-six years, and it is the record of a man to whom nothing had happened.

Then, at dawn on a Sunday in January 1692, that stopped.

First, the calendar

The record calls what happened that day the Candlemas Massacre, and the name needs ten seconds too, because it is not English.

Candlemas is 2 February — the Feast of the Purification, forty days after Christmas, the day the church blesses the year’s candles. York did not keep it. Puritan New England had scrubbed the holy-day calendar down to the Sabbath and a couple of civil fasts, and 24 January 1691/2 was a Sabbath: the minister, Shubael Dummer, preached that morning to a congregation that had no particular feeling about candles.

The French did keep it. And the French were on the Gregorian calendar, ten days ahead of the Julian one England was still using, so the day York experienced as Sunday 24 January was, to the men coming through the snow, 3 February — Candlemas and a day. The massacre is named for a feast the dead did not observe, on a calendar they did not use. The name arrived later, from the other side.

Then, the raid

Somewhere between 150 and 300 Abenaki and Canadians, under the Penobscot sachem Madockawando and the priest Louis-Pierre Thury, came into York through the snow and took the town apart. They burned the undefended houses along the north bank of the York River, which was where the town was. Dummer was killed.

The dead were counted at about fifty by Banks, who assembled the casualty list; other accounts say a hundred, and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Roughly eighty people were marched north toward Canada, in Maine, in January.

Henry Milbury lost most of his family between dawn and the end of that day.

His daughter Elizabeth — killed. Her husband, Thomas Payne — killed. His brother Richard, who had been baptized in the same Devon parish sixty-three years earlier and had followed him to the same town — killed. His daughter Dorothy — taken. His granddaughter Bethia, eleven years old — taken. His grandson Samuel — taken, or so it was reported. His son William was already dead.

Three and a half years later, nearing the end, he wrote his will. Not one of them had come back.

The document

When he came to Dorothy he could not write her down as living and could not write her down as dead, so he wrote her down as both:

Unto my Deer Daughter now In Captivity with the Indians Dorothy Millbury I will & give the Summ of five pounds, In case she return by gods good Providence from captivity, but if not till then to be paid which Legacy I Intend not payable by my Son at all if she never return.

A will is a document for settling known quantities. It exists to convert a man into a list. Henry got most of the way through his list and then hit a line item the form does not accommodate, and rather than guess, he wrote a contingency: five pounds, conditional on an outcome no one alive could report, payable never if the condition failed.

A few lines down, three grandchildren. My two grand children Bethiah Pane & William millbury ten Shillings apeice. William was the son of the son who had died; he was in York, and could be handed the money. Bethia had been in Canada for three and a half years. They are named together anyway. My Grandson Samuell Pain the Sum of ten Shillings sits by itself, on its own line. Whether that means anything, I can’t tell you.

The will was proved on 1 October 1695. Henry was dead inside four months of writing it, still holding the question.

What nobody wrote down

Which leaves seven years, and we do not know one thing that happened in them.

Neither woman wrote anything down. Dorothy’s entire file is two entries — she appears as a captive on a numbered list of prisoners held in Canada, at page 78, and she is recorded as having returned. Bethia’s is a redemption date. Between the two ends of each there is nothing. No letter, no deposition, no line in a French parish register that anyone has yet turned up.

What there is instead is a genre, and the genre is the reason we know anything at all about what those years were like for anybody. The captivity narrative: the ordeal, the providential hand of God, the spiritual lesson wrung out of the suffering. Mary Rowlandson published the template in 1682 and it sold like nothing else in the colonies. If you were lucky enough to come back, you gave the world your testimony.

Neither of these two gave anybody anything. But other people did — from the same war, the same coast, and in some cases the same raiding parties — and while none of it can tell us what happened to Dorothy and Bethia, it tells us what the range was.

Hannah Swarton was taken at Casco Bay in May 1690, twenty months before York, and walked to Quebec. She was put in Indian dress, one pair of shoes, no stockings, and the arrangement was that she kept their pace or was killed where she stopped.

Her feet were cut by stones and by ice, and she said that many times she thought she could go no further, and that if they meant to kill her they could kill her. She was on the move from May to February. The York captives walked in January.

What waited at the other end was not one thing. Swarton was handed along, begged provisions off a French housewife, and was eventually ransomed out of Abenaki hands by the wife of the Intendant of New France — the colony’s chief administrator, second only to the governor.

She was given French clothes, taken to the hospital, bled and physicked and looked after, and made a servant in the house, and she said the French were as kind to her as she could have expected the English to be.

She also spent five years under steady pressure to convert, which is the part Cotton Mather cared about when he printed her account in 1697. A good deal of the piety in the printed version is probably his rather than hers.

John Gyles got both ends of it. Taken at Pemaquid in August 1689, aged nine: six years with the Maliseet, then sold on to a French seigneur on the St John River, then freed in June 1698 — one year before Bethia came home.

He wrote his own account and published it in 1736, and it refuses to resolve into a thesis. It holds the French household that treated him decently at the end, and it holds his own brother, burned to death for trying to escape.

And underneath all of it runs the thing the narratives are structurally incapable of showing you, because the people it happened to never came back to write one.

A woman from Oyster River was taken in 1689 with two daughters, and all three of them stayed. The widow married Edward de Flecheur in Canada in 1710. Her daughter Judith, born 1676, was baptized there as Marie Magdeleine, married Jean le Conte in 1698, and was buried in 1703 — a whole adult life, in French, in the parish books of a country she had been carried into at thirteen.

Swarton herself got out in 1695; her daughter Mary did not, and was rebaptized Marie Souart that February, and was still on the list of those left behind when her mother’s ship sailed.

The pattern is age. Adults were ransomed, listed, exchanged and shipped home. Children taken young were absorbed — baptized, renamed, married into a parish — and after enough years there was no particular reason left to go. That was not the system failing. That was the system, and the paperwork is in French because the people ended up French.

Bethia was eleven going in and eighteen coming out, which is precisely the profile that usually didn’t come out at all. Everything about her file says she should have become somebody’s Marie.

So here is the entire honest contents of those seven years. Two women walked a few hundred miles in winter with the people who had just killed their family, lived through something in a small colony that had a documented interest in keeping them, and then declined to stay. Whatever was asked of them, they didn’t take it. I’d rather hand you the hole than fill it.

Afterward

Bethia was redeemed to Casco Bay in January 1698/9, after seven years, at eighteen — into a province that had burned down around her when she was a child. The war had ended by treaty the previous September, which is probably the mechanism: less bought back than handed back, in the general accounting.

Dorothy came home too. The date isn’t in anything I’ve got — only that she returned, and that in October 1702 the York court recorded her marriage to John Grant. Which is the sort of ordinary sentence that only reads as a miracle in context. The five pounds became payable.

And then the paper closes over her again. No death, no burial, no further entry of any kind. She outlived the worst day her town ever had, walked back out of Canada, got married, and the record lost interest in her.

Samuel never appears again either. No Canadian record, no redemption, no return. The most likely reading of that silence is not a good one.

Bethia had a testimony to give and a market ready for it. What she left is a conveyance. On 5 December 1711, thirty-one and single, she deeded her dead father’s 1683 land grant to her uncle Richard Milbury, with full warranty. It is the only document of hers we have. (Full warranty, too. She wasn’t leaving her uncle exposed to a title dispute.)

She married Joseph Preble, born at York in 1691 and eleven years younger than she was — whose grandfather was the immigrant Abraham Preble, who reaches me twice: once here, on my father’s side, and once by a completely separate line down my mother’s to Nana, whose own mother was a Preble. Two arrivals, three hundred years, one man.

A daughter, Hannah, in 1714. Bethia died at York in May 1724, around forty-four, in the town she had been dragged out of at eleven.

She could have written the bestseller. The century wanted a testimony out of her and would have paid for one. She gave it a daughter and a deed instead. After what the records had already done to her family, I can see the appeal of being unremarkable on purpose.

Sources. Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby & Davis) — the Milbury, Payne, Dixon and Preble families, and the Canadian marriages and baptisms of captives who did not return. Henry Milbury’s will, 10 June 1695, proved 1 October 1695, York County probate (Maine Wills, 1640–1760) — the source of the clause the post is named for. Charles Edward Banks, History of York 1:271 — the raid and the casualty list. A Narrative of Hannah Swarton, printed by Cotton Mather in Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (Boston, 1697). John Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, &c. (Boston, 1736). The Irving Preble Genealogy, register no. 19 — Bethia’s marriage to Joseph Preble and their daughter Hannah, 1714. The York County deed of 5 December 1711 by which Bethia conveyed her father’s grant.

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The Charter and the Pond: Capt. Noah Wiswall (1638–1690)

August 11, 2026

Capt. Noah Wiswall (1638–1690) was fifty-one years old and had ten children the summer Massachusetts asked him to walk into the woods and go to war one more time.

He said yes.

He was a generation past the age when a man is expected to do this, he had a farm in what’s now Newton and a wife and a houseful of kids, and when the colony raised two companies to chase a French and Abenaki raiding party north, Noah took one of them.

It was King William’s War — the European powers had decided to be at war again, which on the New England frontier meant France arming the Abenaki and the Abenaki fighting to keep the English from spreading any further across their lands.

On 4 July 1690 a raiding party hit Exeter. Exeter held. The party fell back and made camp on the shore of a pond named for the Rev. John Wheelwright, in what is now Lee, New Hampshire. Those two Massachusetts companies went after them — one under Capt. John Floyd, one under Noah.

His scouts found the trail at first light on 6 July. The militia came down on the camp and the thing turned into what the old accounts called “a running fight through the woods, after the Indian fashion.” When it was over, three officers and fifteen men were dead — Noah among them, along with his lieutenant Gershom Flagg and his ensign Edward Walker.

And one of his sons. John Wiswall was about twenty years old and in his father’s company that morning, and he died there too.

Theodocia Jackson Wiswall, forty-seven years old, buried her husband and her son on the same day, with five children still living and the youngest fourteen. She remarried four years later, the required next step for a woman of that time after doing the arithmetic of how to stay alive.

The aftermath has its own grim comedy, if you want it. Floyd kept the field for hours after Noah fell, until enough of his men were dead or bleeding that he pulled the rest out — and was promptly second-guessed by people who weren’t there, for not staying longer.

Capt. James Convers rode out at sunrise the next morning, found seven of the wounded still alive in the woods, carried them to a hospital, then went back to bury everyone else.

The Charter

By strange coincidence, while Noah was dying in those woods for Massachusetts Bay, his older brother was in London, losing a different fight to the same colony. The Rev. Ichabod Wiswall was the minister of Duxbury, Ma., down in Plymouth Colony.

In February of 1690 — months before Noah marched — Plymouth scraped together the money to send Ichabod across the Atlantic to plead for a royal charter. Little Plymouth had never had one, and without it the colony was a legal ghost, eyeballed by its bigger neighbors. Ichabod went to London essentially to keep Plymouth on the map.

On the other side was Increase Mather — the heaviest minister in New England — who was working the same court for the opposite result: fold Plymouth into Massachusetts Bay and be done with it.

Two reverends from Dorchester, arguing over a colony’s life in front of the Crown. Mather won. The 1691 charter erased Plymouth and handed it to the Province of Massachusetts Bay — a hostile takeover with a king’s signature on it.

One Wiswall brother dies in a Massachusetts Bay company defending Massachusetts Bay’s frontier. The other watches Massachusetts Bay swallow the colony he’d crossed an ocean to save. Both Wiswalls lost to the same flag in the same eighteen months.

The Monument

Newton put up a monument to its first settlers, and Noah is on it: “Capt. Noah, of the expedition against Canada, killed in battle with the French and Indians, 1690. Leaving a son Thomas.”

Not to be salty, but Noah’s daughter Margaret is the reason I’m here. She married a Parker and carried the line out of that grief and down to me.

He went into the woods at fifty-one and didn’t come back, and somewhere in the wreckage of that summer is a girl who would grow up and marry, ensuring her father was somebody’s ancestor instead of only a name carved on the south side of that monument.

Yet the monument speaks of the son but fails to mention the daughter.

Sources. The Wiswall Genealogy — descent and the Newton, Massachusetts marriage to Theodocia Jackson, 1664. WikiTree (Wiswall) and the Newton Vital Records — Noah’s children, including John, killed beside him, and the eldest son Thomas, named on the First Settlers Monument. Contemporary accounts of the Wheelwright’s Pond fight, 6 July 1690, and of Ichabod Wiswall’s charter agency in London.

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The Talent for Not Dying: Reuben Wentworth (1729–1826)

August 4, 2026

Family legend says my five-times-great-grandfather Reuben Wentworth was at Bunker Hill.

He was a forty-five-year-old farmer out of Shapleigh, in the District of Maine, which was not yet a state, just the far north end of Massachusetts. Most of the people who fought on the seventeenth of June, 1775, were half his age.

The stories do not say which company Reuben fought with. This sounds like an unimportant distinction, until you realize that the two options means the difference between “standing on a different hill and listening to it” and “killing several hundred redcoats at forty yards.”

To make matters more confusing, the Battle of Bunker Hill was apparently not fought on Bunker Hill. There are two rises on the Charlestown peninsula, and the militia were sent up to fortify the taller one in the dark. At sunrise, they found themselves dug in on the shorter one: Breed’s.

Nobody has bothered to correct the name of the battle in two hundred and fifty years. File that away. It comes back under oath.

The 30th Maine

Maine sent exactly one regiment to the war that year: Col. James Scamman’s 30th Regiment of Foot, raised out of York County — Kittery, Berwick, York, Wells, Arundel. Reuben’s neighbors, more or less. A return of 9 June puts it at three hundred and ninety-six men fit for duty.

On the seventeenth they marched toward the guns. They did not arrive.

Somewhere on the Cambridge road they met two men on horseback who said the regulars were landing at Lechmere’s Point, so the regiment went to Lechmere’s Point. There they ran into Col. John Whitcomb, who was acting as a general officer that day, and who testified against them the following month:

“I asked him what brought him there, he replied by asking me where he should go. I told him where he could do the most service.” Two colonels in a field, one asking the other for directions to the largest event of both their lives.

Scamman understood the answer to mean a hill. There are, in the vicinity, several. He picked a small round one a mile off and stood on it watching the British floating batteries.

How long he stood there is the single most disputed fact in the record. A quarter of an hour, said one ensign. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Half an hour or more. Three-quarters, said the major, the drummer and the adjutant.

At some point Scamman sent two sergeants over to Bunker Hill to ask whether his regiment was “wanted.”

Then Charlestown caught fire, and that finally did it. Scamman saw the meeting-house burning, and he marched the regiment up Breed’s Hill with all possible dispatch, going in under fire, with the shot flying thick.

Scamman shouted the line he is now stuck with forever: “Come, my Yorkshire lads, now let us show our bravery.”

Unfortunately, his timing wasn’t great. He was shouting the line that would outlive him at a hill the battle had already finished with. Men were coming down past them, saying they had spent all their ammunition. Scamman ordered a retreat and, according to one soldier, “every one made the best of his way off.”

Even a month later, those involved didn’t know the difference between Bunker’s Hill and Brewer’s Hill. Everybody in that transcript means Breed’s. Nobody in it says Breed’s.

Scamman’s court-martial convened 13 July 1775 on a charge of disobedience to orders and backwardness in the execution of his duty in the late action on Bunker’s-Hill. He was acquitted, but was out of the army before the year turned.

In testimony, a Major Daniel Wood was called, and the record notes that the Major could not say any more upon the case, “for he was not so happy as to reach Bunker’s-Hill for the whole day.”

Major Wood lived in Shapleigh.

The 1st New Hampshire

If family legend suggests Reuben actually fought in the battle, we’d have to assume he marched with his western neighbors.

Shapleigh sits on the New Hampshire line. Rochester is a morning’s walk. Men crossed that border for work, for wives and for regiments — Reuben himself married Eleanor James in December 1768 at Somersworth, on the New Hampshire side.

New Hampshire sent Col. John Stark.

The American line on Breed’s Hill ended in the air on the left. Capt. Thomas Knowlton saw it and took his Connecticut men down behind a farm fence — half stone, two rails of wood — six hundred feet back from the redoubt, threw up a second fence in front of the first.

It looked like a breastwork. It wasn’t — in plain words it gave no defensive cover, since all they had to close the gaps in the fence was newly cut hay.

Col. Stark and the bulk of his regiment arrived between two and three o’clock, crossing Charlestown Neck while the ships and shore batteries raked it end to end.

When he arrived, he looked at the ground and saw the thing nobody else had. The fence stopped at the top of the bank. But, below the bank, at low tide, lay a strip of Mystic River beach — a clear road, wide enough to walk a column down.

So he ran the fence down the bank, and at the bottom his men threw the beach stones into a wall to the water’s edge, in about the time it takes to describe it.

Then John Stark took a stake, walked out in front of his own line thirty or forty yards, drove it into the sand, and told his men: “Boys, the red coats are coming up the hill. If one of you fire a gun till they reach that stake, I’ll shoot him.”

(That one reaches us third-hand — Caleb Stark had it from George Washington Parke Custis, who said he had often heard Washington tell it. Which is a game of telephone, but with the Father of His Country on one end of the line, so I am pretending like it is gospel.)

The British right came down the beach in column at a run — the light infantry, the best they had.

A British officer wrote home two weeks later that their light infantry were served up in companies against the grass fence, without being able to penetrate. Most of the grenadiers and light infantry, he wrote, lost three-fourths of their men the moment they presented themselves, and many lost nine-tenths. Some companies came out of it with eight or nine men. Some came out with three.

The next morning, Gen. Winslow of Boston walked the ground at ten o’clock, before anything had been buried, and counted ninety-six dead in front of that little stone wall on the sand.

None of which was winning the battle. Half a mile to the right the men in the redoubt were down to a round apiece, and Howe sent the third assault in with orders to leave the muskets alone and use the bayonet.

The redoubt fell that day. The rail fence did not. It held long enough for the men coming off Breed’s Hill to get across the Neck, which is the only reason that day was a retreat and not an annihilation. Stark pulled his people out in good order and had to stop them going after the British rear on the way, because they had thrown the attack back so many times they thought they had won.

Then he went home

Let’s be honest about how family legends work.

If Reuben had been down on that beach with 1st New Hampshire, we would know it — fame and glory are not things a family loses track of.

What was passed down through generations was totally devoid of any specifics. In my limited experience, a legend that vague is only vague because nothing in it is worth inflating.

So my money is on Reuben being with the 30th Maine and the little round hill. Either way, he got back to Shapleigh and lived another fifty-one years.

Longevity, not military service, seems to be the fact this family was most interested in keeping. The Wentworth Genealogy of 1878 mentions Reuben made ninety-six, and the book says his widow made it past a hundred.

The rest of his years weren’t any easier than his day in, on or around Bunker Hill.

In Reuben’s sixties, the sea took three of his sons. Reuben Jr. fell from a mast at Wells about 1794. Enoch and John shipped out of Boston in 1797 and did not come back.

The son who carried the line to me was William, born at Shapleigh on 24 July 1776 — thirteen months after the hill, and twenty days after the founding of the country. William’s daughter Sarah was born at Lebanon, Maine, in 1802 and married a Parker.

(William died in 1863 at Grimsby, Ontario, which, for what it’s worth, I am choosing not to read anything into.)

Reuben Wentworth died at Lebanon, Maine, on 18 May 1826, fifty-one years and eleven months after the hill — the part of his life that got remembered, whether true or not.

Sources. The Wentworth Genealogy (1878), v.1 no. 263 — Reuben and Eleanor, their marriage in 1768, his death at Lebanon on 18 May 1826, her death past a hundred, and the three sons the sea took. It is also the family’s authority for Reuben at Bunker Hill. Nathan Goold, History of Col. James Scamman’s Thirtieth Regiment of Foot (Maine Historical Society, 1899) — the York County regiment, the return of 9 June 1775, and the minutes of the court-martial of 13–17 July 1775 as Scamman himself published them in the New England Chronicle or Essex Gazette, bracketed remarks and all. Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston (1851) — Knowlton’s hay-stuffed rail fence, Stark’s stone breastwork on the Mystic beach, and the British letters on what the light infantry lost there. Caleb Stark, Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark (1860) — the crossing of the Neck, the stake in the sand and its chain of custody, and the ninety-six counted dead the following morning. Maine and New Hampshire vital records — the 1768 Somersworth marriage, and the descent through William Wentworth (1776–1863) and his daughter Sarah (1802–1891).

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The Difference Between Fact and Hope: Abraham Parker (1788–1864)

July 28, 2026
Abraham Parker was the first ancestor who ever told me to go to hell.

Well, not in so many words — when he died 160-odd years ago, what he left me was a handful of records that named everyone in his life except his parents. That was the problem. Not that the trail ended. That I couldn’t see where it went.

Getting to him was easy. He’s my great-great-great-grandfather, and every link from me to him is a Parker: my father, his father, his father, his father, then Abraham (1788–1864). Married Mary Haynes in Natick in 1813.

And then the trail just stopped.

It stung in a way I didn’t expect, because Abraham was a Parker. My Parker. By blood he’s no more or less family than a Titus or a Pike or a McCrillis — same fraction of me, same distance back.

But Parker’s the name on my driver’s license, and my mailbox, and yet here was Abram — he signed it both ways — cruelly slamming the genealogical door in my face.

It wrecked me a little. It also kept me up for weeks. So I did what every beginner does when a wall won’t move.

I forced it.

Here’s how you force it. You pattern-match on names — and the colonial records are lousy with the same dozen first names, doubly true if the names are biblical. You “eliminate” the people who can’t be related to you, and whatever is left is your family.

When I did this, Abraham’s father was Elijah Parker of Freetown, and his grandfather was Capt. Elisha Parker of Scituate. And then, a couple generations back, my tree hit a vein of pure gold:
- A Mayflower passenger. Henry Samson, who sailed on the Mayflower itself in 1620 at about sixteen years old. He survived the brutal first winter, living another 64 years and having nine children.
- A man who helped hang an innocent woman. Henry Kinne Jr. — one of the people who gave testimony against Rebecca Nurse during the Salem witch trials. Nurse was about as sympathetic (and demonstrably innocent) a victim as the panic produced: elderly, devout, a respected member of her church.
- One of the creepy girls who did the accusing. Priscilla Lewis Kinne had a sister, Mercy Lewis, who was one of the “afflicted girls” at the center of it all. Orphaned when her family was killed in a raid on the Maine coast, by 1692 she was one of the most active accusers in Salem, her testimony helping convict more than a dozen people.
- A Hilton. Hannah Hilton, a few branches up the same invented line, and the reason I spent an afternoon reading about a family that turned out not to be mine.
- A cousin of Longfellow. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was suddenly my somethingth-cousin-something-times removed. Longfellow even wrote a famous poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish, romanticizing this exact generation of Pilgrims.
These were my people, I just knew it. Even the crazy ones … they were totally my type of crazy. I was so sure.

About a week later it caught up with me. I had known all along, in the part of my brain I’d stopped listening to, that I hadn’t eliminated all the possibilities — I just wanted so badly for it to be done and true that I just … stopped looking. This “strategy” of genealogy has a shelf life. It lasts right up until the moment the Judeo-Catholic guilt sets in, and you feel compelled to start looking again.

It turns out that the real answer was quieter than the fantasy. After another two weeks of banging my forehead on the desk, it turned out that Abraham’s father was Francis Parker of Newton — son of Enoch Parker, a Harvard schoolmaster.

Behind Francis? No Mayflower, no witches, no poets. Just a documented line of boring-but-safe Parkers whose only excitement seemed to be moving from Newton to Dedham and back every two or three generations.

It isn’t a bolt of satisfaction lightning when the answer arrives without a single dramatic document to close the case in one stroke — but I’m learning that type of Indiana Jones #$@# doesn’t happen.

But my flirtation with the other Abraham did cost me. I had fallen in love with my false Parker family tree.

I loved my very own first Mayflower hit. I loved that I was related to a Hilton (Hannah, not Paris). I even loved that I was related to the creepy girl in Salem who lied about witches.

So Abraham told me to go to hell. Turns out he didn’t care that I wanted him in my tree so badly that I made him dress up as someone else.

It’s awkwardly fitting that the ancestor who taught me to wait for the truth instead of inventing it was the one whose name I’d been carrying the whole time.

Hopefully, because I’ve now learned it first on my own name, it’ll stop me from screwing up anybody else’s.

Sources. The 7 September 1845 Roxbury, Massachusetts marriage record — Abraham entered as “widr., a. 56 y., mason, s. Francis and Mary,” the document that names his parents. Newton, Massachusetts vital records — the single Francis Parker of that generation, son of Enoch, married to a Mary. Natick, Massachusetts vital records — Abraham’s 1813 marriage to Mary Haynes.

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The Coward Test: Charles Haynes (1736–1806)

July 25, 2026

The oldest man on the road to Lexington that morning was seventy-eight, and the last thing he did with his life was threaten to call his cousin a coward.

His name was Josiah Haynes, deacon of the Sudbury church for forty-two years, and on 19 April 1775 he heard the same alarm everyone west of Boston heard. The alarm wasn’t the patriotic fairy tale we hear about “The British are coming,” but instead the much more ominous “the Regulars are out” — the British army was marching out of Boston.

Haynes got dressed, said goodbye to his family, and walked into a war. Massachusetts enrolled every man from sixteen to sixty, and Josiah had cleared that ceiling by eighteen years. Nobody was coming to his door with a musket and a grievance if he stayed home and let the young men handle it. He went anyway.

What happened that day were the first shots of the American Revolution. The British marched out of Boston to seize the colonists’ guns and gunpowder, and the colonists … well, let’s say they declined to hand them over. What came next was an all-day firefight that turned into an eight-year shooting war that ended with a new country. This was the morning it started.

Josiah, the dead Sudbury deacon, isn’t, strictly, mine. Josiah is my first-cousin-blah-blah-times-removed — related but off to the side.

The man who is mine is Charles Haynes (1736–1806), my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who marched out of Sudbury that same morning at age thirty-eight.

The Haynes name walks into the Parkers through Abraham Parker’s wife Mary Haynes — the same Abraham I’ve written about before, the one who taught me the difference between fact and hope — then quietly disappears, which is the usual fate of a surname that didn’t win the patriarchy coin toss.

What you need to know about Sudbury in 1775 is that it was lousy with Hayneses. The town turned out wholesale, and a frankly unmanageable fraction of the men in the column shared one of about six first names and exactly one surname.

One company marched under Charles’s second cousin, Capt. Aaron Haynes. Somewhere in the ranks was a Joshua Haynes. There was the deacon, Josiah.

(The casualty list that day couldn’t keep the Hayneses straight either, which I only point out to show that mixing up people with the same name is not a problem I invented.)

The Sudbury men got to Concord and found the company under orders not to start anything.

This did not sit well with the deacon.

When the captain (his Haynes cousin, remember) held back at a bridge at the outskirts of town, the old man rounded on him — if you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward. When you sit with this for a minute, you see it’s an extraordinary thing for a seventy-eight-year-old deacon to say to an armed officer thirty years his junior on the first morning of a new war.

Just then, the British regulars decided to get the hell outta Dodge, and their road home became a bloody, grueling twenty-mile gauntlet.

The militia caught the column at Merriam’s Corner and never let go — firing from behind stone walls, from doorways, from the tree line, melting back and reappearing a quarter mile on. It was the opposite of a battle. It was a slow, ugly, deeply effective bleeding-out of a professional army by farmers who knew the ground.

Somewhere along that road, our deacon was shot while he was reloading his musket. He was one of two Sudbury men killed that day, and one of roughly forty-nine Americans dead by nightfall.

The records refuse to tell us where Grandfather Charles Haynes was in the fray. But presumably he and the rest of the Haynes army pushed the redcoats into what the history books call “Parker’s Revenge” — the payback Capt. John Parker laid on the British for the blood spilled earlier that morning on Lexington Green.

(Was Capt. Parker a cousin, you ask? Well, now that I’m recovered from my Abraham Parker fiasco, I’m ready to be hurt again, so, yes, yes, I’m absolutely certain he’s related.)

The rolls of who did what that day are a mess — they can’t keep Josiah and Joshua apart, never mind everyone else. For a long time I wrote Charles to the margin of his own family’s day, hedging, probably present, because I didn’t have the paper. But that was me applying a courtroom standard to a thing that doesn’t need one.

The honest read is the obvious one: a thirty-eight-year-old Haynes, in a town turning out to the last man, in a clan that marched under one cousin and buried another — and presided over by an octogenarian deacon who would publicly call you a coward for hanging back — was on that road. The deacon would have made damned sure of it.

So the Hayneses marched out together, and that evening the rest of them walked home. The deacon didn’t. Charles did — which is the only reason I’m here to tell you he was missing a man.

But walking home only bought him the first day of eight years. Bunker Hill was two months off, and the war he’d marched into that morning had years left to run.

The line runs through the one who walked back, the way it usually does. They named a school after the one who didn’t.

Sources. Frances Haynes, Walter Haynes of Sudbury and His Descendants (1929), no. 151 — patriline and descent. Alfred Sereno Hudson, The History of Sudbury, Massachusetts, 1638–1889 (1889) — Deacon Josiah Haynes’s death at Merriam’s Corner and the exchange that gives the post its name. Natick and Sudbury, Massachusetts vital records — the Haynes–Winn marriage, 1759. Josiah Haynes’s gravestone and his Find A Grave memorial, the latter carrying the rival version of the “coward” line that this post sets aside.

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Canadian Bacon: Joshua Moore (1804–1870)

July 21, 2026

In 1837 Governor Robert Dunlap of Maine announced that a foreign power had invaded. He wasn’t wrong, per se, but to be clear, he was talking about Canada.

What followed was a genuine international incident between the United States and the great white north, and it produced exactly one agreed-upon casualty — a man who, depending on which account you believe, drowned, froze to death, was run over by an army supply wagon, or was trampled to death feeding horses.

We’ll get to him later.

First, the war. My great-great-great-grandfather Joshua Moore (1804–1870) — up the Parker side, through the McCrillises — was thirty-five and living in Sanford, Maine, which made him precisely the kind of man who was “supposed” to be fighting this whole thing.

The fight itself was over a line on a badly drawn map. The 1783 Treaty of Paris had drawn the border between Maine and New Brunswick in language so vague that fifty-odd years later nobody could say where it ran — which would not have mattered, except the disputed strip turned out to hold the best timber in the northeast.

Crews from both sides were cutting it, much to the chagrin of the other side. Maine got so grumpy that it sent its land agent, Rufus McIntire, up the Aroostook with a posse to arrest the Canadian lumbermen. The Canadians arrested him instead and hauled him to Woodstock in chains, for what the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, with magnificent restraint, called “an interview.”

Maine lost its damn mind.

The legislature appropriated $800,000 and called out the militia. Nova Scotia voted $100,000 to help defend New Brunswick. And the U.S. Congress, not wanting to be left out, authorized $10 million and fifty thousand men to go fight over pine trees. Soon, reports came in that British soldiers were sailing up from the West Indies to join the party.

To commemorate this absurdity, a fighting song was composed in Bangor and set, for reasons known only to Bangor, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” (“We are marching on to Madawask, / To fight the trespassers.”) And, yes, actual militia companies marched north actually singing it.

And then … nothing happened. Everyone had mobilized, everyone had dug in, but the fighting politely declined to occur.

At the time, great-great-great-grandfather Joshua Moore was a member of the Maine Militia for York County’s 1st Division, so he was sitting at home watching TV waiting for his call-up to battle.

President Van Buren, perhaps to boost his favorability numbers or push some sordid affair with a White House intern out of the 24-hour news cycle, sent General Winfield Scott north to keep the peace. Scott arranged a truce with the New Brunswick side by the end of March, and the whole pending apocalypse evaporated.

Mainers named it the Pork and Beans War, after the rations. And some say the ghost of Granddad Moore is still watching Fox News to this day waiting for his big call-up to “the show.”

Private Hiram T. Smith, American Hero

Now. About that casualty.

Roughly thirty-eight men did die during the Pork and Beans War — none in combat, all from disease, exposure, or accident, most of them while cutting a military road through the north Maine woods in a winter that hit forty below.

But the one everybody remembers is Private Hiram T. Smith of Haynesville, who holds the distinction of being the only agreed-upon casualty of a war nobody fought, and the further distinction of having died in about six mutually exclusive ways.

In 1930 the Daughters of the American Revolution put a marker on his grave — a generous gesture toward a man whose war had nothing whatsoever to do with the American Revolution. The marker it had replaced lauded him as a casualty of the “Indian Wars, 1828,” a conflict and a year to which he had no connection.

The rival candidate for sole casualty, depending on who you ask, is a cow shot by mistake during the victory celebration at Fort Fairfield. Or a pig that wandered across the border at the wrong moment. The records, with admirable consistency, do not say.

So that’s the war Joshua sat out: a ten-million-dollar mobilization whose lasting monuments are a fort that never fired a shot, a fighting song set to a tune none of us know the words to, and a grave in Haynesville that can’t get the man, the war, or the decade right.

Postscript: Joshua’s Son-in-Law’s Brush with Glory

A real war did find this family. It came a generation late, but even then the Parker Family still missed out on the action.

Joshua’s daughter Elizabeth married a man named Elihu McCrillis, and in September 1861 — five months into the Civil War — Elihu enlisted as a musician. He mustered into the band of the 9th Maine Infantry, which promptly sailed to South Carolina, and settled into garrison duty on the Sea Islands and later at Fernandina, Florida.

But Elihu was gone before anything got too exciting, because in the summer of 1862, Congress looked at the books and decided the army’s regimental bands were a luxury it could no longer afford. Public Law 165 abolished them outright, and every band in the volunteer service was mustered out.

Elihu was discharged on 1 November 1862, having spent the deadliest war in American history playing music on the Carolina coast until the government laid off the band.

That’s the Moore men and their wars. Joshua drew the one with the pig for a casualty and wasn’t even called up. His son-in-law drew the one with the six hundred thousand dead and spent it in a brass section that got cut for cost.

But the best news is that both of them came home and made little grandfathers and grandmothers for me. Though to be honest, I assume that’s only because their wives didn’t give them the option to sit it out.

Sources. The Wentworth Genealogy (1878), vol. 2, p. 189, no. 2140 — descent. Maine militia muster rolls, 1838–39 — the record of who was called up for the Aroostook standoff, and the absence of Joshua’s York County division from it.

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The Wrong Scot: Ellen Boyle (1823–1866)

July 18, 2026

For about a week, Ancestry.com was confident I was from New Jersey.

It had me descending from a woman born in Marlton – which I assumed was in Scotland, but a quick consult of the atlas turned out to be a city in New Jersey, fifteen miles from Philadelphia. The town is named after marl, a green clay full of crushed shell that local farmers spread on their fields as fertilizer.

There is no Marlton in Scotland. There never was. The whole thing arrived in my tree the way these things always arrive: a bum merge, somebody else’s bad data welded onto mine by a hint I should not have accepted, quietly relocating a genuine Scottish ancestor to a Philadelphia suburb named after dirt enhancer.

It’s even funnier once you know I’d spent my whole life certain that it was being a MacDonald that made me Scottish.

My grandmother was Marion Louise MacDonald — Nana — and honestly her name did most of the work. You hear MacDonald and you picture heather and a tartan and somebody being treacherous to somebody else at a dinner party in 1692. I never questioned it. Of course I was Scottish. Look at the name.

But my MacDonalds had not been in Scotland for a long time. By the time anyone in my family was alive to tell me I was Scottish, the MacDonalds had been Canadian for well over a century. John @#$@#ing George MacDonald — my great-great-grandfather, the brick wall, the man Nana spent twenty years of her life trying desperately to trace past — was born in Nova Scotia and died in Nova Scotia.

So when John George was a seven-year-old Canadian, Helen “Ellen” Boyle (1823-1866) was on an actual boat, leaving actual Scotland. Ellen Boyle is on the Parker side. The side with the flat, unbothered English name that nobody ever accused of being from anywhere.

Ellen was baptized in 1823 in Troqueer, Scotland — a parish on the west bank of the River Nith, just south of Dumfries, in the old stewartry of Kirkcudbright. That’s Galloway, the bottom-left corner of Scotland, the part they don’t feature on the shortbread tin.

Through her childhood, Ellen’s family moved between three Galloway parishes — Creetown out on the granite coast, Troqueer, and Kirkpatrick Irongray inland — the tell of a family chasing work that keeps not lasting.

Her father James did a stretch in the Kirkcudbright tolbooth, the town jail, which in that time and place held one type of guest: men who owed money. (I looked for something more dramatic. There isn’t any.) He died in Scotland. So did Ellen’s mother, Mary.

Galloway in the 1830s and ’40s was a place you left. The handloom weavers who’d anchored the local economy were being ground out by the power looms in the cities. Wages collapsed.

When Parliament studied the misery, its experts arrived at a creative remedy. The government’s official advice for the crisis was for the affected Scots to leave Scotland.

Two of the Boyle children didn’t need to be asked twice. Ellen sailed to Massachusetts and married Charles Francis Parker in Newton — a Yankee, with no claim on a global heritage in him anywhere. Ellen’s brother went to a mill town up in Strafford County, New Hampshire, married a local woman, and dissolved into rural manufacturing without a ripple.

The parents stayed, and died. That was the end of the Boyles in Galloway.

Ellen was built to vanish. Lowland Scots came with the full assimilation kit — Presbyterian, English-speaking, literate — and dropped into Protestant Yankee New England like they’d been ordered from a catalog.

She married Yankee Parker in Newton, and then the couple drifted north to Rochester, New Hampshire — the same Strafford County mill country her brother had landed in. And, within one generation, whatever was left of Galloway in them was simply gone: the tolbooth, the three parishes, the granite coast.

So here’s the full stack, and I’d like a moment to appreciate it.

The branch of my family that defines diversity as “how many minutes are you outside of Boston” brought me the ancestor with the most recent claim on global citizenship.

And when I finally went looking for her, the machine briefly and confidently informed me she’d been born in New Jersey.

In a town named after fertilizer.

Sources. Scottish parish registers — Troqueer and the Galloway parishes (Kirkmabreck/Creetown, Kirkpatrick-Irongray), Kirkcudbrightshire. Newton, Massachusetts vital records — the Boyle–Parker marriage, 1843. Find A Grave — Ellen’s death at Rochester, New Hampshire, 1866, the record that fixes Thomas M. Parker as her son rather than Charles’s second wife’s. Kirkcudbright burgh court records — James Boyle’s imprisonment.

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Nana’s Papers: Marion Louise Macdonald (1906–2000)

July 14, 2026

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I started doing genealogy on 14 November 2018 (which I can tell only because that’s the beginning of my shockingly expensive Ancestry.com subscription) but I had the cheat code all along…

The big box of Nana Macdonald’s genealogy papers. Which I didn’t open until this past month.

Part of that gap was logistics — I began on my father’s side, and there’s obviously nothing in the box for that line. So, for a long stretch Nana’s papers had nothing to tell me.

But mostly it was on purpose. I wanted to make all my own mistakes first. Run down my own dead ends, misread my own records, learn the difference between a fact and a hope — before I asked my grandmother to bail me out. Starting with her answers felt like cheating when I hadn’t earned my own questions yet.

What finally got me to open it was a wall. I’d hit one. With John George MacDonald.

John George is a (beloved, I’m sure) ancestor a few generations up the MacDonald side — my great-great-grandfather, which makes him Nana’s grandfather. And I got stuck trying to figure out who was his father. For weeks I couldn’t get past him.

Every record I pulled either pointed somewhere unprovable or didn’t point anywhere at all. Heck, John George barely existed at all in the genealogical records landscape, so his father was necessarily a bridge or two too far.

So I opened up the box, looking for a way around him.

And somewhere in the middle of all those letters and worksheets, it landed: she’d hit a wall too. Same spot. Same man.

John @#$@#ing George.

Decades before me, with index cards and postage instead of databases, my grandmother had walked up to the exact same blank wall I was standing at, put her hand on it, and not gotten through either.

My grandmother — Marion, though the family called her Mike and I called her Nana — was not a casual hobbyist. Over a quarter-century, roughly 1964 to 1990, she filled a box with letters, worksheets, pedigree charts, and replies from archives and museums and clan societies, all of it done the slow way, most of it by mail. (My mother remembers it running back to the 1950s — trips to Massachusetts, comparing notes at each family gathering a good decade before the box’s oldest letter.)

She wrote to the public archives of Nova Scotia and the vital statistics office on Prince Edward Island. She wrote to Scottish clan societies, to a Catholic college, to cousins she’d tracked down and cousins she was still trying to. She bought books and microfilm. She filled out family group sheets and then filled them out again when a new letter came back and changed something.

She didn’t only write letters. She walked churchyards copying down tombstones, and made the occasional hopeful pilgrimage to a town clerk’s office only to be told the records she wanted had burned in a courthouse fire sometime in the 1800s. She and her eldest brother made those trips together — the two genealogy obsessives in the family, to the patient amusement of everyone else.

This was research with a six-week round-trip latency: write the question, mail it, wait, see what the answer breaks. Hope the letter doesn’t get lost or ignored.

In the past month, I’ve digitized four hundred and fourteen pages of Nana’s genealogy papers so far, and I’m barely halfway through. (There are still five folders of Preble and Haskell records in the box I haven’t touched.)

Whatever the final number is, it’s a lot of paper for one woman with a fountain pen and a stamp drawer.

If you spread the pile out, the first impression is mess. One sheet will have a name spelled three ways. Another will have four father candidates for the same ancestor, two of them crossed out. Margins full of question marks. Drafts of the same letter, slightly different each time.

On the surface, and with barely a date on any of the records to show the passage of her time, it looks like she was someone who couldn’t make up her mind.

But after months of digging, it turns out every crossed-out name is a lead she ran down and rejected. Every competing draft is a hypothesis she was holding open against a reply she hadn’t gotten yet. Pre-internet genealogy didn’t have a search box that returns ten answers in half a second. It had postage and patience, and you kept several possibilities alive at once because you had to wait weeks to rule any of them out.

So I’m not here to grade Nana against Ancestry.com. Instead, I decided to lean into reconstructing how she thought — what she’d nailed down, what she was still chasing, and why.

The families run in a few directions.

On one side, the MacDonalds and McEacherns out of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, traced back across emigrant ships to Scotland — to Glencoe, by family tradition, and to a Catholic bishop that wasn’t exactly widely discussed. (Nana pulled me aside one day, and looked at me like she was worried someone would find out, when she said to me “I think we have Catholics in our family.”) On the other, the Prebles and Haskells, with their own deep New England roots.

There are Scottish clan timelines and charts. There are book invoices. There are cousins writing in from Pictou and Charlottetown with pieces of the puzzle, and at least one relative doing her own legwork in PEI cemeteries on Nana’s behalf.

Here’s the part that gives the whole thing some weight. I never recorded or wrote down her stories, or saw a completed family tree, or asked her a question about her father or her grandfather.

And the joke, if it is a joke, is that I finally opened the box to ask Nana for help and found her standing at the same wall I was, just as stuck, fifty years early. So now it’s the two of us stuck.

I’m just the one who got here last.

So that — *gestures wildly at everything* — is the plan, and why I’ve started blogging again. I chose an archaic channel to post the results from an archaic hobby, built on 50+ year old documents stored in rooms without windows (or boxes stuck on closet shelves that haven’t seen the light of day once in the last 11 years).

A couple of times a week, as I work through the tree, I’ll post the story behind whatever human puzzle I’m trying to solve at the moment. From my Nana’s side, and from my father’s side (the Tituses … Titusi? … and the Parkers) too. Maybe even a photo or two if I can find them.

So far, I’ve found a steady stream of people who deserve more than a line on a chart.

And maybe I watched too many animated movies about the day of the dead (thank you, Book of Life) but it makes me happy thinking that these people are in the happy side of the afterlife because some random old white dude is running through his Nana’s box of genealogy notes.

God knows what I’ll put up and when, but that’s why I wanted to put this post up first. Now you know whose handwriting you’re looking at, and why I am desperately trying to read said handwriting.

More soon.
it’s been a good run…

February 16, 2022

so, it’s been a bit since this site was last updated. the daily updates stopped in early 2016, about 6 months after my father passed away.

but that’s (mostly) a coincidence. life got busy. i started taking fewer pictures. adobe lightroom, a subscription now instead of a one-time purchase, started seeming really expensive for someone who was taking fewer pictures. it got harder to sort. it got harder to post. trump got elected — i can blame him for everything, right?!? — so posting effectively stopped.

late in the pandemic, maybe 6 months ago, i resolved to get myself caught back up. i did — yay! — at least in the picture processing department. i swapped over to Apple Photos, which made everything easier. i actually went out and got a negative/slide scanner, and i’ve started running through a bunch of pre-2004 photos too.

truth be told, Apple Photos made everything easier EXCEPT getting the pictures onto this website. in the last many months, i sorted 8,145 pictures (since 2016) into 447 albums, but there is no easy way to put them into wordpress posts and get them shared out to the public.

so they’re locked up in my Apple ecosystem and shared only with the people i have email addresses for.

but i guess that’s okay. the main enjoyment i got out of the blog — remembering wonderful things that my notoriously weak memory can’t keep track of — i now get out of my TV. i figured out how to get these favorites you see on flickr hooked up to our Apple TV as the screensaver, and the whole family will legit sit on the couch for a quarter of an hour or more watching the pictures scroll past.

it’s lovely.

i’ll keep up a flickr account, certainly — pulling together my favorite hundred or two photos a year — and I’ll get those photos posted out in the ether. and maybe, someday, Apple will change their sharing function to make easier to share an album towards a blog or a website.

but until then, we’ll pause at exactly 3,200 posts over the last 17 years and 10 months. hopefully there will be more, but if not … it’s been a good run.
2021

December 31, 2021

First, the calendar

Then, the raid

The document

What nobody wrote down

Afterward

The Charter

The Monument

The 30th Maine

The 1st New Hampshire

Then he went home