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Tag: Hayneses

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

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

    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)

    The Coward Test: Charles Haynes (1736–1806)

    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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