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Tag: Massachusetts

  • Beyond the Pale: Samuel Parker (1631–1678)

    Beyond the Pale: Samuel Parker (1631–1678)

    Robert Parker was one of the finest scholars England produced in his century, and the king wanted him in chains.

    He attended Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a theologian good enough that Cotton Mather, two generations and an ocean later, called him the father of every Nonconformist in England.

    In 1607 he wrote a treatise that caused James I to put a bounty on his head. There’s even a whisper of royal blood — through his wife, a claimed granddaughter of a knight and a Lady Spencer (yes, the Spencer).

    He had a son who was a prominent civic leader in his own right, founding a town at the mouth of the Merrimack in Massachusetts named Newbury. There’s a river named for him too. And a grandson named Joseph, who settled in Andover and lived so long that he used his will to complain about his “great age.”

    This. This is the line you want at the end of your genealogical treasure hunt. A great line — a figure the right people have heard of, a person who isn’t responsible for any known genocide(s), a hint of royal blood, a town, a river. A line that leads inextricably to Samuel Parker.

    And Samuel Parker is my immigrant ancestor on the line of my father, the line that bears my own last name.

    It’s just … well … a different Samuel Parker.

    Joseph’s Samuel and my Samuel have the same death year, which looks promising at first. But fake Samuel was born in Andover in 1659. By that year, my Samuel had been married to Sarah Holman for two years, and was starting to think about making me some grandfathers.

    Looking through Ancestry.com it seems like there are 1.2 billion Samuel Parkers, which makes sense when you start to tease apart the name itself.

    Parker is a job. It comes into English with the Normans, from parquier — the keeper of a park. He walked the pale, the great banked fence around a lord’s hunting ground. He kept the deer in and the poachers out.

    It was a gentleman’s post, which is precisely how a handful of Parker families climbed far enough to collect the sixty coats of arms and the Earls of Morley that the surname websites can’t stop waving around.

    By 1300, England held more than three thousand deer parks — roughly two percent of the entire country fenced off for deer. Every one needed a keeper. Three thousand parks, three thousand-odd men called “the parker” by their neighbors, in every county with a fence and a herd, and not one of them was related to the next.

    An occupational surname has no ancestor. It has a trade. That’s why Parker was the forty-seventh most common surname in America the last time anyone bothered counting.

    It’s not like “Roosevelt” where you hear it once, and then you just know that everybody with that last name is related. When I punch “Samuel Parker, England” into the search bar, I’m not looking at one record in one church. I’m standing in front of a name that was struck — separately, simultaneously — in every corner of England.

    I’ve reached a wall. And my wall isn’t a birth certificate lost in a fire in the 1800s. My wall is the name itself.

    Two different Parker genealogists, one in 1911 and one in 1913, traced my family line back as far as they could go, and both wrote the same word and stopped: England.

    And that’s all I’m going to get.

    A name would sure help satisfy my completion fetish, but “father unknown” is what actually happens in real life.

    I’ll take the blank.

    So I’m done with the Parker surname, at least for now. I can turn my attention to the rest of my Parker family. The MacDonalds are next, then maybe the Tituses — or the Titusi? Followed later by the Pikes. And finally the-Haskells-and-the-Prebles, the family that taught me the definition of the phrase “pedigree collapse” when they intermarried so often that I lost a clear understanding of which family is which.

    If this is the end for the Parkers, that isn’t a failure of the work. It’s the edge of it.

    Samuel’s namesakes spent four centuries guarding the boundary — keeping what was inside the fence in, and everyone else out. The name still gets handed down. There are Parkers being born this year. And at the far end, it stops at a man whose own father was the literal boundary between the real and what we want the world to be.

    Beyond the pale, and no way through.

    Sources. Samuel Parker’s marriage to Sarah Holman (Dedham, 9 Apr 1657) and the birth of son Nathaniel (1670) from the Dedham Vital Records; his English origin without parentage from John W. Linzee, The History of Peter Parker and Sarah Ruggles (1913), and Augustus G. Parker, Parker in America 1630–1910 (1911), both of which carry the line only as far as “England.” Joseph Parker of Andover (tanner, d. 1678) and his son Samuel (b. 14 Oct 1659) from the Vital Records of Andover and Joseph’s will, Essex County Probate (dated 4 Nov 1678, proved 26 Nov 1678 at Salem). Rev. Robert Parker (c. 1564–1614) and his son Rev. Thomas Parker of Newbury (1595–1677, d. unmarried) from the Dictionary of National Biography and Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration. The deer-park count from Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (1986); the surname’s occupational origin from Reaney and Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames.

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  • Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    William Hilton came to America in 1621, on the second ship to Plymouth.

    Never heard about Plymouth’s second ship? You’re not alone — almost nobody has, and once you know what happened, you’ll understand why.

    The ship was called the Fortune, which is the kind of name you give a ship before anything has gone wrong yet.

    It arrived a year late. The Mayflower landed in 1620, but the Fortune didn’t drop anchor off Cape Cod until 9 November 1621, missing, by weeks, the harvest feast that would eventually get rebranded as the first Thanksgiving.

    It was smaller. Much smaller. About a third the size of the Mayflower, and it carried roughly thirty-five new colonists, mostly young single men, into a settlement that had buried half its people the previous winter.

    And here is the part that tells you everything about the men who financed the voyage: they sent thirty-five new mouths and no food. None. Governor Bradford, who was not a man given to comedy, sat down and recorded for posterity that there was “not so much as a biscuit-cake” for the new arrivals, no bedding beyond “some sorry things” in their cabins, and “nor pot, nor pan, to dress meat in.” The ship hadn’t even been provisioned to feed its own crew on the trip home.

    Plymouth did the math, put everyone on half rations, and worked out that the corn would last about six months if nobody got greedy. The colony’s reward for surviving its first year was thirty-five strangers and a hunger problem.

    That could be considered the best outcome. It nearly went worse.

    The Fortune loitered around the tip of the Cape long enough that the colonists decided it was a French raider come to murder them, and Bradford convened a council of war. Myles Standish — the colony’s tiny, perpetually furious military officer — mustered every man and boy who could hold a gun and had the cannon up on Fort Hill fire a warning shot. The ship then ran up the red cross of England, everyone exhaled, and Plymouth narrowly avoided opening fire on the reinforcements it had spent a year praying for.

    The Fortune’s fortune didn’t get much better. While in port, the colonists spent two weeks cramming the hold with everything that might pay down their debt to their English investors — beaver and otter pelts, sassafras, split-oak clapboard. Somewhere around £500 of goods were packed in the ship for the trip back, enough to cut what they owed in half. The ship sailed for London on 13 December 1621 carrying the first real value the colony had ever produced.

    It never got there.

    A navigation error put the Fortune on the coast of France instead of in the English Channel, where a French warship took it on 19 January 1622, held everyone aboard for about a month, and helped itself to the Fortune’s entire cargo.

    The ship limped into London in February with an empty hold. The financier who’d sent it lost his whole investment, the colony’s first paycheck went to a French privateer, and the Fortune sailed out of history the way it had sailed into it — broke, late, and badly handled.

    Remember, this was the ship my great-grandfather William Hilton (~1591–1656) chose.

    Not a ton is known about what Hilton did, individually, but it doesn’t look like he stuck around to enjoy Plymouth for very long.

    He was still there in 1624 when the Reverend John Lyford baptized a child against the wishes of the Separatists running the colony — the church fight that got Lyford run out of town.

    Not long after, Hilton packed up and left for the salt works at Little Harbor, up on the Piscataqua. Salt-making, as it happens, had been the chief trade of Northwich, the town he’d come from back in England.

    He’d crossed an ocean, picked the worst possible ship, landed in a colony that couldn’t feed him, sat through its first religious schism, and then gone right back to making salt.

    Now, personally, I’m batting .000 as far as Mayflower goes, at least for now. But maybe the Fortune is the better inheritance anyway.

    The Mayflower is the story we tell — the brave little band, the rock, the pageant. The Fortune is how it actually went. You arrived late, with the wrong supplies, to a place that isn’t ready for you, and the one good thing you manage gets taken by pirates on the way home.

    Maybe that’s not the founding myth, but that is immigration for most of us.

    Sources. The arrival of the Fortune (Cape Cod, 9 November 1621), the missing provisions, and the Lyford baptism dispute of 1624 are from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; the £450–500 cargo and the French seizure of January 1622 are likewise from Bradford and the early Plymouth records. William Hilton’s place on the ship rests on the 1623 Division of Land (Plymouth Colony Records 12:5); his Northwich origin, his arrival on the Fortune, and his removal to the Piscataqua salt works are from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby & Davis), under HILTON.

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  • Free of Wound: The Dunbar Scots (1650)

    Free of Wound: The Dunbar Scots (1650)

    Three of my great-nth-grandfathers — Peter Grant, John Clark, and John Taylor — crossed the Atlantic on the same ship, and not one of them chose to be on it.

    The ship was the Unity. It sailed from London in November of 1650 carrying a hundred and fifty Scottish prisoners of war, each under a seven-year sentence of labor, sold by the pound to a failing iron works outside Boston.

    To explain the prisoners, I should explain the war.

    Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan general who fought and won the English Civil War, beheading King Charles I in 1649, and abolishing the monarchy. His revolution made England a republic, with him at its head. He is the patron saint of “we killed the tyrant and managed to replace them with something worse.”

    When the dead king’s son inconveniently turned up in Scotland, the Scots raised him an army — out of a desire to both systematically piss off England and plant a Stuart on the throne who’d turn Scotland Presbyterian.

    Cromwell, never being much for competition, marched north to end the threat before it could come south. He found Charles II’s army at Dunbar, but managed to get himself pinned against the sea, with his army sick and starving, and a larger Scottish force on the high ground above.

    Then the Kirk’s ministers — who’d already purged the army of every officer they judged insufficiently godly — decided something like, “we need pious men more than competent ones,” and “who needs the high ground?”, and marched the Scots down off the hill, over General Leslie’s objections, to be routed by Cromwell’s veterans inside of an hour.

    Trust the Scots to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

    A few thousand Scots were taken prisoner and marched south — roughly a hundred miles, on foot, with no food. The jailer’s own letters record it: men who fell behind were shot, and the starving prisoners penned overnight in a walled garden dug up raw cabbages and ate them whole, mud and roots, which only killed them faster.

    They were held in Durham Cathedral, where dysentery and cold took some seventeen hundred more.

    (If that number feels abstract, it stopped being abstract in 2013, when a construction crew digging behind Durham Cathedral for a new café cut straight into a mass grave. The bones were the Dunbar prisoners — tipped in without ceremony, exactly where they’d died. It took until 2018 to rebury them properly.)

    The prisoners of war were, to the Cromwell regime, an asset that shouldn’t be wasted by slowly killing them in jail, and found themselves a London proto-capitalist named John Becx who owned a failing iron works at Saugus, north of Boston, that needed cheap hands.

    Becx bought himself a crop of unwilling Scottish prisoners, a hundred and fifty of the soundest, who were selected on the explicit standard of being “well and sound and free of wound.”

    He loaded them into the hold of the Unity and shipped across the winter Atlantic. Roughly one in ten died on the crossing. When the hold finally opened for good, three of my great-granddads climbed out of it.

    Peter Grant (1631–1713)

    Peter Grant was nineteen at Dunbar. He went first to the iron works at Saugus. It failed more or less continuously (it’s now a national historic site, which is what we do with businesses that lose money for a living) and he was sent north to the sawmills on the Piscataqua.

    He served out his time and then bought fifty acres of his own. The deed survives, and it names him “Peter Grant, Scotsman,” which in colonial Maine was half identification and half raised eyebrow. He’d come over with his brother James, also a prisoner on the Unity; and when James died, Peter married his widow, Joan, and kept the family on its land.

    John Taylor (1640–1690)

    John Taylor came off the Unity in the group sent up to the Great Works sawmill in what’s now South Berwick — about twenty-five Scots set to cutting the giant white pines the British navy wanted for masts. He served his indenture, took his fifty acres, and then the former prisoner — a man shipped here in irons by an English court — got himself appointed constable. And grand juror.

    But, he was not particularly solemn about it. In 1669, the York County Court formally admonished Taylor, along with a knot of his fellow Scots, for saying “the divell” too freely in everyday talk. You survive Dunbar, the march, the cathedral, the ocean, and seven years of bondage, and the colony’s official grievance against you is that you curse too much. His 1687 will left thirty acres to each of his five daughters, so he died with a good deal more land than he started with.

    John Clark (1620–1685)

    John Clark’s thread runs through his wife, and she gets the best entrance of the three anyway.

    In 1652 the Essex County court fined a young woman named Sarah Verin for the crime of wearing a silk hood. This was an actual offense: Massachusetts kept sumptuary laws reserving fine dress for the right rank of people, and someone had looked at the stepdaughter of an iron-works carpenter, decided she was dressing above her station, and reported her.

    Sarah, fined for the hood, married a Dunbar Scot bonded at the very iron works where her stepfather worked. Whether she meant anything by it, the record doesn’t say.

    Scots’ Charitable Society

    Then the part that warms my cold, jaded, progressive heart:

    In January of 1657, in Boston, twenty-eight Scotsmen signed a short plain agreement to keep a common box of money “for the releefe of our selves being Scottishmen or for any of the Scottish nation whome we may see cause to helpe.” Their indentures were just then running out — newly free, and immediately organizing to feed and bury one another, because nobody else would.

    That box is now the Scots’ Charitable Society, the oldest charitable organization in the Western Hemisphere. Three hundred and sixty-nine years later it still meets, and still gives money away.

    On the founding roster of twenty-eight names are Peter Grant, his brother James, and a John Clark, whom I’ve drawn the obvious conclusion is none other than my own great-nth-grandfather.

    I love the poetry of it. Men who had been sold off a dock a few years earlier put their names to the oldest charity on the continent.

    And one more line in the records closes the circle. Taylor’s daughter Sarah married Clark’s son Elisha. Two of these prisoners — off the same ship, scattered to different mills on the same river — became grandparents to the same children.

    It can’t have been an accident. The Scots that Cromwell flung across an ocean found each other on the Piscataqua and did the most durable thing a scattered people can do: they married their children to one another, deliberately, until “the Dunbar men” stopped being a cargo manifest and turned into a town.

    There are places on that coast — a Berwick, a Scotland parish in York — that exist because the plan to disappear these men failed.

    They were shipped over as the end of something — a defeated army, sold and scattered and entered in the books as property and labor and “Scotchmen.”

    Within seven years they had a charity. Within a generation, a neighborhood. Within ten generations, me — putting their names back into the world one generation at a time.

    Which is the one thing the people who loaded the Unity were trying to make sure they would never ever do.

    Sources. The Battle of Dunbar (3 September 1650), the forced march to Durham, and the 2013–2018 Durham Cathedral mass-grave excavation and reburial. The ship Unity — sailed November 1650 with ~150 prisoners consigned by John Becx to the Saugus Iron Works, selected as “well and sound and free of wound,” and the distribution of its men to Saugus and the Maine sawmills — from Saugus Iron Works records and the Scottish Prisoners of War Society. The Scots’ Charitable Society founding agreement of 6 January 1657 and its roster of twenty-eight names. York County, Maine deeds and probate — the “Peter Grant, Scotsman” deed, Grant’s marriage to Joan, Taylor’s constableship, the 1669 admonishment, and his 1687 will. Essex County, Massachusetts Quarterly Court records — the 1652 fine of Sarah Verin. Stackpole’s Old Kittery and the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire for the Grant, Taylor, and Clark families.

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

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

    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)

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

    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)

    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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  • The Wrong Scot: Ellen Boyle (1823–1866)

    The Wrong Scot: Ellen Boyle (1823–1866)

    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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