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Tag: New Hampshire

  • 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 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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