by Wendy, February 18, 2022

When we break through a brick wall, it’s not always one “Ah-ha!” moment that leads to the discovery we’ve been seeking. It’s often a trail of clues that helps us find the one we need to prove a hypothesis, and that is what I would like to talk about in Week 7 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.

When I broke down the brick wall that was my great-great-grandmother Emma, it took a series of documents to get there. One of the most instrumental in taking down that wall was a land record. I feel like we often neglect land records in New England genealogy, because so many vital records exist. We tend to be fortunate with birth, marriage, and death records, especially in Massachusetts. Reliance on land records often seems to be more important in places like the South. But it was a land record that helped solidify a particular family relationship for Emma and kept me moving in the right direction.

Land Records in Middleborough

On 27 November 1889, Emma A. Shaw, wife of Erastus Shaw, and Miss Maggie Murphy purchased land together. It was real estate located in Middleborough, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where Emma had been living at least since her marriage to Erastus a year prior.

This is one record I hadn’t bothered to look at until my consultation with Melanie McComb at NEHGS, when she mentioned the deed. I’d looked at other land transactions involving Emma in Middleborough, but not this one. I had also found the death record for Margaret Murphy in Boston in 1890 and been intrigued, because her parents’ names were the same as those given on Emma’s death certificate. This land record was another piece of the puzzle that proved there was a relationship between Emma Anna (Murphy) (Regan) Shaw and Margaret Murphy. Though it was not the last piece of the puzzle, it was vital in establishing the fact that these two women knew one another and ultimately part of proving my hypothesis about the family to which Emma belonged, the Murphy family of Manchester, Guysborough, Nova Scotia, Canada.

52 Ancestors, Week 6: Maps

by Wendy, February 11, 2022

I was a little stumped for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Week 6. The only idea that came to mind was how much I loved looking at maps as a child when we went on our annual summer vacation, usually to a campground in New Hampshire or Vermont. But I couldn’t think of a genealogical context until my mother and I started discussing a recent DNA match. That’s when I decided we needed to map the known movements of my great-grandmother’s first husband, Joseph William St. Onge.

Joseph William St. Onge

My great-grandmother, Mildred Marian Burrell, had seven children with four different men. Fortunately, DNA helped us untangle the various threads of paternity, but the fate of one of the fathers remains a question we hope to answer.

Joseph was born 30 August 1893 in Marlborough, Middlesex, Massachusetts. His parents were Joseph St. Onge and Mary Fortier. We know where he was born, where he lived in the 1900 and 1910 censuses, and the addresses he lived at when his children were born. But we don’t know where he died or when. I didn’t realize how much he had moved around until I started analyzing records more closely and found that for nearly every documented event in his life, he was living at a different address.

His life began in Marlborough and by the age of 6, he was living in Whitman, Plymouth, Massachusetts with his family. In 1910 they were still living in Whitman, but at a different address. He was married to Amanda Jean in 1915 and living at a new address when their baby was stillborn at the end of that same year. He lived at the same address when he registered for the World War I draft in 1917.

But in 1919 he ran away with my great-grandmother to Maine. She was pregnant with her first child, not Joseph’s though, and he had apparently offered to marry her. They lived in Biddeford, Maine when Mildred’s first child was born. Joseph’s wife, Amanda, filed divorce the next day. Less than a year later, the divorce was granted and Joseph and Mildred were married in Dover, Strafford, New Hampshire ten days after the divorce. Three months later, their daughter, and first child together, was born in July of 1920, and they were still living in Biddeford, but at a different address.

I am not sure what took Joseph to Maine, but they were back in Plymouth County, Massachusetts by September of 1921 for the birth of their second child. A son was born to them in 1924, and once again they were living in a different address. One more son was born to them in 1925, and yet again they were living at another address. During those years, they lived in Rockland and Abington. However, by 1925 Joseph had run off on Mildred. She went on to conceive my grandfather with a different man, who we were able to identify through DNA testing. She then married her second husband, Herbert Haley, and had a daughter with him.

Joseph, meanwhile, seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. After many years of gathering family rumors, the most promising lead we have is that he had been found by a detective his children hired in the early 1970s. According to that story, he died in Chicago five years before. However, after his children read the detective’s report, they destroyed it.

Another family rumor is that Joseph was a rum runner. Only one family member disputes the idea that Joseph was a gangster or in trouble with the law, but all the rest agree he was likely involved in criminal activity. When I look at how often he moved as an adult, I just have to wonder what he was running from. Clearly he wasn’t about to settle down in one place or raise his children, both step and biological. I can only speculate as to why he made the choices he made, but the main thing we want to know about him is where he ended up after 1925.

This map doesn’t give me answers, but I think it tells me that this won’t be an easy question to answer, even if we think we know his alias(es) and moves after 1925. And even if we get the answer, there are probably still many questions in between.

52 Ancestors, Week 5: Branching Out

by Wendy, February 4, 2022

This week’s topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is “Branching Out” and I would like to look, not at my family, but people who were forced into a connection with my family: the people my ancestors enslaved.

Richard Howett of Tyrrell County, North Carolina

In a post from last year, I wrote about my Unexpected Southern Ancestors. My ancestor, Martha Howett, came from Tyrell County, North Carolina, along with 3 of her sisters, to Duxbury, Massachusetts. These women had married 3 Winsor brothers and 1 Winsor cousin, and if you are familiar with the Winsor family of Duxbury, you’ll know they were prolific.

Unfortunately, having this connection to southern / Tidewater area ancestry also meant a connection to people enslaved by my ancestors. My 5th great-grandfather, Richard Howett (abt. 1755 – 1805 or 1806) had no less than 19 people enslaved at one point in his life. They, or the proceeds from the sales of these people, were bequeathed in his Will, because of course enslaved people were treated like property. The stories of so-called benevolent enslavers giving them “good lives” are, we now understand, ridiculous. No enslavement could ever be viewed as acceptable or good for anyone but the enslavers themselves.

Worse than that, it’s clear from the Will that Richard expected the women to be used as breeders, since the document specified that he wanted his wife to “raise the increase” of two of the enslaved women. If you would like to get a better understanding of enslaved women used as breeders, please watch “Researching the Children of Breeders” on Genealogy Adventures Live.

I’m not related to any of the people forced into this terrible life… as far as I know. That remains a possibility considering how enslavers took advantage of the people forced into slavery, though I’ve started giving extra scrutiny to my Black cousins on DNA sites. As far as these enslaved folks are concerned, I want to get to know them. Why?

Because I think it’s important not to let their stories get lost in time and history. Because enslaved people were still people, no matter what enslavers then and people today do to strip them of their humanity and to discount their experiences. Because I don’t want to forget that these people’s lives were changed by my ancestors’ actions:

Chloe and her 4 children: Nancy, Mary, Samuel, and Patience
A woman named Moll
An old woman named Doll
A boy named Spinner or Spencer
People sold in 1821 as part of the Estate of Richard Howett:
Jim (23 – b. 1798)
Aggy (20 – b. 1801)
Jimmy (5 – b. 1816, Aggy’s son)
Cooper (3 – b. 1818, Aggy’s sons)
Mariah (15 – b. 1806)

This year, I’m branching out by making an effort to research and learn more about these people, and their lives.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Curious | Our Prairie Nest

52 Ancestors, Week 4: Curious

by Wendy, January 28, 2022

This week’s theme for Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is “Curious” and it took a few days to consider how I would delve into this. There are so many things I’m curious about, so many things I want to discover, but I think the main one is the name of my ex-husband’s paternal immigrant ancestors… who I’ve hypothesized might not have been an immigrant at all.

The Hawksley Family

My ex-husband’s ancestors are the Hawksleys of Mars Hill, Aroostook County, Maine. You might wonder why I’m even interested and there are two reasons. 1. These are my son’s ancestors and 2. I don’t have Loyalists in my family, but I find them fascinating. Well, these folks are interconnected with the Loyalists who fled or were forced to leave the colonies, and settle in New Brunswick.

The first mention of a Hawksley in New Brunswick is of my ex-husband’s ancestor, John Goodwin Hawksley, and his sisters, Margaret, Mary, and Sarah. Thanks to a trip I took to the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 2008 to look at a specific manuscript collection in their library, we know their mother is Mary Goodwin and that her parents, whose first names are unknown, were Loyalists from New Jersey. We have the names of Mary’s siblings, their spouses, and their children. I’ve been in contact with some of their descendants.

What we don’t know is the identity of Mary’s first husband, Mr. Hawksley. All we have is a family history from the manuscript collection at NEHGS that states that she married “Hawksley (an Englishman).”

Life in New Brunswick

Now, what’s curious about this family isn’t just their history and lives, but also the fact that I find no records about Mr. Hawksley in New Brunswick. You would think that a person, especially a man, would have generated at least some record of his existence. However, I have dug through births, marriages, deaths, newspapers, voting records, tax records, military records, land records, court records, and everything I can possibly get my hands on from afar and found nothing. This has even included borrowing microfilms from the New Brunswick Archives to scroll through them and yet there is no trace of a Mr. Hawksley before John Goodwin Hawksley was married in 1842 in Hodgdon, Aroostook, Maine (verified only by documents from the town of Hodgdon, certified by the town clerk at the time, found in his son Samuel’s Civil War Pension file; I wrote to Hodgdon many years ago, and they no longer had the actual marriage record), and then John’s residence in Carleton, Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada in the 1851 Canadian Census.

If his father lived there, why is there no record of him?

Of course, plenty of people can live in a place without generating a record. For example, Mary Goodwin’s parents also don’t seem to have created records for their lives in New Brunswick. They were forced to settle there sometime around 1783, yet the earliest record of their family seems to start with their eldest son, James, in Saint John.

I would think a man had to have left some at least indication of his life in a place, however I also found that Mary Goodwin’s “second” husband (and I put that in quotes for a reason), William Madigan, did not leave many records beyond his marriage to her and witnessing the marriages of her daughters Mary and Margaret. The marriage record for Mary Goodwin and William Madigan sparked my hypothesis. Why?

Because wouldn’t Mary Goodwin’s marriage record to William have called her Mary Hawksley if she was already married? That is a pretty typical Anglo-Saxon convention, a woman taking on her husband’s name and then always being referred to by it, up to and in a subsequent marriage record. In fact, it seems like – more often than not – transcribers working on marriages will assume that’s a maiden name, and list the bride’s father by what is actually her married surname. Granted, it’s not always the case that a woman is listed by her married name in subsequent marriages, so I can’t be completely certain.

But what if Mary was not married to Mr. Hawksley? What if she was involved with him, but the relationship went no further than that because he was a British soldier stationed in Fredericton, New Brunswick, who returned to his family at the end of his tour of duty?

The hypothesis is based on what little evidence I’ve been able to gather about a John Hawksley who was stationed in Fredericton during the years of the births of Mary’s children. He was from Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, and ultimately returned to his wife and children where they had been living back in Ireland. DNA matches support this hypothesis, or at least a relationship to that John Hawksley, but I have little else to make the connection at this time.

So I’m curious… was the mysterious Mr. Hawksley this soldier or was it a man (possibly related to the soldier) whose life was so unremarkable that no evidence of his existence remains to be found?

Perhaps the missing links appear in newspaper records that are not part of the PANB Newspaper Vital Statistics collection and other records that remain unpublished. This may very well be an instance where digging into such records will yield answers. Who’s up for an adventure in New Brunswick to satisfy my curiosity? 😀

Land Records in Middleborough

Joseph William St. Onge

Richard Howett of Tyrrell County, North Carolina

The Hawksley Family

Life in New Brunswick

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Land Records in Middleborough

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Richard Howett of Tyrrell County, North Carolina

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Life in New Brunswick

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