More on the Newcombs: The Search for Jennie Newcomb's Maiden Name

The Search for Jennie Newcomb’s Maiden Name

Jennie Van Rees Newcomb: 1873-1957

The lurid stories on Nathaniel Newcomb’s apparent bigamous marriage neglected to provide a critical piece of information: the maiden name and background of Nathaniel’s humiliated second “wife” Jennie.  I set out to track it down and find out what happened to her.

New York marriage records are ridiculously difficult to uncover, so I had no luck trying to find Nathaniel Newcomb and Jennie Newcomb’s marriage license. There was even some confusion as to which state and city they chose for their marriage ceremony, and then there is the question of whether it was legal at all given his failure to get a divorce from his first wife. Did they bother to actually marry at all? Anything is possible, although they presented themselves to the world as husband and wife for several years.

Following Nathaniel’s death in 1903, Jennie Newcomb seemed to disappear. Her brother-in-law implied she came from a well-to-do Brooklyn family, but to preserve her privacy, he wouldn’t give her last name. He said she was returning home to Brooklyn after closing up Nathaniel’s New Jersey home. I searched Brooklyn records for her following the scandal, but found nothing.

To my surprise, I found her in the New Jersey state census in 1905, just two years after her husband’s death. She had stated on previous census records that her parents were born in Holland, so when I found her living with a Marie Bross, also from Holland, I thought she had to be a family member. Marie was a year younger than Jennie, and was married with a young son named Harold. Marie’s husband was also named Harold Bross. It seemed likely Marie was Jennie’s sister. I searched for Marie’s marriage records to find the women’s maiden name, but was unsuccessful.

I then turned to Newspapers.com, thinking Marie’s obituary might reveal her maiden name. Instead my search turned up an obituary for a Cornelius Van Rees, a successful publisher and Dutch immigrant. One of his surviving sisters was Marie Bross. Aha! Perhaps Jennie’s maiden name was Van Rees.

I searched Ancestry records under that name in Brooklyn, and turned up a New York State Census Record for 1892, listing the entire van Rees family:

Father Richard, a carpenter, age 65, wife Jennie, age 60, four sons, Abram, Cornelius, Peter and Richard, ages 30, 23, 22 and 14 (all mentioned in Cornelius’ obit),  and daughters Minnie, 26, Fannie, 28, and Jennie, 18. Jennie, like her sisters, was working as a sales lady in a store. Marie must have already been married and out of the house.

Jennie must have met Nathaniel Newcomb just a year or so after the census, for they were married two years later in 1894 when Jennie was only 20 and Nathaniel was 46. They apparently lived a fairly lavish life. Here is what the newspaper reported after Nathaniel’s death:

“While Newcomb lived he was known as the prosperous president of the Manhattan Steamship Company, the husband of a woman of wealth and high social connections and the possessor of a beautiful residence and fine stable of horses at Westfield, N.J., where he made his home.”

The truth of the matter was that Nathaniel was lower class, as was Jennie. They re-invented themselves following the marriage—they were social climbers. Nathaniel’s brother Francis fed the newspapers with false information that continued the fiction that they both came from wealth.

After Nathaniel’s death, his first wife Sarah and her attorney attempted to claim all of Nathaniel’s property. In addition, there were other creditors—Nathaniel apparently had extensive debts. Jennie apparently grabbed what she could of their possessions before the other claimants could. The newspaper reported that following the appearance of wife Sarah, “the blue ribbon horses, all the valuable furniture and Mr. Newcomb’s jewelry and cash departed from Westfield, as did Mrs. Newcomb No. 2.”

The article goes on to address the issue of the steamship company shares and the various counterclaims for ownership of the company assets, and then also notes, “Meanwhile all concerned are seeking to discover the whereabouts of considerable sums in cash known to have been in possession of Newcomb just previous to his death.”

The articles seems to imply that Jennie made off with all the money and valuables, but given that she was forced to move in with her married sister in lower class Cranford/Passaic, I rather doubt she got much of value from her dead husband’s estate.

But where did she go after 1905? There was no Jennie van Rees or Jennie Newcomb in the 1910 census, either with her sister’s family or on her own. Had she remarried? I examined Cornelius’ obituary more closely, and realized that one sister was identified only by her husband’s name, a Mrs. Jacob Van Reen. Could this be Jennie? A little searching confirmed my suspicion.

Jennie met a Dutch businessman in Passaic, Jacob Van Reen. Jacob was just a year or so older than Jennie and was a wholesale dry goods merchant. They seem to have married around 1907, for his 1947 obituary states that he and Jennie had been married for forty years. They remained in the Passaic area until his death. They had no children, and Jennie's name does not appear in any newspaper articles, and her husband only occasionally pops up as a member of various charitable groups.

392 Lafayette Ave., Passaic today

Census records show that they lived at 392 Lafayette Avenue in 1920, and moved to 72 Belmont Place by 1930. The Lafayette Ave. house, built in 1900, was quite large—over 3400 square feet. The Belmont property was considerably smaller, under 2000 square feet. The family does not appear to have been wealthy, but were just comfortably middle class. Jennie’s sister Marie apparently left her husband before 1920, and she and her son Harold moved in with Jennie and her husband, living with them for over a decade. Harold returned to Jennie's home in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps to help care for his aunt and uncle as they aged. 

Jennie died December 19, 1957. She was buried on Staten Island. Interestingly, she left her estate to Harold Bross, her sister Marie’s son. However, Harold was identified in estate documents and Jennie's obituary as Jennie’s son. I am not sure if she adopted Harold at some point, or if this was a sort of honorary relationship in recognition of Jennie taking him in while he was young. Another interesting mystery in a fascinating life. At least now Jennie can be properly identified on my family tree, and on Ancestry.

Nathaniel Newcomb: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Newsworthy

Bigamy and Big Promises:

Nathaniel Newcomb: 1848-1903

Normally I don’t pay much attention to second cousins three times removed—they are so distantly related to me that it isn’t worth the time to dig deeply into their lives. However, while trying to get birth and death dates for my cousin Nathaniel Newcomb, I ran across a news article that had me laughing and digging for more information: Nathaniel was a bigamist! How could I pass up headlines like “Newcomb Estate Fight”, “Two Mrs. Newcombs?” and “Cash and Jewelry Disappeared After Death”? Talk about newsworthy!

Nathaniel Newcomb was an ambitious risk-taker, who used his brother’s political influence to pump investments into his business schemes. He headed a couple of steamship companies that carried passengers and cargo from New York to Maine and Nova Scotia. The first one went bankrupt in 1892 due in part to mismanagement. Nathaniel’s brother came to his rescue and helped him to restart the company. The last incarnation, the Manhattan Steamship Company, was already failing when Nathaniel dropped dead in a saloon late at night on February 27, 1903. He suffered a heart attack while returning to his office at 11 Broadway in Manhattan from visiting an unnamed "friend". He was only 55. He left a young widow, Jennie, at a large property in Westfield, New Jersey.

1900 blank Share from Newcomb's defunct company

Following Newcomb’s death, a woman named Sarah Ann Newcomb of Boston came forward, filing letters of administration with the probate court handling Newcomb’s estate. She said she was Newcomb’s real wife and that they married in the 1860s and never divorced. This made Newcomb’s marriage to his younger wife, Jennie, bigamous.

The first Mrs. Newcomb also apprised the court, and the press, that she and Nathaniel had a daughter, Ida Frances Newcomb, who lived in Fairchild, Massachusetts.

The press breathlessly reported that the Westfield wife was “prostrated by the news as this is the first initiation she has had that Mr. Newcomb ever married another woman.”

Newcomb’s postmaster brother weighed in, claiming to be “shocked and surprised at this woman’s audacity in coming forward at this time.” Hmm… That doesn’t sound like an actual denial of the Boston marriage. Sure enough, he goes on to state:

“At the time when my brother was about 16 years of age and I myself several years younger, we were living at Easton, Mass…This woman, Sarah Storey by name, who was 6 or 7 years older than my brother, had apparently caught his fancy and they were together a great deal at that time. He was attending school at East Greenwich, R.I. and I remember his leaving school several times to see her. I have no knowledge of his marriage to her, and she has yet to prove her title as his wife. I am sure that he had but very little to do with her after he left school, and such a thing as his having lived a double life for the past thirty years is entirely out of the question. His life here in Brooklyn is an open book, and I do not believe that he has so much as seen this woman within the last twenty years.”

He goes on to imply Sarah Ann Newcomb is a money grubber who saw the obituary that mentioned the steamship company and assumed  Nathaniel was wealthy and she could get a piece of that wealth. The brother ends with a sneer that “if that is her idea, she will be disappointed, for my brother left neither money nor property.”

It would be nice to believe Nathaniel’s brother was taken by surprise when this abandoned wife appeared, but further search of the newspapers from a few years before calls that into question.

The October 20, 1891 issues of the Passaic Daily News of Passaic, New Jersey carried a story about Nathaniel’s previous attempt at bigamy. Nathaniel had romanced Miss Belle Killian, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and they were engaged to marry. Presumably Nathaniel met the girl while on steamship company business in Nova Scotia. The first wife apparently saw the engagement announcement and according to the reporter, “sent a letter of warning to the young woman, inclosing at the same time a photograph of the man she calls her husband. Mrs. Killian, the mother of the girl, is determined to make an investigation. She visited Taunton with her daughter, and as a result the engagement was indefinitely postponed.” The Killians were apparently relieved to be rid of Nathaniel as they had “always objected to their daughter’s marriage with Newcombe on account of the latter’s age.” (Note: I believe the family’s name is actually Killam. They were involved in shipping in Yarmouth, and were wealthy.)

The story the first Mrs. Newcomb told in 1891 varied a bit from the story printed in 1903. She said they were married 23 years earlier, which would be 1868, but due to pressure from his parents “he never lived with her openly and proudly as he should have done, but visited her two or three days at a time extending over a period of four or five years. She had four children by him, but he left her, it is claimed, and came to New York.”

Four children! Nathaniel wouldn’t agree to an interview with the newspaper, but his “typewriter” answered for him—I am assuming this was an assistant, the equivalent of a secretary today, and not an actual piece of equipment. This person claimed that the wife was ten years older than poor little Nathaniel, and that she had fallen in love with him, not the other way around. She had her brother drag him off to Providence where “a ceremony was gone through. It was not a marriage and it was never consummated. Mr. Newcombe was only eighteen…and when he found the position he was in, left the woman…Since that time he has not lived with her and she made no claim on him.”

Now this is an interesting sort of excuse. He claims that she was lying, but oh, yes, there was a ceremony of some sort, but not a marriage, not really, and besides it wasn’t consummated, and he was only 18, and after he ran away like the cowardly cur that he was, she didn’t come after him, so obviously this is all a big misunderstanding…

Since this sad affair made the newspaper and was probably a hot gossip topic, I am sure Nathaniel’s brother was all too aware of it. His claim in 1903 that news of the first wife came out of nowhere, and he knew nothing about her, is patently false.

So what elements of this bizarre set of allegations can be proved? What do the records show us?

The Newcomb/Storey marriage did occur in 1868. However, Nathaniel was not a child, nor was he merely 18. Nathaniel was born on June 26, 1848 to Sarah Augusta Dane, my first cousin 4x removed, and her husband Josiah Laprolet Newcomb. So in 1868 he was twenty years old, certainly of an age to know his own mind and be able to marry. His father had died months earlier, which is probably why Nathaniel waited to marry, having feared his father’s disapproval.

His brother Francis tried to paint the family as wealthier and higher class than they actually were. Josiah Newcomb worked as a “housewright” along with his brother Joseph, according to the 1850 census conducted just months after Nathaniel’s birth. A housewright was a type of wood craftsman who helped build and repair homes, a solid career but not an upper class one. Francis claimed Nathaniel attended school in Rhode Island, which would seem to imply a private school. There is no indication that the family was able to afford a boarding school, and no evidence that Nathaniel ever attended school in Rhode Island. A later version of the story provided by the second wife claimed Nathaniel attended college when he met Sarah. More lies.

Following Josiah Newcomb’s death untimely early death, Sarah Dane Newcomb was forced to take a job as a housekeeper, which confirms the family had no money or position. She was fortunate that her employer allowed her to bring her young son Francis with her, although he was already out of school working full time as a clerk in an office at the tender age of 14 to help support his mother. 

Census records show Nathaniel was not in school or college at that time, but was working as a laborer in a stable and living in a stranger’s house as a boarder. He was no higher class than poor Sarah Storey.

1870 census shows Nathaniel was stable keeper

Sarah Storey was older than Nathaniel, but only by four years, not six, seven or ten as Francis Newcomb claimed. And she did not have four children with Nathaniel or anyone—she had one daughter, Ida Frances, born May 26, 1869, about seven months after the hasty wedding in Rhode Island on October 13, 1868. The birth record incorrectly spells the child’s name as “Addie F Newcomb” and lists her parents as Nathaniel Newcomb, a “stablekeeper” and Sarah Newcomb, wife.  

Ida birth record, mistakenly listed as Addie. Nathaniel still stable keeper, not college student

I suspect part of Francis’ story was correct: that Sarah’s brother Willard had exerted some influence on Nathaniel to make an honest woman of his pregnant sister. The choice of Rhode Island for the wedding probably had to do with length of the wait for marriage licenses—Rhode Island may have been a “Gretna Green” for people in Massachusetts who needed to marry quickly. Sarah must have been familiar with the Newcomb family, for her daughter had the middle name Frances, the feminine version of a family name from the Dane side of the family that goes back to the early 1600s.

The marriage did not last long. By the 1870 census, poor Sarah was abandoned and living with her parents and young daughter Ida. The pair had a difficult life, working in low-wage jobs. The 1940 census finds Ida living alone, still working at age 70 as a packer for a tack factory in Taunton. She never married, living first with her grandparents, then her mom and her uncle until they died in the 1930s, and then alone. Nathaniel should have been ashamed at his failure to provide for his only child.

Sarah Augusta and Francis Newcomb moved to Brooklyn, New York, and Nathaniel followed them after abandoning his wife and child. Francis and Nathaniel re-invented themselves as businessmen, and Francis also moved in political circles, which led to his appointment as Assistant Postmaster.

Nathaniel apparently married his second wife, Jennie, sometime around 1894. The details are murky. I can find no record of the marriage. Francis claimed Nathaniel and Jennie had been married ten years at the time of the death, and that the couple married in Boston, even though Jennie was a Brooklyn girl. Jennie claimed the marriage took place in New York in 1894, which matches up with the 1900 census data. The census says Jennie’s parents were born in Holland, so were immigrants.

Francis refused to reveal Jennie’s maiden name to the press. The title to Nathaniel’s home and property was placed in Jennie’s name. Something sounds very fishy here. Was there actually a marriage at all? Why was the property placed in Jennie’s name? To protect it from Nathaniel’s legitimate wife? A news story from late in 1903 said money, jewelry and horses were all missing from the New Jersey property, and that lawyers for the two widows were trying to track down any assets.

Following the lurid, excited stories of 1903, there is no further mention of either of the wives in the press, or evidence of how Nathaniel’s few assets were disbursed assuming they were recovered. I wonder how the estate was settled, and whether a determination was ever made as to the legality of Nathaniel’s second marriage. Nathaniel had been a newsworthy topic during his life thanks to his business failures and broken engagement, and he continued to make headlines in death.

Sources:

“Two Mrs. Newcombs?” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York)  18 Mar 1903, Wed  Page 7

“She Bided Her Time” 20 Oct 1891, Passaic, New Jersey

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt "Wedding"

A 1926 Wedding Comes to Life: Discoveries from a Book for the Bride

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 1899-1994

I was recently sorting through family photos and memorabilia and ran across a charming little book my grandmother Nora Hoffman prepared, recording details about her wedding to Ivan Macbeth in 1926. I made scans of several of the pages.  Her notes, along with a newspaper write-up of the wedding, provide a charming picture of my grandparents’ special day.

Nora Elsie Hoffman was born on November 17, 1899 in Blue Earth County, Minnesota. She was the fifth of William and Lena Funk Hoffman’s six daughters, and grew up on a farm near Mankato. Her older sisters all married local men over an eleven year span from 1912 to 1923, leaving Nora living at home with her parents and younger sister and brother as she entered her mid-twenties. She had a suitor who lived down the road just a couple miles, but his age must have given her pause—he was four and a half years younger. I have heard that her sisters teased her about her beau, suggesting that she was a bit desperate since the three oldest of them had married the three Seltenreich brothers, leaving no brothers left for Nora.  

My grandfather Ivan was persistent, however, and they decided to marry in the spring of 1926, when Ivan was 22 and Nora was 26. Ivan was taking over his father’s farm, and his parents decided to move into a Mankato apartment building they held an ownership interest in, leaving the farmhouse open for Ivan and his new bride.

The wedding book was apparently given to brides, perhaps by the store where she bought her wedding gown. I love the page that describes the clothing worn by the attendants. All the photos that exist of the event are black and white; I never would have guessed that her sister Edna’s maid of honor dress was “orchid color georgette over pink silk” and that the flower girls were in “yellow ruffled voile”. I loved the details that her sister wore “tan slippers and tan silk hose”—the silk stockings and underskirt must have felt soft and luxurious.

Nora described her own dress as follows: “a beautiful white Georgette dress over white silk foundation. The dress was trimmed with Venice lace, ribbon ruffles and white ribbon rose buds. I wore a white veil with a bandeau of orange blossoms. I wore white slippers and hose and carried a shower bouquet of pink tea roses, sweet peas and ferns. I had blue garters, borrowed Jennie’s veil, carried the same handkerchief I had on confirmation day, in order to have something old, new, borrowed and blue. I wore a white silk chemise and slip. My nightie was peach.”

I love all the details, especially the shy little mention of her peach-colored wedding night gown. Jennie, whose veil Nora borrowed, was the last of her sisters to have married, back in 1923. I also love that the veil had orange blossoms on the headband—such a traditional choice for a bride! The photos show the amazing curled hairstyles the women all sported—it must have taken hours, as curls came from rag curlers and curling irons heated on the stove!

There are no photos of the actual ceremony, held on April 14 at 2:30 in the afternoon--an unusual time and date!  The only reception photos are of the bridal party outside Nora's childhood home, so the newspaper’s write-up, which provided details, was a charming discovery. The Mankato Free Press reported that the bridal party entered the church to the “strain of the bridal chorus from Lohengrin, played by the organist…” The ceremony also included a solo of “Holy Spirit Breath of Love” sung by Cecilia Stockman.

Beatrice Laird, Ivan's niece; Edna Hoffman, Nora's sister; and Stella Seltenreich, Nora's niece, in front of Ivan's car

The reporter noted that the guests attended a reception at the Hoffman home, where “an elaborate luncheon was served, covers being placed for twenty-five.” The rooms were decorated in pink and white, and “a three tier wedding cake, in a setting of sweetheart roses and smilax, was the centerpiece for the table.”

Smilax garland--I had never heard of the plant!

The little bridal booklet had additional pages for recording details about wedding shower, and space to list the wedding gifts the bride and groom received, as well as their first dinner at home and the first time they entertained as a married couple. My grandmother filled all these pages out. Among the wedding gifts were a chest of silver, two velvet rugs, a “fernery and three ferns”, an “Aladdin lamp” and a set of sherbet glasses. The gifts give me an idea of what was considered fashionable in the 1920s.

She sounded young and excited by this big transition in her life. All the little details help me to imagine her not as the competent farm wife in her sixties that I remember, but as a young 26 year old bride eagerly anticipating her new life as a married woman.

Beatrice Laird, Ivan Macbeth, Nora Hoffman, Elmer Hoffman, Nora's brother, Edna Hoffman and Stella Seltenreich on April 14, 1926

Temperence Hull & Elizabeth Bickford: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Oops”

Not Cousins After All: My Friend’s Erroneous Connection to My Family Tree

My friend Pat and I were very excited when we discovered last winter that we were related—very, very distantly (ninth cousins), but still it took us by surprise. The lead seemed so promising, but now actual research has called the connection into doubt.

We were using a FamilySearch app function called Relatives Around Me. When you turn on the app, it checks people near you who also have the app open, comparing your FamilySearch family trees. It identifies any connections between those family trees. If the app finds a cousin in the room, it then shows you and your new cousin the common ancestor you are descended from, and the two lines of descendants leading down from that ancestor to the two of you.

According to the app, Pat and I shared a common male ancestor named Joseph Hull. We descended from two of Joseph’s daughters. On my side of the tree, I descended from Joseph’s daughter Naomi. Pat supposedly descended from Naomi’s half-sister Temperence.

At the time we used the app in December 2019, neither of us had traced our lineage back far enough to find the Hulls in our trees. We decided to treat this connection as a research challenge to verify or debunk. I was able to verify that Joseph Hull is indeed my tenth-great-grandfather—tracing this lineage helped me to break through a brick wall at the level of my fourth-great-grandmother, which was exciting. In addition, the Hull family was also incredibly interesting, and I discovered that Joseph was one of my earliest ancestors to move to colonial America.

Like me, Pat had a brick wall to deal with lower in the tree. I decided to try to trace our cousinship from the top down, starting with Joseph Hull and his daughter Temperence, working down to Pat’s Smyer ancestors.

I was able to verify that Joseph’s daughter Temperence married John Bickford in 1649. The couple had several children, including Elizabeth Bickford, the next link in Pat’s lineage. Elizabeth was born in Durham, New Hampshire in 1652. She married Joseph Smith in 1668 when she was about 16 years of age. She died May 25, 1727. She and Joseph had several children.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any real records of the names and birthdates of those children on Ancestry. Supposedly, they had a daughter named Elizabeth. There are a few Elizabeth Smiths on Ancestry from the Durham area, but they don’t seem to match up with any children Joseph and Elizabeth Smith may have had. One possibility was born in 1712, when Elizabeth Bickford Smith was 60 years old. This seems unlikely in the extreme.

FamilySearch records are even worse. John and Elizabeth Smith are shown as having ten children, including two Marys and three Elizabeths. Of course, parents could always name new babies after deceased siblings, but none of the earlier children had died before the new siblings were born. In addition, the birth dates are ridiculous. The first Mary Smith is listed as being born in 1664 when her supposed mother Elizabeth Bickford was only six years old. Oops.

The first Elizabeth is shown as being born in 1672 and dying in 1747. She is listed as marrying Samuel Chesley of Dover, New Hampshire, which is in the same county as Durham where the Smith parents are living. This seems like the most likely daughter of Elizabeth Bickford.

The second Elizabeth is shown as being born in 1678 and dying in 1708. She is listed as marrying Jonathan Arnold from the town of Haddam in Hartford County, Connecticut. This location is over 180 miles from the Smith home in Durham. How would Elizabeth have met her future husband? This seems an unlikely match. Oops again.

And the final Elizabeth was born in 1687 and died in 1720. She married Peter Moon of St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, Virginia. This is the most ludicrous possibility of the three, as St. Peter’s Parish is 622 miles from Durham, an impossible journey by land in seventeenth century colonial America. Even by ship this was a long and probably expensive voyage. It boggles the mind that a Virginia man would have married a New Hampshire woman in 1709. The appears to be an even bigger oops.

Elizabeth No. 3 is the Elizabeth Smith that my friend is indeed descended from, but her likely parents were not Elizabeth Bickford and John Smith. My search on Ancestry shows that the Elizabeth Smith who married Peter Moon was born in Virginia, and cannot be the child of the Smith family of Durham.

This is an example of why I have issues with information I find on FamilySearch. As a Wiki, FamilySearch trees are at the mercy of the novice researcher, who doesn’t even realize that it is extremely unlikely and probably impossible that a single family would have three daughters in the household at the same time, all with the name Elizabeth, and that it is unlikely that a young woman would travel in 1709 for no discernible reason to a colony over 600 miles from her home and family and marry some strange man there. I expect that further research will reveal the true parentage of Elizabeth Smith Moon, and that those Smiths will have been long-term residents of Virginia.

Sadly, the 9^th cousin connection between my friend Pat and me appears to have been a giant “oops”. Lucky for us, we also connected as 11th cousins through a different mutual ancestor. Let’s hope that link will prove to be verifiable and accurate.

Samuel Blanchard: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Proud”

Samuel Blanchard and His Beloved Black Horse

My ninth great-grandfather Samuel Blanchard kept what researchers term a “manuscript book” in which he recorded the significant events of his life, the sort of record often kept in a family Bible. The interesting thing about this record of births, deaths and marriages is that he added an entry about his horse, indicating how important the beast must have been to him.

Samuel begins his records by recording his marriage to his first wife Mary on the third day of January in 1654. He then follows with the names of their six children and the dates of their birth, followed with the sad notation, “My wife died upon the 20 febrary 1669.”

However, life looks up again. His next entry reads, “I Samuel Blanchard was marred to my wif Hanah upon the 24 day of Juen in the yer 1673.” Next follows notations of the births of his four children with Hannah.

He then writes down the other significant events of his life: first, his own birth in 1629. Next, his arrival in America and his relocation to Andover:

“I Samuel Blanchard landed in New Ingland on the 23 day of Jun in the year 1639. I Samuel Blanchard cam to Andovar with my family upon the tenth day of jun in the yer 1686.”

Then follows a truly extraordinary entry:

“I bought my horce of John Whelar upon the 18 day of march 1691.”

The purchase of his horse ranked among the most important events of his life, alongside his marriages, the births of his children, and his voyage to a new land.

When he wrote his will on Nov 21, 1704, Samuel divided his lands, livestock and personal possessions amongst his children and widow, and finished up with the following bequest:

“Last My black horse I doe give to my Dear Wife”.

This horse must have been incredibly important to Samuel. We tend to think that colonists nearly lived on horseback, using horses for travel and as work animals. But early in the Puritan era in New England, there were few horses. Most farmers used oxen teams for farm work if they had any sort of work animal at all. By the time of Samuel’s horse purchase, there were large breeding operations in the colonies, and horses were starting to be exported rather than imported. Even with their increase in numbers in the 1690s, the purchase of a horse was probably seen as a sign of wealth and status, the equivalent of a modern purchase of a luxury car.

Samuel’s pride in his black horse seems obvious, and quite charming. It is a shame that he never recorded the animal’s name.

Bucknam Family: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Scary”

The Scary Truth: Slaveowners in the Family Tree

Five Generations of Bucknam Slaveowners: 

William Bucknam 

Joses and William Bucknam

Lt. Samuel Bucknam 

Captain William Bucknam & Benjamin Bucknam 

John Bucknam

I was so surprised to find one of my ancestors, Reuben Hull, owned slaves in New Hampshire, of all places. I’d never realized that slavery had been so common in the northern colonies in the 17^th century—I’d believed it was confined to the southern colonies. How wrong I was! But when I discovered another ancestor, William Bucknam, was a slaveowner in Massachusetts, I was stunned. I was even more horrified to realize the family continued to own slaves over the course of five generations and for over a century, and that they refused to free their last slaves until they were forced to some years after Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1783. This was a scary and shameful chapter in the Bucknam family history.

I might never have discovered that the Bucknams owned slaves if I hadn’t started researching William’s carpentry and construction career. While he was an artisan, he was also acquiring large tracts of land in the Charlestown and Malden areas of Massachusetts. However, he apparently lacked necessary farming skills and farm labor. When William’s wife was accused of adultery with William’s friend, farmer Robert Burden, one of the witnesses defending Sarah and Burden noted that William “had much occation of carting and plowing and had neither cattle nor skill of his owne to doe it and could sheldom get others to doe it though often prest my selfe and others.” (See #1 below.) Perhaps William saw the acquisition of slaves as an easy option for gaining farm laborers that he so obviously needed.

Several sources include this quote: “The Bucknam farm was a slave farm. In the days of slavery it was one of the largest slave farms in the northeast.” The source of this information is never identified, so it is hard to evaluate its veracity.

According to the Corey book, “There were several slaves attached to the farm of William Bucknam and his descendants…” How many is “several”? A slave census done in 1754 in Massachusetts found only 21 slaves total in Malden, 16 males and 5 females. Obviously by that year, the Bucknams had few slaves on their farm.

However, there are references to the individual Bucknam slaves in Malden town and court records from the late 1600s and early 1700s, when William’s sons Joses and William Jr. had inherited their father’s land following their father’s death in 1679.  When William Jr. died in 1693, his will granted freedom to one slave, a man named Shan.  It is unclear if this was the only slave William owned, or if there were others who were not freed at his death.

In addition to William’s Shan, Joses’ son Samuel owned a “negro peeter” who had some sort of run-in with a Puritan woman in 1703. I can find no explanation of the incident. Was it sexual? Was it an argument? Whatever the details, it was serious enough that Samuel, as the person responsible for Peeter’s actions, was charged a fine by the city of Malden in the amount of two pounds and 12 shillings, a sizable sum for that period.

Samuel Bucknam headstone, from Findagrave

Samuel’s son William, known as Captain William Bucknam from his war service in Maine, was probably the person described in this incident from Corey’s Malden history:

“The story is told that many times old Captain Bucknam marched down the road from his house at the head of his band of Negro slaves that had been captured from the Spanish and French. There is no explanation for his title of "Captain". No date is given and therefore it is impossible to determine to which Bucknam it referred.”

I find it very interesting that the slaves are supposedly trophies of war, taken from the Spanish and French rather than purchased. If that is true, perhaps William’s rank came from captaining a ship. Perhaps he received a share of bounty from captured enemy ships that had been loaded with slaves as well as other goods. We may never know the truth. William was born in 1709, and died in 1776, so this incident likely occurred in the 1750s or 1760s after William’s military service in the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

Captain William Bucknam's grave in Maine, from Findagrave

The Malden history book also lists slave weddings, births and deaths that author Corey had discovered in his research. One marriage record was for “Bramer, a negro belonging to Benjamin Bucknam of Malden, and Dinah, a mulatto belonging to Mr. Toler of Stoneham. By Rev. Joseph Emerson. Jan. 24, 1760.” Benjamin was Captain William’s brother, and the son of Samuel Bucknam.

The deaths included another slave owned by Benjamin Bucknam: “Samson, a negro man belonging to Benjamin Bucknam, died January 5, 1786.” Note that this is three years after the date slaves were supposed to be freed in Massachusetts. Obviously Benjamin had not complied with the new law.

July 1749 sale ad from Charlestown where Bucknams owned land.

The Maine State Museum had some interesting information on the Bucknam family slaves as well. Captain William and Benjamin Bucknam bought land in the Falmouth area of Maine, and alternated living in Massachusetts and Maine. The State Museum owns a silk waistcoat worn by Captain William’s son John at his wedding in 1773. The museum notes:

“Wearing silk, like owning slaves, was a sign of prestige. John Bucknam was raised in a slave-owning household in Falmouth (Portland). When he was three years old, his father William’s slave, Cuffe, ran away. William advertised in three Boston newspapers to offer a cash prize for anyone who caught and returned his property. Cuffe may have successfully escaped because the first runaway notice appeared in 1749 and the last in 1755.

John Bucknam wore this silk waistcoat (vest) in 1773 when he married Mary Wilson in Columbia Falls, Maine. He and Mary had nine children and owned two or three enslaved people. The Bucknams were forced to free their slaves when Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1783.”

 Boston Evening Post Fugitive Slave Advertisement Sep. 18, 1749

Corey’s history quotes an article about the Bucknam farm from the August 14, 1875 edition of the Malden Mirror newspaper. The article, which apparently provided some history of the Bucknams and the farm, stated that, “The two last woolly-haired residents upon the place rejoiced in the decidedly euphonious names of Pomp and Samp.”

Corey continues, “Pomp and seser (Cesar?) are mentioned as fiddlers at a country frolic in 1777, in a piece of doggerel which is said to have been written by one of the slaves of this estate. This rhyme, which, with other curious papers, is in the possession of Mr. Swan, is hardly to be compared with the work of Phyllis Wheatley, the slave poet of Boston. It was to be sung ‘in the tune of the black swan’ and two couplets of the seven of which it is composed will fairly present its merits.

            Theare was five cobelers made a frolick

            As one was taken with the collick.

            The fiddlers name was pomp or seser

            And dauid danced with a mop squeezer.”

I wish I knew what happened to Pomp, Samp, Seser and all the other human beings my ancestors enslaved. What I do know is that apparently my ninth-great-grandfather William Bucknam and at least two of his sons, (my eighth great-grandfather Joses and his brother William), one of his grandsons (Samuel Bucknam), two of his great-grandsons (Captain William and Benjamin Bucknam) and one great-great-grandson (John Bucknam) owned slaves, over a period from the 1660s until at least 1783. The Bucknam family was quite wealthy, and unfortunately this wealth was built in part through the forced labor of an unknown number of black slaves. This was a scary discovery and a grim legacy.

Sources:

Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699. Roger Thompson. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986; reprint 2012).

The History of Malden Massachusetts, 1633-1785, Deloraine P Corey, 1836-1910, pgs. 417-451

http://www.bucknam.com/sknower.html

Early History of Malden, By Frank Russell, Arcadia Publishing, 2018, pgs 21-22

https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/b/u/c/Richard-Bucknam/GENE19-0001.html

"A Bucknam/Buckman Genealogy" Anne Theopold Chaplin, Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1988,

http://dunhamwilcox.net/me/me_bio_buckham.htm

https://mainestatemuseum.org/exhibit/regional-struggle/missouri-compromise/

https://primaryresearch.org/slave-census/?town=&county=Middlesex