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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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