The Troubled Life of Naomi Hull Daniels: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt "Quite the Character"

 The Strange and Sad Life of Naomi Hull Daniels

Naomi Hull: 1640-about 1686

 

My seventh-great-grandmother Naomi Hull Daniels had a troubled life, and ended up causing trouble for her relatives as she grew older. She was quite the character.

Naomi was born sometime in 1640 to Rev. Joseph Hull and his second wife, Agnis Hunt. She was the tenth of Joseph’s sixteen children, and the third child born in America after Rev. Hull had fled England in 1635 seeking religious freedom in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately for the family, Rev. Hull’s preaching ran afoul of the Puritan church that predominated in the first northern colonies. He was forced to repeatedly move his family further north into the wilderness, trying to find a congenial congregation for his ministry. By 1648, Rev. Hull decided that life in the colonies was even worse than the church conflicts he left behind in England. He booked passage on a ship back to England, taking his wife and only a few of their children with him.

I can find no record of Rev. Hull’s return voyage to England, so it is unclear exactly which children accompanied him. Most of the children from Rev. Hull’s first marriage were either grown and out of the house, or were nearly grown. Despite Naomi’s youth, she was left behind. As Rev. Hull’s son in law John Bickford and a neighbor named John Symonds described the situation,

“about four and twenty years ago or there about naomy hulls father and mother they went for England: and left theyer Children to the wid wilderness: and Left them very young and wear not tutred (tutored) as they ought to have been.”

There are some problems with this testimony. The deposition was supposedly given in 1669, so the time period is off by about three years; the Hulls abandoned their children in 1648, which was twenty-one years prior. However, there is no doubt about the basic charge. The description of leaving the children to the “wid wilderness” is heartbreaking. The mention of the children not being “tutred as they ought to have been” shows that the community felt the Hulls’ behavior was out of the ordinary and that they failed to meet basic community standards for parenting. What arrangements did they make for the care of their minor children? Did they expect their eldest children to care for the younger ones? Did the older children agree with this? Did they take in their siblings? How could any parent with a conscience leave behind an eight-year-old child?

17th Century Map of the New Hampshire Colony

We don’t know where poor Naomi was sent when her parents left, but by her teens she was a servant in the home of Samuel Symonds of Ipswich, a former neighbor of her parents. She may have lived with the Symonds family all along since 1648, paying off her room and board with service. Servants had minimal rights; they were treated barely better than slaves, even by supposedly God-fearing Puritans.

She witnessed a deed for her “master” Symonds in April 1661, and had to testify about it in court in June of that year. A few years later, she gave birth to a child out of wedlock, a great scandal in those days. On September 17, 1667, she was “presented for committing fornication, sentence to be whipped to the number of 15 stripes and fees.” What a cruel society! This impoverished, abandoned young woman was whipped and then charged a fine for either being a rape victim or for seeking a few moments’ pleasure to brighten a miserable life. As a servant in someone else’s home, completely at their mercy, she had no chance of paying off the fine.

Having been publicly humiliated, she had little hope of marriage, respect or help. The town saw her and her illegitimate daughter as a problem. As a solution, in 1667 the town bribed a man named John Church of Dover with sixty acres of land if he would agree to take in “Neamys child” and “keep” her until she came of age. Why did they choose this man? Was he the child’s father? If not, why wasn’t the father of the child identified and whipped along with Naomi?

So Naomi lost her child and reputation. In desperation, she moved in with a man named William Williams, Rev. Hull’s former neighbor in Oyster River. The community was offended by this arrangement, so in July 1668 they turned on Williams, ordering the “Constable take of William Williams sinyer (sinner) by way of distress the som of nineteen shillings for a fine for a breach of a town order for entertaining Naomie Hull.”

There is no record of Williams’ reaction to the fine, but shortly afterward Naomi apparently married a man named Davey Daniels. I have found no record of the marriage so the date is uncertain. In fact, there are few records of Davey Daniels prior to the marriage. He appears in tax rolls in 1661, and from 1662-67 jointly with another colonist named Phillip Crommett. He was fined for quarreling in 1664. It is hard to believe he was the father of Naomi’s illegitimate child, for surely he would have raised it himself rather than have another man do so. Davey must not have cared for public opinion, for he chose to marry a fallen woman that the community despised.

The couple lived in the Oyster River/Durham, New Hampshire area and had several children, including my ancestor John Daniels, who was born around 1679. By 1685, Naomi is referred to as the “Widow Daniels”, so Davey must have died around 1685.

Before Davey’s death, Naomi accused her relatives of some amazing crimes. Naomi’s half-sister Dorothy Hull, was about eight years older than Naomi, and had been widowed around the same time Naomi married Davey Daniels. Dorothy married Benjamin Mathews in 1670 and they lived near the Daniels family. It appears the sisters were closer in proximity than emotionally, for on July 4, 1682, the Oyster River Constable was ordered to bring Naomi before the Counsel in Portmouth to face charges of “reproachful and slanderous speeches against Benjamin Mathews and others.”

Two of Naomi’s neighbors testified against her. The first, a young man named Joseph Grafton, stated that when he asked Naomi about her cow that had gone missing, she said that “Wishes and Divells have bewished my cow in the the myer twice.” She identified the witches and devils as her “sister Matt” and “my brother Benjamin Mathes is as bad.” Grafton asked why she was saying such things about relatives. She responded, “Hang them wishes and wizards. Let them Bring me out If they Dare…”

A woman named Remembrance Rand testified that Naomi said “hir sister Mathews was a wizard that her husband was noe better…naomy said that they tould you that it was I did bewich your child, but it was they that did bewich your child, but they did hit to hid their own Rogry…”

It sounds as if Naomi believed some of her neighbors suspected her of witchcraft, so she was turning suspicion onto her sister with whom she obviously had quarreled..

The History of Durham book that quoted the court case did not include the trial’s conclusion. The Salem Witch Trials were still a decade in the future, so perhaps the court did nothing to investigate any sort of rumors of witchcraft.

I feel sorry for Naomi. She must have been emotionally scarred by her parents’ abandonment, her life of servitude, and the community’s disgust at her giving birth to a child out of wedlock. She must have always been whispered about and scorned by her neighbors. Perhaps her own sister was ashamed of her. It is unsurprising she ended up bitter and possibly mentally ill. She must have been quite the character in Oyster River/Durham, New Hampshire.

I have found no record of Naomi’s death or burial. She seems to disappear from records in the late 1680s, so she probably died just a few years after her husband’s death. I hope that in death she found peace from the “Wishes and Divells” that plagued her.

 

Sources:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Records_and_Files_of_the_Quarterly_Courts_of_Essex_County%2C_Massachusetts%2C_1636-1686 known as EQC.2: 296-297.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Records_and_Files_of_the_Quarterly_Courts_of_Essex_County%2C_Massachusetts%2C_1636-1686 known as NHPP 40:229

History of Durham, N.H. Prov. Court Files, VI.481.

History of the Town of Durham, New Hampshire : (Oyster River Plantation) with Genealogical Notes; Stackpole, Everett Schermerhorn, 1850-1927; Thompson, Lucien, b. 1859; Meserve, Winthrop Smith, 1838-. Pages 222-223, 235-240.