Family Members in U. S. History (2)

The first post about “Family Members in U. S. History” discussed those family members who had come into the earliest American colonies (i.e. colonies that would later become the United States). In Virginia, they were the Northens, and in Massachusetts they were the Lord and Pease families from Mary Beth’s family. At the same time. the Roys, Rita’s ancestors , were settling into the part of New France that was to become Quebec.
While a few of Mary Beth’s relatives did come into those first Massachusetts colonies, the bulk of her family has actually been in Maryland, almost from the state’s beginnings. Maryland is unique among the U. S. colonies in that it was the only one founded specifically as a refuge for Catholics. When Captain John Smith first explored Virginia, he followed the Chesapeake Bay, the huge water highway that separates modern Virginia and Maryland, up into Maryland. As described in an earlier post, during the 1630’s, one of our Northen ancestors Richard Thompson. https://northenhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/richard-thompson/ made a similar journey up into Kent Island to claim it for Virginia, but George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) was able to get a grant from King Charles to establish the colony of Maryland for Catholics, which included Kent island. In 1649, Maryland passed the religious toleration acts. In 1650 Anne Arundel County was founded. Ironically, the new settlers coming in were mostly Protestant and they quickly took over.
One of Mary Beth’s ancestors, Joseph Darby, was among the early settlers in Anne Arundel County. Joseph was born in 1665 and there is some debate about whether he was born in Anne Arundel or arrived from England in 1678; however by 1700, he seems to have established himself. There are not many opportunities to peak into ancestors’ lives during this period, but we do get a glimpse of it with Joseph Darby, his wife Rebecca and his son Josias (Mary Beth’s ancestor). According to a court document in 1705 Joseph gives his older son “Samuel Darby one young bay mare branded on the buttock with an horse shoe, one sow ear marked with a cross and also their son Josias one white fly bitten mare and a sow with similar ear marks.” Presumably the horse was given to Josias as something to train him. Josias would have been 10 years old at the time. Joseph must have died shortly after since Rebecca remarried in 1707. Just two years later, Josias was given over to the guardianship of an influential man named Benjamin Gaither and bound to him until he was twenty years old. Gaither was teach him how to build tobacco houses and set up tobacco huts. He was also to teach him how to read the Bible and would give him a suit of clothes at the end of his indenture. Just like Virginia, Maryland had switched to a tobacco culture in the latter part of the 1600’s and this would have been typical for a boy’s training.
Josias must have done well himself, though, because by 1726 he was purchasing land that had originally been granted to George Calvert. Later, in a list of settlers of Maryland, he is listed as “Josias Darby, Gent” meaning that his social status was that of landed gentry. He owned to tracts of land, one of 39 acres in Anne Arundel County called “Darby’s Delight.,” probably his original purchase, and another of 125 acres in Prince George County, MD, bought in 1746 called “Darby’s Desire.”
Another early settler to Anne Arundel county was Mary Beth’s ancestor Adam Shipley who emigrated from England in 1668. There are also some stories about Adam and his son Richard. These may be the subject of a future blog but for now I’ll merely include a modern Maryland marker that recognizes his presence.

Not all of Mary Beth’s colonial ancestors came in through Anne Arundel County and Annapolis. in the next blog, I’ll mention a few of those who came in from other directions and then discuss a bit about where their lives and the lives of other family ancestors fit in with the history of colonial America.

Family Members in U.S. History (1)

As I continue research to piece together the family genealogies one of the things that strikes me is the extent to which the lives of our ancestors paralleled the development of the United States. In school, we learned about the major events in the country’s history, but very little about the individual people whose lives constituted it, unless they were famous.  I want to take some time and paste on as it were some of our ancestors into those major historical trends. In doing so, I am drawing not just from my direct ancestors but also those of my children’s spouses:  Rita Roy (Pat), Daniel Madden (Maura), John Cotter (Melissa), Brian Augelli (Maya) and Mary Beth Burdette (Eli). 

The first English colonies in what eventually became the United States as every elementary school student knows were Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1620. Members of our family arrived in both of these areas shortly after.  As recorded previously John Northin, the progenitor of the Northen family in this country, arrived on the Plaine Joan in York on  the Chesapeake Bay up river from Jamestown in 1636.  Just a year earlier in 1635, one of Mary Beth’s ancestors arrived in Salem, Massachusetts. Some of those who had been living in Plymouth Colony headed a short way south to establish Salem.  Salem, of course, was the sight of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. Also present in Salem was at least one other member of Mary Beth’s family, John Pease who had arrived in 1645 with his brother Robert who was indentured to a weaver.  It is not likely that either of them were around for the trials since both of them were dead by that time.  Before dying, however, John and his brother Robert in 1679 moved west and established the town of Enfield, Connecticut, reportedly living the first winter in a hut built on the side of a hill. They were later joined by William’s son Jeremiah. The Lord and Pease families intermarried and remained in the Enfield area for generations.  Similarly, John Northin’s son Edmund moved up in what would later become Richmond County, Virginia where members of the Northen family remained until the twentieth century.

For the next century it appears that most of our family members continued to come into the country from the British Isles and to move to Virginia or Massachusetts. This is a bit deceptive, however. In 1820, the state of Maine broke free from Massachusetts to form its own state.  Several years later Rita’s ancestor Jean-Raphael Roy dit Voisine moved from Kamouraska in Quebec  just over the Canadian border into Madawaska, Aroostokck County in Maine.  It is most likely that this happened after Maine became a state since Jean-Raphael had married Marie Louise Caron in Kamoraska in 1810 and their son Benoni  Denis Roy dit Desjardin was bornthere  in 1818.  In 1869, an area of Aroostock County, Maine was incorporated into the town of Frenchville (named for obvious reasons) and that is where Benoni died in 1897.  As with the Northen family, members of the Roy family have lived in that town where they settled in the 1600’s almost down to the present day.

(There is an interesting note on French Canadian names that can be confusing to the average person reseasrching them. The word dit in a name indicates that an additional name has been added to the family and it is the name by which the family is known.  In Rita’s family, for example, Jean-Raphael Roy dit Voisine and Benoni  Denis Roy dit Desjardin were father and son.  The famiy’s traditional surname was Roy, however, the name they were known by was the final name, i.e. Voisine or Desjardin and this was often the name that was listed in documents.)

The reason for saying that the Roy family arrived in the United States in the mid-1800-s is a bit misleading is that they had actually been in North America for almost two hundred years prior to that time and the boundary became what became Canada (originally New France) and what became the United States was fluid.  Marie Louise Caron’s family could trace itself back to Pierre Michaud who came over to New France from Fontenay-le-Comte, France in 1656 as part of a merchant’s ship and ended up staying.  So while the Northens were in Virginia and the Lords and Pease families in Massachusetts, the Roys were settling in at Quebec.