Skip to content

Gold Star Houses

While preparing an architectural history presentation I am delivering for Barrington Preservation Society’s plaque program this week, I learned from my co-researcher on our plaque committee that this house we are studying was that of a bomber pilot killed in action in World War II (pictured; he lived there with his wife and mother-in-law, who was the owner).

A few years ago I had learned that my own house was the home of a young man killed in the Civil War. I have been doing house-history research for years, but don’t think I’ve either thought about or come across a term for this distinction for a house from which a resident was killed in military service: like a family’s service flag (the tradition, dating from World War I, of displaying a blue star for every family member in active service, and displaying a gold stars for a family member killed in service), but applying the concept to a house.

Without detracting from the greater importance of the concept to remember the families of fallen service members, it seems appropriate to make an effort to remember these Gold Star Houses, especially in communities—urban, suburban, or rural—where the neighborhood’s families may have all changed a generation later.

Two William Smiths, or, the decline of “junior”

Two adult William Smiths were living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1775 and 1776. They were perhaps 12 years apart in age, and I have no evidence they were related. One of them—the older one—is my ancestor.

By 1775, the older colonial New England habit of distinguishing same-name men by “senior,” “junior,” “3rd,” etc., in order of their age, in public records was on its way to disappearing.  These two Williams are never distinguished in any town or civil records I’ve found: marriages, births of children, deeds, etc.

But I can be relatively sure* that “my” William Smith served in the Revolution.

How? Because they both enlisted in the same militia company in Gloucester in February 1776. “William Smith” and “William Smith junior” appear side by side in two muster rolls in that year.

Distinguishing them this way in the muster and pay rolls was contextually important. The older William left the unit on June 10, 1776, serving only 10 days in that quarter. William “junior” stayed in for several more months, but in the rolls drawn up in subsequent quarters, the clerk did not bother to call him “junior.” It wasn’t contextually necessary.

If the two Williams had not served together in the same unit, I would never have known for sure who was who, and that “my” William served for those four months.

*”relatively sure”: This of course depends on the argument from silence, that a third adult William Smith did not sojourn in Gloucester in 1776, or that this company, mustered and stationed at Gloucester, and looking, from its roster, like it included all Gloucester men, had no interlopers from other towns at this time.

Images: Capt. Daniel Giddings’s Co., Col. Joseph Foster’s Regiment, Coastal Defense [Mass. Militia], muster / pay rolls: Mass. State Archives, Revolutionary War Muster Roll Records Coll. (77 vols.), 36:13 (Feb., April, May 1776) and 36:48 (June, July, Aug. 1776) [FS DGS 008092197, images 28 and 43].

New trim paint

New trim paint in the east parlor, General Thomas Allin House. My grandfather’s framing hammer is holding up the sash on the left.

Father’s Day to Juneteenth

Last night, on the cusp between Father’s Day and Juneteenth, I took a closer look at my male-line ancestors. I knew they had enslaved people in Kentucky, and before that in Virginia. But wills and inventories had told only part of the story. For example, Richard Taylor, who fought in the Revolution, died intestate in 1843, and no inventory survives for him. Richard’s father, Harrison Taylor, who died in 1811, bequeathed in his will a Mulatto woman, Charlotte, “during her servitude,” and Charlotte’s son James, both under some pre-existing term-limits to their enslavement.

Richard’s son Blackstone Taylor (1806-1870), my great-great-great grandfather, died after Emancipation, so his will and inventory do not include enslaved people. But I’m not sure why I never looked for him before now in the Slave Schedules of the 1850 and 1860 Federal Censuses.

In 1860 he enslaved seven people, ages 29 to 2 years, the 15-year-old boy an “idiot” (1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedules, Deckers Dist., Ohio Co., Ky.). So many people with names and stories to seek.

Heraldry in a probate register

Working through footnotes for the current issue of The American Genealogist and stumbled on this rare appearance of heraldry in a probate register: arms of John Agmondisham, Esquire, of Rowbarne, parish of East Horsley, Surrey, in the registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for 1572. [In the new style, this is TNA PROB 11/55/103; in the old style, this is 7 Peter, f. 51r.]

Maybe the copyist sensibly presumed we would have trouble with his odd surname, so helpfully drew his coat of arms?

I’d love to see other examples of heraldry in probate registers!

looking for a leg up

Here’s a photo of my current obsession:

This man outlived his leg almost 47 years, and is buried far away. I’m putting together an essay on the man, the leg, and what it all means.

I’ve been asking around: does anyone know of other similar stones?

new fasg.org website is up

One of my engrossing summer projects has been updating the website for the American Society of Genealogists, fasg.org. Well, it has been up (and stable) for a few days now. I have learned (and re-learned) a lot of new web skills, and might even use some of them on this site — who knows?

“Looking at graves? Count me in!”

That’s what my four-year-old said when I told him (somewhat apologetically) where we were going. A chance encounter had led me to discover four new ancestors of my wife, who lie in the small burying ground by the beautiful Bradford Center meeting house in Bradford, New Hampshire, only five miles (by a dirt track through a beaver bog) from our idyllic getaway home in East Washington village. So I took our youngest along for a visit. At four years old, he already has a vast experience of visiting churches, graves, and archives; he is not shy with ancestors:

Jonathan Knight was, as his stone states, a Revolutionary soldier. The raking light on the unusual sandstone, long broken but strongly repaired with iron, makes a dramatic sight.

This graveyard is lovingly tended, and all the old Revolutionary soldiers in it are carefully marked with flags. Nearby lie my son’s other ancestors, Josiah and Mary (French) Rowe:

In this part of the New Hampshire hill country, the once-bustling farms have almost all grown up into quiet woods, so sometimes it is easy to forget how thickly our ancestors lie all around us.

my ancestor, my neighbor: Benjamin Allen of Rehoboth

In the previous post I figured out that my ancestor, Benjamin Allen of Salisbury and Rehoboth, was actually my neighbor for ten years when I lived by the Newman Cemetery in Rehoboth (now Rumford, RI)—and his gravestone may be extant, though misidentified in the RI Cemetery Database. On a sunny day last month I was able to find and photograph it. The headstone is split and flaked, almost completely gone, and no legible inscription remains on it (just a fragment of verse from well below the information on Benjamin himself). But the footstone, deeply incised, does survive:

Below the name is (as is the style from the good stones from the 1720s surviving in this ground) simply the year of death. The footstone is now split, though, and only the first half of the year remains: “1 7”; the “2 3” are now gone as well (it is the “1723” which was misread as “1793” in the transcription which is now in the RI Cemetery database, but the head and footstone are obviously of a style of the 1720s, not the end of the century). As with many of the stones in this section of the ground, the footstone has long ago been moved so it is up against the headstone. Here are the two stones in situ:

And here is a close-up of the front of the headstone, bearing the remaining visible fragment of verse inscription, and a tiny bit of what must have been a handsome floreate border flanking the inscription. This is seen on a couple of other stones in this yard which I had admired for years — never thinking my own ancestor may have had a similar stone nearby:

I am glad finally to meet my ancestor and my neighbor! I have not yet found the deeds by which he came to own land bordering the Runnins River at Nockum Hill in Barrington, but I am getting closer, now that we have access to the 17th-century Swansea Town Records on microfilm. But the answer to this may lie in Rehoboth town records – that is our next target.

serendipity in a basement evidence-room

Two weeks ago I attended my first annual meeting of the American Society of Genealogists, meeting several of the other Fellows for the first time. Five days after coming home, I was in the dim, cavernous basement of the Registry of Deeds of Bristol County, Massachusetts, when someone approached me to fight over an index volume I was hoarding — and it turned out to be another Fellow, Fred Hart of North Guilford, Connecticut, whom I had met only the week before!

I was in Taunton on behalf of the Barrington Preservation Society, to research the chain of title for an eighteenth-century farmhouse on the other side of Hundred-Acre Cove, long held by members of the Allen family — not the Allin family who built my farmhouse in West Barrington. I had presumed the house belonged to a branch of descendants of John Allen of Swansea (d. 1683), an early Baptist follower of Rev. John Miles, whose first meeting-house lay next door to this Allen homestead. But instead, I was surprised by the revelation that the deeds for this Allen house led back not to the Swansea Baptist Allens, nor to the West Barrington Allins who built my own house, but to yet a third Allen family in the neighborhood, and moreover, to someone who was actually one of my own ancestors: Benjamin Allen (1652-1723), of Salisbury, then Rehoboth. I have lived in this corner of the Plymouth Colony for twelve years now, but only now feel like less of a newcomer, with this realization that an ancestor of mine settled in the same place 300 years ago! My next task is to locate his gravestone, in the Newman Cemetery where I walked my dog every day for years, without an inkling…

UPDATE, the morning after the election: After a blustery hour walking the Newman Cemetery, I went inside and checked the RI Historical Cemeteries Database Index. Benjamin Allen’s gravestone is not extant, nor for either of his wives: but I did find the group of stones for one of his children, David Allen (1707-1751), and his family. David, who is my ancestral half-uncle, lived on the parcel just north of the target of our house-research, which was his brother Joseph’s homestead. David’s land spanned four towns and two colonies, much to the consternation of anyone looking at his deeds! Here are David Allen and his wife Hannah:

SECOND UPDATE, Friday of Election Week: Turns out that Benjamin Allen’s gravestone was extant into the early 20th century, though no longer. A 1932 alphabetized typescript of Newman Cemetery inscriptions (alas only abstracted, not preserving original inscriptions), lists him: “Allen, Benjamin, Sept. 30, 1723 in 71 yr.” (this is Marion Pearce Carter, “The Old Rehoboth Cemetery, ‘The Ring of the Town’, at East Providence, Rhode Island, Near Newman’s Church” [Attleboro, Mass.: the author, 1932], 58 pp., at RIHS Library), p. 1. I wonder if his is one of the many stones still standing, but with inscription completely obliterated? His may be the gravestone listed in the more careful transcription by Robert S. Trim (“Gravestone Records of Old Rehoboth, Massachusetts: Newman Cemetery,” compiled 1978/9, 230 pp. plus index, at p. 176), which records “Benjamin Allen . . . 1793 (Footstone): Headstone badly chipped and unreadable.” Since Trim notes that Mrs. Carter’s transcription did not include any stone for a Benjamin Allen in 1793, I wonder whether Trim misread 1723 for 1793? I will need to go find this myself. Trim’s transcription is done in some sort of perambulation order and lists this after a set of Butterworths (including Lieut. Noah Butterworth, d. 1736), and a Thomas Hawkins, “Born a slave in Kentucky”, d. 1863; and before Benjamin Rand, d. 1736 age 11; an undated fieldstone, and a stone for Jael wife of David Saben, d. 1726. So, maybe I can find this stone? I’ll try again on the weekend — supposed to be warm and sunny.