August 8, 1775 — 250 years ago this day — a Gloucester, Massachusetts, militia company scrambled and successfully fought off a shore raid by marines from HMS Falcon, menacing Gloucester Harbor. Dogtown resident and militiaman Peter Lurvey, age 35 — my ancestor — was fatally shot, dying later in the day. He is my only (known) Revolutionary War ancestor killed in action.
My mother’s cousin Janet was in the DAR as a Peter Lurvey descendant. A photocopy of her lineage paper was my first introduction to genealogy — about 40 years ago. The odd twist that we descend from Peter Lurvey *twice* got me even more curious about all this stuff.
Detail of “Gloucester Harbour” from “Map of Gloucester, Cape Ann” from survey by John Mason, printed by Senefelder Lithographic Co., Boston, in 1831, available at the Library of Congress and the Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library.
A whole book contextualizing the Battle of Gloucester is Joseph Garland’s The Fish and the Falcon: Gloucester’s Resolute Role in America’s Fight for Freedom (2006). There’s a recent webpage at HistoricIpswich.net (using the same map illustration) here.
Two companies of men from Gloucester, Massachusetts, fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, 250 years ago today: Captain Nathaniel Warner’s company in Col. Moses Little’s 17th Regiment, and Capt. John Row’s company in Col. Ebenezer Bridge’s 11th Regiment.[1] Both companies have muster rolls and related documents surviving in the Massachusetts State Archives. One of the men in Capt. Warner’s company was William Grimes. Was he my ancestor? Probably, but I am not sure. It is one of those cases where evidence includes enough conflict to cast doubt. How much doubt?
My ancestor William Grimes was the only adult of that name (so it seems) living in Gloucester from early adulthood in the 1760s through 1789. Then there were two of them, father and son, in the censuses and tax lists of 1790, 1798, and 1800, after which the father died probably before 1810 and the son left Gloucester. The surname Grimes (or Graham, or Grimes alias Graham) had first appeared in Gloucester with Andrew Grimes who married Mary Davis in 1731. They had five children from 1731 to 1745, three daughters and two sons, Andrew in 1739 and another, born in 1745, but with no given name in the record—presumed to be William who, alongside the 1739 Andrew, appears as an adult in the next generation. In 1765 William Grimes married Abigail McLaughlin; they had five children between 1766 and 1782. But three years before marrying, William Grimes in 1762 was recorded in town as the father of an illegitimate child. (This illegitimate child, Lydia, is my ancestor.) It is plausible that William Grimes was the unnamed boy born in 1745, fathering an illegitimate child at age 17 in 1762, and marrying three years later at age 20.
The Revolution, however, presents a problem. Two rolls of Capt. Nathaniel Warner’s company survive from summer and fall of 1775. One lists all the soldiers’ ages, in years. William Grimes was “24”– suggesting birth about 1751, which would have made him an absurdly young husband at age 14 in 1765, and stretching credulity to the breaking point to have fathered a child at age 11 or 12 in 1762.
It is worth remembering that we do not know for certain that the William Grimes who married in 1765 and fathered a child in 1762 was the unnamed son of Andrew and Mary Grimes born in 1745. He could have been born some other time, earlier or later — but probably not much later. Or he could have been related to this earlier Grimes couple some other way, or not at all.
But Occam’s razor suggests that we give weight to the absence of any (other) evidence pointing to two near-contemporary William Grimeses, and consider the probability that we are dealing with one William Grimes, who was the child of Andrew and Mary, became a father in 1762 and married in 1765, and was also the soldier in Capt. Warner’s company — and that his stated age in the muster is an error, understating his age by five years (or some other amount). John Bradley Arthaud and Ernest Hyde Helliwell III considered this problem and concluded that it was most likely that the muster roll age was in error.[2] But their conclusion was based only on seeing the age in a printed source, the entry for Grimes in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War.[3] They went on to suggest, “If the printed ’24’ is a mistake for an original handwritten ’29’, then a birth year of ca. 1744 would correspond favorably to our William’s birth in 1745.”
But the original roll (from which the Soldiers and Sailors reference was drawn) clearly shows “24”:[4]
This eliminates a manuscript-to-print transcription error, but still leaves open the possibility that this muster roll itself, perhaps a fair copy from other draft lists, might include a transcription error. More due diligence is required before accepting that this is the same William Grimes. Specifically: a new “reasonably exhaustive” review of Gloucester sources to confirm the absence of any evidence suggesting the sojourn of a second contemporary William Grimes in Gloucester; and also, perhaps, a systematic review of the stated ages of other men in the muster to assess its accuracy and consider analogous errors.
I have not yet done either portion of this due diligence to my satisfaction. But—thinking about William Grimes on the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill—it needs to be done!
[2] John Bradley Arthaud and Ernest Hyde Helliwell III, “The Mark3 and Tammy Lurvey (Priestley) Grimes Family of Gloucester and Rockport,” The Essex Genealogist 29 [2008]: 121–32, 159–69, at 122 note 20.
[3]Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, 17 vols. (Boston, 1896-1908), 6:898.
[4] “A list of Capt. Warners Company in the 17 Regt of Foot in the Service of the United Colonies of North America Commanded by Col. Moses Little” tipped in as document #82 in vol. 56 of “Muster Rolls of the Revolutionary War, 1767–1833” (77 vols. in 81), Massachusetts State Archives, Collection SC1-57 [FamilySearch DGS 8092211, image 184/476].
250 years ago today — May 6, 1775 — Julie’s ancestor Samuel Harmon was commissioned as lieutenant of the militia company of the “Second Society” of the town of Suffield in “His Majesty’s Colony of Connceticut in New-England,” by its Governor, Jonathan Trumbull. There is indeed a typo in “Connecticut”.
A fortnight after the Lexington alarm, militias were expanding. The “Second Society,” the second Suffield church, formed in the western part of the town, dated back to 1744, but I don’t know if it had its own militia company before this moment.
In 2006 we had this folio sheet conserved and reframed in its full, unfolded state, which emphasizes just how Lt. Harmon folded and carried it.
Recent addition to a Charlemagne bookshelf: huge pedigree of all known descendants of Charlemagne through eight generations, roughly to the year 1000. This side, generations 1-5; other side, generations 6-8, so you need two copies if you want to display it!
Published in 1967, with 79 pp. of dense and, for some lines, still-definitive annotation, in a four-volume interdisciplinary conference proceedings / reference set on Charlemagne (Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen bis um das Jahr 1000: 1-8 Generation,” in Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, 4 vols. [Düsseldorf, 1965-68], 4:403-82).
Once a reference-room staple in university libraries, discarded copies now occasionally available. This one came from University of Arizona. Not available digitally anywhere, so far as I know.
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 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].
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.
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!
