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!
[1] “1775: Battle of Bunker Hill,” post from “The Gloucester Timeline: An Interactive History,” at website of Sawyer Free Library, Gloucester (https://timeline.sawyerfreelibrary.org/timeline/battle-of-bunker-hill/).
[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].
Post a Comment