a genealogist's sketchbook

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.

One more Memorial Day post about Lt. Chedel, the young Civil War casualty who lived in our house. He was brought home and buried in 1866 in his family’s plot in Providence’s North Burial Ground — an amazing place despite its current bad luck to lie next to Interstate 95. Anyhow, Findagrave has three photos of a gravestone for him: one from 2006, showing his original marble stone in reasonably good repair (visibly reset in a concrete pad); one from 2012, showing the same stone lying flat in the grass, presumably having been broken off at the base; and finally one from just a few months ago showing, not the same stone re-erected, but a replacement stone in a more generic historic-military style. I am glad that the grave has been tended and restored, but I wonder whether it was truly impossible to preserve the original stone — which, after all, was chosen and erected by his own parents?

Not sure I like “refreshing” gravestones like this — if the originals are discarded.