Frost and Fairchild

The ancestry of Florence Bell (Frost) McMillan (1885-1957), wife of Alfred Ross McMillan and mother of Lucille (McMillan) Holbrook: Quakers of Oyster Bay, Long Island, who moved up the Hudson valley, and the Fairchilds of the Catskills, with whom they went west. William Frost, at Southold by 1655 and then at Setauket, took over a farm at Matinecock, by Oyster Bay, in 1674, and it stayed in the family for more than two centuries. His wife Rebecca Wright had been freed from her first marriage in 1670 by Governor Lovelace's council, on her father's petition, in what is believed to be the first divorce granted by the governor's council of New York. Their son William, killed in 1728 when the carcass of a beef he was slaughtering fell on him, married Hannah Prior, a granddaughter of John Bowne of Flushing, whose banishment by Peter Stuyvesant in 1662 for holding Friends' meetings in his house led the Dutch West India Company to order that consciences be left free in New Netherland. Their son Isaac married Mary Cock of Buckram, now Locust Valley, his cousin twice over, and through her, and again through Hannah Prior, the family descends from Lieut. Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones, the niece and widowed daughter-in-law of Governor John Winthrop. Hannah Prior's family is the Prior and Bowne line, and Mary Cock's the Cock and Feke line.

In 1763 Isaac and Mary sold their farm at Mill River Neck and moved to Cortlandt Manor and then to Dutchess County. Their son George, a Quaker farmer, married Sarah Underhill at the Creek Meeting House in December 1781, in the middle of the Revolution, and in 1805 moved up the Hudson to the Coeymans meeting, by Rensselaerville, where he lived out his life; Sarah's family, perhaps descended from Capt. John Underhill of the Pequot War, is the Underhill line. His son George followed his own son, Stephen George Frost, west and died at Heart Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1860. Stephen had left home in his thirteenth year for Coxsackie and New York City; he married Elizabeth Fairchild at Windham, Greene County, in 1849 and moved west by stages, to Wisconsin, where he was town clerk of Sugar Creek, to Iowa in 1866, California in 1883 and Washington in 1889, and died at Spokane in 1919, aged 92.

Elizabeth was a granddaughter of Jonathan Fairchild, a tanner, who built the first tannery in Greene County and settled at East Jewett about 1800, perhaps the Jonathan born at Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1744 to Thomas Fairchild and Ann Raymond, whose family is the Raymond line. Her mother, Nancy Woodworth, was a daughter of Lemuel Woodworth, who came to East Jewett from Scott's Patent in 1806; Nancy's family, the Woodworths of Scituate and Lebanon, is the Woodworth line. Her father Richard C. Fairchild and his brother John were probably both Jonathan's sons. John's daughter Adeline married William H. Bell, a carpenter and later coroner of Walworth County, and their daughter Lucy married Stephen's son George William Frost at Elkhorn in 1876, her second cousin. George was a banker in California, at Cloverdale and then Santa Cruz, where Lucy died in 1887. Their daughter Florence, born at Cloverdale in 1885, was with her father at Spokane in 1900 and married Alfred Ross McMillan there in 1904.

The line at a glance

• Frost: William Frost (bef. 1635-1719), of Southold, Setauket and Matinecock = Rebecca Wright, daughter of Nicholas Wright of Oyster Bay > William Frost (1674-1728) = Hannah Prior (1681-1771) > Isaac Frost (1717-aft. 1798), of Mill River Neck and Dutchess County = Mary Cock (1722-aft. 1777) > George Frost (1760-1830), a Quaker of Creek and Rensselaerville = Sarah Underhill (1761-1834) > George Frost (1791-1860), of Rensselaerville and Heart Prairie = Abigail Tanner > Stephen George Frost (1826-1919) = Elizabeth Fairchild (1830-1889) > George William Frost (1850-1925), banker at Cloverdale and Santa Cruz = Lucy Ellen Bell (1858-1887) > Florence Bell Frost (1885-1957) = Alfred Ross McMillan (1884-1966) > Lucille McMillan (1905-1996) = Richard Clifford Holbrook.
• Fairchild, twice: Jonathan Fairchild (d. by 1815), tanner, of East Jewett > (1) Richard C. Fairchild (1808-1882) = Nancy Woodworth (1808-1891) > Elizabeth Fairchild, above; (2) John Fairchild (1803-1867) = Catherine Clawson (bp. 1807-1831) > Adeline Asenath Fairchild (1829-1891) = William Hamilton Bell (c. 1829-1887), son of John M. Bell and Sarah Gerow > Lucy Ellen Bell, above.
• Possibly, the Norwalk Fairchilds: Thomas Fairchild (d. 1670), first settler of Stratford > Samuel Fairchild (1640-1704/5), ship's carpenter = Mary Wheeler, daughter of Moses Wheeler the ferryman > Jonathan Fairchild (1692-1772), the Norwalk fuller = Eleanor Whitney > Thomas Fairchild (b. 1718), of Norwalk and Bedford = Ann Raymond > Jonathan Fairchild (b. 1744) [?], perhaps the tanner of East Jewett, above.

The scope walks every ancestor of Florence Frost, and stops at the five women whose families are lines of their own: Hannah Prior (the Prior and Bowne line), Mary Cock (the Cock and Feke line), Sarah Underhill (the Underhill line), Nancy Woodworth (the Woodworth line) and Ann Raymond (the Raymond line). Her husband's side is the McMillan line, which stops at her. Her parents were second cousins, both great-grandchildren of Jonathan Fairchild.

How sure it is

From Florence to her great-grandparents the links are proven by records: her marriage record (1904), which names "Geo W Frost" and "Lucy Dell" [Bell], and the 1900 census; her father's 1876 marriage and the censuses of 1850 and 1860; her mother's 1876 marriage and the censuses of 1860 and 1870; Stephen G. Frost's death certificate, naming George Frost; and Elizabeth Fairchild in Richard C. Fairchild's household in 1850. William H. Bell's father John M. Bell is proven by the 1880 census; his mother Sarah Gerow is probable, from the 1827 marriage notice of John M. Bell and "Sarah Giraud of Manchester" (McMillan Frost Master Research).

The Fairchilds (Notable connections of Frances Fairchild Holbrook: the Fairchild branch and the families that married in):

• Adeline to John Fairchild and Catherine Clawson: compiled, probable: two genealogies, perhaps not independent (Gilmore, from Plume's manuscript, and the East Kill Valley Genealogy, under Catherine's gravestone).
• Richard C. and John to Jonathan Fairchild of East Jewett: compiled, probable. Two compiled genealogies say so, with Beach's list of Jonathan's children, the 1810 census, Henry's administration of the estate and deeds between the brothers; no record seen names Jonathan as their father. This is the link that makes Florence's parents second cousins.
• Jonathan to Thomas Fairchild and Ann Raymond of Norwalk: compiled, possible. Gilmore (2001) makes the tanner the Jonathan born at Norwalk on 29 Aug 1744; but the family stone at Bridgewater, Oneida County, gives him "age 66" at his death in 1815, and the East Kill Valley Genealogy "b. about 1751," and nothing yet ties him to Norwalk by record. The research report called it "probable at best"; the ruling of 8 Oct 2026 (Research decisions) brought the Norwalk generations in as pages with this step labelled possible. Everything above it rests on it: the Fairchilds of Norwalk and Stratford, the Wheelers, the Whitneys and the Seabrooks in this line, and the whole of the Raymond line. That Thomas's wife Ann was Ephraim Raymond's daughter is inferred and probable (see the Raymond line).

The Frosts (The Long Island Quaker families of the Frost line):

• George Frost (1791) and every step of the Frost line above him are compiled and probable, from Josephine Frost's Frost Genealogy (1912) and Underhill Genealogy (1932) and the Cock genealogy (1914), books by one small circle of Long Island genealogists who shared notes but quote the Friends' registers of Flushing and Westbury, the Oyster Bay town books and wills. Rebecca Wright's father is named in a record, Governor Lovelace's council papers ("Rebeckah his daught[er]"). That William Frost (1674) was Rebecca's son rests on the timing and on his brother's name, Wright Frost.

The families of the five women who married in, and how sure each of their links is, are set out on their own lines' pages. The Feakes, Foneses and Winthrops stand in three of them, since the Frosts descend from Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones through Hannah Prior and through Mary Cock, and perhaps a third time through Sarah Underhill, whose descent from Capt. John Underhill and Elizabeth Feake is possible only; Matthew Prior stands in two, as the grandfather of both Hannah Prior and Mary Cock's mother. The Woodworths do not depend on the Fairchild link; the Raymonds do.

Left out: the Revolutionary service and 1818 pension that online trees give George Frost (1760), who was a Quaker married by Friends' ceremony in 1781 (the pensioner was probably George P. Frost of Ulster County); the "Capt." John Bell (1791-1886) whom FamilySearch makes William H. Bell's father, contradicted by the 1880 census; the Frost Genealogy's "Ann (Beaupre)" as Nicholas Wright's wife; the Wrights' Norfolk gentry ancestry, which its own author calls unproved; the Ancestry tree's dates for Catherine Clawson (born 1814, died 1900), which are not hers. Abigail Tanner's parents in the trees, Joshua Tanner and Dinah Gifford, are unsupported.

Open questions

• Is Jonathan Fairchild of East Jewett the Jonathan born at Norwalk in 1744? The Bridgewater stone's inscription and his 1815 Greene County probate should say.
• Who was Jonathan's second wife Elizabeth, mother of Richard and John (Cooper is possible only)?
• William Frost's origin; Rebecca Wright's birth and death, and whether Elinor, the widow of 1720, was a second wife.
• Abigail Tanner's parents; Sarah Gerow's parents.
• Adeline Fairchild's marriage, 8 Sep 1849 or 1850.
• George W. Frost's "pistol accident" at Santa Cruz in 1887, and why he left the bank.