Story 01 of 32
Four men in one boat, 1620
On 6 December 1620, while the Mayflower lay at anchor in Cape Cod harbour, a party set out to explore the coast. Among them were John Tilley, his brother Edward, John Howland and Richard Warren. At dawn two days later they were attacked on the beach, the fight the Pilgrims called the "First Encounter." Three of those four men are ancestors in the family.
John Tilley and his wife Joan Hurst died that first winter. Their daughter Elizabeth, about thirteen, survived, and later married John Howland, the young man who had been in the boat with her father. Richard Warren's wife and daughters came over on the Anne in 1623, and his daughter Mary married Robert Bartlett.
The Howland-Tilley family and the Warren family then went separate ways for five generations. They met again at Plympton on 23 May 1773, when George Ellis, a great-great-grandson of John and Elizabeth's son Isaac Howland, married Phebe Stephens, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Mary Warren and Robert Bartlett. As it happens, George and Phebe were also third cousins through another Plymouth couple, John Churchill and Hannah Pontus.
Their daughter Nancy Ellis was the mother of Capt. Richard B. Holbrook. In her, the three men from that boat come together again.
A fifth man in the shallop, one of the "three of London, Richard Warren, Steeuen Hopkins" that Mourt's Relation names, is an ancestor too, on the Ellingwood side: Stephen Hopkins. His daughter Constance married Nicholas Snow, and their line runs through the Snows and Coles of Eastham to Hope Holdershaw, who married Richard Ellingwood in Maine. So the Holbrooks and the Ellingwoods both go back to that boat. [Hope's mother's line is probable.]
Story 02 of 32
The governor, the dissenter and the suitor
Thomas Prence was governor of Plymouth Colony in 1634, in 1638, and again from 1657 until his death in 1673. He is an ancestor on the Holbrook side. His daughter Sarah married Jeremiah Howes of Yarmouth. Their daughter Sarah Howes married Daniel Mayo of Eastham, and their granddaughter Sarah Mayo married Elisha Holbrook in 1742. Elisha's son was Capt. Gideon Holbrook.
Edmund Freeman, the leading settler of Sandwich, and John Howland of the Mayflower come in on the Ellis side. Each was a great-great-great-great-grandfather of Nancy Ellis, by two different lines. Nancy married Gideon Holbrook at Plymouth in December 1818, and their son Richard B. Holbrook, was in the first generation of the family to descend from all three men.
A century and a half before that wedding, the three were already tangled up together. Prence held Plymouth's hard line on religion; a Quaker writer, George Bishop, quotes him saying the Quakers "deserved to be destroyed." Freeman was the colony's best-known dissenter. In 1646 he lost his seat among the colony's Assistants, which Edward Winslow put down to "his professed Anabaptistry and separacion from the Churches," and in 1651 he and his wife were brought to court "for not frequenting the publick worship of God." Even so, two of Prence's daughters married two of Freeman's sons, Rebecca in 1646 and Mercy in 1650, and Prence left his books to his son-in-law John Freeman.
The Howlands gave the governor a different kind of trouble. In 1667 Prence's own court fined Arthur Howland Jr., John Howland's nephew, £5 "for inveigling of Mistris Elizabeth Prence" by courting her against her parents' wishes. Prence's will, six years later, names "my Daughter Elizabeth howland." She had married him after all.
One more knot: Prence's fourth wife, Mary, was the widow of Thomas Howes and the mother of Jeremiah Howes, the young man who married Prence's daughter Sarah. So both of Sarah Howes's grandfathers, Prence and Thomas Howes, are ancestors in the family, and Prence was married to her other grandmother.
Story 03 of 32
Three Holbrooks, three Pierces
Capt. John Holbrook of Weymouth and Capt. Michael Pierce of Hingham and later Scituate were militia captains in neighbouring towns on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. Three of Holbrook's children married three of Pierce's.
In 1670 Holbrook's daughter Hannah married Pierce's son Ephraim. In 1671 his son John married Pierce's daughter Abigail; the family descends from them. And in 1675 his son Samuel married Pierce's daughter Mary. When Pierce made his will in January 1676, "being now by the appointment of God going out to war, against the Indians," he left "my daughter, Abigail Holbrook five pounds" and "my daughter Mary Holbrook, twenty pounds." Two months later he was killed.
The other two couples have famous descendants, according to the compiled family lines. Hannah and Ephraim are ancestors of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and Samuel and Mary of President William Howard Taft. Because the family descends from both captains, and so do those presidents, the kinship runs through both families at once.
Story 04 of 32
The captain, the lieutenant and the press master
Capt. John Holbrook, born at Scituate in 1686, was the grandson of Capt. Michael Pierce through his mother, Abigail Pierce. His wife, Sarah Chittenden, was the granddaughter of two more Scituate men: Isaac Chittenden on her father's side and Lt. Isaac Buck on her mother's.
Those three older men served the town together. In 1669 Michael Pierce was made captain of Scituate's militia company and Isaac Buck its lieutenant. When King Philip's War broke out in 1675, Isaac Chittenden was one of Scituate's three "presse masters", the men who chose which townsmen would march. On 26 March 1676 Captain Pierce was killed near Pawtucket with most of his company, and Chittenden's own son Benjamin died with him. Two months later, when Scituate itself was attacked, "Lieut. Buck had mustered all the men below."
In 1679 Chittenden's son Stephen married Buck's daughter Mehitable. On 3 May 1709 their daughter Sarah married Pierce's grandson, John Holbrook. So the captain who fell at Pawtucket, his lieutenant, and the man who drafted the town's soldiers all came into the family through that one wedding, thirty-three years after the battle.
One family history, the Nye genealogy of 1907, adds that Benjamin Nye Jr. of Sandwich also died with Pierce. His father, Benjamin Nye, is a probable, though unproven, ancestor on the Ellis side, and nothing else confirms the story.
Story 05 of 32
The Pontus sisters
William Pontus was a fustian-worker from near Dover who joined the English congregation in exile at Leiden. He married Wybra Hanson there on 4 December 1610, with William Brewster, the congregation's elder, as a witness. By 1633 the family was at Plymouth, where Pontus was a freeman, and they had two daughters, Mary and Hannah. Both are ancestors in the family.
Hannah married John Churchill in 1644. Mary married James Glass in 1645; he drowned in 1652, and in 1654 she married Philip Delano, a son of Walloon Protestant refugees, who had grown up in Leiden and come to Plymouth on the Fortune in 1621. William Pontus died in 1653. He left Mary his house, and he had already given Hannah and John Churchill part of his meadow, on condition that John help fence it and "bee healpfull towards the maintainance of him whiles hee lived." In 1664 the court settled his share of land at Middleborough on the two sisters.
Then the sisters' children married each other. On 28 December 1686 Hannah's son John Churchill married Mary's daughter Rebecca Delano; they were first cousins. In 1694 Rebecca's brother Samuel Delano sold John his half of their grandfather's Middleborough share, so the old Pontus land came back together.
Rebecca and John's daughter Elizabeth Churchill married Joel Ellis, and Hannah's other son, Eleazer Churchill, is the ancestor of Phebe Stephens, who married Joel's grandson George Ellis. So William Pontus and Wybra Hanson come into the family three times over. And Rebecca Delano's half-brother Jonathan is an ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant.
Story 06 of 32
Grandfather Freeman and young Matthias
Edmund Freeman, the leading settler of Sandwich, was serving as an Assistant, one of the colony's magistrates, in 1645, when his daughter Elizabeth's marriage to John Ellis brought the couple before the court. On 4 June 1645 Ellis was sentenced to be whipped for "committing vncleanesse wth her before marryage," with "Elizabeth, his wyfe, to stand by whilst execucon of the sentence is pformed," and fined £5 more for being slow to confess.
The marriage lasted. John Ellis became lieutenant of the Sandwich company and kept an inn, and their son Matthias, born in 1657, went to live with his grandfather. In 1679 Freeman, then in his eighties, gave Matthias land "for and in consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to the said Matthias Ellis, being my kinsman in blood, that is to say my grandson; ... as living with me until he ... came unto man's estate, being a support unto me in my old age and weakness." The land ran along "a Ditch called the Divell's Ditch," under Sagamore Hill, near "a great Rock like the ridge of a house."
A Sandwich tradition says Freeman chose two boulders for graves, one shaped like a pillion for his wife and one like a saddle for himself, and that the first was "by oxen driven by Ellis ... hauled to the recent grave." The stones were given bronze tablets in 1910.
Matthias lived to 91. Every Ellis in the family after him, from Joel down to Nancy, descends from the boy who grew up in his grandfather's house.
Story 07 of 32
The London backer
William Collier was one of the London merchant "adventurers" who put up the money for the Plymouth colony. Governor Bradford mentions him: the colony's agent Isaac Allerton "had cleared up 400li. and put it into a brew-house of Mr. Colliers in London." When the investors sold out to the Plymouth leaders in 1626, Collier signed the agreement, and in 1629/30 two of the London partners wrote of him, "account of him as a sure friend."
In 1633 he came over himself with his family and settled at Duxbury. His daughters married quickly: Sarah to Love Brewster, who had come on the Mayflower as a boy, and Rebecca to Job Cole, both in 1634, and Mary to Thomas Prence on 1 April 1635. Prence's first wife had been Patience Brewster, Elder William Brewster's daughter. Mary Collier and Thomas Prence are ancestors in the family through their daughter Sarah Prence (see "The governor, the dissenter and the suitor"). [The archive marks Sarah Prence's descent from Mary Collier as possible: Stratton has Mary dying about 1644, with only Jane and Mary as her children.]
Collier became one of the colony's Assistants, and he was as unbending as his son-in-law. In 1658 James Cudworth, who opposed the harsh laws against Quakers, complained that "Mr. Collier, last June, would not sit on the bench, if I sat there." When Collier died in 1671, the first-named administrator of his estate was the governor, Thomas Prence.
Story 08 of 32
Thanksgiving at Barnstable, 1639
The Holbrooks came to New England in 1635 in a company led by the Rev. Joseph Hull, which sailed from Weymouth in Dorset. Thomas Holbrook, his wife Jane and their children are on the list made at Weymouth on 20 March 1634/5.
By 1639 Hull had moved to Barnstable, on Cape Cod. That December the Barnstable church kept a day of thanksgiving and, as its record says, "divided into three companies to feast together, some at Mr. Hull's, some at Mr. Mayo's, some at Brother Lombard's." Mr. Mayo was the Rev. John Mayo, another ancestor in the family, who later became the first pastor of Boston's Second Church and in 1664 laid his hands on the young Increase Mather at his ordination.
So the minister who led the Holbrooks across the Atlantic and John Mayo hosted the same thanksgiving. A hundred and three years later, in 1742, Elisha Holbrook, a great-great-grandson of Thomas, married Sarah Mayo, a great-great-granddaughter of the Rev. John, at Eastham.
Story 09 of 32
Four signatures on one petition
In 1637 Ipswich was a two-year-old town on the edge of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On 21 June the townsmen sent the governor a petition asking him not to take John Winthrop Jr. away to command the Castle in Boston harbour: "It was for his sake that many of vs came to this place." Four of the men who signed it are ancestors in the family: John Cogswell, Robert Lord, Thomas Boreman and John Procter.
For the next fifty years their families kept turning up in one another's papers. In 1653 John Procter and William Varney took the inventory of John Cogswell Jr.'s estate, and the next year John Cogswell helped appraise Varney's. Varney's son Thomas married Procter's daughter Abigail, and in 1676 he gave evidence for William Cogswell in a family lawsuit. In 1669 Thomas Low was serving court papers as deputy to the town marshal, Robert Lord's son. And in 1692, when Abigail's brother John Proctor was jailed in the witch trials, Thomas Varney and Deacon Thomas Low both signed Ipswich's petition for him.
Then the families married. In 1733 Caleb Low, Thomas Boreman's great-grandson, married his second cousin Abigail Varney, a granddaughter of Thomas Varney and Abigail Procter and a great-granddaughter of William Cogswell. Their son Nathan married Lucy Lord, the marshal's great-granddaughter. Their son, Major Nathan Low, born in 1765, descended from all four men who had signed that petition 128 years before. He was the grandfather of Harriet Phillips Low.
Story 10 of 32
Lucy Lord's grandfathers
Lucy Lord, born at Ipswich in 1747, was Harriet Phillips Low's great-grandmother. Three of her ancestors were already in one another's papers a century before she was born.
In 1653 Thomas Emerson of Ipswich made his will. He left his son James £40 "if he shall Come ouer into this Country (or send by a certayne surtifficate of his being liueing)," and left his daughter Elizabeth his "great carued chest." One of the two men who witnessed it was the town clerk, Robert Lord. Elizabeth Emerson had married John Fuller, who had crossed to New England at about fifteen. In 1657, when Fuller was in court over some hogs, a Thomas Low testified that Fuller's wife owned some of them.
Robert Lord was Lucy's great-great-grandfather, Thomas Emerson another, and John Fuller and Elizabeth Emerson were her great-grandparents. In 1765 Lucy married Nathan Low, a descendant of that Thomas Low. Their son was Major Nathan Low. And through Elizabeth's brother, the Rev. Joseph Emerson, the same Emerson family produced Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Story 11 of 32
Two Boston printers and a banished midwife
On 5 April 1722 Rachel Kneeland, aged sixteen, married Samuel Foster, a Boston periwig-maker. That wedding tied together three remarkable families.
Samuel's great-uncle was John Foster, who in 1675 took over a printing press and opened Boston's first printing office. The standard bibliography of early American printing lists his edition of an Increase Mather sermon as "The first book printed in Boston," and his 1677 woodcut map of New England as "the first cut in the United States." Samuel descended from John's brother, Ensign Hopestill Foster, and further back from Rachel Bigg, who crossed in 1635 at about seventy.
Rachel Kneeland's brother Samuel Kneeland became a leading Boston printer of the next generation. He printed the Boston Gazette, ran the firm of Kneeland & Green for twenty-five years, and was for many years printer to the governor and council. Isaiah Thomas says Kneeland & Green secretly printed the first Bible in English in America, under a false London imprint, though no copy has ever been found.
And the Kneelands' great-great-grandmother was Jane Hawkins of St Ives, who in 1629 dictated verse in a trance for "three days and three nights" to some two hundred people, and who later, as the midwife of Anne Hutchinson's circle in Boston, was banished from Massachusetts. Her son James was a Boston bricklayer, and so was Rachel and Samuel's father, John Kneeland, who learned the trade from his uncle, another James Hawkins.
Story 12 of 32
On the same ship
Several ancestors from quite different branches of the family crossed the Atlantic together, long before their families had anything to do with one another.
The Fortune, the second ship to reach Plymouth, in November 1621, carried Thomas Prence and William Bassett, both Holbrook-side ancestors, and Philip Delano of Leiden, an Ellis-side ancestor. Their lines finally joined when Gideon Holbrook married Nancy Ellis in 1818. In 1635 the Abigail brought Edmund Freeman and his family, later of Sandwich (Ellis side), and John Fuller, about fifteen, whose descendants lead to the Lows.
The Elizabeth left London on 17 April 1635 with a widow, Patience Foster, aged 40, her son Hopestill, 14, and her mother Rachel Bigg, who was about seventy though the clerk wrote her down as 6. Also aboard were James Bate with his daughter Marie, 17, and a man named Thomas Millett. The two teenagers, Hopestill Foster and Marie Bate, later married; one family historian says they were second cousins. Their line leads to Mary Foster and the Lows of Deer Isle. [The descent through Mary (Foster) Thompson is possible: her father is not yet proven.]
Thomas Millett settled at Gloucester, where his daughter Mary married Thomas Riggs, and that line leads to Sally Ginn and the Tylers. In 1672 Millett took the inventory of a Gloucester widow named Bridget Varney, a Low-side ancestor. The Low line and the Tyler line joined in 1832, when Capt. Nathan Low of Deer Isle married Hannah Read Tyler.
Story 13 of 32
The Gloucester town clerk
Thomas Riggs was very probably the son of a farmer at Hawkshead in Lancashire. On 3 February 1646/7 he was bound apprentice in London to a scrivener, a professional writer of documents, and the entry survives in the books of the Drapers' Company, the same archive now being searched for Richard Warren. By 1658 he was at Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he married Mary Millett, daughter of Thomas Millett, the lay preacher who had crossed on the Elizabeth in 1635.
The training showed. Riggs was Gloucester's town clerk for fifty-one years, from 1665 to 1716, and in old age the town's schoolmaster. He kept a pigskin notebook inscribed "Thomas Riggs, his Booke, 1656," with twelve pages of shorthand that no one has been able to read. In 1688 he and his brother-in-law Thomas Millett were fined for the town's refusal of one of Governor Andros's "odious taxes." Part of his squared-log house still stands at Annisquam.
In 1706 Riggs signed the inventory of his neighbour Sgt. John Stanwood, whose estate included "one Dwelling House very old and bad" and "one old Sloop." In 1735 Riggs's grandson Joshua married Stanwood's granddaughter Experience. Their daughter Ann Riggs married Capt. James Ginn, and Ann's daughter Sally Ginn, Harriet Phillips Low's grandmother, married Rowland Tyler. [That Sally Ginn was their daughter is possible, not proven; see her page.]
Story 14 of 32
The Dotys, who are not in the line
Mollie believed the family descended from Edward Doty of the Mayflower. The records show it doesn't. The Dotys crossed the family's path all the same.
In the summer of 1674 Deborah Ellis, sister of Lt. Matthias Ellis of Sandwich, married Edward Doty's son Joseph. That October Joseph was bound over by the court, because Elizabeth Warren, a granddaughter of Richard Warren, named him as the father of her child. Richard Warren is also an ancestor in the family, so in a single year a Doty married into one ancestral family and was accused by a granddaughter of another.
A century and a half later, on 1 March 1819, a Gideon Holbrook, very probably Capt. Gideon Holbrook, signed as one of Plymouth's selectmen a complaint to the probate court that the sailmaker Edward Doten, a descendant of the Mayflower Doty, "by his excessive drinking" was wasting his estate. Three months earlier Gideon had married Nancy Ellis, a descendant of Deborah's brother Matthias.
On Frances Holbrook's mother's side, Anthony Wright of Oyster Bay, an uncle of Rebecca (Wright) Frost, ended his will of 1673: "Alsoe, I give unto Isaack Dotye one cow." Isaac Doty was another son of Edward Doty of the Mayflower.
Story 15 of 32
One war, every branch
King Philip's War, fought in 1675 and 1676, turns up in the records of every branch of the tree.
Four years before it began, in 1672, Philip himself wrote to Capt. Hopestill Foster of Dorchester, a Low-side ancestor, asking for "five yards of White light collored serge to make me a coat and a good holland shirt."
When the fighting came, ancestors on every side were drawn in. On the Tyler side, Samuel Tyler was impressed at Rowley in November 1675 for the Narragansett campaign, and John Stanwood was in garrison at Lancaster that winter. On the Ellis side, Lt. John Ellis called the Sandwich town meeting of February 1676 that let families move into the town garrison. On the Holbrook side, Jeremiah Howes sat on Yarmouth's council of war, Capt. Michael Pierce was killed near Pawtucket in March, and in April Capt. John Holbrook marched a company out of Concord with "neither Drume nor Collors." That same April, at Sudbury, Thomas Hawley, the second husband of Low-side ancestor Dorothy Harbottle, was killed.
In the summer of 1676, during a raid on Philip's people, Benjamin Church "sent Mr. Isaac Howland with a party on one side of the swamp" while he went round the other. Church was a grandson of Richard Warren, and Isaac Howland is an ancestor in the family; the Warren and Howland lines are the ones that came together a century later in George Ellis and Phebe Stephens.
The other grandparents' lines were in it too. On the Ellingwood side, Peter Woodbury and Josiah Dodge, brothers of Thomas Woodbury and his wife Hannah Dodge of Beverly, were killed together with Capt. Lathrop "At Muddy-Brook bridge ye 18 Sept." 1675, the ambush known as Bloody Brook; Ralph Ellinwood was at the Great Swamp Fight, and Martha Rowlandson's brother was killed at Lancaster (see "Lancaster, 1676"). Richard Cheever of Boston marched with Capt. William Turner's company in the spring of 1676, and a "Robert Rand," very probably Robert Rand of Lynn, was credited for service under Capt. Brocklebank. On Frances Holbrook's mother's side, Benjamin Woodworth of Scituate, a son of Walter Woodworth, "was a soldier in Philip's war, and lost his life" (see "Scituate, 1676").
Story 16 of 32
1692, from three sides
The witchcraft trials of 1692 reached three different branches of the tree.
On the Low side, John Proctor, brother of Abigail (Proctor) Varney, was jailed in April, condemned on 5 August and hanged at Salem on 19 August. Two of the men who signed the Ipswich petition for him were ancestors in the family: Abigail's husband, Cpl. Thomas Varney, and Deacon Thomas Low. Thomas Varney died that December.
One of the judges who condemned him was Wait Still Winthrop, a grandson of Governor Winthrop and a first cousin, once removed, of Elizabeth Fones, an ancestor on Frances Holbrook's mother's side.
On the Tyler side, the accusations reached Job Tyler's family at Andover that summer. His granddaughter Mary Post was accused on 2 August, and so were her mother, her twelve-year-old half-sister, and her uncle Hopestill Tyler's wife and two daughters. Mary Post was tried in January 1693 and found guilty, one of only three convicted at that sitting, and the governor reprieved her.
In 1711 the General Court reversed the convictions by name, John Proctor's and Mary Post's among them. The two families' lines joined in 1832, when Capt. Nathan Low, a Varney and Low descendant, married Hannah Read Tyler, a descendant of Job Tyler.
Story 17 of 32
Three towns and Governor Andros
In 1686 the New England colonies were put under a single royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who raised taxes without an elected assembly. Three branches of the family met his government in three different ways.
At Chebacco, Rev. John Wise, brother of two Low-side ancestors, Mary and Abigail Wise, led Ipswich's refusal of an Andros tax in 1687 and was jailed for it. At Gloucester, Thomas Riggs, a Tyler-side ancestor, and his brother-in-law Thomas Millett were fined in 1688 for their town's refusal of one of Andros's "odious taxes." And at Scituate the town clerk was Lt. Isaac Buck of the Holbrook side: in January 1687 his signature, "per me Isaac Buck, Town Clerk," certified an Andros order read at town meeting.
Andros was overthrown at Boston in April 1689.
Story 18 of 32
Autumn 1775 in Attleborough
In the autumn of 1775, a few months after Lexington, two Attleborough households, one family, buried six people in three weeks. The town record gives no cause.
Capt. Daniel Read lost his son David on 12 September, his son Ezra, aged fifteen, on 21 September, and his wife Mary on 23 September. His daughter Hannah was married to Ebenezer Tyler, who had marched with the minute men that April. Hannah and Ebenezer lost their small son Leander on 26 September, and two more sons, Rowland and Habijah, both on 1 October. Within three weeks Hannah had lost her mother, two brothers and three of her children.
In 1780 Hannah and Ebenezer had twin sons and gave them the names of the two boys who had died on 1 October, Rowland and Abijah. That second Rowland Tyler grew up to build the church at Dixmont Corner in Maine, and was the grandfather of Harriet Phillips Low.
Story 19 of 32
Two men on the Rhode Island alarm
On 8 December 1776 British troops landed at Newport, Rhode Island, and the militia of southeastern Massachusetts was called out. Two ancestors, from opposite sides of the family, answered the alarm.
Ebenezer Tyler of Attleborough marched to Rhode Island as a sergeant in Capt. Jacob Ide's company and served seventeen days. George Ellis of Plymouth marched to Bristol, Rhode Island, on 11 December in Capt. Robert Finney's company and served ten days. (Several men named George Ellis served in the war; the Plymouth company fits ours best.) Whether the two ever met is not recorded.
Eighty-four years later, on 24 December 1860, at Steilacoom in Washington Territory, George Ellis's grandson Richard B. Holbrook married Ebenezer Tyler's great-granddaughter Harriet Phillips Low.
Story 20 of 32
Raising churches on the Penobscot
Capt. James Ginn came to Maine by way of Maryland and Gloucester. On the Penobscot he ran a mill at Orland and built a brig and two schooners there, and in 1800 he moved to Bucksport, where he built a wharf, a store and, in 1803, the town's great house. On 12 May 1803 the Bucksport church was gathered in that house while it was still unfinished: "a temporary pulpit and seats were fitted up for the occasion," and so many people came from nearby towns that they had trouble finding places to sleep.
The next year, on 28 March 1804, his daughter Sally married Rowland Tyler, a schoolteacher from Attleborough who had come to the Penobscot in 1796. Rowland went on to design and build the church at Dixmont Corner, now on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the earliest carpenter-gothic buildings in the region. [That Sally was Capt. James Ginn's daughter is possible, not proven; see her page.]
The two families were already linked: Sally's sister Anna had married Josiah Brewer, and Josiah's sister Lavinia had married Rowland's brother Ebenezer. Sally and Rowland's daughter Hannah Read Tyler was Harriet Phillips Low's mother.
Story 21 of 32
When cousins married
In small colonial towns people often married relatives, and the tree shows it. When two cousins marry, the ancestors they share turn up twice.
Some examples: at Plymouth in 1686 John Churchill married his first cousin Rebecca Delano (see "The Pontus sisters"); at Plymouth in 1715 William Harlow married his second cousin Mercy Rider; at Chebacco in 1733 Caleb Low married his second cousin Abigail Varney; and at Plympton in 1773 George Ellis married Phebe Stephens, his third cousin, both of them great-great-grandchildren of John Churchill and Hannah Pontus.
George W. Frost and Lucy Ellen Bell, who married in Wisconsin in 1876, were very probably second cousins, both great-grandchildren of Jonathan Fairchild of East Jewett, New York, who built the first tannery in Greene County. Their granddaughter was named Frances Fairchild Holbrook.
That family was close-knit a generation earlier as well. Three of Jonathan Fairchild's sons married into one interlocked family at Scott's Patent: Richard married Nancy Woodworth, daughter of Lemuel Woodworth and Lydia Winter; Henry married Hannah Woodworth, probably Nancy's sister; and Edward married Sally Winter, whose father was Lydia's brother and whose mother was Lemuel's sister, so that Sally and Nancy were double first cousins. George W. Frost was Richard and Nancy's grandson, and Lucy Bell was the granddaughter of their brother John.
Isaac Frost and Mary Cock, who married in 1738, were cousins twice over: second cousins through Matthew Prior, and second cousins once removed through Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones. Two of Mary's brother and sisters married Frosts too.
Story 22 of 32
Next door at Birch Cooley, 1880
In June 1880 the census taker in Birch Cooley Township, Renville County, Minnesota, wrote two Irish families onto the same page. One was "John Dwire," 63, farmer, with his wife Mary and their sons John, 20, and Cornelius, 18. The other was Henry Tisdell, his wife Elizabeth and their children, among them Martha, 16, at school.
The families had come by different roads. John Dwyer and Mary had moved through the iron and mill towns of upstate New York, to Moriah when its iron mines were opening, to Black Brook, the seat of the J. & J. Rogers iron works, and by 1875 to Cohoes, the town of the Harmony Mills. Elizabeth Connelly, born in London, had lived at Cohoes as a girl, before she came to Minnesota in 1854 to keep house for her brothers; she married Henry at St. Louis, and in 1870 they took up land at Birch Cooley. [Whether the Cohoes years had anything to do with the Dwyers coming to Birch Cooley is not known.]
About two years after the census Cornelius married Martha, the girl next door. Their son Edwin was born at Birch Cooley in 1897.
Story 23 of 32
Lancaster, 1676
On 19 December 1675, in King Philip's War, Ralph Ellinwood Jr. of Beverly was in Capt. Joseph Gardner's Salem company at the Great Swamp Fight in Rhode Island, where Gardner was shot through the head inside the fort.
Seven weeks later, on 10 February 1675/6, the war came to Lancaster. The garrison house of the minister, Rev. Joseph Rowlandson, was set on fire, and among the dead was "Thomas Rowlandson, nephew of the minister, aged 19," who had come from Salisbury. The minister's wife, Mary Rowlandson, was taken captive with her children, and wrote the narrative of her captivity published in 1682.
The dead nephew's younger sister, Martha, was nine. In 1691 she married Ralph Ellinwood, the soldier of the Swamp Fight, at Marblehead. [Martha's father, Thomas Rowlandson of Salisbury, and Rev. Joseph were brothers, sons of Thomas Rowlandson of Ipswich and Lancaster, as Savage and Hoyt have it; the elder Thomas's estate papers of 1657 would prove it.]
Story 24 of 32
Smallpox at the Hitchbornes', 1764
In February 1764 smallpox was loose in Boston. The selectmen were told that "Mr. Richard Ellingwood and Mr. Thomas Raymond who lodge at Mr. Hitchburnes House had the Small Pox," and when they "absolutely refused leaving the House" they were talked round and carried to the hospital in a sedan chair. At the same meeting the selectmen summoned "Mr. Reviere," whose house had smallpox too, for going in and out against orders.
Richard was the son of a North End mariner, Capt. Israel Ellingwood. The Hitchbornes were cousins of the silversmith Paul Revere: his mother, Deborah, was a Hitchborn. The next year Richard's sister Susanna married Robert Hitchborne, Revere's first cousin.
On the night of 29 November 1773, with the tea ships in the harbour, Robert Hitchborn and Paul Revere were on the same armed watch on the Dartmouth at Griffin's Wharf. Robert and Susanna named a son Paul Revere Hichborn, and their great-grandson Philip Hichborn became Chief Constructor of the U.S. Navy.
Story 25 of 32
Two sisters in a will, 1709/10
In January 1709/10 Nathaniel Bassett of Yarmouth, a son of William Bassett of the Fortune, left the rest of his estate to six of his children, among them two daughters, "Mary Mulford" and "Sarah Nickerson," and asked them to "provide and set up some suitable Grave Stones to my Grave after my burial."
Mary had married Thomas Mulford of Truro. Her granddaughter Sarah Mayo married Elisha Holbrook, and from them came the Holbrooks of Wellfleet and Whidbey Island, and Frances Holbrook.
Sarah had married John Nickerson of Harwich. Her granddaughter Sarah Cole married John Holdershaw of Eastham, who took the family to the Penobscot, and their daughter Hope married Richard Ellingwood of Frankfort. From them came Dr. Finley Ellingwood, Cudge and Dick Ellingwood.
Dick and Frances met at the University of Washington and married in 1955, seventh cousins, once removed. [Two steps on the Ellingwood side are compiled, not recorded: that Hope's mother was the Sarah Cole born at Eastham in 1738, and that Sarah Nickerson was the daughter of John and Sarah (Bassett) Nickerson.]
Story 26 of 32
Two brothers, two sisters
Three times in the family a pair of brothers married a pair of sisters, twice in the Ellingwood line and once on Frances Holbrook's mother's side.
At Marblehead in 1684/5 John Ellinwood of Beverly married Elizabeth Rowlison of Salisbury, and in 1691 his brother Ralph married her sister Martha. An agreement about their father's estate in 1706 names "John Elenwood and Ralph Elenwood and Martha his wife" together among Thomas Rowlandson's children.
A century later, on the Penobscot, Richard Ellingwood married Hope Holdershaw at Orrington in 1787, and in 1792 his brother Ralph married her sister Delilah. Ralph witnessed Richard's will, and after Richard's death stood surety for Hope as guardian of the children; in 1807 the two sisters sold their shares of their father's estate on the same day. Ralph and Delilah lived on the same farm for sixty-four years.
At Spokane in January 1904 Alfred McMillan married Florence Frost, and in July 1905 his brother George married her sister Dora. Alfred and Florence were Frances Holbrook's grandparents.
Story 27 of 32
Almena, 1899
In July 1887 Theodore Hamm, the St. Paul brewer, sent two of his relatives, Albert H. Koehler and S. W. Sparlin, to spy out a townsite on the railway in Barron County, Wisconsin. They cleared the land with axes and saws, and when the Post Office Department turned down "Lightning City" they put together the names Albert and his wife Wilhelmina went by, Al and Mena. Sparlin opened the first store and was the first postmaster. [Wilhelmina was Hamm's daughter, according to the Saint Paul Historical tour of the Hamm family's Dayton's Bluff.]
In 1896 George Panian, who had come from Stari trg in Slovenia as a penniless peddler and kept the store and post office at Zell, Dakota Territory, moved his family to Almena. He followed Sparlin as postmaster. In February 1899 a young man from Delano, Minnesota, Joe Kuchenmeister, son of Frank Kuchenmeister, came to clerk in Panian's store, and that October he married Panian's daughter Theresa in the Sacred Heart mission church.
Joe went into business with Sparlin and George Panian Jr. as the Panian Mercantile Co., and in 1908 he followed his father-in-law as postmaster, a post he held for twenty-six years. Their daughter Margaret was born at Almena in 1915.
Story 28 of 32
Joseph Wise's daughters
Joseph Wise, a butcher of Roxbury, Massachusetts, and his wife Mary Tompson had a large family. Their son John became the minister of Chebacco, and went to jail in 1687 for resisting Governor Andros's taxes.
Two of the daughters are ancestors of Frances Holbrook. Mary's grandson Caleb Low of Ipswich married Abigail Varney, a granddaughter of Abigail, so their son Nathan Low descended from Joseph Wise twice.
A third daughter, Katherine, baptized at Roxbury in 1658, married Richard Mather, a grandson of the Rev. Richard Mather, in 1680 and went with him to Lyme, Connecticut. Her granddaughter Catharine Mather married Capt. Elisha Marvin of Lyme, and their grandson Pickett Marvin went west to the Ohio, where Ruth Marvin was born in 1802. Ruth's great-grandson was Ralph A. Hatten, the grandfather of Patricia Hatten.
Frances's son married Patricia's daughter. If the Hatten line holds, the two women were ninth cousins, once removed, through Joseph Wise. [Two links are not yet proven: Ruth Marvin as Pickett Marvin's daughter (probable) and Ralph A. Hatten as the son of Thomas J. Hatten (possible).]
Story 29 of 32
Dorchester, 1635
In the spring of 1635 the town of Dorchester, in the Massachusetts Bay, was full of people coming and going. Thomas Holcombe, made a freeman there in May 1634, sold his house and lands that year to Richard Jones and went with the Dorchester church to found Windsor, on the Connecticut. That year the *Elizabeth* brought the widow Patience Foster and her son Hopestill, fourteen, from Biddenden in Kent, and Jonas Humphrey of Wendover was living there, where his daughter Sarah was buried in 1638.
Thomas Holcombe's line ran west: to Windsor, Union and the Enoses, to Hannah (Enos) Humphrey in New York and Wisconsin, and to the McMillans of Tacoma. Hopestill Foster's and Jonas Humphrey's stayed in Massachusetts, down through the Lows of Ipswich to the Holbrooks. Three hundred years later the two lines met when Richard Holbrook married Lucile McMillan, the parents of Frances. [Whether the families knew each other at Dorchester is not known. The Humphreys of Frances's mother's side are a different family from Jonas's.]
Story 30 of 32
Oyster Bay, 1653
In April 1653 the sachem Assiapum sold the land between Oyster River and the Papaquatunk "unto Peter Wright Samuel Mayo, William Leverich, their Heires." Peter Wright was an uncle of Rebecca Wright, whose father Nicholas came too, and Rev. William Leverich, the minister of Sandwich, was the father of her first husband.
Samuel Mayo, a mariner of Barnstable, was a son of Rev. John Mayo, an ancestor on Frances Holbrook's father's side. He had agreed to carry Leverich's and Peter Wright's goods to Oyster Bay in his sloop, the Desire, and the vessel was seized in the harbour by the privateer Thomas Baxter. So a son of one of Frances's father's ancestors carried the goods of her mother's ancestors to the founding of the town. ["Samuel Mayo probably never came here," the town's editor adds; his parentage rests on Savage.]
Ten years before, the three Wright brothers had been on Sandwich's list of men able to bear arms, with John Ellis, Thomas Tupper and the Freemans, ancestors on her father's side.
Story 31 of 32
Scituate, 1676
On 20 May 1676, in King Philip's War, Scituate was attacked. "The Indians then hastened forward to attack the principal garrison at Charles Stockbridge's," the mill house that John Stockbridge the wheelwright had built by the first Herring brook: "The garrison house of Stockbridge was pallisadoed on three sides, the fourth being defended by the mill pond." They fought there for hours and could not take it. Toward night the town's men came up: "Lieut. Buck had mustered all the men below."
Lt. Isaac Buck is an ancestor of Frances Holbrook on her father's side, through his daughter Mehitable and the Chittendens. The Stockbridges are ancestors on her mother's side: John Stockbridge's daughter Sarah married Joseph Woodworth, and their line leads through the Woodworths of Lebanon and East Jewett to Nancy (Woodworth) Fairchild and George W. Frost. When the court allowed land for the war, the list of "persons to have land" put them a few lines apart: "Lieut. Isaac Buck, 10..00..00" and "Charles Stockbridge for Benj. Woodworth, 07..09..07." Benjamin, Joseph's brother, had been killed in the war, and the land was for his family.
A generation later the families married. "Thomas, son of Stephen [Chittenden], married Elizabeth Woodworth 1707": Thomas was the brother of Sarah Chittenden, the Holbrook-side ancestor, and Elizabeth was Benjamin Woodworth's daughter. And Stephen Vinal Jr., a nephew of Martha (Vinall) Chittenden, "married Mary Woodworth 1704", Joseph and Sarah's daughter and the sister of the Frost side's Joseph Woodworth.
Story 32 of 32
The witchcraft jury, 1677
Deane counted only two indictments for witchcraft in Plymouth Colony, both against people of Scituate. The second came before the court on 6 March 1676/7. Mary Ingham was indicted for having "by the healp of the diuill, in a way of witchcraft or sorcery, malliciously procured much hurt, mischeiffe, and paine vnto the body of Mehittable Woodworth, the daughter of Walter Woodworth," so that she "hath bin almost bereaued of her sences." Walter Woodworth is an ancestor on Frances Holbrook's mother's side; Mehitable was a sister of Joseph Woodworth.
The jury of twelve men "brought in not guilty." Two of them were "John Howland" and "Joseph Bartlett": very probably John Howland Jr., son of the Mayflower's John Howland and brother of Isaac Howland, and Joseph Bartlett, son of Robert Bartlett and Mary Warren. Both were close kin of Frances's Plymouth ancestors on her father's side, the Howland and Warren families of "Four men in one boat". So her father's family sat in judgment on a case brought by her mother's.