Reviving this Blog

I left this blog dormant for a long time. Now I want to revive it. Watch this space in coming weeks

A Group of Early New London Sea Captains

This is Mike writing, but writing about a sideline of some of Tam's (and Sarah's) early New England ancestors on the Boylston side. As it happens, because Lucy Foster, a descendant of those I'm talking about, married one Samuel Jerome in 1749 and among their descendants was the actress Jennie Jerome, these folks are also ancestors of Sir Winston Churchill.

Lucy Foster's great-grandfather was Captain Thomas Foster, master mariner out of New London, Connecticut. He was born about 1642, though I am not sure of a source for that date; he died in 1685.  His marriage record states that he was a "son of John Forster [both spellings seem to have been used: later descendants used Foster] of Kingsware," meaning Kingswear, Devon. You'll find many genealogies on the Internet showing him as the son of John Foster and Mary Tompkins, but they married in Salem, Mass. in 1649, so either Thomas' birth date or the identification is wrong. Nor is Thomas listed in that John Foster's will, so perhaps his father was a different John of Kingswear. Many list Thomas as being born there, others in New London; the sources seem silent though,

But Thomas, the master mariner who sailed between New London, Boston, and "the Barbadoes," is one of a group of intermarried New London sea captains. When he married Susannah Parker on March 27, 1665/66 Old Style, he married the daughter of Captain Ralph Parker, another ship captain who may also have owned several vessels. Parker was at the heart of a small maritime dynasty: his wife Susannah (perhaps second wife), was the daughter of Captain William Keeny; Parker's daughter Mary married Capt. William Condy of Boston; his daughter Susannah, as noted, married Thomas Foster, and his son Jonathan went on to become a sea captain.

I would guess family reunions of Captains Parker, Parker, Keeny, Condy, and Foster would have tended to see a lot of talk of the sea.

(The links above are to the Google Books edition of Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London From the First Survey of the Coast in 1612, to 1860 (New London, 1895).

The Two Grandfathers

One hundred years ago, in 1912, our (Kate's and mine) two grandfathers, George Garland Mehuron and Edward  M. Boylston, lived in an era much like this one: full of change, new technologies directly affecting everyday life, and new adventures. George Mehuron, like his great grandchildren, was swept up in and enamored with the new aeroplanes, telephones, etc. In his youth he raced cars with Barney Oldfield, a noted racer at the time. He was also taken with the "barnstormers," pioneer aviators who thrilled crowds with their swoops and loops and daredevil flying in the early aircraft of the time. In WWI, he was the only one in his unit in the European frontlines brave enough to go up in the airplane to release the carrier pigeons for vital messages between forces. It was amazing that he survived that vicious and terrible war, but when he returned to York he kept racing greyhounds and carrier pigeons in the back yard, which my Dad, George C. Mehuron, helped care for.

Edward M. Boylston often remarked that he was blessed to have the best of two worlds: an upbringing back east in Manlius, N.Y., that grounded him in a classical education: Latin, history, literature, etc. , along with the opportunity to go West, when there was still much frontier to explore and settle. When he was a young man he went to the train station there and plunking down a bag of money, asked the ticket master where that amount would take him. "Wyoming," said the man, to which Ed replied, "I don't know where that is, but that is where I'm going!" Soon he found himself working the oil fields in eastern Wyoming, and he was happy in that work. It was there that he met and courted my grandmother, Ann Ruth Eatough, who was working as a governess on the famous Hat Ranch in the area. Ranch life then was still very much a frontier life: we have a picture of her with the hired hands and friends stopping for a meal in front of the chuck wagon. A record in the Bureau of Land Management, Record of Patents (patent number 148713) shows that in 1910, he bought 80 acres, presumably to set up their new life together. They married in 1911, and soon they had four children: Ruth Ann, Edward, John, and Richard. But as the children grew they realized that the young raw state of Wyoming lacked the education institutions they desired for the kids, so they moved to Nebraska to farm at Chester, Nebraska, Thayer County, just 10 miles north of the Kansas state line.

My Mother Would Have Been 100 Today

I've been planning to get this new genealogy blog started and this seems as good a day as any. Today my mother, Sarah Agnes Jones Dunn, born August 1, 1912, would have been 100 years old.

She died in 1966 when she was only 54, a shock to everyone. The youngest of 12 kids in a big Irish Catholic family, her older sisters (one, Edith, lived to be 97) outlived her.

Though her name was Sarah Agnes, everyone called her Agnes or Ag. That included her sisters and my Dad, though she always claimed she liked Sarah better, and used to say that "in movies, Agnes is the name of the mule." Nobody listened. But my daughter is named Sarah, not Agnes.

Actually, since this is a genealogy blog, it's worth noting that Sarahs in my mother's line skip a generation. Mama was almost certainly named for her own grandmother, as my daughter is named for her. Her maternal grandmother, Sarah Fitzpatrick Cleary, left, born in Ireland in 1848, died in Missouri in 1897, was presumably her namesake and, if you look at both pictures (particularly around the forehead and eyes), I think you'll see a very striking resemblance.

So to launch this blog, which I hope to use to post interesting family stories, unsolved genealogy problems, and cool old photos. happy 100th, Mama. I'll be shifting soon to my Dunn side as we vacation in North Georgia, the ancestral stomping ground.