Ipswich Mary

Followers of this blog and my work on the early Leveretts know that I believe that the secret of our lost ancestorship lies in unraveling the mystery of Ipswich Mary, who I believe was the sister of John Leverett, President of Harvard, and probably the mother of William and a string of Williams going right up to the William who died in Boston in the early 1800's, leaving his wife to send Joseph up to Maine where he would lose touch with most relatives except for his Aunt Walker, and grow up in the country near what's now Livermore Falls.

Back to Mary: she was the full sister of John, president of Harvard, and therefore her father was Hudson and mother was Sarah Peyton. Sarah was sick most of her life, and when Hudson remarried Elizabeth Gannett they moved out to Brookline/Brighton, which was way out in the country, and disappeared. Mary would have been a stepdaughter in this situation, though her brother John was already on his way to Harvard and fame, being about 18 when Hudson remarried. My first job would be to put a very accurate timeline onto this picture, because being out in Brookline/Brighton everyone disappeared, and the stepmother Elizabeth, who probably had his son Thomas the Barber, was never quite accepted by the Puritans downtown (she was of Pilgrim stock), and never wanted to live downtown with the high-society world that had brought up John. So here's Mary, stepdaughter, out in the country, then disappeared, completely.

I believe she's the Mary who reappeared and married a farmer, Johnathan Moulton, in Wenham in 1713 (that's up by Ipswich), and that she might have had the William who was founder of our line. He would be the first of several Williams. He would be the one who married Mary Whiteridge (many spellings) and one thing you can say about her was that there were hundreds of Whiteridges up on the north coast, and almost none in Boston, so to me it's very likely he grew up up there, met her, married her and moved to the family country estate and from there to Chelsea, or perhaps his son did.

There could be several Williams between that one (who would have been born in the late 1600s) and the one who grew up in Chelsea and Medford in time to marry Rachel Watts in 1740 at the age of about 16. That William, founder of our line, could only say that he was born in Boston, and we know that when he died on his farm in Needham, father of eleven, family members brought him back to Medford to be buried. He had apparently grown up among some Leveretts who were sons of Knight, son of Thomas the Barber, by that time undisputed carrier of the Leverett name.

To get back to Mary, she would need a reason to move to the north coast, and I believe her reason is to get away from Boston with her out-of-wedlock William and hide until he could grow up. I suspect Spencer Phipps, son of William, who died around the late 1600's, but the reason I suspect him is that John, in dividing his Lincolnshire Patent, gave one share to all his step-aunts (six altogether) but two for himself, and two for Spencer. Could it be that Spencer had harbored Mary and her child, up there in Ipswich, all those years? Or that William, a very colorful character of the late 1600s, was actually the father (he died right around then) or at least involved enough in getting Mary up there to safety, that she would name her son after him? I suspect. I have absolutely no proof. BBut the geography alone is very interesting. And the fact that Wihiteridge/Whitridges are almost uniformly from up there.

I'll say it again: I have absolutely no proof yet. The coincidences pile up and seem to beg for me to do more research. The Otis/Hodge theory of ~1960 says that the ancestor was a late child of Hudson's, born after his will but right before his death in about 1694, but I don't buy that. The reason they even needed that theory is that it was well known that William the Needham farmer was descended from John the Governor but not John of Harvard. OK. But family members placed their ancestry through Thomas the Barber, Knight, and hone of is sons, the last of whom could not have been father of William the Needham farmer. They had some facts wrong, it's just. a question of how many.

For now the facts remain: We don't know who William the Needham farmer's parents were, so we can't establish for certain the connection to Hudson. We know that the ancestor line as given by Joseph and his brothers cannot be totally accurate though they could have come through Thomas the Barber and Knight. We also know that Knight's boys, Colonel John and Thomas the printer, took in some stray Leveretts from around town as they were both wealthy enough to do it, especially Thomas the printer, who printed grammar primers (among other things), made good money, and lived in privacy somewhere in Medford. To me, it's likely that a young William, born in Chelsea or perhaps Brookline/Brighton, was taken in by that Medford family until he came of age and ended up in Needham.

It was the times of hardship: starvation, privation, blockade, no food or goods entering Boston. One can't blame him for hightailing it out to Needham where there was more room and one could grow a potato. He joined the Revolution as an officer, but didn't get paid well, and his son William took to drink and moved to town.

All of this is in Eighteenth Century Leveretts but that book needs updating, mostly so I can do more research on the characters above.

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A story from the Revolution

I've been telling my kids and friends this story because it's very revolution, very 1776, very Leverett. The hero of this story was not my ancestor; he died before he could create descendants. He was a Leverett during the Revolutionary War.

Thomas and his cousin John Leverett graduated from Harvard in 1776, the year they moved Harvard over to Concord, Mass. so that the soldiers could use the old buildings as a barracks. Concord was unacceptable as a replacement and many suspected that they cut some corners to make it possible for the class of 1776 to graduate, but they did. Thomas was to become a surgeon while his cousin John was a lawyer and would therefore be known as John Esquire, though he never practiced much as a lawyer.

Thomas would have become a surgeon but the war broke out and, as a doctor, he was placed on a boat heading to Maine to fight the British. But the boat was captured, and all the prisnoners were deposited in the Jersey, an old boat that was sitting and rotting in Brooklyn harbor, a boat that the British were using as a prison.

The British were very aggravated at the rebel soldiers and took it out on them. They figured that if they mistreated these prisoners badly enough it would teach everyone a lesson. The boat was rotting and wet and unsafe below, and they brought only scraps of unhealthy food to them. Soon the prisoners started dying, but they didn't care. The orders were treat them like hell and everyone followed the orders.

Thomas, being a doctor and all, was appalled by the conditions, and protested to the Captain of his own boat, who was also a prisoner. Status however didn't seem to matter. Everyone was suffering appalling conditions.

Finally the captain got Thomas and one other guy to join him, and plead to offer a deal to the Americans. You free some British prisoners, and the British will free these and save their lives. It was their only hope. The British agreed to let them talk to the appropriate authorities, who would be generals under Washington, along with British authorities, and see if some kind of humane trade could be arranged.

They did it at a bad time in the war, though. The Americans weren't interested. They weren't making deals with anyone for anything. They felt like they were about to win the war and any deal would look like accepting the permanent status of prisoners and those who would soon be free anyway. No deals were happening, and Thomas went back to being on the prison ship.

Many died on the Jersey and its documentation rebuilt a very horrific scene. A recent book has been written about it called Ghost Ship of Brooklyn, which documents the horrible conditions and the number of people who died, in some cases seven or eight a day.

Others, like Thomas, were simply so damaged they could never live a normal life again. After the war the prisoners were released and Thomas did have a chance to practice as a surgeon, but he died after only six or seven years, unable to recover his full health. Of course he received lots of recognition as a surviving prisoner of war.

Some said that the harsh treatment of prisoners actually backfired on the British and made Americans more likely to defend the rebels, more likely to join the war efforts, less likely to have any sympathy for the British at all. For years bones would wash up onto Brooklyn Harbor's beaches and people would tell stories about the prisoners. So many of those prisoners didn't survive, or if they did, couldn't have descendents, so we don't know what to make of the stories when we encounter them.

Thomas's cousin John had an interesting tale. During the war his parents were very sick and he moved them to Connecticut, where they could be cared for more properly. His mother would inherit a farm up in Windsor, Vermont, whereas his father, Colonel John, who had given up printing to run an imported goods store, only to find that the 1760's was a terrible time to run an imported goods business, had simply left Boston after years of being an Overseer of the Poor. They had seen enough of the "Times of Hardship" and the "Times of Suffering" where Bostonians had starved and been unable to import food legally due to a chokehold tariff by Britain...anyway, from Connecticut, when he finally did join the war it didn't amount to much. And when his mother inherited that farm in Windsor Vermont, he would move up there and occupy it.

An odd thing happened, though. His second wife was a cousin, Thomas the surgeon's sister Hannah. Thomas the surgeon would have inherited his father's printing fortune, but he, being dead, could not, so Hannah had inherited it, and now all the wealth was combined in John Esquire's household, soon to move to Vermont, and John Esquire would never have to work again. He became a gentleman farmer and a kind of vocal intellectual.

I'm not sure if he was haunted by knowing what happened to his close cousin, Thomas, on that boat in Brooklyn. It was like the people on those boats were the martyrs of the revolution, having died for the cause, and not only died, but suffered quite a bit in the process. Making the book probably helped memorialize them. It's an unpleasant topic, though, because their treatment was so horrific.

I think of the story sometimes when people remind us that 250 years is a long time, and we often forget what happened and why.

old letters

It was during the Depression I think that Frank Leverett, famous geologist, got interested in family genealogy, and actually went to Boston to see what he could dig up. My great grandfather Will was in his generation, and also interested, and saved many of the letters from Frank, among which this is one. You can see that it comes from Ann Arbor, and its date is 1940. It's a classic.

In it he claims that Will's father James W. had made a mistake. James W. had come through Boston when he was four; had received some children's things from one of his aunts who was taken with how cute a child he was, and had named that aunt as one of the two that were living there with his grandmother, who he met only that once. They had a stagecoach at the time (1834), had it all decked out, and were on their way from Maine to Illinois.

So this aunt, Frank said, was a relict, or surviving widow, of a Leverett, brother of James W.'s father. But the one who had lost two children was different from the one James W. had named. Frank figured this out.

But my question is this: Is it possible that James W. was right, even though he was only four, and the two lost children should have been attributed to the aunt he named, not the other aunt? These trees are sometimes reconstructed on very flimsy evidence, and are often reconstructed wrong. A child who died, well who knows who its actual parents were? I guess it's just a question. We are using one tree to call James W. wrong, while maybe we should be using James W.'s personal witness to question that tree.

Not sure if anything will come of this. I'll show you the letter if you're interested.

Catherine Mauer

My father, James R. Leverett Jr., once said that most people have pleasant memories of their maternal grandmothers, but he had no pleasant memories of his. His grandmother, Catherine Mauer, moved in with his mother and father and, according to him, made their lives absolutely miserable. As an example he said that his mother was sick and needed medical advice, but couldn't talk to her brother, my dad's Uncle Roy, because grandmother had a feud with him and wouldn't allow him into the house. I was curious about how somebody could become that angry, that difficult, that unpleasant, so I did research into her life.

Born into a family of Ostfrisians, originally from that northern land between Netherlands and Germany, she was born in Ogle County, Illinois, which had a kind of Ostfrisian community. It's not clear to me whether her father, John Singelmann, served in the Civil War or not, but she was born right after that, the third of four daughters all born in Illinois. Her mother, Katharine, may have used the German spelling but named her Elizabeth Catherine with her middle name clearly being the same as her mother's. The family moved to Hancock, Iowa, on the Nishnibotna River, in Pottawattomie County, not too far from Council Bluffs.

As far as I can tell life was difficult out there; it was isolated. I am not sure whether the girls were able to help John with the farming, or whether they were able to hire anyone, but the best I can figure, no, no. The second daughter married a prominent local farmer in the Minden area; Charles and the Mauer clan were from York township, near Minden.

Minden was a German town with lots of Ostfrisians and even a Dutch Reformed Church, which is no doubt where Catherine met Charles. They married in 1893. But John, her father, died that same year. I may have to get the exact dates nailed down here but this is my understanding.

She went with Charles to live at his family's farmhouse in York Township. The house was large but his older brother was already married (to another Kate or Catherine Mauer) and also had several children. She soon had her three children, Leona, Roy, and Verna, while still in that farmhouse. It would be crowded.

If Charles wanted to farm, he'd have several choices. His parents Henry and Anna would surely split their farm into two and let him build on the empty half, given that his older brother wanted the farm and, as oldest, was in line to get it. They could also save money and buy a nearby farm, though cash was hard to come by and this appears that it would be more difficult.

But the last option would be for him to take that Hancock farm once the father died. She may have even hoped or expected him to, since they were family. With her father dead, her mother and two sisters were in trouble. The first sister married and moved out, now leaving her mom with a young teenage girl, her young sister.

Charles would take his share of the farm (I presume) and buy into a hardware store in Council Bluffs, and work there through the early years of the 1900s. He would take Catherine and the three children and move to Council Bluffs where they would live on Harrison St. I am still trying to work out whether this is what he wanted, or whether it was his only choice, given that his brother would inherit the main farm that he grew up on.

Not all people are made for farming; in that era it was mostly running horses, and attaching plows to them, or figuring out how to bring in crops somehow and get them to market. Hancock being isolated, it would take more work, with less reward, than the Mauers were used to, but the Mauers had a fairly successful farm in Minden, and Charles could see what farming would be like in the area. It's a little competitive, brothers on farms isolated day after day, and maybe he couldn't handle that. But also it requires a lot of skills and hard work. Maybe he thought it was too much work.

But here's the tragedy: a couple years later, in early January, the teenage girl, the youngest sister, died. There is no record of what she died of. She is buried at the Dutch Reformed Church near Minden, next to her father. The mother moved out soon after, to move in with the second sister, and died in her sixties soon after (the father died in his fifties). The family was gone.

Charles, after many years running the Swaine-Mauer Hardware store with his partner, Mr. Swaine, decided to open a store where customers checked themselves out, like an Aldi's setup. It was quite revolutionary at the time and I believe he did it with groceries, not hardware. We are talking Council Bluffs here, early twenties, the Roaring Twenties. It failed. He gave up, got a traveling salesman job, and died in Watertown South Dakota (on the road) in the late twenties. My dad's grandmother Julia said she always suspected that Catherine had driven him into the grave.

When he died, she had no place to go except in with her youngest daughter Verna, my grandmother. She wasn't talking to her son. Her older daughter was out in California in a small apartment. Verna took her in because she could. She made Verna's life miserable and Verna died early; my dad said he suspected dying was the only way she could get out of it. By this time there was nothing pleasant or loving of her at all.

How could she be this way? I finally concluded that the answer lies out in that Hancock farm, or in the story of what happened to it. By the way I'm not exactly sure what happened to it, so I could be wrong here, but the lack of records or clear testimony suggests that they just sold it out and left it; if nobody could or would farm it, it would go to someone who could. Could she be mad at him for not doing that? Could she have deep down expected him to take and run a farm and take care of her mother and little sister? The bitterness of her sister's death must have eaten away at her, I figure.

There may be more to the story that I haven't uncovered, given that records are scarce and not enough to go by anyway. I keep wondering what I'm missing, or if what I've found is really enough to justify the turn in her life. My father didn't know her until the thirties when it was the Depression and everybody was miserable. Apparently the fight with her son was over handling of Union Pacific stock, the family fortune, and would have been right around then. I have yet to really look into that. Maybe being hungry during the Depression was enough whether her son-in-law, my grandfather, provided for her or not.