murky times in the 1700s

I didn't quite give you the entire story (in the Ipswich Mary posts below). I have been searching for signs of the Williams - and there may be even more than we know about - but the one who is most interesting appeared in Chelsea marrying Rachel Watts, daughter of a deacon there. Now I've been researching old Chelsea but haven't found much. She is easy to find, where her family came from, etc., but how he got there, is another story. There are mixed accounts.

But what I think happened was this. I will have to get the timing right because I admit this story sounds a little full of holes and not filled in accurately with time details. But I think a William was born in about 1727, and could have been born in Roxbury (Boston) which he would come to identify as Boston later. His son and grandson (William and then Joseph), as well as William's sister (Aunt Caroline) and younger brothers (uncles Warren and Washington) all believed that he was descended from Knight and two Johns, Colonel John (son of knight) and John Esq., Col. John's son. But John Esq. was born basically after he found Rachel Watts in Chelsea. He couldn't have descended from John Esq..

He could, however, have latched onto that family in hard times (which were plentiful and very hard), such that legends of who they are and where they came from came out of him when he was talking about where he'd come from.

He lived most of his adult life on a farm in Needham, a little southwest of Boston. It was rural at the time and not an easy life. He had his wife Rachel, daughter of Deacon Watts of Chelsea, and eleven children including William, Aunt Caroline, Daniel and some older girls who seemed to grow up, marry, and live in Cambridgeport. He had apparently started out with Rachel and stayed in the city for a while, living in Cambridgeport and various places. I found it interesting that when he died they came and got his body and buried it in Medford. Is it possible that he'd latched onto Thomas's family (Col. John's brother)? In that family they reported an older step-brother, half brother, not accounted for in any other way. Their accounts of this half brother, John W., don't quite match in the time area; he's just a legend and I couldn't get the times to work.

But let's go back to young William (1727) whose family has fallen apart, perhaps because his parents, William (~1697) and Mary Whiteridge, have died. He finds the Leveretts perhaps when they are still together: Knight and two sons, Col. John and Thomas, still living in the house downtown. John will eventually get that house, stay there, have a son John Esq., and a family, until moving off to Connecticut and dying right during the war. Thomas however will go into printing, make big money, and get an estate out in Medford. Would this William go with him? When he meets Rachel Watts, has twin girls and is struggling to make it (in Cambridgeport, where the girls ended up coming back to?) - are John and his family somehow involved in this?

Once again timing is crucial, and I still have to solve the problems, but it seems to me that the true line of descent goes down through the Williams, while the belief was that it went down through the Johns. They were obviously wrong about John Esquire, who went to Harvard in 1776, and was a kind of celebrity for doing that. But they claimed Col. John and Knight because they believed that. Whoever William (1727)'s parents were, William (1697) and Mary, they were long gone when he was small. He'd been taken in and brought up by the Leveretts who were around.

Ipswich Mary (cont'd)

Here is my present opinion about Ipswich Mary. It is gleaned from my recent research that I am about to let go of, so I want to put everything I know here now, so that I can work on it one step at a time.

First, I believe Mary, John the Younger's full sister, is the mother of William and of our line which descends basically from William (~1727) and William (~1778). From those two there is a clear path to Joseph, Warren, Washington, etc. and to most of the people who might be reading this. The Northern Leveretts.

So this Mary was born in 1674 or earlier to Sarah Payton and Hudson Leverett, and when Sarah died she was raised as a stepdaughter out in Roxbury with Hudson and Elizabeth Gannett. Out there she disappeared, except that there's a Mary who surfaced marrying a Johnathan Moulton in Wenham in 1713, and dying in Wenham 1728. Meanwhile in here is the William (~1698) who married Mary Whiteridge in Boston (1715) and had a daughter Phebee (1716), then dropped out of sight. I believe William (~1698) is Mary's child.

Now my first job is to figure out how this Mary had an out-of-wedlock child, and hid him for fifteen years, when he was a Leverett male and she was the sister of the President of Harvard. How exactly does that work? I have two theories: 1) she brought him up in Roxbury, and 2) she brought him up in Wenham or perhaps Ipswich.

Under theory #1, it makes some sense because the family had a lot of land out there, they could stay under the radar, and family in town could help her. When she did move to Wenham (1713) it would only be for a few years; he would be ~15; he would be unhappy or unwilling to settle up there; he could meet his bride up there (all Whiteridges seemed to be from the Wenham/Salem/Ipswich area); but he would bring her back to town where he could live in the old family plot. Or perhaps straight to Cambridgeport/Chelsea.

He did seem to move to Chelsea at some point. They had Phebee (1716) but possibly a Mary who has been documented as growing up, marrying, moving to New Haven, having a baby, and dying. The interesting thing here is that I have actually seen a record of a Mary being born in Chelsea, in an old Chelsea birth record, but have been unable to find it again; it dropped from sight. Presumably William (~1727) would be his last child as there are no other records of Leveretts in Chelsea.

One advantage of connecting these is that it fits a familiar pattern. Young William grows up in Chelsea and meets the Deacon's daughter, Rachel Watts, and they marry in 17 something I'm not sure. There could be an extra generation in here if you believe strictly in the 16 rule, which is that because of lack of birth control and natural forces the vast majority of families started when kids were sixteen and not later, like say give the guy ten years before he picks a bride. No, William and Rachel are starting at 16 probably, having twins, having a few more, experiencing rough times, ending up out in Needham. During the Revolution.

There's a guy, Spencer Phips, adopted son of William Phips, governor of the colony, who died near 1698. This guy bought land in Cambridgeport, which I believe counts as Chelsea, or at least close. He bought it in 1706 or thereabouts, and, because he was from near Wenham, he traveled a lot and because he had money, he could be responsible for helping William resettle or getting Mary up out of Boston and into Wenham in the first place. I am not clear about ages but I found that there was a connection between the Leveretts and the Phips family that may have been important here. Why else would he move to Chelsea? Someone had to make it possible and even desirable. I might read his biography.

I need to find more information about the Mary who ended up in New Haven.
I need to find that birth notice from ancient Chelsea birth records.
I need to read up on Spencer Phips and Cambridgeport.
I need to figure out why one would move to Wenham or Ipswich in 1698 or later, in 1713. How would one encounter a Johnathan Moulton, landowner and widower with a few too many orphaned kids on his hands?
I need to track down the dates more accurately so I know how old William was, when he married, etc.\

Note: After writing this I made a simple map search, and found that Cambridgeport is not to be confused with Chelsea. They are not near each other and in fact would be a long walk. Much of what I said above still needs to be looked into. He ended up in Chelsea, that's for sure. Lots of family connections and possible land in Cambridgeport, that's true also. But even Malden is a different part of town. People didn't move freely between them those days. If he found that Deacon's daughter he had to be in Chelsea for some reason and I hope to find the reason. It wasn't Spencer Phips.

Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

Ipswich Mary, cont'd

Having just finished my book, Harvardinates (see below post), I am free to think about some of the issues it brought up. Actually one reason I wanted to do it was so that I could explore the era (1690-1720) of the gap in our genealogy.

I actually have a working theory on that gap:
Willam Laverick/Leverit (married in 1715 as Laverick, had baby in 1716 as Leverit) was born to one of our people, probably Mary, John's sister;
Mary (1675) was a full sister to John; lived much of her life in Roxbury; was the same Mary who remarried in Wenham 1713 and died in Wenham 1728;
William Leverit's bride Mary Whiteridge was from Ipswich/Wenham or the area;
they had a child William, later, and a daughter Mary; Mary ended up in Connecticut; William was our William, who married Rachel Watts in Chelsea in ~1740.
That William was poor, perhaps orphaned, enough so that, at some point, he relied on or fell in with Knight's child Col. John's family. The timing was somewhat unclear here. This William could not have been a child of John Esq. (Col. John's son), and still marry Rachel in the 1740s. But he could have stayed with the family enough that his children and children's children all thought (and wrote on an envelope) that their line went up through the two Johns. Family stories could have included all of them. And he was a Leverett who could easily say, I'm descended from Governor John but not John the President of Harvard.


The above theory requires some filling in, especially in the early 1700s when William falls in with Col. John's family. But the part I'm more concerned about now is where Mary brought up William, how, why & when she found her way to Wenham, and what could possibly explain that.

And, bear with me here, there's another possibility. Sarah, youngest of Gov. John's daughters, was the same age as Sarah (1674). Thus she would have been 18 at Hudson's will & death in Roxbury, during the witch trials, and 23 at John's wedding, an Ipswich-filled affair in Boston in 1697. I focus on the wedding because any William born out of a 1697 experience would be 18 in 1715, just about right. So let's say Mary or Sarah were at that wedding and met a William from Ipswich, but had the child in Roxbury or Boston, brought it up there, and didn't go up to Ipswich until he was 16, or something like that.

Putting Sarah into it has the advantage of an explanation for the name William, who would be her maternal grandfather, Sarah Sedgwick's father, who was a strong character. But Sarah presumably lived in the mansion downtown, where it would be impossible to hide an out-of-wedlock child, unless she were to just move out to Roxbury. This theory requires some things about out-of-wedlock children: first, that it would even be possible in witch-trial Mass Bay Colony. Second, whether life would get any better for this boy when he goes up to Wenham with his mother (Mary). Or maybe he was hiding up there somewhere all along, growing up there, waiting for Mary to find a suitable mate. Could Sarah be involved?

Sarah is something of a mystery. At 31, she was still not married when Sarah Sedgwick died and who knows if she lived in the mansion, stayed there, or what. She would not marry until 1722, and by that time she would be 48. Plenty of time to have a baby in there, and even bring it up, and turn him out into the world at 16 or whenever when he was ready to marry. As long as it wasn't downtown; I don't think she could have done that downtown.

My bets are still on Mary. And I want to know about anyone in Wenham, Ipswich, or the road between.

assuming it's Mary's child, born about 1692) and we need a William, how about William Phips?

He was Governor at the time. He was calling off the witch trials, and traveling back and forth a lot. His adopted son, Spencer, who was born in Rowley, would buy land in Cambridgeport and this gave proximity to John; he worked with John on the Muscongus patent, and John gave him one share. That share could be Mary's share.

But William Phips was married. A very colorful character, his son with money, reason and ability to take Mary & young William up to Wenham/Ipswich in 1713, connections and travel money. But if William was the father, how does one explain that? How could they meet when he was Governor? He died in 1685, before the wedding. But that also could be a clue.

Other Williams? Other ideas?

Harvardinates

Whew! Just finished! The process of writing the book, Harvardinates: The life and times of John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard, has been long and arduous. I just finished with the writing an hour ago, and slung it off to my two proofreaders, my brother and my wife. I still have to do the index for the paperback version. And I have to decide whether to put in more pictures.

I learned a lot in the process, and actually set it aside several times in the process of writing it. I am still not entirely confident in the accuracy of everything i've written. This would be a good argument for finishing the index before publishing.

The problem is (argument for publishing), I'm dying to publish, having finished and having birthed it. It's almost unbearable to wait. I don't want to pressure the proofreaders; on the contrary, I want them to be careful with it. But I would love to see it out there.

I wrote to Leverett House, Harvard, hoping to be able to peddle the book there, in one form or another. Maybe they can set up a zoom, or put me in their Leverett House newsletter. They are kind of a singular fan club of John Leverett, President of Harvard. They consider him to be their one little corner of Harvardiana and the guard it jealously. So I think I'll have a little business there if I can get people to actually try it.

Let me tell you about what I learned. First was about Bezaliel (see below post), which haunts me. The guy had a younger brother, by two years, who died at some point, or perhaps just disappeared in the war, or sailed off or something. Who knows? Bezaliel is a mystery and unlike John, his brother, his fate has gone pretty much unrecorded.

The second is about Cotton Mather. We are generally agreed that Cotton Mather was the enemy of the age, come unhinged, put nineteen people to death including one minister/Harvard graduate. He was all in favor of these hangings and he paid a price for it. But he also brought inoculation to America, and he paid for that too. He decided that enough was enough for the smallpox, and he was going to do what he could to eradicate it.

Out of that, I had to give him some respect. He actually sacrificed his own need to be powerful, in order to do what was right for his flock. And he stood up to them even when they threw a bomb into his house. The bomb apparently didn't explode, but hey. That's a story. It's one of many, but it's something I learned.

The book should be out within the week. If I get ancy, I might do it tonight. I should probably work on the index, though. That's a somewhat tedious job, but at least it involves going over the words one at a time. The spellcheck will have trouble with half this book, and won't be crazy about 17th century spellings. But I can do that too and that will at least show me all the mis-types which I always find embarassing, after I've published.

Bezaliel

I am haunted by something I just found in my research, so I thought i'd talk about it. him His name is Bezaliel.

i've been writing a biography of John Leverett (1662), first secular president of Harvard, and I noticed that he was a lot like my older brother, older by two years. Studied hard, went to Harvard, did well at Harvard, was generally very serious. As an oldest brother, he took responsibility and succeeded. As a younger brother, I was a little wilder.

I always thought John Leverett grew up alone. He had siblings: Bezaliel (1664, died young), Sarah (1667, died at the age of three), and another one born in 1674, when John was 12. But in my research I found that Bezaliel lived until he was at least ten.

One man was dragging another man into court because of some stolen ribbon which had been found on the second man's work-bench. But the second man got to the bottom of the problem: it was Bezaliel, who had stolen the ribbon and left it in the second man's workspace. Bezaliel was reprimanded by the judge and Hudson was told to reprimand him in front of a Constable. Actually I'd like to reread that little passage.

But what it did was to make me realize that John's life was more like my brother's; he had a little brother who was around, for all of ten years, at least, stealing ribbons and such.

Bezaliel must have died soon after that, because there is no record of him marrying, or going to school, or anything like that. No record of his death, either. He just disappeared so that records say, "died young." He's a mystery.

He would have been too young to fight in King Philip's War (1675-1676), but not too young to die in it. It kind of messed everything up, and records were a bit hazy for a while. His grandfather was governor at the time, though. You'd think someone would have noticed.

Just makes me wonder. This was downtown Boston, 1674, about three hundred years before I got there, and found my brother over there at Harvard, working hard, and succeeding.

uh oh

https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/680#ch12

In the Suffolk County records, July 29, 1673:

Hudson Leverett sent'd:
"Hudson Leverett bound over to the Court to Answer for his rash indiscreete & dangerous speeches of which hee was convict in Court: the Court Sentenced him to pay one hundred pounds in mony fine to the County & to bee imprisoned for one month & to pay Fees of Court & charge of prosecucion."

Hmm said the bear. A month in the slammer, in July of 1673. I wonder what he said?

Hudson's travails

When one encyclopedia called Hudson Leverett "disreputable," I actually got kind of mad. I knew that he had fallen out with the Puritan church, had refused to join, had moved way off into the city where he was hard to find, with his second wife, step-daughter, and his own son and daughter, one by his new wife. There were things about him that people didn't like: that he wasn't an upstanding member of the church or the downtown community. But "disreputable?" I hadn't found anything that would cause that.

I've been wading through the legal records of County Court in Boston, and he appears in there a lot. He actually was a practicing lawyer, although it's been said by many that law was not a legitimate trade in this era and that one could hardly make a living practicing it. OK, so I understand that he had a rough time bringing up his three children (not counting John, who was in Harvard by the 1670s, almost fully grown) while practicing law, and at the same time being completely overshadowed by his father's rising star; his father was elected Vice Governor in 1672 and then Governor in 1674.

But around that time, Hudson's own life began to fall apart. His wife gave birth in 1674, but the child wasn't recorded until later, and even then, without a name, and the note: Here begins to fayle the record. Somebody was no longer keeping track, as if his wife was sick now, and he refused to deal with the church (the best record-keeper) and even tell them who the child was. I suspect this was Mary, not Thomas; by 1679, his first wife Sarah was dead, he'd remarried Elizabeth and taken on her daughter, and soon he was out in Roxbury with Elizabeth, her daughter, Mary, and Thomas. Thomas could have been born before he married (which would explain why it wasn't recorded), and Sarah could have died before 1679; both possibilities have come up.

But here's the clue I found. In 1674 (the year his father became governor), he was sued by Henry Bull for "non-payment of 2,101 pound of Virginia Tobacco remaining due on a bill or specialty under the hand of saide Hudson Leverett bearing the date of 14th December 1669...." It appears that, back when John was seven, Hudson had bought this tobacco and never paid for it. It appears from the above that the 2,101 pounds is money, not pounds of tobacco, but I can't be sure of that. It appears that the 2,101 pounds is what's left of the bill, still unpaid, that this Henry Bull has to sue him for, because it appears he never will pay it if he's not forced to by the court.

Wow, take a few deep breaths.

You have a guy who refused to join the church in a small, righteous puritan town. I know how these small towns work. If you're on the wrong side, you stay on the wrong side, and it gets worse, until you're involved in pretty much every anti-establishement activity known to the town. In other words, trouble finds you. Now I have no idea about the nature of tobacco dealing in Boston in 1669, but Hudson was apparently right in the center of it. He couldn't have bought all this tobacco for personal consumption (could he?)...but must rather have been dealing it much as one would deal other smokable things in the modern world.

And yet, he fell behind on his bills, and five years later he still hadn't paid this one.

My new working theories are the following: his money problems started well before 1674. In 1674 his father was being elected governor, but his wife was having a baby, not recording it, and falling into a sickness from which she would not recover. His salary as a lawyer was not covering his bills and his tobacco-dealing side-hustle didn't prove to be lucrative, as either he'd traded a lot of tobacco for alcohol, or he'd simply lost the money, and it was beginning to catch up to him. There is general evidence of an alcohol problem (he would later be sued by an old friend, a barkeeper, presumably for unpaid tab. I have to finish going through these records and put them in time order; I'm not sure what else I'll find.

I'm beginning to get a sense of "disreputable;" not paying a two-thousand pound bill for tobacco begins to qualify.

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. (2017). Vol. 29, Records of the Suffolk County Court 1671-1680, Part 1. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/694#ch16.