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.