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.