As I recounted in my very first GFHC diary, I learned almost two years ago that my great-grandfather Lee was not Irish Catholic as claimed but instead descended from the earliest New England colonists. Once the initial surprise wore off, I excitedly started to follow the trail back, as far as I could on as many lines as I could. On some lines I hit brick walls, mostly in the 1700s, but in most cases I was able to trace the lines to the early 1600s and beyond.
What struck me is how much English immigration to New England slowed between about 1650 and the early 1800s. This shows up in my own ancestry. I have literally hundreds of direct ancestors who came to New England between 1620 and 1655 or so, but after that I’ve only found one immigrant from England who came about 1663 and one other who came in about 1718. By and large, the New Englanders of 1800 were descended from people who were here early. Both in my personal story and Boston’s larger narrative, the unwashed hordes of Irish in the nineteenth century and the Ruthenians and such in the early twentieth century came well after those original immigrants.
In early New England, unlike in some American colonies, communities generally kept good records. Most towns in this part of the country have published versions of their vital records from Day One, and virtually all of those volumes can be found at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. As many of you have mentioned in earlier diaries, published family genealogies (mostly from the late 1800s and early 1900s) can be another excellent resource for this type of research. But hose books, helpful as they are, can contain some errors. This is the story of how a couple of those errors led to my being “disowned” by some distant cousins from a century ago, and how those late-to-the-party English immigrants left a nice brick wall and a disputed lineage for me.
All of these old New England ancestors are mine through my great-grandfather Lee. Lee’s maternal grandmother was named Fidelia Churchill. She lived with Lee’s family when he was born, but she died when he was two and a half months old, so he would not have remembered her. Fidelia also never knew her maternal grandparents. She was the last of about ten children, and her mother Azubah was almost 40 when she was born. Azubah also had been a later child, so her father John Cheadle (I’ve also seen Chedle and Chedel) was about 50 when Azubah was born. John was born in Ashford, Connecticut in 1732. As a result, 90 years separated Fidelia Churchill and John Cheadle.
I know John Cheadle (Chedel) had children; I found his daughter's grave in Vermont.
Back in 1770 this John Cheadle, my 5x great-grandfather, was the second English settler in Pomfret, Vermont. Later that year his daughter Rachel, Azubah’s older sister, was the first English child born there. More than 50 years later, most of the family hadn’t gone anywhere; Fidelia was born and raised in Pomfret. Tracing John Cheadle’s ancestry has proven vexing, as you will see.
John Cheadle’s Father
John Cheadle’s father was George Cheadle, the aforementioned “only-immigrant-from-England-in-my-direct-ancestry-who-came-to-America-after-1663.” I have seen genealogy forum people disputing exactly where in England George Cheadle came from. Some of these people said they were going over there to research it, but none has been kind enough to report back to the rest of us.
It is agreed that George Cheadle was born in England in 1699 and came to central Massachusetts in about 1718. He fell in with a group, led by Asa Whitcomb, that moved down into northeastern Connecticut a year or two later. In 1721 he married there, had children, and lived the rest of his life in that area. One of George’s other sons is named Asa, presumably in honor of Asa Whitcomb. Interestingly, when John Cheadle moved to Vermont 50 years after George showed up in Connecticut, the son of this same Asa Whitcomb led the settlement of another Vermont town not far away.
It generally, though not universally, is agreed that George Cheadle’s father was named Increase Cheadle, a theory given credence because another of George’s sons is named Increase. As the name suggests, the story goes that George’s father Increase was a Puritan but for whatever reason never left England. By the time George emigrated, Increase apparently was older and in bad health. Nothing more is known of Increase Cheadle’s ancestry, or of George’s mother. Brick wall, made all the more daunting by the fact that people can’t agree on where in England George Cheadle was born.
John Cheadle’s Mother
George Cheadle’s wife, John’s mother, presents a different challenge. Most sources identify her as Martha Hall Burgess, born in Yarmouth, Cape Cod, Massachusetts in February 1702/3. Martha, it seems, was the daughter of Thomas Burgess (1666-1737), who moved his family from the Cape to Ashford, Connecticut in about 1713. Thomas’s grandfather, also named Thomas Burgess (1601-1685), was among the earliest English settlers in Sandwich, also on Cape Cod. He lived in the Sagamore section, near today’s traffic-snarled Sagamore Bridge, and there is a small street called Burgess Avenue there even today. In the center of Sandwich is a museum in the home of a much later Burgess.
The grave of Thomas Burgess, immigrant (1601-1684/85), in Sandwich, Massachusetts
I’m trying to identify the source of the “Hall” in Martha Hall Burgess’s name. Thomas Burgess lived in Yarmouth, Massachusetts. At the time the Hall family was well-known in Yarmouth, and they appear elsewhere on my family tree. But I can’t find a direct connection to the Burgess family until the late 1700s, well after Martha Hall Burgess was named. The search continues.
The Storrs-side Problem
Compilations of marriage records show that the younger Thomas Burgess married Sarah Storrs in Yarmouth on February 26, 1696/7. The only problem: the “official” Storrs family genealogy says differently. The Storrs Family was published privately in 1886, about two years after the death of its author, Charles Storrs. Fans of college basketball may recognize the name Storrs, and they would be correct in assuming that this Storrs family is related to the University of Connecticut’s location.
The patriarch of the family in America was Samuel Storrs. He was born in Sutton-cum-Lound, England, emigrated to Barnstable, Cape Cod, in 1663. Samuel married and had a large family in Barnstable. After his wife’s death he married again and had two more children. In the 1690s Samuel moved with his wife and younger children from Barnstable to Mansfield, Connecticut, then part of the town of Windham. Many of the Mansfield area’s first settlers came from Barnstable and its neighboring towns.
Cape Cod Bay in Barnstable, Massachusetts
Samuel Storrs was a prominent citizen there, signing the petition that resulted in Mansfield’s incorporation as a separate town in 1702. He also was a founding member of the First Church of Mansfield (UCC) in 1710. It is the fourth-oldest church in northeastern Connecticut. He and his son Samuel Jr. owned about 20 percent of the land in Mansfield, no small holding because the town is about 45 square miles, roughly the same size as the cities of Boston or San Francisco today. The 1886 genealogy that’s giving me fits asserted that, except for one small family in Richmond, Virginia and a Swedish immigrant who adopted the name, all Storrs-es in the United States at that time were descended from Samuel.
In 1881, two of those Storrs descendants who still bore the name founded the Storrs Agricultural School in Mansfield, and the section of town where it was located came to be known as “Storrs.” Between 1881 and 1939 the school evolved, in several stages, into the University of Connecticut. Among sports fans today “Storrs” is a well-known shorthand for that school’s highly successful men’s and women’s basketball programs.
One of the school’s founders, Charles Storrs, was the author of The Storrs Family. Charles Storrs was born in Mansfield in 1822, but lived most of his adult life in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Although a bit pompous, he appears to have been a generous and noble person. I therefore won’t hold it against him that the book’s introductory obituary of him contains effusive praise from his longtime neighbor Henry Ward Beecher, whom I consider one of the more mendacious figures in American history.
What I will hold against Charles Storrs is his assertion that Samuel Storrs’s daughter Sarah married someone other than Thomas Burgess. According to The Storrs Family, Sarah Storrs married Dr. Joseph Jacobs, the first physician in Mansfield. He had this to say:
The Storrs Family, Privately Printed, New York, 1886, at p. 111.
The 1917
Encyclopedia of Connecticut Biography and the 1920
A Modern History of Windham County essentially repeat the Charles Storrs version verbatim, down to the healing herbs in the large botanical garden. This now is the “official” version.
I have yet to see any source before Charles Storrs’s book was published in 1886 that has Sarah Storrs marrying Dr. Joseph Jacobs. The will of Samuel Storrs, Sr., mentioned by Charles Storrs in the book, identifies his daughters only by first name. Likewise, the grave of Dr. Jacobs’s wife Sarah says only “Sarah—wife to Joseph Jacobs.” Other sources indicate that Dr. Jacobs married a Sarah Lindsay in Massachusetts in the 1690s and had children with her, all before he settled in Mansfield.
This theory is supported by the dates on the Sarah Jacobs grave in Mansfield. It says she died January 8, 1734/5, at the age of 59 years and 10 months. If accurate (and it sounds pretty precise), that would put her birth in about March of 1674/5. But Sarah Storrs, as the Barnstable, Massachusetts records show, was born June 28, 1670. Charles Storrs used this date not only in his book, but on the granite monument he erected in Mansfield in 1879, to honor the original Storrs family, not fifty feet from Mrs. Sarah Jacobs’s grave. That date is literally carved in stone.
Monument erected by Charles Storrs in 1879 to honor the family of Samuel Storrs, the immigrant, in Mansfield, Ct. It lists Samuel's daughter Sarah as born on June 28, 1670.
It thus seems entirely plausible to me that Dr. Jacobs married a different Sarah, and Sarah Storrs (well into her 20s by the time her father left Cape Cod for Connecticut) remained on the Cape with some of the older siblings. In this scenario Sarah Storrs married Thomas Burgess on the Cape and didn’t move to Connecticut for another twenty years. That would explain why Charles Storrs found nothing about her, or her children, in the Mansfield records. My information is that her children were born on Cape Cod, before the move, and after the move they lived in the town of Ashford, not Mansfield. They never lived in Mansfield.
One possible source of the confusion is that the doctor’s son, Joseph Jacobs, Jr., married Mary Storrs, a daughter of Sarah’s brother Samuel Storrs, Jr. and his wife. Confusing things even more, Samuel Storrs Jr.’s wife just happened to be Thomas Burgess’s sister Martha. It turns out Joseph Jacobs Jr. and Mary Storrs are direct ancestors of President Rutherford B. Hayes. (Hey, a crummy one-term President who lost the election and only took office in a seamy deal to end Reconstruction is still a President. Or so George W. Bush and his enabler William Rehnquist, who wrote a book about the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election, told me.)
Back to the main Storr-y. (I know, awful. Sorry.) Charles Storrs, though he states matter-of-factly in his book that Sarah Storrs married Joseph Jacobs, Sr., takes no position on whether Joseph Jacobs, Jr. was her son or a stepson. If he was her son, he married his first cousin (daughter of his mother’s brother). That kind of thing happened pretty frequently in the first few decades of English settlement in New England, but by the early 1700s was less likely because there were more people to choose from.
Here’s what I think happened:
- Sarah Storrs married Thomas Burgess. They lived in Barnstable, Mass. until 1715, then in Ashford, Conn. This is why there are no records or gravestones for them in Mansfield, Conn.
- Dr. Joseph Jacobs married some other Sarah, perhaps Sarah Lindsay. They are buried in Mansfield, near (but not right next to) their neighbors, the Mansfield Storrs crowd.
- The marriage of Joseph Jacobs, Jr. to Mary Storrs, daughter of Samuel Storrs, Jr., was mistaken for a marriage between Sarah Storrs and Dr. Joseph Jacobs, Sr. In each case the groom’s name is Joseph Jacobs and the bride is a daughter of Samuel Storrs (Samuel Sr. in Sarah’s case, and Samuel Jr. in Mary’s case). Sarah Storrs had an older sister named Mary who never married. Perhaps Charles Storrs saw the Joseph Jacobs-Mary Storrs marriage, knew Joseph Jacobs, Sr.’s wife to be Sarah from other records, and assumed the clerk wrote the name of the wrong Storrs sister.
Anyway, the Storrs family might not claim me, but I’m claiming them. Not that it matters much unless free UConn tickets are involved somehow.
The Burgess-side Problem
The wife of Thomas Burgess, grandson to the immigrant Thomas Burgess, was Sarah. The Barnstable records suggest it was Sarah Storrs, and the Storrs family genealogy says she married someone else. As I set forth above, I agree with the Barnstable records.
Regardless, we know Martha Hall Burgess married George Cheadle in Ashford, Connecticut in 1721. Their son John had a daughter, Azubah. Azubah had a daughter, Fidelia. Fidelia had a daughter, Agnes Ida. Agnes Ida had a son, Lee. Lee had a daughter, my grandmother, who had my father, who had me. Right?
Maybe not. Just minutes, I tell you, after resolving the error in the Storrs family genealogy to my satisfaction, I find this in the Burgess family genealogy written in 1865 by Ebenezer Burgess (more on him coming sometime):
Ebenezer Burgess, Burgess Genealogy: Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess, Who Were Settled at Sandwich, in the Plymouth Colony, in 1637, Boston, T. R. Marvin & Son, 1865, at p. 16.
She died in 1718? Before she got married in 1721 and had a child in 1732 who kept the chain going? Do I even exist? The Ashford town records suggest I might; Ebenezer Burgess categorically denies the possibility, cruelly killing off my ancestor before she reached 15. I think I’ll go with the town records. I like existing, at least on most days.
These late 19th-century genealogies are a treasure. They did preserve a lot of names and dates that might otherwise be lost. But the work was hard, especially in that age without the internet, and they made mistakes. For me, the most important thing to remember is not to take their inadvertent mistakes personally. It gets annoying, though, when family societies tell you that you can’t join, and they can’t help your research, because your ancestors didn’t exist in their snooty book, and of course it’s your research error and not their snooty ancestor’s.
Who else has been rejected like this?