So, last week, we looked at the memorial for William Low Weston and the errors it contained in this diary.
This week, a bit about his parents..... and, no, neither mobile nor dysfunctional families are modern inventions ;-)
Since William Low Weston was a member of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, I figured that the parents listed in a pedigree he did were likely right ;-)
So he was the son of Samuel Weston and Julia Ann Horton. The James listed in the memorial I highlighted last week was wrong.
What I've found about Samuel and Julia, although not necessarily in the order I found the information.....
Samuel was born in CT, to Amaziah Weston and Mary Cady. Amaziah died when Samuel was young, and Mary remarried to Andrew Tracey. Mary and Andrew relocated to what is now Susquehanna County, PA, not long after their marriage.
Samuel married Julia Horton (whose family history has led me through NJ, New York City, and Long Island) sometime around 1812, and they had three children: Charles, Samuel, and Julia.
Mary Cady Weston Tracey Miles (to use all her various surnames over the course of her life) kept a diary, which is now in the historical society in Montrose, the county seat of Susquehanna County. According to her diary, in 1822, Julia's mother Sarah (Low) Horton hanged herself on a loom.
In 1825, Mary records that Julia left Samuel, and headed to Baltimore with her brother. Samuel took out an add in the local paper that said (paraphrasing only slightly.....) that his wife had left him, and he doesn't want to talk about it. And, anyway, the neighbors know more than he does, so ask them if you want to know more ;-)
Julia had left with the younger 2 of their 3 children, first going to Baltimore with her brother and later living in Tamworth NH before dying in Danvers. At the Danvers Archival Center, I'd also found a letter to William Low Weston from his sister Julia (the other child who had left with their mother Julia; brother Charles stayed with their father in PA), who had gone back to PA in the 1840s, in which she referenced the disruption of the family but gave no details....... Argh!
A few years ago, I got an email from someone who tracked me down about an eBay auction of a letter. It has sold for the stamp by the time I found out about, the woman who tracked me down sent me these excerpts:
"After a journey of six days attended with only one unpleasant incident, I arrived to this place, with my sister & her two children, all in health …”
”When Julia was tortured, insulted, abused by her tyrannical husband, secluded from her relatives, beyond the protecting influence of her brother, she was inexpressibly miserable. Her heart strings had been nearly severed.”
”Had you seen her as I did, with all the agonizing marks of grief & sorrow depicted in her countenance ……… then the smile of transport & the tears of joy & gratitude at the first sight of me ……..”
”He had complete control over her actions; & if she has erred in some things, it was to please him; errors of the head, not of the heart.”
”Cold indifference, neglect, insult, abuse, outrage, relentless cruelty, vile profiligacy, hellish & fiend like villany, have marked the character of him, she mistakingly chose for the object of her devotedness.”
”That vain wretch, her husband, supposed a separation from him would be like a separation of soul from body, and so it would once, that day has long passed and Julia now reckons the commencement of her happiness from the time of her deliverance from the power of a wretch …”
I'd looked for Samuel's and Julia's divorce record in PA, NH, and MA (haven't made it to MD yet) but haven't found it. Samuel stayed in Brooklyn, PA and remarried, having two further daughters, so I think it is likely that there was an official divorce. It turns out that the divorce records for Susquehanna County for the 1820 are not extant, but I have found a court case where Julia's brother sued Samuel to recover some of her inheritance in the mid-1820s, so my educated guess is that happened about the same time as the divorce.
His mother Mary did record in her diary that Samuel left PA in the late 1830s for western NY, where he 'died in a land of strangers' in 1840.
Bonus fun:
Letter from Julia Horton to her future sister-in-law Mary (Polly) Weston, sister of Samuel, from 1805: