You don't see so many blacksmiths nowadays.
Land of Enchantment, July 25, 2014
Many a family has its legends, passed down from generation to generation in ever vaguer terms, without a hint of detail or evidentiary support. In the United States, in fact, many families share the same legends; descent from a Native American princess and descent from some sort of European royalty are two of the big ones. I’ve heard both of those from members of my own family, and from members of many other families.
There are variants specific to specific American subgroups. I’ve known a great many Irish-Americans, including relatives of mine, who believed their Irish ancestors not only predated the Great Hunger wave of immigration to the United States, but fought on the American side in the Revolution. I’m descended from people who fought in the American Revolution but, alas, they’re not my Irish ancestors.
The legend I’ll share with you this week is a little different. It’s the story, or rather stories, of one man’s origins. As the introductory quote suggests, that man was a blacksmith, my 8th-great-grandfather Anthony Coombs. Anthony was born in…wait, nobody knows, for sure, when or where he was born. That’s the whole reason for the post.
The first time we encounter Anthony Coombs, knowing for sure it’s my ancestor, is when he turns up in Wells, Maine in 1684 as an apprentice blacksmith to Lewis Allen. Lewis Allen was actually born Louis Allain, and Acadian census records suggest that he was born in France in about 1654. By the age of 30 he was a fairly wealthy man, owner of hundreds of acres in the Wells area and more land and other property elsewhere.
Within a couple of years Allain would be living in Port Royal, the capital of French Acadia, where he married and had a family. In about 1704 he briefly returned to Wells, allegedly sent by the French to spy on the British. In 1711, following the fall of Acadia to the British (Port Royal was renamed Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), the bilingual Allain was arrested by the British for encouraging desertion among their troops. He lived his long life out in Nova Scotia, suing in 1719 for title to his lands in Wells, which he won and sold.
Anthony Coombs, meanwhile, stayed in Wells, where in 1688 he married the young Dorcas Woodin. Dorcas was the daughter of John Woodin and his wife Mary, who had emigrated from England to the northern part of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The large Woodin family moved often, living in virtually every town in Essex County, Mass., where the older children settled. In about 1687 John and Mary took the younger children (including Dorcas) to Wells, where they settled briefly on land next to that occupied by Anthony Coombs.
The marriage record of Anthony and Dorcas. As was common in the 17th century, these names were spelled at least a dozen different ways. Dorcas, legend has it, hated her name and wanted nobody in the family to have it. Another Dorcas did show up on the family tree a few generations later.
1688-89 was a momentous period in both old and New England, the days of the “Glorious Revolution,” culminating with the flight of King James II and the ascension to the British throne of the Protestant William and Mary. The period, although it produced the seminal British Bill of Rights of 1689, was disastrous for Catholics in Britain and Ireland. It was equally difficult for settlers, both English and French, on the amorphous border between French Acadia and New England, where “King Wiliam’s War” would rage for nine long years.
A quiet town today, Castine, Maine was hotly contested territory a few centuries ago
In April 1688, even before the fall of James II, Sir Edmund Andros had kicked off the bloodshed by attacking Castine, Maine, then an important French town. Andros was the autocratic and highly unpopular governor of the Dominion of New England, created by James II in 1686 to bring the unruly northern colonies under tighter control. The Dominion included today’s New England (home of your Super Bowl champions!) as well as New York and New Jersey. In the process of creating it James II revoked the charters of several colonies, most notably hard-to-tame Massachusetts Bay.
The creation of the Dominion was the natural outgrowth of a series of acts passed by Parliament in the 1660s and 1670s, following the restoration of the monarchy in Britain. Presaging the troubles of a century later, New England colonists envisioned their colonies as largely independent havens from their troubles in England, offering plentiful land and the opportunity to practice their religion as they saw fit. The British crown and Parliament saw them as potential moneymakers for the mother country, and thus forbade long-established practices of trading with other European powers in North America. Enforcing these laws in self-governing and distant colonies was difficult, so James II created the Dominion to streamline colonial government and put his own people in charge. His people was Andros: Twelve years earlier James II, who was Duke of York before becoming king in 1685, had named Andros governor of his recently-acquired Province of New York.
Sir Edmund Andros, unpopular governor of the Dominion of New England from 1686 to 1689
The French didn’t take Andros’s attack on Castine lying down. During 1688 and 1689 they and their allies in the Wabenaki Confederacy conducted a series of raids on English settlements along the Maine and New Hampshire coasts. In early 1689 Andros was gathering troops to fortify Pemaquid (now Bristol, Maine), which would fall to the French in a bloody siege in August 1689, pushing the British frontier back to Falmouth (today’s Portland). When word reached Boston that King James II had fled to France, the local populace saw their chance to oust Governor Andros. Led by Increase and Cotton Mather, a mob of Massachusetts Puritans placed Andros under arrest and restored the prior regime.
It mostly worked. William and Mary made no effort to preserve the “shattered” Dominion of New England, and over the next couple of years issued new colonial charters for the New England colonies. Importantly, in 1691 they merged Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, and granted the new Province of Massachusetts Bay the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (previously claimed by New York) as well as Maine. To the chagrin of Nonconformist Puritan leaders like the Mathers, whose chief gripe against Andros was his successful introduction of the Church of England in Massachusetts, the new colonial charter called for religious tolerance and a governor appointed by the crown. No more virtual theocracy.
King's Chapel. Boston. As the name suggests it was founded in 1686 as the first Anglican congregation in Puritan Massachusetts. This building was built in 1749; the original on the same site was built in 1688. Gov. Andros had to build in the municipal graveyard because no Massachusetts Calvinist would sell land for an Anglican church. Today the congregation splits the difference: it is "unitarian Christian in theology, Anglican in worship, and congregational in governance." Whatever that means.
The elimination of Andros may have made the Mathers a little happier, but it did nothing to lessen British-French tensions along the Maine coast. In fact, they increased when William and Mary joined forces with the League of Augsburg, which was allied against the France of Louis XIV. The resulting “Grand Alliance” did battle against the French in Europe from 1689 to 1698, in what was called the Nine Years’ War. French and English colonists clashed along the Maine coast during the same period.
The disputed coastline on a modern map. From left to right, the red marks represent Wells, Bath, Castine (all in Maine), and the Acadian capital Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). The red line roughly follows the Kennebec River, which France considered the border of l'Acadie
During these years, as you might expect, the town of Wells was in a continuous state of vulnerability. Shortly after hostilities began, Anthony sent his bride back to Salem. It was there that their first child, my ancestor Mary Coombs, was born on September 3, 1689. Dorcas and Mary lived with a number of Woodin siblings on Cape Ann during the next eight years, while Wells held out against raids by far larger French and Wabenaki forces in both 1691 and 1692. Anthony mostly remained in Wells, where his services as blacksmith were needed for weapon making. But he (or someone!) made frequent visits to Dorcas, as shown by the three additional children born to her during the duration of King William’s War.
English colonists in Wells held off a French/Wabenaki assault in June 1692. This monument marks the spot of Capt. Samuel Storer's garrison.
Today Wells has plenty of traffic on a summer weekend, but it's worth it to get some of the Maine Diner's famed lobster pie. Or anything else on the menu.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, perhaps both Dorcas and Anthony had had enough. Dorcas had raised her young children in the shadow of the Salem witch hysteria, knowing her far-away husband could be killed at any time; Anthony had spent nearly a decade ducking arrows, hatchets, and bullets. Time for some normalcy.
Dorcas's first children were very small during this time, the Salem witch hysteria
Dorcas’s sister Martha, who had married John Raymond of Beverly, had left the Salem area altogether to settle in Middleborough, just west of Plymouth. Anthony and Dorcas followed suit. In about 1697 the relatively new town of Rochester, Massachusetts, which is just south of Middleborough, granted Anthony land on the condition that he serve the town as a blacksmith for at least seven years. Not a bad deal. Blacksmiths, now rare indeed, were a hot commodity in 1697.
A crude 1675 map of New England shows the family's new beginnings; Wells is the red mark to the north and Rochester, Mass. the red mark to the south. Dorcas's native Essex County is circled in red.
Eastover Farms in Rochester, Mass., now stands on the land where Anthony Coombs and family lived. Delicious blueberry pies.
The family lived near what is now Eastover Farms (great blueberry pies and a beautiful spot), and several more children were born in Rochester. Anthony and Dorcas appear sparingly in the records, but it is believed they died in the 1720s. And that’s all I know about their later years.
So how old was Anthony when he came to Wells, Maine, in 1684? Where was he born? Who were his parents? Big mystery, and a hotly contested one at that.
If you’ve done any research into families from New England in colonial days, you’ve almost certainly come across family genealogies compiled lovingly by proud descendants around the turn of the last century, a time when long lineage on these shores was seen by some as a mark of superiority over the unwashed hordes of immigrants surging into our nation. Motivated by snobbery and xenophobia or not, these works can be a great help to the present-day researcher. If they’re accurate.
The “definitive” genealogy of the Coombs family is The Story of Anthony Coombs and his Descendants, published by William Carey Coombs of Ohio in 1913. Unfortunately, many more recent researchers insist that, at least as concerns its recitation of Anthony Coombs’s origins, the book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
The Ohio grave of William Carey Coombs, genealogist
As William Carey Coombs (whom I’ll call “WCC” for convenience’s sake) presents it, Anthony was born Antoine Combes, or something to that effect, in Pons on the western coast of France. WCC concedes that Coombs is an English, not French name, but says that “Combes” is a common name in the Aquitaine area between La Rochelle and Bordeaux, and is believed to be of English or Welsh origin because Aquitaine was under British control through the mid-1400s and was settled by many English and Welsh families.
As WCC tells it, you can blame Eleanor of Aquitaine, "la Dame des Troubadours," (1122-1204) for the whole mess.
WCC, who is a very good storyteller, writes that young Antoine was born into a Catholic family in about 1642, during the last year of Louis XIII’s life. His father wanted him to be a Roman Catholic priest or friar, but an old man who worked as a servant to the friars Anthony was to join told him of their depravity and hypocrisy, and Anthony was repulsed. This old man gave him an English, Protestant bible and, through reading it, Anthony came to the conclusion that he was a dissenter from the Catholic religion.
His mother, presented by WCC as a possible secret Huguenot, provided him with the means to meet with a vessel that was heading to America. 18-year-old Anthony reached Boston in 1660, and settled briefly in Salem before heading up to the northeastern frontier of 17-century New England, the vast woods of Maine.
As WCC tells it, in 1665 three men bought land on the west side of the New Meadows River, at what it today Bath, Maine. They were Thomas Stephens, Rev. Robert Gutch, and the “Scotsman” Alistair Coombs. WCC speculates that Antoine, or Anthony, adopted this Scottish name to avoid hostility toward Catholicism on the part of Massachusetts Puritans. Anthony, or Antoine, or Alistair would have returned to the area of Salem, Mass., after the English settlement at Bath was destroyed by Native Americans during King Philip’s War in September 1675. WCC explains his reversion to the name “Anthony” after the 1675 attack as evidence of his shame over his deceit, hypocrisy, and cowardliness. Apparently it took that shame a decade plus to mature.
In the 1670s the French considered the beautiful Kennebec River, on which Bath sits, the southern border of Acadie. The English, and the Dutch, had other ideas.
A really interesting story, but some modern researchers resoundingly (and
archly) reject WCC’s account as the mere fantasy of an imaginative mind.
Here’s what I know:
It's hard to imagine an 18-year-old from France passing for Scottish in 17th-century New England. I also don't know why a newly-converted Protestant fleeing France and hoping to pass as Scottish would go to the place he was most likely to meet other French speakers, the border between New England and New France. Maybe there would be fewer tongues wagging about his background, be it French or Scottish, in such a rough frontier place.
If Anthony’s connection with the Frenchman Louis Allain (and we don’t know how long they knew each other or where each was before 1684) gives credence to the theory that he was French, his apprenticeship would suggest he was not born in 1642. A 42-year-old apprentice to a 30-year-old blacksmith would be an unusual thing, especially when that apprentice had been in a position to buy land of his own 20 years before. Another possible indication that Anthony was not born in 1642 – although this is hardly conclusive – is that he would have been 46 in 1688, when he married Dorcas Woodin, who was about 17.
Rochester’s granting of land in exchange for seven years’ service as a blacksmith also suggests to me that Anthony was not born in 1642. Even a new town desperate for a blacksmith would not likely, in 1697, hire one already 55 years old for a period of seven years. In those days that was old for such difficult work.
Over the years there have been several alternative theories of Anthony’s origins:
1. Anthony was in fact born in 1642, but was the son of the Englishman John Coombs in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
2. Anthony was born in about 1656 in either England or Scotland, or even France, and first came to North America at Plymouth in 1677. WCC says that his appearance in Plymouth in 1677 was certainly not his first arrival in the New World.
3. Anthony is a son of the Alistair Coombs who bought land in Bath, Maine in 1665.
In favor of Theory Number 3 or the WCC theory that Anthony is Alistair, it is documented that in the 1720s several of Anthony’s children, born to Dorcas Woodin Coombs in Massachusetts, successfully claimed the land bought by Alistair Coombs in Bath, Maine, six decades earlier. Coombs descendants lived there at least until WCC’s book was published, and may live there still.
In the 1720s Anthony Coombs's sons obtained the land bought in 1665 by "Alistair Coombs" on the New Meadows River near Bath, Maine
On top of this, there was a Francis Coombs in nearby Middleborough, whose family cannot be connected with Anthony’s definitively, and a Robert Coombs of Hull (some 30 miles away) sold his land in Rochester in 1685, nearly 20 years before Anthony and Dorcas settled there.
I hadn’t begun to sort through the various accounts, let alone research this myself firsthand. I do, after all, have over 1,000 8th-great-grandparents. But it seems DNA testing may have helped solve the problem for me, and the answer is "none of the above." In November 2013 it was reported that Y-DNA analysis reveals a definite connection between multiple direct male descendants of Anthony Coombs and multiple direct male descendants of Pierre Comeau of Port Royal.
Pierre Comeau, born in France in around 1597, came to Port Royal in 1632, making him among the first permanent French settlers in Acadia. He was a barrelmaker. Pierre married Rose Bayon, born in Dijon, in La Hève, Acadie in 1651 and they had nine known children. Among them was an "Antoine" born in 1661. Antoine turns up in census records in Port Royal throughout his youth, up to around the time Anthony Coombs first shows up in Wells, Maine. Genealogies of the Comeau descendants in Canada do not show any spouse or children for him, and his date of death is unknown. That would make sense if he relocated to the English colonies and died in Massachusetts. Also, Antoine would have been ten years older than Dorcas Woodin, not 30. It seems his parents were the ones with the huge age gap: Pierre Comeau was about 51 and Rose 18 when they married.
Family of "Pierre Comeaux" in the 1671 Acadian census. The circled words are, "Anthoine, agé de 10 ans" ("Anthoine, age 10 years), a son of Pierre.
Antoine Comeau, now 24, appears again the 1686 Acadian census. During this time he would have been in Wells with Louis Allain, but may have been counted in Port Royal as well.
Port Royal National Historic Site (Annapolis Royal, N.S.). Did my ancestor grow up here?
Is the Comeau story to be believed? You can't really argue with DNA testing, but I have plenty of questions. Nothing indicates the Comeau family were Huguenots. Did Anthony become a Protestant when he moved to Maine? Did he do so for the sake of convenience, or did he go there for reasons of conscience in the first place? What role did the ambitious Louis Allain play? Some accounts suggest Allain came from France to Wells, and then went to Port Royal. That makes little sense to me. It seems more likely the Frenchman went first to the French colony, then tried his hand in Wells. All the more likely if he brought Antoine Comeau, who was living in Port Royal, to Wells as his apprentice.
And who was "Alistair Coombs" and how did Anthony's kids end up on his land in Bath? Antoine Comeau was only 4 when "Alistair Coombs" bought that land.
I don’t know the answers for sure. I only have a story based on speculation and some supporting scientific evidence, a story of religious conflict and commercial conflict and military conflict, and somehow making a stable home and family out of the ashes. Hope you liked it.
Open thread, so have at it. Anything new and interesting? Any unresolved mysteries on your family tree? (See poll!)