May 10, 2025 was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga. My ancestor Thomas Pinkham was there according to his pension papers. After securing the fort the army took the cannons all the way to Dorchester Heights.
Sadly Thomas only served 9 months and in order to receive a pension you had to serve at least one year. So his widow was denied. But the pension papers survive and paint a wonderful story.
Following up on the wikitree hint on the parentage of Betsey (Dudley) Learned of Vermont, I did some preliminary researching using the Mass. Vital Records to 1850 series which is online. I used Sutton, Millbury, and Auburn.
David-4 (Rogers-3 Samuel-2 Francis-1) Dudley was born 14 January 1749/50 at Sutton (Sutton VRs) and died 8 August 1814 at Millbury (Millbury VRs). He married at Sutton as David Jr. Lois Whitney on 16 December 1773 (Sutton VRs), she born say 1750 and died at Millbury 13 January 1822 (Millbury VRs) and whose parentage is unknown despite a prominent New England name. Both David and Lois have gravestones still extant at the Millbury Cemetery and on Findagrave.com. David is consistently given as David and never David Daniel. Like I said no one had two given names in the 18th century.
They had:
i. Molly born 3 July 1774 at Auburn (Auburn VRs)
ii. Sarah, born 27 July 1777 at Auburn (Auburn VRs)
iii. John, born 27 January 1780 at Auburn (Auburn VRs)
iv. David, born 5 June 1781 at Auburn (Auburn VRs)
v. Luther born 12 June 1783 at Auburn (Auburn VRs)
vi. Betsey born 9 February 1787 at Sutton (Sutton VRs)
vii. Joseph born 14 March 1790 at Sutton (Sutton VRs)
viii. Amasa born 17 October 1792 at Sutton (Sutton VRs)
This looks like a full picture of their family. Here are the problems. The Betsey Dudley who married Moses Learned did so on 30 May 1802 at Windham, Vermont. She also lives long enough to be recorded in the 1850 U.S. census at age 73. (1850 Census of Windham, VT, 2 Oct 1850, page 356). She cannot be the Betsey born in 1787. She would be 15 at marriage and her age would be off by 10 years in 1850.
Likewise Polly Dudley (if in fact she is a Dudley) lives to the 1850 census too at age 63 so born in 1787. She cannot be born much before that since her last child is born in 1830 when she is 43. So she can't be the Molly Dudley born in 1774.
So this family is a bust and wikitree again proves to have dubious information. I am still curious about this family and will someday look up David's probate records.
Every time I identify a possible couple that might end a brick wall, before I find out if that's possible, I sketch out their ancestry. And it's usually glorious.
When I first identified Abiah Leonard of Canton, Me. as my ancestress, I did her genealogy which had nine Mayflower lines. But she was really Abiah Russell Learned of Canton.
Likewise when researching Abiah's mother, Polly Learned, I first identified her parents as Nahum Dudley and Margaret Howe. That line included Simon Willard, the founder of Concord and Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard. But that Polly married someone else.
The next Dudley was Josiah Dudley and Elizabeth Denison. Again, there was a Mayflower line and an immigrant of royal descent. But that didn't pan out.
I even traced the ancestry of Addington Daniels (and brothers Reuben and Aaron). They descend from the Adams family of presidential fame.
Now, with David Dudley and Lois Whitney I've seen their ancestry on wikitree. David Dudley is the son of Rogers Dudley, he the son of Samuel Dudley and Abigail Rogers. Abigail is from Ipswich and is the granddaugher of the Rev. Nathaniel Rogers, the first minister of Ipswich and on her mother's side Jonathan Wade, the merchant. She is also the niece of the Rev. John Rogers, the third president of Harvard and Harvard Class of 1649.
So before I check the will of David Dudley, I already covet his ancestry. I've had my heart broken so many times.
I’ve always kept track of the professions of my ancestors. If possible. So there seems to be over a dozen ministers for which I can account. Three are famous enough to be on wikipedia.
1. and 2. Rev. Samuel Arnold b.ca. 1622-1693 and his son Rev. Samuel Arnold 1649-1708. They were Puritan ministers. The Puritan church in Massachusetts was the only church available (it was a theocracy) and it would in time become the Congregational Church of today. The older Samuel Arnold was the minister at Marshfield, Massachusetts and his son was the minister at Rochester, Massachusetts. They each married and had children
3. Rev. John Buss ca. 1644-1736, the minister at Durham, New Hampshire. Born in Concord, Massachusetts he eventually settled in Durham, New Hampshire where he was minister for 45 years. He lived so long he had three wives and had six children by the first two.
Rev. John Buss m. Eilzabeth Bradbury
Elizabeth Buss m. John Smith
Hannah Smith m. Abraham Runnels
Ebenezer Runnels m. Betsey Stanton
Alice Runnels m. Jonathan Pinkham
Luther Hale Pinkham m. Mary Chamberlain Wallis
George Hale Pinkham m. Olive Ann Hurd
Burt Hale Pinkham m. Kate Kinmond
Clarence Melvin Pinkham m. Agnes Elizabeth Pratt
my grandparents.
As a footnote, Elizabeth Bradbury in line #1 was the daughter of Thomas Bradbury and Mary Perkins who was accused of being a witch in the Salem witch hysteria of 1692. Convicted she was not executed. Thomas Bradbury himself was the grandson of William Whitgift, the brother of the Rev. John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1583 to 1604. See wikipedia for his biography.
4. and 5. Rev. Nathan Cleveland 1777-1868 and his son John Cleveland 1802-1892. The Rev. Nathan was a Baptist minister. He was the minister of Onslow, Nova Scotia for ten years before moving to Hopewell, New Brunswick and preaching there before retiring to Alma, New Brunswick. There’s no doubt he was a ordained minister. His son John was a carpenter and itinerant preacher. I’m not sure he was ordained but he acted as a minister during his life.
Rev. Nathan Cleveland m. Diademia Dexter
John Cleveland m. Amy Martin
Ama Ann Cleveland m. James Smith
Agnes Jane Smith m. John Quigley (this is the couple who first owned the family Bible)
Lila Mae Quigley m. Archibald Thompson Pratt
Agnes Elizabeth Pratt m. Clarence Melvin Pinkham
6. Rev. Gershom Hall 1648-1732. He was also a Puritan preacher. He was a millwright by trade but was called to the pulpit as there was an opening. He preached on and off for twenty years. He married and had five children.
Rev. Gershom Hall m. Bethia Bangs
Bethia Hall m. Kenelm Winslow, III
Rebecca Winslow m. Samuel Rider
Lydia Rider m. Ebenezer Dexter
Diademia Dexter m. Rev. Nathan Cleveland, see above nos. 4 and 5.
7. Rev. Thomas Hooker 1586-1647. This man has a biography on Wikipedia as well as written biographies. In my estimation he is (not counting medieval royalty) the most famous person from whom I descend. He was one of the big five ministers who came on the Winthrop Fleet. He was first the minister at Cambridge, Massachusetts (then called Newtown) but disagreed with the idea of theocracy. So he left and established Hartford, Connecticut and was the minister there. His early writings form the nucleus of the concept of separation of church and state. We descend from him twice through two of his daughters.
Rev. Thomas Hooker m. Susannah Gabrand
Mary Hooker m. Rev. Roger Newton Sarah Hooker m. Rev. John Wilson, Jr.
Sarah Newton m. her first cousin John Wilson, III
Sarah Wilson m. John Marsh
Samuel Marsh m. Jemima Spear
Joshua Marsh m. Margaret Corbett
Isabella Marsh m. Robinson Thompson
Joshua Thompson m. Mary Spencer
Rebecca DennyThompson m. Samuel Pratt, Jr.
Joshua Thompson Pratt m. Elizabeth Jane Stack
Archibald Thompson Pratt m. Lila Mae Quigley see above nos. 4 and 5
8. Rev Joseph Hull 1596-1665. He also has a biography on Wikipedia. B.A. from Oxford University in 1614. He was the curate at Broadway in 1633 and 1634 and was instrumental in organizing the ship Marygould which he was on in 1635. He married twice and had seventeen children. We descend from him four times. He lived in Hingham, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, Massachusetts, York Maine, and Isle of Shoals, New Hampshire.
Rev. Joseph Hull m. Joanne (—-)
Temperance Hull m. John Bickford
Benjamin Bickford m. Sarah Barsham
Temperance Bickford m. George Walton, Jr.
Jane Walton m. Reuben Heard, see below
Rev. Joseph Hull m. Joanne (—-)
Elizabeth Hull m. John Heard
Mary Heard m. John Ham Tristram Heard m. Abigail (—-)
Mary Ham m. John Horne Tristram Heard, Jr. m. Jane Snell, see below
William Horne m. Mary Varney Reuben Heard m. Jane Walton, see above
Abigail Horne m. Moses Hayes
Moses Hayes, Jr. m. Anna Coffin
Nancy Ann Hayes m. Frederick Heard, grandson of Reuben Heard and Jane Walton, above
Benjamin Wingate Hurd m. Abiah Russell Learned
Olive Ann Hurd m. George Hale Pinkham, see above no. 3
Rev. Joseph Hull m. Agnes (—-)
Reuben Hull m. Hannah Ferniside
Elizabeth Hull m. John Snell
Jane Snell m. Tristram Heard, Jr. see above
9. Rev. Roger Newton b. ca. 1620-1683. Studied at Kings College, Cambridge and may have finished his studies at Harvard College. He studied under the Rev. Thomas Hooker whose daughter Mary he married. They moved to Connecticut where Roger was the minister at Milford, Connecticut for years. See under Hooker for descent.
10. Rev. Charles Luther Pinkham 1841-1903. He attended Bates College and graduated in 1879. He first enlisted and fought in the Civil War. He was a free-will Baptist and lived in New Hampshire. Later in life he was a representative of Alton, New Hampshire in 1903. He married but had no children. His wife outlived him and died in 1919. He is the brother of George Hale Pinkham see no. 3 above. I include him even though he’s not a direct ancestor because he’s the most recent mnister I can find.
11. Rev. Richard Slaney b.ca. 1550-1599. Minister at Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, England. We know him from his burial record which records his profession
Rev. Richard Slaney m. Margaret Adams
Mary Slaney m. John Baisey
John Baisey, Jr. m. Elizabeth (—-)
Mary Baisey m. Samuel Burr
Elizabeth Burr m. Thomas Clarke, Jr.
Ann Clark m. Benjamin Cleveland
Benjamin Cleveland, Jr. (a noted hymn writer) m. Mary Elderkin
Rev. Nathan Cleveland m. Diademia Dexter, see above, nos. 4 and 5
11. 12, and 13. Rev. Willam Wilson b.ca. 1542-1615, his son Rev. John Wilson 1588-1667, and his son, Rev. John Wilson, Jr. 1621-1691. Rev. William Wilson educated at Merton College, Oxford (B.A. 1564, MA 1570, BD 1576 and DD, 1607). He was a minister in Islip, Clifee and Caxton before becoming a prebendary at St. Paul’s in London 1595-1615, at Rochester Cathedral 1591-1614 and most importantly canon of Windsor for 32 years. He married Isabel Woodhull, the niece of Edmund Grindal, another Archbishop of Canterbury. See wikipedia for his biography.
Rev. John Wilson 1588-1667 was another of the big five ministers of the Winthrop Fleet. He was the first minister of Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Christ College, Cambridge University in 1606 with AB and 1609 with an MA. He has a biography in wikipedia and well as other sources such as the Dictionary of American Biography and the American National Biography. He married Elizabeth Mansfield whose grandmother was the daughter of a lord. Through her we get all kinds of wonderful medieval ancestry.
Rev. John Wilson, Jr. 1621-1691 graduated from Harvard College in 1642, in the very first class of graduates. He was minister of Medfield, Massachusetts 1652 to his death. He married Sarah Hooker, daughter of Thomas Hooker, no. 7 above, See that for your descent.
14. Benjamin York (IV) 1761-1845, Baptist minister. He first took part in the American Revolution. After that he settled down in New Hampshire and became a minister. He married his first cousin Rebecca Coffin and had ten children.
Rev. Benjamin York m. Rebecca Coffin
Rebecca York m. Joseph Wallis
Mary Chamberlain Wallis m. Luther Hale Pinkham, see no. 3 above.
So you have a bunch of puritan ministers from the 16th and 17th centuries and some Baptist ministers since then. The puritan ministers were not nice people (my opinion). They truly believed that there was only one true religion and if you believed in that you went to heaven and if you didn’t you went to hell. John Wilson of Boston was so drastic he hanged Mary Dyer, a Quaker, for not being puritan. (She was warned away and exiled in Rhode Island but she returned and they executed her). So there wasn’t much room for love and compassion. But they were products of their times.
There are a few more ancestral uncles that were ministers:
James Hamden Thompson 1742-1795, Princeton Class of 1761 (AB and 1764 AM) Presbyterian minister of Charleston, South Carolina, brother of Archibald Thompson, Jr.
Samuel Thompson 1802-1885, Baptist minister in Nova Scotia., brother of Joshua Thompson
Descent:
Archibald Thompson, Jr. m. Martha Robinson
Robinson Thompson m. Isabella Marsh
Joshua Thompson m. Mary Spencer, see above no. 7.
I have just completed abstracting the Vrbovce protestant church records from 1783-1815 for all baptisms, marriages, and deaths for the surnames Chodur, Valuch, Tomecek, and Balaz. It was an overly ambitious project that took months. The records are in Latin which is easy, but the handwriting changes over time from scribe to scribe.
I know my great-great-great-grandfather Paul Chodur Dolinsky died 26 April 1891 aged 74 and 1/4 according to his death record. That aligns beautifully with a Paul Chodur baptized on 9 January 1817 son of Jan Chodur and Anna Chodur. Jan and Anna are the two most common given names in Vrbovce and trying to distinguish them from others is difficult.
They certainly seem to be the couple who married 21 November 1803. They had the following children:
However, I continued abstracting death records from 1816 on and to my dismay the Paul Chodur baptized in January 1817 dies that same month. He can't be my great-great-great-grandfather and this identification is wrong.
I looked around and found another candidate. This Paul Chodur is baptized in December 1817 to Jan Chodur Janowych and Catherina Ondris. This couple marries on 16 November 1795 and has eight children and Paul is the youngest. Paul uses the dual name Chodur Janowych when he baptizes his own children. This seems like a likely match. Fortuitously I found Catherina Ondris's death record in 1842 and can put her with her parents Jan and Catherine Ondris. Identifying Jan Chodur Janowych will be more difficult.
Part of my reasoning for the identification of Polly Learned in my article, Searching for the Parents of Polly B. (Dudley) (Daniels) Learned, New Hampshire Genealogical Record, Vol. 20 (2003):141-150, was that Moses Learned, brother of Amos Learned, married a Betsey Dudley and settled in Vermont.
There was also an available Betsey Dudley in the family of Josiah and Elizabeth (Denison) Dudley and it made good sense that two sisters married two brothers. Well, as I have written, I no longer believe that Polly was a Dudley but probably a Daniels.
Yet on Wikitree, Betsey Dudley is given parents as David Daniel Dudley and Lois Whitney. That is intriguing. First of all no one born in 1750 had two Christian names so there's something dubious about David Daniel Dudley. He is from the Francis Dudley of Concord family, a family I have already researched in regards to Polly. But intriguing too is the Lois Whitney. That would mean a second Whitney Line for me and it would make Amos and Polly cousins. Sadly, Lois Whitney is given no parents on Wikitree. She is another woman known only from her marriage record. But according to Wikitree David Daniel and Lois had a daughter named Polly. Is this worth pursuing? They were in central Massachusetts (Sutton) and David Daniel Dudley dies in 1814. Did he leave a will? Well, if he did it wouldn't help since Polly doesn't marry until 10 December 1818. Perhaps if probate took long enough she could be mentioned as Polly Learned in court documents. But this is a long shot.
If only genealogy were as easy as filling up names on a chart. But if you are using Wikitree (or Ancestry) and you're trusting someone else's research beware. There's lot of unproven connections on the Internet.
I have already written about the unlikely fact that the English Origins of the Rev. Roger Newton of Milford, Connecticut are unknown. He studied at King's College, Cambridge U. in England and finished his studies at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a protege of the Rev. Thomas Hooker whose daughter Mary he married.
A google search of Roger Newton shows an entry in the Milford Hall of Fame webpage. This biography claims that Roger Newton is of the same family as Sir Isaac Newton (doubtful) and that his father was Samuel Newton and Grandparents were John Newton (b. 1565) and Alice Hales. All of this is without evidence or citation.
If you then google John Newton and Alice Hales you get a fanciful royal line to Edward I.
This line falls apart at lines 9 and 11 and 12. (If not more than that). All the wonderful royal lines I could have if I weren't particular.
This pedigree has the added flourish of a descent from Jacquetta of Luxembourg through one of her Woodville children.
I have been musing on how hard it will be for future generations to research me for primary documents in genealogy. Of course, I have no children so no future generations of my progeny will be researching me. But maybe a descendant of my six nieces and nephews might be interested in filling out the family tree and start a project on me. After all I wrote 40 articles on genealogy and they may wish to know how I fit in.
Off the bat, you won't be able to find my birth certificate. My parents lived in Jersey City, NJ but my mother had gone to school in New York City and her doctor contacts were there. So my birth certificate is in Manhattan although I was there for only a week. I suppose you will be able to find my parents in the Jersey City directory for that time period.
After that I appear in the 1970 and 1980 censuses in Pompton Plains, New Jersey with my family. I went to college several states over so how you find that out is a question. By 1990 I'm in Somerville, Massachusetts with Michael. Will they look at domestic partnership records in Cambridge, Massachusetts? By 2000, I'm in Belmont, California. Again will they check domestic partnership records in California State or San Francisco County? In 2004 I got married in San Francisco, but that marriage was annulled by the California Supreme Court. Is there any record of that?
In 2005 I got married again in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2010 I'll be in the census in Boston. In 2020 I'll be in the census in Norwood, Massachusetts. But there are only land records to prove my residency in Florida from 2020 to 2024. And now I'm in Delaware where I intend to stay and could be the place where my death certificate and will will be and possibly my grave.
Land records are county by county so you'd have to search a wide swath to find the counties in which I owned property. And some of the properties were investments and I never lived there. I have owned property in North Carolina but never lived there. Otherwise you miss San Francisco and Wilton Manors.
I've left a slew of records but I think my peripatetic nature will make them hard to find.
Rhoda SCOVILLE (sometimes spelled SCHOFIELD or SCOFIELD) was born about the year 1724, at Colchester, Connecticut. Her tombstone in the Jawbone Corner Cemetery in Wolfville, Nova Scotia reads, “To The Memory of Rhoda, Wife of Capt. Peter Wickwire, a native of Colchester, State of Connecticut, who died Sept. 24, 1802 in the 78th Year of her Age. Gentle Reader drop a mournful tear, the best of Mothers, Wives and Friends lies here.” The only other factual evidence for her appears in the Congregational Church records for Montville, CT. In the family record for Peter Wickwire and Patience Chapell is the baptism of their son Peter Wickwire (Jr.) by which entry are the words, “Marrd. Rhoda Scofield.” Certainly the list was compiled some time after the last entry for this family was made, which was the death of Sarah Wickwire on 23 March 1756. No other formal marriage record survives. However, Rachel Scoville married John Baker of Montville on 14 March 1754, where the record notes her as the daughter of Arthur of Colchester. Rhoda and Peter named their first daughter Rachel. John Baker was also Peter Wickwire’s second cousin through the Tonge family of New London, CT. This familial connection, the tombstone, the marriage record, and the fact that Arthur Scoville’s family is the only one of that name in Colchester at the time, leave little doubt that Rhoda is also their child.
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