Heather Wilkinson Rojo's Blog Posts Tagged 'Essex' (9)

Last weekend we were in Washington DC, and at the top of my list of things to do in our capital city was to visit the National Archives.  If you read my blog story from last October, “Did George Washington Sign Here?”  http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/10/amanuensis-monday-george-washington.html  you will know that I was questioning the authenticity of George Washington’s signature…

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My 5x great grandfather Abner Poland served in Revolutionary War, but so did his father, Abner Poland, Sr., and so the records have always been difficult to separate when I started to research the Poland family.   He was born in 1761, and was only fifteen when the Battles of Lexington and Concord occurred in 1775.  He enlisted not long after, on 15 January 1776 as a private in Captain Abraham Dodge’s Company in Ipswich, Massachusetts.   He reenlisted in 1777 for another two years, and…

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21 February 1873, Cape Ann Advertiser "On Friday afternoon, as one of the workmen in the shipyard of A. O. Burnham was hoisting the bow hasping, it got the best of him and fell striking Mr. Gilman P. Allen (about 63 years old) a glancing blow on the shoulder and head, and knocking him down. Fortunately no bones were broken, but it was a…

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An early Halloween Story.....

In the spring of 1819 the residents of Ipswich’s Chebacco Parish (now the town of Essex) saw lantern light in the graveyard at night. Soon they discovered that the graves had been disturbed, and several families discovered that their relative’s graves were empty. Eight graves, going back to…

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United Shoe Machinery Corporation was a major employer in Beverly, Massachusetts. The locals called it “The Shoe,” and when it began manufacturing in 1902 it was the largest factory in the world at that time. By World War I it employed over 5,000 workers. Founded in 1899, they produced machines for the shoe industry, and it was one of…

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The Batchelder name is liberally sprinkled over New Hampshire. There are eight Batchelder/Bacheller families listed in the white pages for the Londonderry area. There are Batchelder Roads in towns from Hampton, to Strafford, to Raymond, to Nashua. The first Batchelder immigrant to the New World was…

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Searching the family tree for more cow stories, I began to notice cows in wills and other legal records. Obviously, a cow was important to a colonial era family, and so cows were lovingly given to family members, and often called by their pet name in legal documents.



A typical document can be summarized like this:

Isaac Allen is on the 1799-1800 tax list in Essex, Massachusetts assessed for 1 poll, $60 in buildings, 1 cow-right of $40, 1 cow $10, 1 swine $3.33, and $37.50 for… Continue

This is a cute story from my family tree…



“William Cogswell, when a lad, was out from home by the highway, where some men were trying in vain to relieve a cow who had become choked with a potato. There stood by, also, a young girl, eight or ten years old, who watched with interest every effort made. When all experiments failed, and it was suggested that only by someone thrusting his hand down the cow's throat would the cow be saved, she at once said, "My arm is small; I can do it… Continue

I love this story. "Just regular folks" in the family tree. Thomas Varney was born about 1630 in the Barbados and removed to Massachusetts to settle at the Chebacco section of the town of Ipswich before 1650. His first wife was Abigail Proctor, who was also just a "regular folk" except that her brother John was hung as a witch in 1692. Perhaps being a bit different from all the other puritans in town ran in the family.



Uusally all the women in the family tree have blank spaces next… Continue