WELCOME TO THE FAMILY

Posted by Sheila Connolly

This week I solved an eighty-year-old mystery. Looking back, I realized once again how close genealogy and mystery writing are: I used all the processes of collecting evidence and studying personalities and making intelligent inferences (and a few wild guesses) that any good detective would.

As I may have mentioned (ad nauseum), I've been a genealogist for years, both professionally and for my own personal interest. My great-grandmother Mabel Barton Floyd started the ball rolling when she decided to join the DAR in 1928. To join, all you need is to prove one line from yourself back to a Patriot, to qualify. She used her mother's line to Paul Pratt of Weston, Massachusetts. Her mother, the last Pratt in the family, was still alive then, so she could ask her questions, although great-great-grandmother Lil didn't seem to know a lot (I have their correspondence). "Proof" means a legal document, usually provided by the town clerk where the ancestor was born/married/died, although in a pinch you can submit evidence from family bibles or even tombstones.

The document trail to Paul Pratt was no problem, but in filling out the family tree there was one hitch: Daniel Barton of Granby, my 4xgreat-grandfather (I'm also his cousin about twelve ways), didn't seem to exist before he served in the War of 1812. Apparently there was an oral tradition about his origins, because Mabel filled in a birth and a marriage date on her application. The birth date we can work out from his tombstone; the marriage date must have been handed down through the family, because I have yet to find a document listing it, although I have pored through the local records and other published and Internet sources, with nary a hint. Daniel sprang out of nowhere, and there he dangled, rootless, for 80 years.

Until this week. As a writer, I have long since proved that I am stubborn (how many submissions? how many rejections?), and I don't give up. Since I am briefly between manuscripts, I seized the opportunity to do some serious ancestor hunting, which in this case included making a three-foot-square chart with a lot of red arrows and marginal comments, which I stuck on the wall and stared at. I had a lot of circumstantial evidence:

–Daniel had married into the Towne family that had traveled with Bartons and Shumways from Oxford, MA as a pack in the eighteenth century.

–There was a well-documented Daniel Barton in Granby–I've seen his marriage record, and those for the births of his nine children, none of whom was named Daniel.

–I've seen Other Daniel's tombstone, which is located a significant distance from any other Bartons in that cemetery in Granby.

–My great-great-grandmother Lil (married to Daniel's grandson) told her daughter that there had been "some little trouble" with Daniel's ancestry and she hadn't poked around any further.

After years of gnawing on this, I reached the conclusion that my Daniel was in fact Documented Daniel's son, but not by his legal wife. You see, my Daniel was born just about a month before Documented Daniel married someone else. Oops. The assumption made sense, but I wasn't sure I would ever be able to prove it. After all, people didn't go around trumpeting illegitimacy in 1788. You don't see a lot of single mothers listed in church records, and you don't see a lot of single women listed in censuses that early, unless they're widows, and I didn't even know who I was looking for.

And that's where things rested until this week, when I discovered a document in the collections of the Belchertown historical society. Here's the relevant part:

"whereas Elisabeth Shumway of Belcherstown Single Woman hath in and by her Voluntary Examination Taken in Writing and Upon Oath ... Declared that She is with Child and that the said Child is likely to be Born a Bastard and to be Chargeable to the said town of Belcherstown and that the above named Daniel Barton is the father of the said Child..."

This document describes the bond which Elizabeth forced Daniel to agree to, in order to support her and the child, so that they would not be a burden upon the town. (Actually it was most likely Daniel's father who put up the money, and he also signed the bond.) It was posted on May 19, 1788; Daniel had posted marriage banns to the Other Woman on April 30. Nice little soap opera, eh? I'm so glad that Elizabeth stuck up for herself, and didn't just slink out of town to have the baby–and got it in writing.

Maybe you think it's odd for me to be celebrating that my Daniel was officially a Bastard, although I tend to blame his scurrilous dad (regrettably now also my ancestor). But it took five generations and eighty years to find the one piece of paper that proves my deduction–and I never gave up. I pieced together a story about how it all happened, based on what I knew about the people and the town and the times, and it turned out I had it right. And that feels a whole lot like writing a plot for a mystery book.

P.S. In case anyone thinks I'm slacking off–this really was research. My Daniel married a granddaughter of the builder of the house I use in the Orchard Mystery series, so it's definitely all in the family.

Comments

[Barbara Monajem]

Fabulous, Sheila! How extremely gutsy of Elizabeth to call Daniel to account. It's surprising to me that she had any recourse at all. (But then, I've read a lot of historical romances where pregnant women are abandoned by heartless rakes, so my viewpoint may be skewed.) I wonder - did Daniel's father pay up to avoid shame to the family? To hush things up so the Other Woman wouldn't find out? Or what? Great fun to look back a few centuries and wonder.