Up a Tree

Sharon's distant cousin, Samuel F.B. Morse, began his early adult life trying to be a professional artist, but most people know little about this phase of his life. Instead they think of him as the inventor of the telegraph.  Now there's a sense in which this invention, combined with the telephone, led us to this modern day in which we carry a device about in our hands so we need never be out of touch if we don't want to be. I may never be able to entirely forgive him for this.  Like many creative people, Morse's interests were wide, as I mentioned in the last post.. Among those interests was electricity. But a couple of events occurred in his life that caused him to take up the study of electricity in earnest -- a death and a chance encounter. As I mentioned last time, at one point Morse was an itinerant portraitist. While away from home doing one such commissioned portrait, his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, gave birth and subsequently died from compli...

While examining Samuel Morse's life, I began to wonder if I might be related to Samuel F.B. Morse, he of telegraph and code fame. Family Search allows a researcher to determine what relationship s/he has to someone on their family tree, so I looked him up and clicked "View Relationship." After some thought, my computer returned the result that Morse was related to Sharon. Something like a 5th cousin, four times removed. Good enough. As a reminder, these posts aren't intended to be brags about what famous person belongs to either side of our family but to place an ancestor within their historical context and to learn something not generally contained in the history books we studied long ago. In the process, I often learn a bit of history that has long since escaped my aging memory cells or a bit that would surprise me.  Such was the case with Morse. It turns out his life can be demarcated by his involvement in two different disciplines.  He was born in April 1791 in Ma...

After helping settle the town of Dedham, Samuel Morse, my 9th great-grandfather, joined a group of folks ready to strike out from the growing town and start a new one carved from the original grant of territory Dedham lay in.  Named Medfield, the town was just one of several others established. Before long, it became a victim in the increasing animosity between the indigeousnes tribes and the English settlers. As mentioned in the last post a distinguishing feature of the Dedham land grant was that the settlers established relations with the tribes and arranged to purchase the properties. Unfortunately these agreements were not recorded in writing, which caused a certain amount of friction among the parties but they managed to come to new agreements. Still some members of the tribes believed the English were violating treaties which caused new frictions. In one instance the English insisted that the tribes could not own guns according to their treaties and demanded the surrender of ...

Now comes one of those difficulties in dealing with the genealogies I have access to on Family Search. While following the Morse line of Orphah Morse, the richest lineage of my possible ancestors, I came across Samuel Morse (no, not that Morse), who immigrated to America in 1635 at the age of 50.  As I searched for a historical connection I could tie to for this post, I found that he had been one of the original signers of the Dedham Covenant, which I'll discuss in just a bit. But as I began to read through the various documents posted about him and seek out confirmation of those records on the Web, I ran into the question of which Samuel Morse this might be. To make a long story short(er). posters to his entry disagree as to who Samuel's father is, though in the end they all seem to agree that Samuel Morse came to America in 1635 and is the Morse listed in the passenger manifest for the Increase, the ship he and his family sailed on. The problem is that Samuel's age listed...

While searching through my side of the family tree, I came upon a story for which I can find no familial ties. But because these little missives are supposed to include history that doesn't have to include an ancestor, I've decided to tell it this week. And it's a good story. John Eliot came to Boston in the Massachusetts colony in 1631 to pastor a Puritan (aka Congregational) Church. After a year, he moved to nearby Roxbury and began a church there. He would serve as the church's pastor until his death 58 years later.  Almost immediately he established relationships with members of the Narragansett tribe, and as time went on, with other tribes of the Algonquin language group. He took the time to learn their language and ministered in their midst at the same time as caring for his English church. The English settlers had rocky relations with the tribes. Many thought of the indigenes as a nuisance, in the way of God's will for their ownership and domination of the la...

I wrote previously about John Howland, who may be an ancestor of mine (see Hanging by a thread, er, rope , June 24, 2022). For those who don't remember -- and who would? -- Howland survived falling overboard on the Mayflower, surviving only because in the storm that caused his misfortune, some lines had come loose and were hanging over the side. He managed to grab one of those and hang on until he was rescued.  He would later marry a woman named Elizabeth Tilley, who also turns out to be one of my ancestors not just because of her marriage, but because her parents were on board and show to be in my direct lineage. John and Joan Tilley left England on the Mayflower with their youngest daughter to come to the new land for the same reason most of the other passengers did -- they belonged to the dissenting group known to us as Pilgrims and sought freedom to practice their version of Christianity outside of the constraints of the Church of England. The other children had reached majorit...

After all the wonderful connections I found on Sharon's side of the family with famous incidents in English history, I decided it was time to jump to my side of the tree and see if I could come up with some illustrious person or persons I could talk about.  As I've mentioned before, the most fruitful source of stories on my side has been through the lineage of my third great-grandmother, Orpha Morse, my grandmother's great-grandmother. I have links to English peerage through her and have occasionally found the odd good story.  For this post I started tracing back through a previously unexplored ancestral line, failing to find any interesting stories until I hit upon my 10th great-grandfather William Mead. I seem to be temporarily stuck on 10th great-grandfathers. Not much information exists about William. The notes attached to his record state that several genealogists have invested some effort into discovering the details of William's life, only to come up short.  One ...