Now and again—you run across a family in genealogy that just boggles the mind. A Reverend Stephen Bachiler, a minister from England, was involved in at least one bollixed-up attempt to migrate to the colonies, (colonists went, he, the organizer, didn’t) and he kept marrying and begetting as wives would die…probably in childbirth, though there’s enough contagion floating about to also account for it. He finally got to the colonies, with Bachilers begotten before the voyage, got a new Colonial wife, begat some more Bachilers, most of whom couldn’t spell and called themselves Batchelders, and finally, widowed yet again, and in his dotage, he married a sweet young thing who didn’t mind his property but who had a thing for the guy next door. Now—at this point it gets foggy, but in spite of the fact the adultery was in flagrante delicto, so to speak, not hard to prove, the Colonial court required the reverend to go on living with the sweet young thing, whom now he did not trust with the silver, until they could meander their way around to a divorce, perhaps next session. So the reverend decided he’d had it, and took ship BACK to England, usually a 4-6 month venture fraught with such lovely things as typhoid in the water casks, etc, but he lived to get there, and finally died.
Other Bachilers, however, had also emigrated to the Colonies, some who spelled it Bachelor, Bachelder, and Batchelder, and there was a thing going in the Colonies, that, though they were in church for hours on end, more than once a week, and had all these things they didn’t do—apparently sex must’ve been on their minds 24/7, because every danged one of them reproduced until the wife died and then they got another and another, and begot more Batchelders until finally the husband dropped over of a heart attack while plowing, or got shot in the endless skirmishes with Native Americans, who hadn’t been consulted about these people claiming Massachusetts. The wife would then find herself another husband and carry on having kids (usually with a Dodge, a Davis, a Maxfield or Kimball) until she finally wore out.
Well, the Bachilers and Batchelders founded Hampton, Massachusetts, and were prominent in Salem, but they also went elsewhere, and begat and begat, each generation having about 12 kids each one of whom grew up to marry successively and have 12 kids. I have downloaded 150 pages of Bachilers/Batchelders just in Hampton and surrounds.
My direct maternal line goes through a Farrell in Ohio who married a Maxfield (a tale similar to the Bachilers) in a first cousin marriage, so she was Mrs. Maria K. Maxfield Maxfield; and worse—her husband was James Bachelor [Batchelder] Maxfield, to whom she was related, also being, we think, a Batchelder.
Well, thought I, the Batchelders are well documented. This should be easy.
Heaven help me, every other one of the Batchelders is named John or Josiah or Mary, those who aren’t are named Hannah and things like ‘Increase’ and Hepzibah and their dates are all squishy. People doing the trees have made so many mistakes of identification that everything has to be questioned.
This is the hobby I do for relaxation from plotting, —eh?
Hmmm… and in that timeframe, each wife brought a dowery. My twisted mind considers personal enrichment and murder by childbed.
Oh, yeah. A lot of the records involve parcels of real estate and houses that are changing hands via marriage and death, between the Batchelders, Dodges, Kimballs, Maxfields and Davises, plus the church records of marriages, births, deaths. The sunny picture of turkeys, Pilgrims and happy Native Americans is not borne out by the picture of militias organized on board ship, to deploy on landing,typhoid in the water, death by childbirth, Rev. Cotton Mather stamping about looking for witches in their midst, witch trials in various of the townships, militias led by the colony leader’s son, cities laid out on maps and protected with rifles, and militias an officership in which constituted automatic status as a ‘gentleman’… and ‘judges’ not being expert in law, but in the regulations of the community as laid down in the charter: no need for a doctor juris degree there! Just how do you read the Articles. And the inter-family politics in the meetings would be a real nest of Borgia politics.
I have a (very distant) uncle, Jonathon Selleck, who was an examiner at a witch trial in Stamford, Conneticut. A young woman named Katherine Branch accused first Elizabeth Clauson, and upon getting lots and lots of attention, she accused several others, of causing Branch’s epilepsy and consorting with the devil and being EVIL ™.
Goody Clauson (also spelled Clawson and Clason) was indicted, but the jury failed to convict, after lots of back and forth regarding her reputed good or bad character. It should be noted that Branch’s mother and Clauson had a quarrel going regarding the weight of some flax previous to the initial accusation, and that this, along with Branch’s increasingly colorful and wide-ranging accusations were points which led to her discrediting.
That, and Stamford wasn’t nearly as hysterical about witches as Salem, not that Branch didn’t do her best (or worst, depending on one’s take on this sort of behavior). At least one of her victims, Mercy Disborough, was convicted and sentenced to death, but this occurred after her credit started sinking. The verdict was successfully appealed and Disborough was set free.
So, while yes, the politics of the time was a snake-pit of spite and superstition, there were some level heads around, and some of them demurred to execute people based on wild rumor.
It does make me think, though, how it would have been to live like that, where one honestly believed that sorcery existed, and that it worked, and that one had to fight against it to the death or else… and how one liar could bollix up an entire community.
I have Norwegian ancestors like that — except the repeating names are Ole and variations on Tosten and Maret. The lack of surnames and the tendency to change names based on place of residence are points of confusion; the other tendency to name the kids in regular order based on the names of parents and grandparents is a point of untangling said confusion.
But yes, haphazard scholarship by other researchers… sigh. Kittil is a male name; so is Ola. Viil is female. And any ‘name’ ending in -ieiet is going to be a placename being used to distinguish this Ole/Tosten/Marit from that other Ole/Tosten/Marit, either of which might be the person you are looking for (or not), so keep a map handy!
‘farm names’ – they tell Berta Jonsdotter Grude from Berta Jonsdotter Wold.
My sister-in-law has Norwegians. And Kimballs. Bachelers are connected in various ways, but so far none have shown up on main lines. [knocking on wood, because there are some large holes in her tree]
I’ve recently discovered that FamilySearch has a lot of digitised books.
Go to Search, then Books, and there are 366 books with Bachelder in the title.
This should confuse the issue no end.
Lol—then there’s Tryphosa Herrick. When you name your kid Tryphosa, and her sister Tryphena, at least you don’t have as much duplication in the line as if you named them Josiah, John, Jonah, Jacob or Jabez. She’s descended from Dr. Zerubbabel Endicott, of Salem. What do you call a kid named Zerubbabel for a nickname, eh?
And thanks for that note on the Bachelders!
My 3 year old nephew is named “Zevulon”, a.k.a. Zev. At first I thought his folks had named him after Zebulon Pike, discoverer of Pike’s Peak, but was promptly corrected. I’m grateful they didn’t get even more ‘enthusiastic’; at least there’s a limited amount name-callers can do with Zev.
Add to the mix, a current prolific science fiction blogger, Kevin Bachelder or Batchelder, I forget the correct spelling. He’s, IIRC, from Massachusetts.
…And this once again reminds me of a story of post-colonial history, a story where really, no one wins, though one side thought they did. I need to reread what sources I have there and see what more I can draw from it. it makes me want to see what else there is in actual documents, to see if my dad’s hunch was right. He believed it was a case where what other people did forced two friends and/or in-laws onto opposite sides, and one of them ended up killing the other. What is documented shows just how bad relations were between settlers and Indians then, and predates the Trail of Tears. Neither side in the story was really right, and it ended badly. Very likely people on one or maybe both sides were my ancestors.
Zerubbabel? Was he Zeb? Skeeter? Bubba? Oh, dear….
…Babble…?
Cherub? naah, I guess not.
Bob?
Zeri.
Double cousining is another hazard… Two brothers marry two sisters; the children of each couple marry the children of the other couple; the children of those couples all marry within the first cousin ring and so on from the late 1700s to the 1960s, when first cousin marriage was outlawed. The couple I met in the 1970s was living together and having children out of wedlock, due to said law. Supposedly I am related to them through a generation who had a spare cousin. Children of the outsider marriages were not, apparently, considered preferred spouses… The last names remained the same, and there were many common first names. On the other hand, I don’t suppose it actually much matters exactly how they are related to one another.
Boy, I’ld love to see the results of that family’s DNA tests. Can you imagine? All sorts of recessive genes will start to show up.
I’m assuming they aren’t the brightest of the bunch.
They didn’t strike me as terribly bright, nor as terribly stupid, either. My first thought was Yeuw! Ick! But then, my mother’s line makes a habit of marrying out as far a socially possible, so my veiw point is very biased.
Not necessarily, see the description of Peter of Castile (link below).
Cousin marriage is actually very common worldwide: many societies prefer it. It keeps property, esp. land, within the family. It also means that the “moving-in” spouse (most societies don’t send a newly married couple off on their own to live, rather the bride moves in with the groom’s family=”patrilocal” or the groom, more rarely, moves in with the bride’s=”matrilocal”) has lots of relatives around and isn’t doesn’t feel so strange and stranded.
Our culture has been taught to have a horror of “inter-breeding,” but it seems to work out fine in general, anthropologists find.
As I recall from college genetics class, i.e. don’t quote me, really deleterious genes are (necessarily) quite rare and in most cases a marriage of first cousins increases the probability of homozygosity, q.v., by about 11 times. But it’s 11 x [a very small number] which is still a small number. Still, it’s best to keep the probabilities on one’s side. 🙂 There’s a reason “opposites attract” we find, having to do with HLA antigens we (Europeans) now seem to have inherited from our 2-4% of H neanderthalensis “blood”. 😉
One of my aunts married a man from a family like that. Two sisters married two brothers. One brother’s wife died, the other sister’s husband died. The survivors married each other, and had “his, hers, and ours” kids. My uncle was an “ours” — He had a half brother who was also his cousin. We’ve got some real soap operas in my family too: Germans immigrating to SE Texas where there was plenty of cheap land available and no military conscription. Bauer (immigrated 1851, stonemason, built the church Neuthard founded), Neuthard (was a preacher, born into a Catholic family, who attended Heidelberg University in Germany, converted to Lutheranism, his family disinherited him and marked his name out in the family bible. He immigrated to Texas in 1864 and founded a school and a church, and married one of Bauer’s daughters), Melchior (painter), Schuddemagen, Helmeke (he was a foreman at the Schiege cigar factory). My grandma was second generation Texan, but spoke English with a German accent! She also had 12 kids, all of whom survived her — uncommon to have that many children and have them all live to adulthood. The last three are still living at 88, 89 and 91. Grandma was 84 when she died. See: http://grundlepod.blogspot.com/2010/10/quilts-tale_07.html
I was surprised to find very little in the way of cousin marriages in my lines, even in places, like small town Norway or New England, where you might expect fifth or sixth cousins to be marrying each other, at the least. Instead, it’s tenth and twelfth and fifteenth cousins. It’s like the whole family, both sides, was as exogamous as they could get without marrying outside Northern European stock.
There’s research suggesting that a tendency to prefer new experiences has at least some genetic basis. I wonder if that is part of why I’m a Heinz 57 mutt…?
Jane points to SF as an exploration of the impact of technology on society. I read a serious claim that the invention of railroad (which the atevi had 😉 ) made a biologic change to humanity by allowing people to move around a lot more and mate with pwoplw they never would have had contact with in the days of a one-day ride horseback! I agree it’s certainly true.
OTOH, if one examines the Type B blood group cline in Eurasia, it is still possible to see the invasion of the “Golden Horde” to the west.
OMG! “pwoplw”? Editor! Where’s that damned editor when you want him?
As I understand my sister’s work on our family tree, we’re descended from a Margaret deClare, one of two first cousins. Aparently someone on Ancestry presumed the wrong cousin, so for a time it seemed we were descended from Edmund, 1st Duke of York, hence Peter 1st of Castile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_of_Castile
There’s your double first cousins for you. (Scroll down to “Ancestors of Peter of Castile” and click “show”.)
[So for this month, how about an homage to someone else who arguably had Aspergers’?]
Oh that whole cousin thing… One branch in my tree started out in a little village in Germany and apparently the thing was having births/deaths/marriages/baptisms recorded in two different towns… Throw on that the fact that everyone was named Johanne, Johan, Jacob, or some combination with the last name Jungman. Cousins begatting with cousins, all at the same time, recorded in two different towns, then if a child died very young, naming the NEXT child after the same grandfather. So, generation one, three children named Jacob. Generation 2, 7 children named Jacob and 2 Johannes all born within 5 years. Generation 3, 6 Jacobs, 4 Johannes, and 2 Johanne Jacob.
For about 12 generations running….
Then the whole kit n kaboodle packed up and moved to Ohio.
OY!
My mother’s great-grandmother Harriet Hattie J (probably Jane) Ferrall or Ferrell who married David H. Tipton…and SHE is of great concern because I’m trying to trace the route of the MtDnA, which only passes from the mother…
David H. Tipton is credited with marrying one Mary Funk, who is incredibly hard to find data on, and I suspect she could have died young, because she is not on any census, only on the list of marriages, and does not seem to have had any children. Nancy J Maxfield, however, IS on the census, and on it with Hattie J as a child and David H as the husband.
It gets better. Nancy’s mother was Maria K Maxfield-Maxfield, as above. So I’m still digging trying to find out what happened to Mary Funk, or if somebody made the mistake of transcribing David A Tipton for David H. Tipton: David A left records all over Ohio and Kansas. David H, my great-grandfather, left far fewer, since he left Ohio, went to Mound KS, and then headed into Oklahoma, probably in the Land Run, though that would be uncommonly law-abiding for my family: the other side never met a border they wouldn’t cross whenever they felt like it: I suspect my great-grans on that side spoke Creek, since they lived and ran cattle in Creek territory for years, and apparently preferred being there to being in Texas, where they had been until it became a state. I did recently find out that Sam Houston had a dustup with the Cherokee, and that one guy who was a remote relative—very remote! the relationship with my branch goes back into the 1600’s in Ireland—was a translator with the Cherokee during that period. There’s more history there to dig up. I also suspect that many Cherokee and Creek of that day were perfectly fluent in English but had every reason not to use it…their relations with the American government were not good, and I suspect they weren’t happy to see Texas leave Mexico.
Oh my goodness, we are cousins. the actual fellow was John Wing,married to Deborah Batchilder (or some such spelling). They were from Banbury, England originally. We haven’t been able to trace them further back, haveyou? they arrived in MA in 1634 or there abouts. John actually died in Holland, where he had taken the family to get away from religous persecution in England. I have a book that my mother bought that has his sermons given while in Holland. he died in Holland, and Deborah and her father and her children then returned to England and then set sail for MA. one of the sons built the Wing Fort House, which is still standing on Cape Cod as the center of the Wing Family reunions. I have been there a couple of times, can send photos. I am descended from John Wing through, I believe, his son Stephen Wing. My grandfather’s grandmother, I believe, was Zedora Wing. They came down the Appalachians to Georgia.
I have a lot of stuff on that if you would be interested. My mother was very interested in genealogy and she amassed much material. when we went to Holland for a vacation not long before she died (in 1985) we looked up what John had been up to while there.
I can send you links to the Wing family group if you are interested.
PS, happy birthday!
There’s an Emma Batchelor in my family, although she’s not in my direct ancestral line. One of these days I’m going to have to study up on English geography. If they are the same Batchelors, she would be from the branch that stayed home in England. She was from Ukfield, Sussex, England, and came to America in 1856. She was a tough and competent woman who lived a colorful but hard life well.
I think Jane may be in direct descent from Rev. Steven Bachiler, –maybe. It’s a messy genealogy at that point. *I* may be in direct descent from the fellow who has gotten mixed into the Rev’s family. I’m not sure. I’ve got 150 pages of Batchelders and have not found everything I’d like to find. I’d be interested in the Wing materials. All sorts of things can provide a clue.
Meanwhile we ran a check on another huge family, the Fitches, which turns up Jane as a third cousin seven times removed of John Fitch, who was Fulton’s rival as inventor of the steamboat…would have won, except he ran out of backing. And HOW she’s related to him is a braided mess. Her 8th-great grandfather James Fitch had a brother named Joseph; and they came to the Colonies. James had a daughter named Hannah, who married a chap named Mix; meanwhile Joseph had a son named also Joseph Fitch. Hannah Fitch had a daughter, Abigail Mix. And Joseph son of Joseph had a son named…Joseph Fitch.
Abigail Mix married a guy named Rockwell, and they had a daughter named Lucy Rockwell. Joseph Fitch III had a son named John, who invented the steamboat and ran out of money trying to build it.
Meanwhile Lucy Rockwell married a guy named Giddings and had a daughter, Lucy Giddings…who married…wait for it…Captain Daniel Fitch, Jane’s fourth-great grandfather, who is descended from, yes, James Fitch, of the original brothers.
In Olde New Englande, no apple fell too far from the tree…you had these immense resultant clans of Fitches, Osgoods, Giddingses, Crabbs, Haskells, Rockwells, Brewsters, Reads, Knowltons, Woodburys, Oldhams, Woods…and Batchelders…and they all had 12 kids in every generation.
The way everybody in Europe is sooner or later related to Charlemagne? Everybody with roots in New England is sooner or later related to one of these families.
My mother’s family is; Jane’s mother’s family is.
Her father’s family is out of New York, the people who replaced my maternal Dutch ancestors from New Amsterdam, after the British-Dutch War gave the East Indies to Holland and New Amsterdam to Britain, who renamed it New York.
My paternal family are a mix of ex-Quakers who’d been run out of England by the Puritans (the same guys who were in all those aforenamed families) and Loyalists, meaning to King Charles I, who’d been beheaded by the Puritans. Once over here, they stayed: none of mine seems to have gone back when Charles II came in. One of my lot found out he was a lousy farmer and lost the farm; and the ex-Quakers got into the Revolutionary War, which in the South was mostly the British supplying the Native Americans with arms and inciting them to attack the settlers as intruders (which they were.) That meant mine were so busy staying alive most could barely sign their names. Literally. I’ve seen the signatures. Generally Jane’s folk were things like inventors and pharmacists; and mine were farmers and hunters, in between getting caught up in the War of 1812 and the Civil War…but by the time of the Civil War, there was another option: the railroad made it possible not to just saddle up a horse and make a long difficult and dangerous trek, but to load up the kids and belongings and ride in relative safety as far as the train could take them, to some small town where the war didn’t reach. And many of our people took it.
Her grandfather and mine were both up in Nebraska at one point, but hers stayed there, and mine trekked on down to Bleeding Kansas, and on into Oklahoma.
Derek van der Hoeven of New Amsterdam is in my ancestry…
Not related to the van der Hoevens…but a lot of New Amsterdam genealogy is coming on line.
Here is a link to the Wing Family of America website. http://www.wingfamily.org/
It has a nice picture of the Wing Fort house. The Wing family history links has information in a fairly colloquial style about John and Deborah Bachiler Wing, and Deborah’s father Stephen Bachiler. http://www.wingfamily.org/thewingfamily.html
It sounds as if you are descended from the Bachilers, rather than the Wings, but we are still cousins all 🙂
Some of the Wings moved to NY later on and founded a little town called Wingdale in Duchess County. The current Wing built The Wing Castle (visible in all its glory here: https://www.google.com/search?q=wing+castle&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=2-wkUtHMM4y4sATo34GwCQ&ved=0CEAQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=996)
from recyled materials. He’s quite a character. That’s probably the closest the Wings have been to a castle for many centuries.
Google is good for public-domain family-history books, and Ancestry has a lot buried in their card catalog. They may not be completely reliable, but they’re a start.
Software: I use RootsMagic, and it’s two or three times as fast as FTM. But you can’t pull stuff straight out of Ancestry. When you have 35 thousand people in your database, speed matters. (Mine goes out to second cousins – I’ve had cousins turn up more than once in unexpected places. Like the ones in New Jersey that I didn’t know were there, but my great-great-grandparents were living with them in 1850.)
And….one of Jane’s Fitches married a Dodge gal who was descended from a Batchelder.