In casting around for a July 4 post, I thought it might be interesting to see which (if any) of my ancestors were born on – or married, or died on – the fourth of July. It turns out that there were several!
The closest, a woman likely known to my mother (and certainly to my maternal grandparents), was my great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Jane Eggleston,[1] who was born in Ward Township, Hocking County, Ohio, on 4 July 1856 – just eighty years after the date on which the Declaration of Independence was approved for publication in Philadelphia. With her first husband, Jennie lived in Ohio, Virginia, and New York; later, after her second marriage, she lived in Long Beach, California, and was perhaps my earliest direct ancestor to live permanently on the West Coast.[2]
On my father’s side, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Abel Willard Atherton[3] was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts on the first anniversary of Independence Day: 4 July 1777. Willard Atherton was in Portland, Maine to marry the widowed Margaret Duncan in 1809, and he died in Castine, Maine in 1821. His daughter, my ancestor Eliza Robinson Atherton, married Samuel Henry Foster of Boston in Portland in 1830; they later lived in New York, where my great-great-grandmother married Gilbert Livingston Beeckman. (My grandfather was named for his maternal grandfather.)
By coincidence, the next ancestor with a 4 July connection is Samuel Henry Foster’s great-grandmother, Elizabeth Abbot, who died at Andover, Massachusetts 4 July 1758.[4] All of the life events of Elizabeth and her husband, Asa Foster, took place in Andover: his birth and death, his marriage to Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s birth and death, and Asa’s marriage intention to Lucy (Wise) Rogers, the aunt of his daughter-in-law (and my ancestor) Lucy (Rogers) Foster.
Jennie Eggleston’s parents’ great-grandmother Lois Curtis[5] died at Otis in Berkshire County, Massachusetts 4 July 1804. (Jennie’s parents were first cousins.) Jumping back to the seventeenth century, my paternal grandmother’s ancestor Joshua Kent[6] was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts 4 July 1674. He married the wonderfully named Mary Toogood (1686-1762) in 1710; she subsequently married Joseph Barney in 1730 and Joseph Hodges in 1738. Another ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side was John Spinney[7] of Kittery, Maine, whose estate administration was granted 4 July 1726.
Reverting to my paternal grandfather’s family, another seventeenth-century ancestor was Samson Benson,[8] for whom a birth date of 4 July 1652 is given – I wonder where I got that, since a baptismal date seems more likely. Jacob Ide,[9] one of Margaret (Weeks) (Duncan) Atherton’s forebears, was born at Rehoboth, Massachusetts 4 July 1681; his wife was my paternal grandfather’s matrilineal ancestor, Sarah Perry.[10]
Nor is this the end of it: my mother’s ancestor Martha Lovett[11] was born 4 July and baptized at Braintree, Massachusetts 4 September 1654. She married Eleazur Fairbanks in 1680, and their marriage lasted 61 years. (She died several years after her husband, on the sixty-ninth anniversary of their wedding day.) After all, everyone loves a wedding, so I will conclude with the marriage of Thomas Gardner and Lucy Smith,[12] at Roxbury, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1641 – another marriage that lasted almost half a century, until Thomas’s death in 1687.
[1] Rebecca Jane Eggleston (1856-1937) was married to Oliver Doddridge Jackson 1875-1915 and to William E. Waterman in 1924.
[2] Her mother, Tryphena (Judd) Eggleston, was my only known ancestor to live in Missouri.
[3] Colonel Abel Willard Atherton (1777-1821) married Margaret (Weeks) Duncan in 1809.
[4] Elizabeth Abbot (1711-1758) married Asa Foster in 1732.
[5] Lois Curtis (1720-1804) was married to Timothy Judd 1744-85. Their son Arunah Judd (1747-1836) married Sarah Spring in 1773; the offspring of this marriage included Rebecca Judd, who married David Eggleston, and Arunah Judd, who married Laura Jeffers. The children of these last marriages, David and Tryphena, married in 1839.
[6] Joshua Kent (1674-1725).
[7] John Spinney (1691-1726) married Patience Shepard before 1714.
[8] Samson Benson (1652-1730) married Catharina Teuwis van Deursen in 1673 and Margriet Kermer, widow of Hendrik de Boogh and Jacob van Tilburg, in 1707.
[9] Jacob Ide (1681-1759) married Sarah Perry in 1708.
[10] Sarah Perry (1688-1775) was the daughter of Sarah Carpenter and the granddaughter of Sarah Redway. My grandfather’s matrilineal line passed through the Perry, Ide, Ingraham, Crabtree, Weeks, Atherton, Foster, and Beeckman families.
[11] Martha Lovett (1654-1749).
[12] Lucy Smith (d. 1689).
