In my recent post on the Round family of Swansea, Massachusetts, I noted that the forename of my ancestor Renew (Carpenter) Round, was frequently repeated (or renewed). Renew was named for her paternal grandmother, Renew (Weeks) Carpenter, who died in 1703, and was buried in a part of Swansea that is now in Barrington, Rhode Island. She was “Renew the first,” and after my last post I learned from Nathaniel Lane Taylor, editor of The American Genealogist, that her footstone has a story of its own.
Renew (Weeks) Carpenter was buried at Nockum Hill Burial Ground, where her headstone stands today. However, her footstone, shown at left, is in the custody of the Barrington Preservation Society, cataloged as Accession No. 1990.4. Nat showed me the five-page summary explaining how the footstone came into the possession of the Barrington Preservation Society. The summary also noted that Renew “is known to be the ancestor of three United States presidents: James A. Garfield, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. It is a statistical certainty that Renew has thousands – probably tens of thousands – of living descendants today.” I’m grateful that her footstone has been preserved, with a concise summary of interest to Renew’s descendants.
I descend from Renew (Weeks) Carpenter twice through her children Jotham and Elizabeth, making my mother’s paternal grandparents fifth cousins three times removed. This is certainly one of the closer coincidental kinships of my ancestors, as my great-grandparents were from Illinois and New York and married in Kansas. As shown on the chart below, I found the name Renew six times over five generations among descendants of William and Elizabeth Weeks. The six Renews lived between 1660 and 1855.
The longer line of Renews was partially covered in a recently published book I co-authored, Descendants of John Lippitt of Providence and Warwick, Rhode Island. The “last” Renew I found was Renew (Eddy) Howland, who is buried in Webster, Massachusetts, where my parents live today. The “first” Renew also had a nephew named Return, but I doubt either name had anything to do with overdue library books!
For further treatment on the Weeks and Carpenter families above, see Mary Lovering Holman, Ancestry of Colonel John Harrington Stevens and his wife Frances Helen Miller, 1: 261-75. For the Eddy generations, see The Eddy Family in America, 114-15, 190 (in addition of the Lippitt genealogy mentioned above).
