Cover of the summer issue of Mayflower Descendant. Photo: Cimetière Saint-Jean, St. Barthélemy, burial location of Louis Charles Lambert and his wife Jeanne Augustine.
Our summer issue of the Mayflower Descendant includes an article by myself and Michael Leclerc entitled “The Family of Louis and Lydia (Fosdick) Lambert Ma(s)cillier of Boston, Virginia, and Guadeloupe: The First Known Catholic Mayflower Descendants in Massachusetts.” When we first announced our digitization project of the parish records of the Archdiocese of Boston in 2016, I was interested to find such descendants. I wrote about the first person I found in the records with colonial New England ancestry, Caroline (Plimpton) Francoeur (1759-1827)—however, she had no Mayflower ancestry. I only needed to go eighteen pages further in the parish records to find the baptism of the eldest child of Louis Lambert Ma(s)cillier and his wife Lydia Fosdick, who was an eighth generation-descendant (two times over) of Mayflower passengers William and Mary Brewster.1
Throughout the colonial period, no official Catholic congregations were allowed in Massachusetts. Local laws forbade any Catholic priest even to enter the colony. The 1780 Massachusetts Constitution established religious freedom in the new state, and the first public Catholic Mass was held in Boston in 1788. The below baptism of Mary Catherine Elizabeth Lambert in 1796 (who died suddenly in the following year), and that of her sister Amelia Mathilda in 1798, represent the earliest known Catholic Mayflower descendants in Massachusetts. I cannot qualify this beyond the Bay State, as there were early Mayflower descendants in England, Netherlands, and elsewhere in North America. I state in the article that if any readers can find earlier examples in Massachusetts (or elsewhere), I will happily publish an update.
Baptism of Mary Catherine Elizabeth Lambert, 19 March 1796, Holy Cross, Boston
The story of the Lambert and Fosdick family turned out to be of much more interest beyond their Catholic first. Louis Lambert was a native of Guadeloupe, an island group in the southern Caribbean Sea which remains under the jurisdiction of France to this day. Lambert was in Boston by the early 1790s, and married Lydia in 1794 at the Second Church in Boston. Lydia’s parents were originally from Connecticut. Louis Lambert and Lydia’s father Alvan Fosdick were business partners together in Boston in the 1790s (more on that later). The Lambert family’s residence in Boston was relatively brief. They moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and Louis died in his native Guadeloupe in 1805, aged 49 years. Afterwards, Lydia and her three young children moved back to Connecticut, but the family would continue to travel extensively.
As Michael and I pieced the family together, I came across a very valuable record set at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. known as “French Spoliation Claims.” During the Quasi-War between the United States and France, several American vessels were seized by French privateers. Lambert and Fosdick’s schooner Three Friends sailed on a commercial voyage from Boston in 1798 bound for Guadeloupe. It was captured by a French privateer called Les Amis and carried to Port Liberty, Guadeloupe where the schooner was “condemned as good prize” by a French Tribunal and ordered to be sold.
Nearly a century later, the U.S. Congress passed an act in 1885 empowering the United States Court of Claims to hear and examine evidence relating to outstanding “French Spoliation Claims” that originated before July 31, 1801. A total of 5,520 petitioners presented their claims, including the heirs of Fosdick and Lambert. Alvan Fosdick was the surviving partner, although all of his descendants were through his daughter Lydia (Fosdick) Lambert, as Alvan’s three other children died without having children of their own. By 1885, all of Lydia and Louis’s children were also dead, and Gilbert Clement Huntington (1841-1893), a grandson of Lydia and Louis, applied to the United States Court of Claims as the family’s representative to pursue this claim for their family’s loss in 1798.
I should note that getting this record from the National Archives was not easy. My colleague David Lambert (no relation to Louis Lambert) was in Washington, D.C. while I was researching this family, and was not able to even get someone to give him the finding guide while he was there. Fortunately, he connected me with Gopher Records, who are at the National Archives weekly, who were able to get this record quickly and at a great price. There were 329 pages in this claim, in both English and French, which revealed a lot of information about Lambert, Fosdick, and their business. Ultimately the estate of Alvan Fosdick was awarded $13,517 in 1895—by that point, Gilbert Clement Huntington, who began the proceedings, had also died.
Additionally, Alvan Fosdick (1750-1831) never had an estate probated in Suffolk County, Massachusetts—he actually died in New Hampshire (I’m not sure if his living descendants in the 1880s knew this; you can read more about that in the full Mayflower Descendant article). So, Gilbert Clement Huntington also started probate proceedings in Suffolk County in 1886 regarding the estate of his ancestor. The payments did not begin until 1900, seven years after Gilbert’s death. At this point, the living descendants of Alvan Fosdick were all through six of Lydia’s grandchildren. Complicating the distribution was that two of these grandchildren had not been heard from for forty years, so the heirs were listed with shares with two theories of distribution, either in quarters or in sixths, with each sixth or quarter being further divided if the grandchild was also deceased.
Louis and Lydia’s descendants lived all over the world, especially in the Caribbean. Their daughter Amelia Mathilda largely lived in Connecticut, their son Louis Charles in St. Barthélemy, and their son Gabriel Jean/John in New Orleans, Guadeloupe, and Georgia. The next generation also lived in Sint Maarten, Philadelphia, Australia, Texas, New York City, and Key West (unfortunately, American Ancestors did not approve my request to actually travel to these places!). All told, this article used records written in English, French, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish.
The heirs took out notices in newspapers to try to find their missing relatives (the daughters of the youngest child Gabriel Jean/John), but to no avail, so their shares were sent to a receiver in 1904. I was able to locate one of the two daughters, who moved from New York City to Key West, Florida with her husband and children. Perhaps we can still get very small amounts of money to their descendants. The other heirs of Alvan Fosdick received the money paid from his estate in 1901, seventy years after Alvan’s death, based on the proceeds of the French Spoliation Claim of Fosdick and Lambert’s ship seized in 1798. The chart below shows the amount every living descendant received (or was entitled to receive), ranging anywhere from 1/6, 1/30, or 1/54 of the total estate.
Notes
[1] The second Brewster descent of Lydia Fosdick 8-8 (Alvin Fosdick7-7, Ezekiel Fosdick6-6, Samuel Fosdick5, Mercy Pickett4, Ruth 3 Brewster, Jonathan2, William1; Susannah Turner 5 [wife of Samuel Fosdick5], Ezekiel Turner4, Mary 3 Brewster, Jonathan2), is the result of an article by Keith Edward Wilson, “Three Husbands for Mary Turner and One More for Susannah Turner of New London and Lyme, Connecticut,” appearing in this same issue of Mayflower Descendant.
