Sunday, May 10, 2009

Mother's Day

I just got back from New Fairfield where my mother, Eleanor Mae (Fairchild) Williams is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery. Her mother, Martha (Post) Fairchild, Martha's mother, Jennie Post, Jennie's mother, Mary Elizabeth (Benedict) Post, and Mary's mother, Hannah (Wildman) Benedict are all buried there also. Five generations all buried in New Fairfield, Connecticut in the same cemetery!
Hannah's mother, Betsey (Chase) Wildman is buried in Brookfield's Central Cemetery. Betsey's mother, Lucy (Pepper) Chase, is buried in Coburn Burying Grounds in Sherman, also adjacent to New Fairfield. Lucy's mother, Lucy (Bennett) Pepper, is buried in the Pepper Burying Ground, also in Sherman.
I don't know where Lucy Bennett's mother, Abigail Moss, is buried; the family came from Lyme, Connecticut to Sherman. Abigail's mother is supposed to be Mary (Borden) Moss, daughter of Mary (Tillotson) Borden, daughter of Dorcas (Coleman) Tillotson, daughter of Susannah (Rawlings) Coleman. I'm still working of verifying this rest of this information.
I had my mitochondrial DNA tested which goes back through this line, mother to mother. I am in Haplogroup K, or Katrine if you follow Brian Sykes. We are related to Otzi, the frozen Ice Man, found in the Austrian Alps from 5,300 years ago.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Dorothy Hoyt, b. 13 April 1656

I'm working on Hoyt families right now. I have Hoyts that settled in Fairfield county, Connecticut, but I'm looking at my mother-in-law's family, Hoyts that settled in Salisbury/Amesbury, Massachusetts. I was amused to find a Dorothie Hoyt, daughter of John Hoyt and his second wife, Frances (the first wife was also Frances). Besides her birth record, there is not much other information about her excepting a legal case when she was 21 years old. Apparently, Dorothy dressed up in male clothes and was hauled into court.
Her father was there and agreed that she had "ye fact comitted". The court ordered that she be apprehended and whipped unless her father paid forty shillings in corn or money at once. This seems to me to be somewhat excessive. It is unknown what happened next as there is no further record of this intrepid ancestress, except that both her brother and father were jurors at the Court session in Hampton where this took place.