Misconstruing Caleb

~ Or ~  

"MISCALULATING THE TRIBE OF HARRIET"

Above: My third great uncle, (and Harriet Hathaways' son) Edwin Matlock Hampton, 1825-1880)

(Author's note: Who'dat baby daddy?)

As always, rudely unedited.

I.

Man, did I make a mistake.

I really thought I had something, or rather, I wanted to see if I did. You see, I did what we all did about five years ago—I prompted my Ancestry.com search results by "filling in the blanks" to help me get things sorted. Nowadays, we just ask some AI chatbot to do this for us, that is, to extrapolate some sort of answer out of the primordial soup. What's worse, though, is I left it (that filled-in blank) "up" and just walked away—I moved on to some other rabbit hole or brick wall. I didn't bother to take that supposed guess down, and, even while flagging it as "only speculated," something happened.

It grew like a wildfire. Yeah, it spread.

Yes, all because I presumed to know an answer that was still very much "a work in progress" by "filling in the blanks." Now, because of this, there are at least ten trees that have adopted my ill-begotten conclusion. They have adopted my misconceived notion as fact. It's even spread to FamilySearch.org, where it has glued itself onto the Mayflower lines of passenger Edward Doty—just like a parasite, or at best, like some old dog with a bone.

                          

Above: Harriet Hathaway Hampton's daughter Elizabeth Hampton Jones, and Elizabeth's great granddaughter, (right) my grandmother, Katheryn Ogle Record  - Is it something in their eyes?? Is it that the undefined "Hathaway" regard?

Hey, I didn't mean it! Hey, I take it all back?

You see, it all started when I went looking for Harriet and her Hathaways...

II.

Yes, Harriet, or rather Harriet H. "Hathaway" Hampton, born in "The Quaker City" presumably on October 25, 1802. Yes, dear Harriet, my four-times-great-grandmother on the dreaded Jones side of my family tree. It all started when I got a whiff of her possible Mayflower ancestry through Harriet's Hathaways. I figured even if she came through some less-than-stellar, slave-holding, Bible-belted pedigree lines, she was darn well worth investigating if she would lead me back to Ye Olde Ship.

    

But honestly, following Harriet back in time has been more like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that about five years ago, I postulated that our lovely Harriet's father was a guy named Caleb Hathaway, "lately of Philadelphia." My basic—and very unfounded—reasoning was that as dear Harriet was born in 1802, and as there were only two Hathaways in the 1800 to 1810 censuses in Philly, one of those happy Hathaways just had to be Harriet's papa. There was even a perfect slot in the birth order of Caleb's children that Harriet fit quite well into, and even a possible spot in the 1810 census that "could make sense" for it to be Harriet. (Though in retrospect, "that spot" is likely Caleb's daughter Mary). The other choice was a young Philly dad, a guy by the name of William Hathaway, but he had no female children.

So I figured that Old Captain Caleb Hathaway surely won the "who's your baby daddy" game by default.

Can you say, "Rubber Chicken?"

III.

So now I have egg on my face—egg that I have inadvertently spread on everybody else's face too. If you're out there, and you think Caleb Hathaway of 1801 Philly is our dear Harriet's father, you'd better at least mark it as "maybe-maybe-not," because that's really all you have. Believe me, I have run this forward and backward. I've tried investigating another alternative candidate too, a guy named John Hathaway who married a German gal named Catherine Kemmel, to see if I could eliminate him. I figured since Harriet named one of her daughters Catherine "Hathaway" Hampton, and also one of her granddaughters was named Catherine, and another granddaughter was named Maude "Hathaway," I had to be on the right track. Believe me, I got nowhere fast—even though Old Caleb and Old John's marriages are both listed right next to each other on the same page.

          

Above: My third great aunt, Harriet's daughter, Sarah Christy Hampton Donley (1827-1868)

Go figure.

I followed the whole Quaker thingy too—it's more than evident that the Hamptons (the family Harriet married into) were big-time Quakers. The trouble is, there really isn't much to indicate that Harriet herself came from a Quaker, other than being born in "The Quaker City" and the small possibility that her maybe-daddy Caleb seems to have flirted with Quakerism also—though to be fair, the only evidence I have is that a verified daughter of Caleb's was super into Oatmeal Cookies. Nah, truth be told, our dear Harriet looks like some stuffy Anglican gal who converted to the Bible-belted ways when she and hubby Joe Hampton moved to Missouri circa 1835.

They even followed their Philadelphia minister, a guy named Ezra Stiles Ely, back to Missouri when he left Philly. They even named their tenth kid after this same preacher, calling him Ezra Stiles Ely Hampton.

Oddly enough, the preacher may have preached at the same church Caleb Hathaway lived around the corner from.

Does your head hurt? Yeah, me too.

IV.

Past this, there hasn't been much to go on. I've dissected middle names for onomastic patterns, but most of the middle names lead back to the Hampton side (Harriet's husband's) of the equation. There are a couple of surnames, notably "Matlock/Matlack" and "Christie/Christy," that don't immediately identify with the Hampton side, but they also don't necessarily shed any light on my "Philadelphia Hathaways." It is interesting how Harriet made sure to perpetuate the Hathaway name in her children and her grandchildren, all the while not explaining where it came from.

    

Above: My third great aunt, Harriet's daughter, Harriet Henrietta Hampton Dawson (1831-1910)

Sure, I'd love it if my original theory about the baby daddy being Caleb could be shown as true, but as more time goes on, the less true it appears to be. Chalk up another false Mayflower line connection for me. I will, however, keep at it. If nothing else, Harriet is fun to try and pin down. I'm sure that somebody left something "Hathaway" behind at the turn of the nineteenth century in Philadelphia. Plus, it gives me something to argue with AI bots about—they get very annoyed with me when I push the logic and restate the inquiries or case in another form. It's like the AI is screaming for mercy and saying, "Look, I've already told your dumbass human self that you're not going to find her this way."

        

Above: My third great aunt, Harriet's daughter, Mary Stiles Hampton Rouner, 1835-1907

    

Above: My third great uncle, Harriet's son, Samuel Smedley Hampton (1838-1908)

Personally, I think the robots are just lazy and should work a bit harder gleaning the wheat from the chaff. (Lol).

V.

In the meantime, for sh*ts and giggles, I thought I'd post what pictures there are of Harriet's (and Joe's too, of course) children among what little "Hathaway" clues there are. It gives me an opportunity to look at this next generation of Hathaways and see if there are any sneaky clues glinting out of their sepia-toned eyeballs. I especially like the picture above of Harriet's son "Uncle Edwin" with the two babies on his lap. I want to say, "Uncle, I feel your pain..." As the father of twins from moons ago, I surely must have looked the exact same way.          

So if you think of any "Hathaway" clues, be sure to jot them down, list them as "maybe-maybe-not," and send them my way. Whatever you do, don't be a "copy-and-paster" and misconstrue Caleb as a pater familias into your family tree. He was a salty old dog, and as much as I'd love to claim that our dear Harriet was his love child from another Mayflower momma, sadly, I may never know the truth.   

Above: My third great uncle and Harriet's son, Ezra Stiles Ely Hampton, (1845-1925), and on the right, the man he was named after, the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely.

In the end, though, it may not matter.

After all, I'm still, if nothing else, a Hathaway "of sorts" anyways.

Wink!

☮

 The Six Degrees of Leon Ames

(Author's note: I'm told I ramble too much - well, to Hell with that, I say. Be careful what you chase down the rabbit hole. Be more careful if you follow.)

As always, apologetically unedited.

I should not watch rom-coms. Despite my best efforts at keeping an open mind about them... well, let me just say that I get distracted. It happened again tonight, as my wife and I watched the latest J-Lo movie. Nothing against the genre, or the very talented J-Lo, but color me relieved when my wife asked about the "real" identity of one of the actors. The actor in question was, for me, one of those immediately recognizable faces whose name ya just can't place.

Hooray for me! Something to research beyond the silly romance story.

However, as usual, I digress.

The unidentified man in question in the innocuous J-Lo film was/is an actor named Edward James Olmos. He seems to be an accomplished actor running the gamut of a lot of various roles, and, overall, well, not a bad dude.

However, the researcher dude in me wanted to know more. So just who was Edward James Olmos? What were some of the "vital records" of his life?

A quick Wikipedia search showed that our boy Eddie, in addition to film roles, has also run the gamut of lovers and wives like any good Hollywood persona is wont to do. As I perused Edward's list of exes, though, one name stuck out: Kaija Keel.

Kaija Keel—an interesting-sounding name, but one that didn't mean a damn thing to me.

So I almost sped past it. After all, like I said, it didn't mean anything to me. That is until I read a bit further, and it was revealed that the lovely and talented Kaija is the daughter of old-time (?) movie actor Howard Keel (1919-2004).

Okay, before I get too far, I gotta digress a bit again. You see, I gotta tell you that "back in the day" (and well before Alzheimer's stole her mind) my mother was a bit of a movie buff. Anyone who knew her will tell you it's no secret that Mom grew up as a lonely latchkey kid in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I think because of this, or at least in part, Mom used the movies to escape—and part of Mom's escape was studying the movie credits. And Mom loved those movie credits. Mom always knew "who was who" in any movie, and I guess Mom's penchant for movie credits sorta got passed down to me.

So when I saw the phrase "daughter of" and the name "Howard Keel," I had to chase that rabbit down the rabbit hole.

I like to think that Mom would have wanted me to.

I didn't expect that rabbit hole would take me to Dad.

Say what?

You see, after a quick perusal of actor Howard Keel's movie credits and CV, I also saw that the dashing Mr. Keel was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Ya know, that organization that hands out those pesky SAG awards once a year?

Now, as interesting as all of this was, and as grateful as I am to Mom for my strange and peculiar interest in movie and actor credits, it was none of this that caught my eye. No, what caught my eye was that actor Howard Keel's tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild was succeeded by what, in my family, was something of a household name.

And that name was Leon Ames.            

       Above: My sister with the baby "Leon"

There's a lot to unpack here. And truthfully, I really know nothing about Leon Ames, and if I ever met the man it was only fleetingly as I walked past his office at work one day—nor did I ever see The Postman Always Rings Twice—but I do recall it being a movie my mom mentioned from time to time. Really though, what got me going about old Leon Ames wasn't even the horrible kidnapping ordeal he and his wife went through in the mid-1960s. 

No, what got to me was Dad, signaling to me from the great beyond.

Almost as if Dad were saying, "Hey, did I ever tell you about the time..." Up flashed a newspaper article and photograph I had never seen before. And yes, I knew that my father, "the car dealer," had worked for "the car dealer"—that car dealer being, of course, Mr. Leon Ames- Dad's employer.

              

Above: Leon Ames, in later years, visiting with the charming Samantha Stevens.

So let this be a lesson to you about watching too many rom-coms, or memorizing too many movie credits, or taking too many trips down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. You see, when it comes to the six degrees of separation, Kevin Bacon doesn't have the corner on the market. By my best guess, Howard Keel does, and if not him, there's a guy named Leon Ames who just might.

☮

Now, how do I get outta that rabbit hole? 

 AMERICA 250

"Grandpa Boom-Boom"

(Author's note: One of the best things a genealogist can do is go back and examine family lore and legend. It's often a tough call — but sometimes it can answer, or not answer, a lot of questions both personal and historical. In this case, it has also proven a way for me to personally celebrate "America 250" through remembering and attempting to reconstruct the life of my grandfather.)

As always, unapologetically, unedited.

I am a genealogist by training and by inclination. I have spent a good part of my adult life pulling the threads of family stories apart to see what holds and what doesn't. I (mostly sometimes!) know the difference between a fact and a legend, and I know that the truth usually lives somewhere between the two. So when my uncle pointed to an old black and white photograph of some sort of transport truck hanging on his garage wall and said to me — and I am paraphrasing here, because this was the late 1990s — "Yes, Dad drove that truck. It was left on one of the islands in the Pacific during the Atomic Bomb tests" — I did what genealogists do. I filed it away. 

I waited. And eventually, I started pulling the thread.

My grandfather was Howard J. Record (1909-1987). He had a hard life, but he never complained about it, at least not that I ever heard. He had some pretty tough physical disabilities that would have sidelined a lot of men, but he had an eighth grade education and a family to feed, so he drove trucks and he worked in the oil fields. That was his life, and by most accounts he was good at it. 

He was a good man.    

Above: My grandfather and his brood, circa 1958

At some point in the 1950s — and possibly extending into the 1960s, though I can't pin the exact dates down yet — he worked for a company called Crail Brothers Trucking and Transportation, out of Long Beach, California. The company was owned and operated by Frederick W. Crail and his brothers. I know this from family memory, and aside from a 1953 Long Beach, California City Directory, not yet from any primary sources documents. Even though "this" is only about merely unraveling folklore, I want to be honest about that distinction throughout this piece. That is how genealogy works. You start with what you know, and you go looking for what you can prove.

What I do have is a newspaper clipping from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, dated Sunday, January 19, 1958. The headline reads, in bold type: "Oilman Crail Falls Dead on Tennis Court." Frederick W. Crail, the paper reports, was a "veteran Long Beach oilman" who collapsed and died the previous Saturday while playing tennis at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs. He was 57. He was secretary of Victory Oil Co., a firm he ran with his three brothers — Edwin P., George B., and L. A. Crail.

What makes this clipping striking — and I will admit this is the kind of thing that hooks a researcher — is what runs directly alongside it. The headline immediately above the death notice reads: "Nerve-Gas Attack by Missile Seen." The juxtaposition is purely accidental, the ordinary chaos of a newspaper page. But it sets a mood. This was 1958. The Cold War was not an abstraction. The atomic age was not history yet. It was Tuesday.

And dang it, my family couldn't afford a darn bomb shelter. Ugh.

But that brings me back to my uncle's photograph and what he said about it.

Here is what I know, and what I don't.

What I know: My uncle pointed to a photograph of a truck and told me his father — my grandfather — drove it, and that it was left on an island in the Pacific during atomic bomb testing. My uncle was a "salesman's salesman," colorful and confident, and I would not have called him a liar. I believed him then. I have no reason to doubt the core of the story now.

What I don't know: Whether the truck went to Bikini Atoll specifically, or somewhere else. Whether it was connected to Castle Bravo in 1954, Operation Crossroads in 1946, or another test entirely. Whether Crail Brothers had any documented contract with the military or the Atomic Energy Commission. Whether my grandfather's role was to haul the truck to a Long Beach pier, or something else. The photograph itself is gone. My uncle passed away nearly a decade ago, and I don't know what became of it.

With any luck, the photo still exists. Maybe my cousins have it. Maybe it's among my grandmother's things...

What is historically plausible: During the Pacific nuclear tests of the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. military placed vehicles — trucks, jeeps, heavy equipment — on target islands and on the decks of ships to measure blast and radiation effects. Equipment sent to the atolls largely did not come back. Long Beach was a major military logistics hub. A heavy-haul oil-field trucking company based there, in that era, could plausibly have had contracts to move equipment to the naval docks. I have searched for any documented connection between Crail Brothers, Victory Oil Co., and military contracting. I found nothing — not because the connection didn't exist, but because civilian contractor records from that era are not digitized. If they survive at all, they are in the National Archives. That is where this trail leads next.

There is one other thread worth noting. The Crail family business did not end with Frederick W. Crail's death on that tennis court in 1958. Victory Oil Company, founded in 1934, still exists. A Crail family descendant runs it today, alongside a family foundation in Los Angeles. Whether anyone in that family has records, photographs, or institutional memory that touches on what their company hauled and for whom in the 1950s — I don't know. But it is a question worth asking.

What I am left with is a family story that has the texture of truth without yet having the documentation to confirm it. That is not an unusual place for a genealogist to be. It is, in fact, exactly where the work begins.

Howard J. Record died in 1987. He drove trucks most of his life. He worked for a Long Beach oil company whose owner died in 1958, in the middle of the atomic age, with a nerve-gas headline running alongside his obituary purely by accident. And somewhere, in a garage that no longer exists, there was a black and white photograph of a truck that may have ended up on an island in the Pacific.

I'm still looking for the documents. I'll let you know what I find.  

 

And, I still wouldn't mind a really snazzy bomb shelter. Just sayin'

☮

"AMERICA 250"

A SAGE MOVE...

(Author's note: For the next couple of weeks, I'm gonna check out some of my own family stories that I think truly help celebrate America's 250th - if you've got one to share yourself - I hope you will.)

I.

I’ve always been proud that I was a Sage. No, not like that kind of "a sage," but proud to be a part of the extended Sage family—which is comprised of the descendants of David Sage of Wales, who immigrated and settled in Middletown, Connecticut, in the mid-seventeenth century. You see, my maternal grandmother was "a Sage," so those particular Connecticut roots have always been near and dear to me. Heck, even the official name for this dang blog site is A Troubled Sage, so I think you can see where my allegiance falls.

Yes, this is the family I like to think I most "identify" with—though I admit that is all likely in my head. It is, after all, a special vanity and hubris that cherishes my Sage connections. It's the kind of pride that lets me trace my bloodlines to my Gateway Ancestor, Obadiah Bruen, and backward into archaic royalty through my ancestor Abigail Blinn Sage, while completely betraying my very remote connection to nineteenth-century robber-baron financier Russell Sage. Yeah, when you come from an overall "mutt-ish" background like me, you have to cling onto those rare silver strands that may shake out of Ye Olde Branches, indeed, however rare they may be.

Above: Genealogical record of the descendants of David Sage... p. 31 - my great grandfather, "Sam."

But I have to tell you, as much as I loved my grandmother and relish her Sage family connections, there are a couple of other things about the Sage clan that endear me to the people they were—and hopefully still are. So, in my personal effort to celebrate "America 250" in a way that doesn’t involve garish displays I thought I’d go back and take another look at my Sage family connections. For me, these are real American stories and connections that, hopefully, underlie the people we truly are, or at least aspire to be.

I guess that brings me to the General. 

Well, two of them actually—two generals during the Revolutionary War. One was my grandmother’s kinsman, General Comfort Sage, and the other was none other than that near and dear traitor to all of our Revolutionary causes. You might recall him from school. And yes, his name was General Benedict Arnold.

You see, they kinda hung out together back in the day. Word has it they liked to talk business ventures, combining Arnold’s New Haven merchant fleets with Comfort Sage’s extensive maritime trade networks out of Middletown. It seems like a pretty normal and, (sorry, Benedict) a very "American" thing to do.

Not to digress too much, but as the story goes, when General Benedict Arnold was found out and discovered for the traitor he was in September 1780, the public crowds went absolutely wild. Effigies were burned, and anger boiled over into the streets. General Sage’s wife, the amiable Sarah Hamlin Sage, fearing for the innocent children of Benedict Arnold who were stranded in Connecticut, hid his three young sons in her home. She instructed that the windows all be shuttered and that the children be kept away from the riotous mobs so they should be protected from any possibility of violence, and spared from hearing the horrific news of their father’s treachery.

 

Yep, those were my kinsmen—protecting the kids despite it all. That makes me proud. American proud.

I guess a few years later, when General Sage died in 1799, his wife laid down beside him to rest. When they came in later to check on Mrs. Sage, they found that she had passed away, too. Local rumor has it she died of a broken heart.

What great folks to call family!

II.

There’s a lot here to unpack, and where to even begin in terms of speculation is beyond my ken. Personally, I think the whole mess of it is screaming for a DNA test of in-line direct descendants, as surely there must be some out there. But hey, it’s not for me to say.

I mean, who’d a thunk that my Sage kin would have anything to do with General Benedict Arnold?

So, color me surprised when I learned a few years back the name of Benedict Arnold’s illegitimate son:

"JOHN SAGE ARNOLD"

Say what???

         

Yes, the old, celebrated (?) American traitor managed to father a boy around 1786 while operating a gritty post-war shipping business in the loyalist haven of Saint John, New Brunswick. Now, this wasn't just some random kid who claimed he was "an Arnold." Nope, Old Benny explicitly acknowledged that the boy, first called simply "John Sage," was his son. I guess General Arnold’s second wife, the lovely and leggy Peggy Shippen, even knew about it and eventually helped settle the estate. In fact, General Arnold explicitly provided financial support for his bastard son (sorry, tough choice of words) in his Last Will & Testament, bequeathing young John a massive 1,200 acres of land in Upper Canada along with a steady annuity.

Above: "I give devise and bequeath to John Sage now in Canada living with my sons there being about fourteen years of age ) Twelve hundred acres of land being part of a Grant of Thirteen thousand four hundred acres of land made to me as one half pay Officer for myself and family by Order of the Duke of Portland by his letter directed to Peter Russell Esquire President 12th of the Council in Upper Canada dated the June 1798 which said 1200 acres of land I give to him to be located altogether in one place out of the before mentioned Grant as my Executrix may judge equal and fair I also do hereby give and bequeath to the said John Sage Twenty pounds per annum to be paid to my sons Richard and Henry for his use for board clothing and Education until he shall be of the age of Twenty one years to be paid out of the Estate I may die possessed of I also give and bequeath to the said John Sage Fifty pounds to be paid to him when he shall attain the age of Twenty one years"

The young man would grow up and have a full life, eventually moving to Ontario to claim his land near his half-brothers, where he became known as "John Sage Arnold."

 

Now, my question in all of that isn’t so much "Who was the baby mama?" but more so, "Why did they call him 'John Sage'?"

Given that the Sage family were friends with Old Benny from back in the day, and given that General and Mrs. Sage hid Benedict Arnold’s other children behind shuttered windows when news of Arnold’s treason broke out, is it just me, or does it seem a little weird that Benedict Arnold names his illegitimate son John Sage?

          

Above: The grave of John Sage Arnold at Lehigh Corners, Ontario, Canada

Did the boy take his mother’s name, as was the strict custom for out-of-wedlock births back then? If so, did Arnold have a mid-winter fling with a Sage woman handling family shipping business up in Nova Scotia? 

Is Benedict Arnold's bastard son a cousin of mine?

Hey, works for me.

There is some information about each of these things out there—that is, the Sages hiding the Arnold kids, and the birth of and bequests to young John Sage Arnold—but truly, much of this remains shrouded in time and remains a mystery. I just think these are cool America 250 stories—stories of individuals doing the right thing. Stories of people who make mistakes and maybe who don’t agree with each other, but still, people who have a moral compass and a code to live by.

That feels pretty darn American.

I like to think I’m a part of that. I guess I am.

After all, Grandma was a Sage.

Wink!

☮

"AMERICA 250"

 AND THE

THE SCARLET CLOAK

Aaron Fuller, Philip Skene, and the World Ruth Francisco Left Behind

(Author's note: Sometimes as a family historian you find a story too incredible not to tell. This is what American patriotism actually looked like — a man in a cave, his daughter chopping wood in her brother's clothes, his wife watching through the logs for Red Coats in the dark with a babe in her arms. )

As always, unapologetically, unedited.

There is a letter written in 1833 by a man named Hopestill Bigelow to his son Artemas. Hopestill was born in 1786 at Whitehall, New York — the settlement that had been called Skenesborough before the Revolution remade it — and he was writing to make sure his son understood something about where he came from. The letter runs long. It covers two wars and several generations. But the part that stops you cold concerns a cave, a scarlet cloak, and a man named Aaron Fuller.

Aaron Fuller was Hopestill’s maternal grandfather. He was also, in all probability, the brother of Ruth Francisco — the woman at the center of a proof argument about a Mayflower line, the weaver identified only by her first name in her husband’s pension file, the woman whose maiden name took years of research to establish. We found Ruth through Aaron. His name is in her son’s family Bible, recorded as the officiant at Solomon Francisco’s wedding in 1787. But the Bible does not tell you who Aaron Fuller was. Hopestill Bigelow’s letter does.

To understand the letter you need to understand Philip Skene.

The Man Who Built Skenesborough...

Philip Skene was a British army officer who arrived in the Lake Champlain region in the 1750s and saw opportunity where others saw wilderness. He obtained a land grant, built a settlement at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, and named it after himself. Skenesborough. He recruited tenants, built mills, developed his land, and made himself the dominant figure in the region. By the early 1770s his settlement comprised roughly thirty households. Among his tenants were Aaron Fuller and his brothers, Henry Francisco, Moses Sawyer and his son, and Ebenezer Vine — names that appear together in Skene’s own ledger of promissory notes, the same ledger that now sits in the New York State Library and is one of the primary documents establishing Ruth’s identity.¹

Philip Skene was also a Loyalist. When the Revolution came he chose "the other side" — or rather, he chose the side he had always been on, the side of the Crown that had given him his land and his commission and his position. In 1775 he was arrested. His property was seized. He went to Canada, and his son and daughter followed him, abandoning the settlement he had built.

They left in such haste, or with such cold calculation, that they left behind the body of Philip Skene’s wife. She had died some years earlier and Skene had kept her unburied, enclosed in a leaden coffin in the cellar of their house, collecting an annuity on her estate that required her to be technically still living. The body stayed in the cellar. The family fled to Canada. The settlement they had built was now, effectively, abandoned enemy property.

Hopestill Bigelow recorded what happened next.

The Cave...

Aaron Fuller — Justice of the Peace, community patriarch, the man whose name appears in the Skene Papers and whose signature appears in Solomon Francisco’s family Bible — was appointed by the provincial congress of New York to confiscate Skene’s estate for the use of the Continental Army. It was the right thing to do. It was also extraordinarily dangerous. Philip Skene, upon learning of it, offered 1,600 crowns for Aaron Fuller’s scalp.

Sixteen hundred crowns. In 1777.

Hopestill Bigelow wrote:

The liberal bounty made it very dangerous for him to attend to business, as the tories and indians were numerous and on the lookout for him. He was therefore obliged to ride in the night, and in the daytime hide in a cave in the edge of a dense swamp. Well do I remember when I was a small boy of my mother leading me and two older sisters to the cave, and telling us the story till the hair of my head would seem to stand erect and every rustle of a leaf would appear to be the step of an indian or a tory. I have suffered more thereby, and fireside war tales, than years afterward by the roar of cannon, the rattle of small arms, the beat of the muffled drum, the groans of the wounded, the sting of the bullet, and the flow of blood in the war of 1812.

He was not speaking metaphorically. The cave was real. Hopestill was born in 1786 — years after the Revolution — and his mother Elizabeth led him and his two older sisters to the cave when he was a small boy, telling them the story of what had happened there. The hair standing on the back of his head was a child’s response to a story his mother had lived.

But Aaron Fuller did not simply hide. He had work to do. The army needed supplies. He had to move. So at night, Hopestill records, he would put on his wife’s long scarlet cloak and her bonnet, mount his horse, and ride out. If he was likely to meet anyone he would fling both legs to one side of the horse — riding sidesaddle, as a woman would — pass on as quickly as possible, and then with a leg aside put spurs to his horse and ride away. A Justice of the Peace, a man of standing in his community, confiscating a Loyalist estate for the Revolution, in a scarlet cloak and a bonnet, riding through the night with a 1,600 crown bounty on his head.

Hopestill adds, with the precision of a man who remembers what matters: “Well do I remember the cloak.”

The Women He Left Behind...

While Aaron Fuller was in his cave, his family was managing without him. He had sons in the army.

His daughter Elizabeth — Hopestill’s future mother, then about twelve years old — took over the farmwork. Hopestill describes it without sentimentality:

She laid aside her own dress, and adopting her brother’s she foddered the cattle, yoked and hitched the oxen to the sled, then she drove to the woods, chopped down trees, cut them into proper lengths, loaded and drew them home, where she prepared the wood for the fireplace. Thus she did all necessary work during the winter.

And while Elizabeth worked in her brother’s clothes, her mother — Aaron’s wife, whose name Hopestill records elsewhere as Rebecca — walked the house at night watching through peepholes between the logs, a babe in her arms, no fire lit, no light showing, watching for tories or Indians who might set the house alight hoping to flush Aaron from hiding. On nights when the fear became too much, she would send the children into the woods. Elizabeth, twelve years old, would sit in the middle of a blanket spread on the ground, gather her brothers and sisters around her, pull another blanket over them all, and sit through the night keeping watch to make sure no one suffocated.

The bounty on her father’s scalp stood the whole time.

After the War...

Aaron Fuller survived. He emerged from the cave, set aside the scarlet cloak, and became exactly the man Hopestill Bigelow describes him as in peacetime: a Justice of the Peace, a man “very noted in public business in that region.” Known ever after as Squire Fuller. One of five justices at Washington County’s first post-war court session in 1786. A landholder. A community patriarch. The man who in 1784 appears in the forfeiture records of Skene’s estate — the estate he had been appointed to confiscate, whose former owner had put a price on his head — as a neighboring landowner, designated “Aaron Fuller Esqr.”

In 1787, three years after that, he officiated the wedding of Solomon Francisco and Mary Freeman. He recorded it in Solomon’s family Bible as “Mr. Aaron Fuller, Esq.” — the same title, the same man, ten years past the cave and the cloak and the bounty.

In 1814, the Lansingbury Gazette reported his marriage to “the amiable and sprightly Mrs. Jane Bennett, age 75” — Aaron was 76 at the time, though the notice said 79. One of the primitive settlers of the county, marrying again at 76. The man contained multitudes.

One curious footnote: for all of this — the sequestration appointment, the confiscation of Skene’s estate, the cave, the bounty on his scalp, the night rides in a scarlet cloak — Aaron⁶ Fuller Jr. does not, as far as can be determined, appear in the DAR’s roster of recognized patriots. Commissioner of sequestration is a documented category of patriotic service under DAR standards, and his appointment by the provincial congress of New York is on record. Whether he has simply never been submitted as a qualifying ancestor, or whether the documentation has not yet been assembled in a form the DAR would accept, is an open question. It seems one worth answering.

He died sometime before 1820, probably the “Mr. Fuller recently deceased, aged between eighty and ninety” that Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale mentioned when he visited Whitehall in 1819 to interview Henry Francisco, the reputed 134-year-old Revolutionary War veteran. Silliman found Henry’s wife weaving cloth. He estimated her age as more than eighty. She was probably closer to seventy-four — Henry’s own pension schedule, sworn the following year, said so directly.

Her name was Ruth. Her maiden name, almost certainly, was Fuller.

Why This Matters...

Ruth Francisco is the subject of a forthcoming proof argument to be published in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record in July 2026, identifying her as Ruth⁶ Fuller, daughter of Aaron⁵ Fuller and Ruth Sawyer of Colchester, Connecticut, and sixth in descent from Mayflower passenger Edward Fuller. The argument rests on multiple independent lines of evidence. One of them is Aaron⁶ Fuller Jr.’s appearance as the officiant in Solomon Francisco’s family Bible.

The proof argument does not tell you about the cave. It does not tell you about the scarlet cloak, or the 1,600 crowns, or Elizabeth Fuller chopping wood in her brother’s clothes, or Rebecca watching through the peepholes with a babe in her arms. Those details live in Hopestill Bigelow’s letter, in Ward Roylance’s compilation of Fuller family records, in the footnotes of the genealogical literature rather than its body.

But they are the world Ruth Francisco came from. The brother who officiated her son’s wedding was the man in the cave. The Skenesborough settlement where she met and married Henry Francisco was Philip Skene’s plantation, the one whose owner fled to Canada leaving his wife’s body in the cellar. The ledger that places Henry Francisco among the Fuller brothers is Philip Skene’s ledger — the record of debts owed to a man who would later put a price on her brother’s head.

"The brother who officiated her son’s wedding was the man in the cave."

Genealogy at its best is not a list of names and dates. It is the recovery of lives. Ruth Francisco was a weaver who appears in one pension document and then disappears from the record. Her brother was a man who hid in a cave in a swamp and rode out at night in a scarlet cloak to supply a revolution. Their father brought the family from Connecticut to a frontier settlement on Lake Champlain and settled them there in the 1760s, alongside the Sawyers and the Vines and, eventually, an itinerant Frenchman of implausible age who would become Ruth’s husband.

The Bigelow letter survives because Hopestill wanted his son to know who he came from. Ruth Francisco survives in the record because in 1820 Henry Francisco swore a schedule of property naming his dependents and wrote down his wife’s name and her age and her occupation.

She was a weaver. She was about seventy-four years old. 

Her name was Ruth.

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Sources

1. “Notes of hand & Bonds of Different persons at Skenesborough,” 1767–1773, Philip Skene Papers, Box 1, Folder 01, New York State Library, Special Collections, Albany, N.Y.; Document ID 90534.

2. Hopestill Bigelow letter of 1833, reproduced in Ward J. Roylance, Remingtons of Utah with Their Ancestors and Descendants (Salt Lake City: the author, 1960), pp. 65–68.

3. Henry Francisco pension file, no. S44864, Case Files of Pension Applications, 1800–1900, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; National Archives Catalog ID 54606831. Schedule of property dated 30 Aug. 1820.

4. Solomon Francisco Family Bible Record (1768–1886), NSDAR Ancestor File No. A041636, NSDAR Library, Washington, D.C.; digital images at FamilySearch, IGN 007949717, images 652–653.

5. Jeffery Allen Record, “Ruth Fuller, Wife of Henry Francisco of Whitehall, New York,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 157 (July 2026): 231–236.

6. “Fuller—at Whitehall on the 10th Inst. by S. Hatch—Aaron Fuller, age 79 years, one of the primitive settlers of the county of Charlotte to the amiable and sprightly Mrs. Jane Bennett, age 75,” Lansingbury Gazette, 22 March 1814, as reproduced in Roylance, Remingtons of Utah, p. 64.

7. Benjamin Silliman, Remarks Made on a Short Tour Between Hartford and Quebec, 2nd ed. (New Haven: S. Converse, 1824), pp. 184–191.