The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (25 page)

THE DAVIS CLAN

Dolor Davis, the progenitor of this Vineyard clan, was born in Kent about 1600.10 (Pedigree not shown, appears on the website.) He took a wife from Kent and immigrated to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1634, working as a carpenter and master builder. His son John, who plied the same trades, married a woman from Kent and the couple moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, where they found a Kentish community, as explained earlier. John Jr., grandson of Dolor, moved the family to Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. His grandson Meletiah was born there but moved to Edgartown on the Vineyard to work for Thomas Butler in his tannery. We are told that Meletiah was hard-working, thrifty, a large landowner, and a colonel in the militia. His son Benjamin, also a farmer, married Mary Daggett, whose family early intermarried with Butlers, Wests, Lamberts, and others on the Vineyard. (For more on the Butlers, see Appendix A.) A little after 1805, their son Henry Davis moved to Maine, a "reverse migrant," so called because his ancestors had migrated from the mainland (Falmouth) to the Vineyard, whereas Henry moved from the Vineyard to Strong, Maine, on the mainland, located on the Sandy River, almost at its western extreme. The first white settlers to Strong came in 1784 but the first sawmill and the gristmill mill did not open until well after Henry Davis's arrival.

In Strong, Henry Davis married Betsy Athearn, a descendant of Simon Athearn of Kent, and herself a reverse migrant. This is an example of Vineyard families continuing to intermarry on the mainland. The couple also lived in two towns adjacent to Strong, Farmington and New Vineyard." They had ten children of whom two were Deaf, CordeliaD (a tailor) and LydiaD. It appears that neither attended the American Asylum nor married.

THE NEWCOMB CLAN

Captain Andrew Newcomb, the progenitor of this clan, was one of the earliest settlers of New England, emigrating from the west of England, possibly from Devon or Wales around 1636 (see Fig. 8, Newcomb pedigree). The Newcomb Genealogy states that he likely came to the New World as a sea captain carrying cargo to Barbados.12 He was later placed in Virginia where he captained one of the ships in coastal trade, probably bringing tobacco from Virginia to Boston. His son, Lieutenant Andrew Newcomb was born in Boston in 1640. Later, he lived on the Isle of Shoals, near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and next to Kittery, Maine, where he married Sarah Young of that place and had seven children, including Peter. When Peter's mother, Sarah, died, his father, Andrew, moved the family to Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, and remarried. In due course Peter married Mercy Smith, a daughter of the second Smith family on the Vineyard, a descendant of Reverend John Smith and Susanna Hinckley of Kent. Peter and Mercy moved to Sandwich, where they kept an inn. The inn passed into the hands of their son William, who married Bathsheba Bourne of Sandwich, and had three children with Deaf descendants, William Jr., Sarah, and Hannah.13 William Jr.'s son Lemuel also kept the inn and had eight Deaf children, of whom three died young and five attended the American Asylum. His sister Sarah married her cousin Benjamin and their daughter would have two Deaf children and four hearing by Nathan Dillingham (see below). (For more on the Bourne family, see Appendix A).

Finally, sister Hannah married John Jennings in Sandwich in 1759. The Jennings progenitor was John Jenny, who emigrated from Norfolk, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and then to Sandwich. Jennings was a prosperous Tory, imprisoned after the Revolution. On his release John took his eldest son and traveled up the Kennebec to Hallowell, then through the forest to Wayne, Maine. There Jennings, with his son's help, cleared land and built a cabin; then he sent for his wife Hannah and the other children. The pedigree shows that the couple had ten Deaf descendants in the Lovejoy and Allen families (described below).

Wayne is about twenty miles south of the Sandy River town New Sharon. The pioneers making their way from the Androscoggin River to the Sandy River Valley traveled along the Thirty Mile River, which flows directly through Wayne. The first pioneer had come about 1773, and had named the town New Sandwich after his town of origin. Wayne is bordered on the north by East Livermore, Fayette, and Readfield; on the east by Winthrop, on the west by Leeds-all these towns had Deaf families. Without ever moving, the Jennings lived in Wayne and in Winthrop because Wayne annexed land from, and set off land to, neighboring towns.14 John Jennings' sons, John Jr. and Samuel, moved to Leeds about 1783 in a birch bark canoe navigating the small lakes, streams, and rivers. They settled on the banks of the Androscoggin River, cleared the primeval forest, and made homes. Their sister Bathsheba and her husband Andrew Cushman joined them there. They would have two Deaf grandchildren.

THE SMITH-HINCKLEY CLAN

There was a second Smith clan on the Vineyard, as we mentioned; its progenitor was the Reverend John Smith of Sandwich (Barnstable County, Massachusetts). (See Fig. 8, Newcomb pedigree.) It seems he was born in Dorset, although some sources give Kent. Reverend Smith came to New England in 1630 and joined the church at Barnstable township a decade later. In 1643, he married Susanna Hinckley of Kent, sister of the governor of Plymouth Colony. Their son Shubael moved to Chilmark with his wife. Their daughter, Mercy, has the distinction of being the ancestor of a large number of Deaf families, namely: the Newcombs, of whom we spoke above; and the Dillinghams and Fessendens of Sandwich, the Lovejoy branch in Sebec, Maine, and the Allens of Turner, Maine-of whom we speak below.15 This finding provides an indication of where this thread of Deaf paternity began in the United States. Since Mercy was the common ancestor of so many Deaf people, she must have been overtly Deaf herself or a carrier; it is not known which. Accordingly, at least one of her parents was a carrier of the Deaf trait; her father would have acquired the gene from one of his parents, most likely from Mercy's grandmother, Susanna Hinckley of Kent. (For more on the Dillingham and Fessenden families, see Appendix A.)

THE SEBEC LOVEJOYS

We stated earlier that there were two principal founding clans in the northeast with three or more consecutive generations of Deaf people (with the first born before 1800): these were Brown-Swett-Sanders and Lovejoy-Jellison-Berry. We have identified twenty-five Deaf descendants of Christopher Lovejoy, the progenitor. They can be sorted into three regional groups. First, Sebec, Maine, in the northern cluster, to which we now turn (see Fig. 8, lower left, Newcomb pedigree and Fig. 12, Lovejoy pedigree).-Two other groups are discussed in the next chapter: Sidney, Maine, and Concord, New Hampshire16 The male ancestor of the Sebec branch of the Lovejoy clan is Lieutenant John Lovejoy. He was born and married in Amherst, New Hampshire, and fought in the Revolution. His wife was Mary Polly Jennings of Vineyard ancestry. At the close of the war, he bundled his wife, eleven children, and a few possessions in an oxcart and moved to Fayette, Maine. After a time, Lieutenant Lovejoy harnessed another ox team and moved his family about six miles to Wayne-Winthrop, where the Jennings moved.

Alexander Graham Bell states that Mary Polly Jennings "traced her descent by two lines of ancestors, from persons who came from Chilmark."17 Her ancestor, Lieutenant Andrew Newcomb, son of the progenitor, settled on the Vineyard in Edgartown in 1675. Mary Polly was also descended from Shubael Smith, son of the progenitor, who settled in Chilmark (see Fig. 8, Newcomb pedigree). Most of her ascendants, however, were born in Sandwich or Barnstable, Massachusetts (both are in Barnstable County). Mary Polly Jennings had numerous Deaf relatives, among them Newcombs, Allens, and Dillinghams. Two of her sisters had Deaf children and grandchildren: Sarah married Benjamin Allen (see next section), and Bathsheba married Andrew Cushman, a fifth-generation descendant of Thomas Cushman of Canterbury, Kent (Fig. 8).

Of Mary and John Lovejoy's eleven children two were born Deaf. Both were born at Fayette and both attended the American Asylum. HartwellD, when he was twenty-six, drowned in a pond at Winthrop; CharlesD married and moved nearly eighty miles away to the town where his hearing wife was born, Sebec, Maine, on the Piscataquis River-the most northerly Deaf family in Maine to our knowledge. There they had four children of whom three were Deaf. All three attended the American Asylum and the Deaf-Mute Mission. Son HartwellD (Jr.) and daughter Emma JaneD did not marry, while SarahD married Major BucknellD, a Mission member who had also attended the American Asylum; they had no children. BucknellD worked in a cotton mill. In 1887, he attended the Gallaudet Centennial, a gathering of ethnic Deaf from eleven states and three countries, celebrating the birthday of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

THE SAMUEL ALLEN CLAN

Five Deaf members of the Allen family, also of Winthrop, Maine, appear in the Newcomb pedigree (Fig. 8). Their mother, Sarah Jennings, like her sisters, was descended through the Newcomb line from families that lived on the Vineyard. (Bell states that Sarah's father, John Jennings, also had Vineyard ancestors but his ancestors according to our pedigree lived on the mainland-see Jennings pedigree on the website). The Deaf Allen's father, Benjamin, was descended from Samuel Allen, the progenitor of this family (see Fig. 9, Allen pedigree). Born in Somerset, England, about 1600, Samuel died in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1669.

One of Samuel's sons, James, moved to Sandwich, where he met James Skiffe, of whom we have spoken earlier as a settler of Martha's Vineyard. The two became friends and, in the year his father died, James Allen purchased land on the Vineyard and went there to live. His descendants intermarried on the Vineyard with Mayhews, Tiltons, Athearns, and Bournes; James Allen would prove to be an ancestor of four Deaf Mayhews and a Deaf Tilton; many of his descendants settled in Maine. James' great-grandson, Ephraim Allen, and a companion were the first settlers to spend a winter in the Sandy River Valley. While Ephraim's wife and children awaited them in Winthrop, the two hunters tended traps in which they caught an abundance of furs. In the spring they made a crude dugout and paddled down the Sandy River to the Kennebec.18

It is, however, James Allen's brother, Samuel at Braintree, Massachusetts, and his wife Sarah Partridge of Kentish origins, who were ancestors of the five Deaf Allen siblings of Turner, Maine: RebekahD, SallyD, and MaryD Allen and their two Deaf brothers who died young: JosiahD and DavidD. Their parents were Benjamin Allen and Sarah Jennings. Sarah's father, John, moved his family from Sandwich to Wayne-Winthrop in the spring of 1780. Benjamin Allen and his wife had their first child there eight years later.19 All the Allen women married Deaf men.

In appealing to the state to pay for his daughters' education at the American Asylum, Benjamin Allen movingly describes his predicament: "I am a father of three deaf and dumb daughters. I have a wife much out of health and five children only two of which can hear and speak. I myself am over sixty years of age; I cannot get them to Hartford or clothe them."20 The cumulative register of the Asylum, published in 1887, states that Rebekah AllenD had fifteen Deaf relatives: two brothers, two sisters, and eleven others, including cousins Newcomb and Dillingham (see Fig. 8, Newcomb pedigree). RebekahD married William BlaisdellD.21 The Blaisdell progenitor, Ralph, left Lancashire in 1631, and settled in York, Maine (pedigree at the website). WilliamD was a tailor from New Hampshire with whom she overlapped three years at the American Asylum; however, the couple waited fifteen years after graduation to marry. (About that time the Asylum admitted John BlaisdeliD, from New Hampshire; we have yet to discover his relation to WilliamD.) Sally AllenD married Jacob BosworthD from Salem, Massachusetts. In appealing for his boy's tuition at the Asylum, Jacob's father wrote: "His present employer thinks him as useful as any boy his age [16]. He learned to write a pretty good hand but it is not known that he has any current idea of the use of letters. Appellant posses [sic] no property."22

A glimpse of the elaborate Deaf kinship network in mid-nineteenth century New England was to be had when RebekahD and her husband attended the 1850 alumni reunion of the American Asylum. There she found numerous Deaf cousins including AbigailD, JohnD, JaneD, and JosiahD Newcomb of Sandwich, Massachusetts; Charlotte LovejoyD from the Lovejoy branch in Concord New Hampshire (a NEGA member) and NancyD and Charles DillinghamD, formerly of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.23

Deaf families originally from the Vineyard made up only a part of the northern cluster of Maine Deaf families. We turn next to Deaf families in this cluster who came from mainland Massachusetts (Maine was a district of Massachusetts until granted statehood in 1820), or from elsewhere in New England, or directly from Europe.

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The Jellison-Lovejoy-Berry clan includes thirty-three Deaf members with those names and presents several major nodes in the network of kinship relations.

THE JELLISON CLAN

The first white settler in Monroe, Maine, cleared a piece of land and built a cabin. A few years later, a Revolutionary War veteran bought the property and moved his family there. He then built a carding mill (a mill for brushing wool so it can be spun into yarn for knitting or weaving into cloth) and several lumber mills. He prospered, since in that era people relied on the mills for cloth, flour, and lumber.'

The Jellison family had always lived in Berwick, in southern Maine, not far from Portsmouth, New Hampshire2 (See Fig. 10, Jellison pedigree). The progenitor, Nicholas, settled there in 1671. His brother, William, was born in Kent, and came to America in 1630 in Winthrop's fleet, the first mass exodus of Puritans from England. We do not know why Nicholas's great great grandson, Samuel (1774-1862), moved relatively far north in Maine to Monroe but the family settled there and that is where Samuel's son, Moses, married his cousin, Esther Ham. She was descended from William Ham of Devonshire and distantly related to four Deaf Hams in New Hampshire.3

Moses and Esther had seven children, three of them Deaf, who would marry members of other Deaf families, and thereby create important links for themselves and their descendants. First was daughter LucyD who, after graduation from the American Asylum, had three illegitimate children by a hearing man from Monroe, Howes Mayo.4 The Mayo clan had four Deaf children in its various branches, three of whom were Howes's contemporaries; it may be that he had some knowledge of matters Deaf. Howes and LucyD had one Deaf child, named after his father (variously spelled Howes, Harris, and Hawes); HowesD Jr. was a Mission member and, like his mother, graduated from the American Asylum.