Quakers, Penns, and the Mason-Dixon Line Part 2

A year ago now, I wrote a post about what I had found out thus far about the old house I grew up in. I have been meaning for ages to continue the story, as I left it on something of a cliffhanger (you know, a cliffhanger as far as historical research goes).

As a refresher, I grew up in an old house in northeastern Maryland that was built sometime in the first part of the 19th century. It was built by the Rogers family, who lived there until 1912. The Rogerses were Quakers, and at one time that section of Maryland was considered (by Pennsylvania) to be part of Chester County, Pennsylvania. I had found out all of this through tracking down the deeds at the county courthouse in Elkton, Maryland. The last item in the records, though, was a strange document from 1823 that was filed as a “decree” and seemed to be part of the settlement of Thomas Rogers’s estate. The trail seemed to run cold there.

Here’s the pertinent part of the “decree”, which is really opaque:

…the balance of the said purchase money [for the sale of some land] is now to be distributed amongst the legatees mentioned in the 20th item in the same will of whom John Rogers the part of the first part is one. And whereas the said John Rogers is also entitled to a small dividend or distribution share upon the general settlement of said Thomas Rogers Sr.’s estate. And whereas by the will of the said Thomas Rogers there is devised to his son John the part of the first part certain lands and tenements mentioned in said will and in the 14th item thereof in fee provided he the said John Rogers should pay the amount of a bond given by him to his father Thomas Rogers for the same lands, and by the codicil to the same will there is devised to the same John Rogers the same land in fee simple with remainder over to his surviving brothers and sisters in case he dies without issue of his body. And whereas the said John Rogers hath agreed and by these presents doth agree to release, transfer, and set over to the other persons mentioned in the 20th part of the same will all his, the said John’s, share or dividend of the balance of the purchase money for which the lands as aforesaid devised to his brother Thomas Rogers [Jr.] hath sold, and also the dividends or distributive share which he may be entitled to upon a general settlement of the estate of the said Thomas Rogers [Sr.], his father, deceased.

Basically, each of the siblings was given a portion of the sale price of certain land, but John both owed money to his father and had inherited some land directly from his father. In sum, he gave up his portion of the estate in order to pay off the debt, and in return he received the land he’d been left by his father.

As I was doing some genealogical research on the Rogerses, I came across a will of one Thomas Rogers—in the Chester County, Pennsylvania records. It was dated 1774 and was fascinating. As it turns out, this document wasn’t what I thought it was (more on that later), but there are some very interesting bits anyway, such as the bit about apprenticeships and the items left to his wife Catherine:

I, Thomas Rogers, of the township of West Nottingham in the county of Chester and Province of Pennsylvania (or so reputed [quite possibly a reference to the dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania over the border]), being now weak of body but of sound mind and perfect memory, do make this, my last will and testament—thereby disposing of the worldly goods and estate it hath pleased God to bless me with in [the] manner following—viz:

First, my will is that my body be decently buried at the discretion of my executors hereafter named, and my just debts and funeral expenses defrayed as speedily as possible after my decease.

Secondly, I give and bequeath unto Catherine, my loving and well-beloved wife, the third part of my plantation I now live on while she remains my widow [i.e. only if she doesn’t remarry] and the east end [eastern?] or newest house to live in, with free egress and regress to and from the same with privilege of water and firewood.

Thirdly, I give and bequeath to her my said wife the third part of my personal estate after my debts and funeral expenses are paid, and also her riding mare and saddle, one bed and bedding.

…

Ninthly, my will is that the share that shall fall to my said son Thomas on a division of the land be rented, and also the residue of my personal estate after my debts and legacies are paid as above said, be applied to the schooling and maintaining [of] my two youngest children until they shall arrive to [the] age to be put apprentice, and no charge to be brought against them out of the money left them for their maintenance.

Tenthly, as there is [not?] a burying ground on my said plantation, my will is that one quarter of an acre be reserved for that use forever, and provided as of one perch [i.e. 16.5 feet] wide to the Great Road, South [and?] of the same to it and from it. [?]

 

Naturally, the bolded part got my attention. Excuse me, but did you say “burying ground”? Good Lord, where?!

The sad truth is that we’ll probably never know exactly where, but this much is clear upon closer inspection: this is NOT the Thomas Rogers I was looking for (to, uh, paraphrase Star Wars). As it turns out, there were several Thomas Rogers in the family. The Thomas Rogers I want (the guy who died and left his son John our land) was born in 1738, and this doesn’t fit with the will above (he would not have been old and infirm, as this will indicates in its opening lines). Also, the children listed in the will do not match with the children of the Thomas I want. As it turns out, our Thomas’s grandfather was another Thomas born in 1690, making him 82 when this will was made (meaning “old and infirm” would fit). Our Thomas’s great-grandfather was another Thomas born 1665 in England. So this will belonged to the Thomas born in 1690 and does NOT refer to the land our house stands on.

I pursued a few more avenues for figuring out the answers to my big questions: I decided to look into the Nottingham Lots, which was an area of land sold off way back when the Penns still claimed that section of Maryland as their own. This was 1712, and our land is very near the sight of the Lots. I was having all kinds of trouble figuring out whether our house sat within the bounds of the Lots or not, because I wasn’t able to line up the Lots precisely with a current-day map. I visited the Historical Society of Cecil County, perused a book called The Nottingham Lots: A Tercentenary Celebration (2001), and looked at some books in the local library about the Quakers. I compared maps; I looked into land patents at the Maryland State Archives; I came closer to my goals but never quite found the answers I wanted.

What I found were records for the patenting of several plots of land by various Rogers family members in the late 1700s. The problem again was not being able to line up what I found precisely with current geography. I found Rogers’ Rest (patented 1789 by William Rogers and too far north to be our land), Pleasant Seat (patented 1789 by William Rogers and an early candidate that upon closer inspection is too far west to be our land), Pleasant Farm (patented in 1790 to Elisha Rogers and also too far west). Springton (patented 1790 by Thomas Rogers) was in very nearly the right location but was clearly too small to be a possibility. Then there was Rogers’ Range (patented 1790 by Thomas Rogers), which seemed to be in exactly the right place due to the creek (North East Creek) and mill noted in the patent. But it was shaped oddly, like a backwards C: two rectangles of land were connected by a very slim strip of land running north to south. Most frustrating of all, the blank center of this “c” shape seemed to be exactly where our house stands today. The map in the patent notes this is “Thomas Rogers’s other land, patented”, but I could not find the patent for that land.

However, digging through some documents at the Historical Society, I found a notation on a map saying the land was called “Providence” and was “unpatented”. And I was able to find the document for “New Providence”, an unpatented bit of land. Now, this appears to be the right place and the right time and the right person (Thomas Rogers, 1774), but because it was unpatented, it didn’t have the detail found in the patented document, such as roads or the name of neighboring lots. Still, it appears to be correct.

Which would put our land directly off the southeastern edge of the Nottingham Lots, as in adjacent to it but not part of it.

The Nottingham Lots.

This was disappointing, because in my research on the Nottingham Lots, I found a surprising level of connection between the Rogerses and the Browns, who were some of the original settlers of the Nottingham Lots. According to The Nottingham Lots: A Tercentenary, James and William Brown were brothers who came over from England when the area was still very much a frontier. They bought several lots and settled in “East Nottingham”. The pertinent part is that William bought one of the southeastern lots, remarkably close to where our house now stands. And, as it turns out, his granddaughter Catherine Brown married our Thomas Rogers (b. 1738). What’s more, her mother, Elizabeth Harris Rogers, was Thomas’s stepmother, because she was the second wife of his father William Rogers. In other words, Catherine and Thomas were stepbrother and stepsister. Intriguingly, in The Nottingham Lots: A Tercentenary, it says that the original settler William Brown left the bulk of his estate to his son Samuel, whose daughter is the Catherine who married our Thomas. So, all of these connections suggest the possibility that bits of the Nottingham Lots were passed down from William Brown to Samuel Brown to Catherine Brown and then to her children by Thomas. And yet . . . it appears this was just a massive red herring.

The real pain is the so-close-but-not-quite-there aspect of it all. I simply can’t place the land patents and the Nottingham Lots precisely on a modern-day map. If I could, I might be able to make more headway!

Another small thing I found while at the historical society was a notation about a mill that was on the North East creek very near our house and was clearly owned by the family: it was called, uninspiringly, “Rogers’ Mill”, listed in 1856 as “clipping the North East Creek” upstream of Warburton Sawmill and having a fall of 15 to 20 feet. There is a cow pasture in that spot now.

I think the moral of the story is that I’ve exhausted the avenues I’ve pursued thus far. What I need to do next is try to locate wills, look at tax record, see what more can be found by visiting the Maryland State Archives, and maybe check out some old newspapers. Since I work full-time and live two hours away now, my research takes place only in fits and starts, but I hope to learn more as time goes by.

Quakers, Penns, and the Mason-Dixon Line

The front of the house (the older part) with the deep front porch that was added much later.

I grew up in the northern reaches of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Although I-95 passes straight through the county, it has much more in common with the slower, rural way of life of the Delmarva Peninsula than it does with the suburban/urban life of central Maryland (the Baltimore-Washington DC area). It’s a quiet corner of Maryland full of rolling hills and coursing waterways–the county is cut through by five rivers.

The area has a rich history as well, going back deep into the colonial era. The house I grew up in is part of that history. My father bought the house in 1978, well before I was born, and we still own it. I lived there until I left for college. After returning home from graduate school a few years ago, I found myself unemployed and with time on my hands. I’d always been curious about the history of that old house and decided to do some research.

I had some information to go on. My mother had done some research not long after my father bought the place. I’d always been told the house had been built some time before the Civil War (though when exactly wasn’t clear) by the Rogers family. I knew the house had been a duplex; that one section of the house, the western half, was the newer part of the house. It was built sometime in the late 19th century.

A quick description of the house: The older portion of the house has two rooms down, three rooms up, a walk-up attic, and an earth-floor basement. Off the front is a deep porch. The newer portion of the house has two rooms downstairs (large kitchen and powder room) and three upstairs. The back stairs in this part of the house are steep and make a 90-degree turn at the bottom, coming to a stop at a plank door. There used to be a rickety porch off the side of the house (in addition to the front porch), but that was rebuilt and incorporated into the kitchen. Outside, the house is flanked by two enormous trees, each of them five or six stories high and the largest of their species in the state. Just to the south are the barn and the granary, both of which are large old structures in their own rights. Beyond that are pastures and corn fields. The house now sits on only two acres, but at one time it included about 100 acres all around.

My research began with the land records. I headed off to the Cecil County courthouse to pull the deeds. Luckily, deeds lead you backwards through time. I found my parents’ deed, which said it was purchased from such-and-such a person, who had purchased it in turn from such-and-such a person, the deed being in such-and-such a book on such-and-such a page. I easily worked backwards through time. Before my parents bought the place, it was abandoned for a while. It was the subject of a sheriff’s sale in 1958. Between 1912 and 1978 (when my father bought it), the house was sold to seven different owners. You can see time passing through the physical deeds: the deed from 1912 is type-written, but the deed from 1875 is handwritten, and the handwriting gets progressively more difficult as the decades pass. That last type-written deed, from 1912, marks the last date at which the Rogers family (who built the house) still lived there.

Smith Rogers was the last Rogers to own the place. He and his brother Isaac had inherited the property in 1845 from their father, Jeremiah Rogers, Jr. (That, one thinks, has to be when the second part of the house was built, to hold both the brothers’ families. The timing is right.). Jeremiah Rogers, Jr., in turn inherited the place from his uncle John Rogers. This much could be found easily in the deeds. But when I went to find out who John Rogers had inherited from, I hit a brick wall.

The house from the side in the early 1980s. You can see both large trees, which have only grown bigger. The “newer” part of the house is behind the truck and the tree.

I found a document in the records, but it wasn’t another deed at all. It wasn’t a will, either. It appeared to be a document settling (in part) the estate of Thomas Rogers in 1825. It was a fairly odd document and left me with many more question than answers. It certainly didn’t help answer my main question: when, exactly, was our old house built? Sure, there were deeds to the land, but that didn’t mean there were any buildings on that land. Yes, the documents mentioned “improvements” (ie, buildings), but that could be legalese: if there were buildings on the land, they were included, but that didn’t mean there were buildings. It’s sort of a legal nicety. So, there was no proof that the house was on the land in 1825, just proof that land was owned by the Rogerses.

And what the heck was this odd document? It was hard for me to decipher the handwriting and the language, but I made out this much: Thomas Rogers had passed away in 1819 and divided his assets between his children. However, it appeared that, in lieu of cash money, John Rogers got the land (and house?). The document I found seemed to settle the matter officially (it was listed as a “decree’). One question that is still outstanding is the timing: Thomas Roger died in 1819, but this document was dated 1825. Why on earth was there such a gap?

It also raised the question: who were these Rogerses, and where had Thomas Rogers gotten the land? The trail seemed to run cold with him.

I started answering the first question first. As I was poking around the Cecil County records, looking for anything related to the Rogerses, I came across the story of one Catherine Rogers. I’ll have to look this up to fill in the gaps, but what I found was that this old lady, Catherine, was apparently taken advantage of, and her younger relatives petitioned on her behalf to have her land returned to her. In the process, it was mentioned that Catherine Rogers attended the local Brick Meetinghouse.

Although the story was interesting in and of itself, what I took away from this was the fact that the Rogerses were Quakers, because the Brick Meetinghouse is an old, local Friends Meetinghouse. This was an important clue, because the Quakers were wonderful record-keepers. I went to the library to search the local history section and found a very useful book of Quaker births, deaths, and marriages. From that, I was able to reconstruct a very full Rogers family tree. It all fit together beautifully with the scant information I was able to glean from the land records. It gave me some idea of who these Rogerses were. For instance, I found that they all had a lot of kids–and that at one point it appears a sister came to live in the house. It must have been one crowded house, because it isn’t that big!

So, a little about Quakers: In the early 1800’s, the Quakers (or Friends) were some of the most socially progressive people in the country. They believed in things like equality of the sexes and races. They were early abolitionists. They were usually pacifists, as well, who believed in plain speech and plain dress. There was, of course, a large Quaker community in Pennsylvania (founded by the Quaker William Penn). It made sense for Quakers to be in our corner of Cecil County, because it’s less than a mile from the Pennsylvania border. And, significantly, at one time, it was in Pennsylvania (at least according to Pennsylvania). In colonial times, the Penns and the Calverts (proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland respectively) argued over the boundary between the colonies. Pennsylvania and Maryland both claimed the land that our old house sits on. It wasn’t until Messrs. Mason and Dixon surveyed their famous line in the 1760’s that the matter was considered settled and the plot of land in question was formally and from thenceforth part of Cecil County, Maryland instead of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Of course, it isn’t clear (yet) who the land belonged to in the 1760’s…

From 1912 to sometime before 1825, however, I know for sure that the Rogers family owned and lived on this land. That makes me wonder about who they were–what were they like, and are there are any interesting stories about them? I’m not sure I’ll ever find that kind of information, aside from (perhaps) a few references in the Quaker meeting minutes. For more than that, I have to use my imagination.

When I was little, I used to think that the root cellar in the basement, a ramshackle little room in the corner, was a hiding place for slaves. Why I thought that, I don’t know; it wasn’t a very secret place. (Give me a break; I was young.) However, given the fact that the Rogers family were Quakers, there is the possibility that they sheltered runaway slaves after all.

This much and no more was I able to learn from the land records and Quaker genealogies. I was a bit frustrated by the absence of a better explanation. My search had come to a puzzling dead end with a document that seemed to be neither deed nor will and that was unclear about many things.

That was when I turned to other sources. Next time, I’ll start filling in some of the gaps. Let’s just say it involves a will filed in Chester County and a graveyard.

The 1940 Census

The Census Bureau has just released the information from the 1940 census. I know this isn’t strictly related to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace–in fact, it has nothing to do with the Affair. But I’m interested in history in general, and I hope some of the readers of this blog are, as well.

You can find summary and comparative information at the link below:

http://www.census.gov/1940census/

Information on individuals isn’t all available yet; the specific data hasn’t been digitized and made searchable. If you know the location you’re looking for, however, you might be able to locate the person or people you want to find info on. It will take some browsing through pages of the census. You can help out by letting the Census Bureau know what you find. Follow this link:

http://1940census.archives.gov/

I’m curious to look up my own grandparents. The problem is, I’m not entirely sure where to look for them. My paternal grandmother was almost certainly in Lawrence, Kansas at this time, a 15-year old girl. I might be able to find her. I’m not sure, however, whether my grandfather was in college or was still in Pennsylvania, and if so where exactly in PA he might have been. My maternal grandparents were probably in, maybe, Ohio and northern New Jersey. Those are just guesses, however. I’d have to find out more to find them.

Good luck if you’re looking for your family!

History, Close to Home

Because of the demands of the real world, I have been neglecting this blog shamefully fora while, now. But I thought that I would share a little of what I discovered over the past few weeks. No, it doesn’t have to do with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, or even with France or the French Revolution or the ancien regime.

The old Farmhouse in the snow.

It’s the history of the old house I grew up in. I have always known the old farmhouse was built before the Civil War. Many years ago, my mother did some research on the house that my father bought in 1978. She couldn’t finish the research then, so that’s where the research stood for about twenty years.

Having a historically curious mind, I decided I wanted to know how old this house is. I could guess from the size, style, and height of the windows at its approximate age. I’m no expert, but I put it in the early 1800’s. It has an almost Federalist style to it. But I wanted some facts, so I began at the beginning by going to the old Cecil County courthouse in Elkton. In the land records archives, I started with my parents’ deed from the 70’s. From there, it was easy to trace it backwards in time. Each deed states that the land being conveyed to so-and-so by so-and-so is the same land conveyed to so-and-so by so-and-so as recorded in such-and-such a book on such-and-such a page. So I moved back in time, through the 20th and 19th centuries……..

Finding Toussaint

I uncovered a puzzling and rather unsettling error in historical research by an author I trusted.

A man by the name of Toussaint de Beausire played a very small part in history but a much bigger part in the work of historical fiction I’m currently slogging through. The fiction is really just the words and one or two characters–remarkable amounts of information exist about everyone, everything, and ever place involved.

In doing my research, I relied on Frances Mossiker’s The Queen’s Necklacefor my information on most things. The characters involved all gave his-hand accounts, which are translated and pieced together by Mossiker. What is said by the people involved is inherently suspect; these people all had strong motives to lie (generally speaking). Not to mention, quite a few of them were writing these years (sometimes many years) after the events, and their memories are demonstrably faulty.

Which is, I think, what must have happened in the case of Abbé Georgel, the secretary of Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan [see the sidebar for a link to my post on Rohan], who was the man duped into handing over a necklace of 2400 carats to a pretty, youngish adventuress.

The error in question is this: Mossiker quotes Abbé Georgel’s summation of the end of both Beausire and Nicole d’Oliva [see the sidebar for a link to my post on Oliva]. He died by guillotine, she died alone and abandoned in convent. Having taken a look at some other secondary sources, and some birth and death records, it seems that Abbé Georgel and Mossiker (who supports his words in a footnote) are both wrong.

The person in question, Beausire, was the husband of one Nicole d’Oliva, a reformed lady of the night. Nicole was, as the link to my profile makes clear, involved in the jewel heist of the century without being aware of what she was doing. Nicole met Cardinal Rohan in the darkened gardens of the Chateau de Versailles and during the trials. There is no reason to believe that Beausire ever came any closer than that to Abbé Georgel: Beausire’s wife saw Georgel’s employer briefly in a garden. The relationship is pretty tenuous.

Georgel also wrote his memoirs in 1817, over thirty years after the events took place.

Both explain the error that Georgel made. These were, more or less, tangential characters, especially to Georgel, who was interested mostly with the Cardinal and the conniving Comtesse. He had barely known these people, and besides so many years had passed . . . he remembered the sad demise of Nicole d’Oliva, and remembered something vague about Beausire.

As it turns out, Toussaint de Beausire appears to have lived until 1818. In fact, he must have been alive when Abbé Georgel’s memoirs made the error about his (Beausire’s) death. I found this book online as I was doing a quick search to see if I could find anything more about Beausire’s exact date of death. On page 69 of Cagliostro and Company by Frantz Funck-Brentano and translated by George Maiment, I found a very full account of Toussaint de Beausire. His story is fascinating. He was quite the juvenile delinquint, running away from school, stealing from his teachers, running up debts.  The real kicker came at the end, when it says that Beausire not only lived until 1818, but had remarried after Nicole d’Oliva died (young and abandoned by Beausire). He had six children by his second wife and was a servant of the Empire under Napoleon.

This needed further investigation. As far as I knew, Beausire had been executed during the French Revolution. I was inclined to believe Mossiker, who I’d been following, and assume that the authors of this new resource had mixed up my Beausire with someone else with a similar name. I dug into a few genealogy sites and found a few interesting documents. There was a record of the birth of Toussaint’s child by Nicole d’Oliva. There was a marriage license for a man I could only assume was that same son many years later. Then I found some other births. The mother’s name seemed to match what was said in Cagliostro and Company. However, the name used for the father was slightly different. The initials were a bit off. It was as though Toussaint was used sometimes as a surname and other times as a first name. In any case, this still left some room open for the possibility that there were two men with similar names and that everything attributed to Beausire in Cagliostro and Company had been the works of another man.

Quite a lot is attributed to Beausire in Cagliostro and Company. He was active in the French Revolution, turning informant and getting a relative executed because of an old grudge. There are speeches and such attributed to him. There is an account of his trial–he was acquitted. This was still a little baffling; he was meant to have been condemned. With the records I’d found, I was beginning to suspect that Mossiker was wrong and Cagliostro and Company was right.

Then I stumbled across ancestry.com’s archive of those guillotined during the French Revolution. Search as I might, Beausire was not there. This, to my mind, closed the case. The mystery appears to be solved. As far as I can tell, Frances Mossiker took Georgel’s word for Beausire’s death. Unfortunately, she didn’t double check his words. This is understandable but a little sloppy. As said before, Beausire was peripheral and Mossiker clearly had some respect for Georgel’s words. She must have believed enough of what he said to not check on this one small item. Of course, I’m probably one of very, very few people who would ever think to ask about Toussaint de Beausire, but when I did, I found that Mossiker had fallen down a little here. Don’t get me wrong; the book is fantastic and I rely on it heavily, but it’s a lesson to check things if and when you can.