Under revision, 2023-2024.

Handwritten record of her marriage to Jehiel Alvord, in 1778:

FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-691S-H5Z

Couples usually married at the town-church of the bride. In her and spouse Jehiel's case, as neighbors, they had attended the same church, at the time, still attending the mother church in Northampton, as Westhampton had not yet fully split away.

They married shortly after Jehiel returned from his first service in the Revolutionary War, benefitting by serving short stints in local militias, commanders known, as neighbors, his widow later to qualify for a pension. Multiple ones who'd signed up instead for the Continental with its three years of required service found themselves under unpredictable strangers, sometimes good commanders, sometimes needlessly causing deaths. George Washington, after his own experience with the Continental, was said to want the Constitution to require a big change, that any officer in the national army qualify on merit (instead of, say, social class, or beer-drinking ability, or whether his father was a supplier). The Constitution would not require that. However, wanting that was one of the things making Washington popular with those whose sons had experienced the negatives of the Continental Army.

Jehiel would serve twice more after their marriage. Her paperwork for a widow's pension said, "He lived at Northampton at the time he first enlisted to go to Ticonderoga seven months under Capt joseph Lyman she believes Woodbridge was the name of the Colo and that Elijah Bartlett (who is a Revolutionary pensioner under the Act of Congress passed in 1832) was at Ticonderoga with her husband during the whole seven months." (SOURCE: RevWarPensions.com/AlvordJehiel.pdf, with pension documents viewable in the National Archives in downtown Washington, DC. The post-marriage stints included the capture of Burgoyne.)

A fact check verifies that the company of Capt. Joseph Lyman was indeed inside the regiment of Col. Ruggles Woodbridge. The latter's grave page is at 10847251. Bur. 1819, it gives him first name Benjamin, at South Hadley, so with Alvord neighbors. In contrast, Dorothy's brother, Abiathar French, served in the Continental, with difficulty. Too many at Ticonderoga were under a stranger noted for an attitude that it was God's will when people died, had nothing to do with what people did, so forbade any self-inoculating against small pox. Smallpox, a the time, was rampant and spreading and causing many needless deaths. The self-pricking technique was known in Cotton Mather's day, said to have been folk medicine brought from Africa by a slave (a doctor officially given credit?). Self-inoculating made a person more ill than would today's vaccinations. Men doing it needed to be absent (maybe 5 or 6 days?) while they recovered. (Until the fever went down?) They were counted as absent without leave, even though serving the rest of their term, after finding a better commander. Being absent was cause for denying pensions.

The families kept up ties long-term, despite Abiathar's set moving out west, to Lake Erie. For example, when Abiathar's grandson, Elah French, was an inn-keeper, in northeast Ohio, for the 1850 Census, a Jehiel Alvord one of his guests. Dorothy's son?

Elah's father had been the David French who'd died young, no birth record left in Westhampton, after Rev. Hales' house fire, to prove his parentage. Instead, the 1820 Census listed him next to her other nephews, her brother Abiathar's known son Jacob, with a bit younger Timothy French also in proximity. (That 1820 Census was out in NE Ohio, east of Cleveland. Multiple modern townships and counties were not yet polled separately, their Leroy still combined with Painesville/Concord. Adding further to address confusion, her nephews' Lake County was still in the north end of mother Geauga, true until 1840. )

Elah French's father David married a Keneippe (many spellings) out in Ohio. Timothy married an Allison. The vow-taking minister was Shadrack Ruark, said to be a circuit-riding Methodist, maybe also a J.P. His son Solomon had also married a Keneippe, latter surname Hessian, again, spelling highly variable. Ruark was hearing not many marriage vows then. However, he heard theirs and other relatives and in-laws.

She and Jehiel had Claps/Clapps and Phelps as neighbors out in Westhampton? Spencer Phelps had come, by 1803, to what later became LeRoy, OH, from western Mass.. with two Clapps. Aging and said to be going blind, Phelps, decades later, seeing the area's true history disappear, relayed that and other facts, in a letter written to the Painesville Telegraph. He described the marriage of Abiathar's daughter, Rebecca French, to her first spouse Elah Clap. Phelps described David and John French as arriving with a few other young men pre-1805, the rest of the extended family there by 1805, only the two Claps and Spencer and a hired man there earlier, silent about who among any native population still remained.)

Taking vows for her own wedding and Abiathar's was the Rev. Solomon Williams, long at the old church of Northampton. The newer church, closer to home, at Westhampton, would not separate from mother Northampton and open for services until about a year after their marriage.

More remote churches had smallish congregations, tended to be under-staffed. Westhampton's records would be expected to be scant, harder to find, but the early Westhampton ones were made particularly so, as the Rev. Hale, a brother to Nathan Hale, kept them at his home and his house burned. Her marriage record survived, as it was kept with the Northampton records, not forwarded to Westhampton.

As some of their family moved away, Dorothy and Jehiel put down roots in western Mass., as did her brother Jonathan, as did the family of her first Hessian in-law, who'd married a sister, and less well-researched, maybe the families of her sister or sisters marrying into the Chilsons.

Part of their roots were the adult children whose stones are found nearby, one named Abiathar French, for her father and brother. Son Isaac married a Barker, had a large family to make up for the lack of children by the others, a granddaughter by him named Dorothy, for her, a grandson by Isaac, called Jehiel, for her spouse. Her stone is missing. Her spouse's seems a replacement, of a newer veteran's style, not of their children's nor the older "angel head" styles.

THE HESSIAN IN-LAWS. The Northampton church recorded five weddings on its last page for 1778. A growing number of young men, if not killed in the War, were returning from service.

Three of the five in 1778 had key names. Dorothy and Jehiel were on the top line (July 11), while two lines later were "Christopher Kneep" and Meribah Miller (married Nov. 17). "Kneep" become the second Hessian in-law, after a marriage in the next generation. Last of the five named a groom called Phelps, people of that surname often neighbors, not just in western Mass., but out on Lake Erie, in northeast Ohio's so-called "Western Reserve", which had its own land records, handy when county ones were lost.

One Spencer Phelps told stories remembering the interconnected families who left western Mass., did so for several Painesville OH newspapers. He would tell how two of her brother Abiathar's sons, David and Timothy, and a "Charles Keneep", plus one other (an unrelated Russell?), all still young and single, had gone to northeast Ohio to clear land and plant gardens so that the rest could come. He noted how, he, a Phelps, and two Clapp brothers had done the same a year or two earlier, on adjacent land, that a feast was held when Elah Clapp married a daughter of the Frenches.

They would be neighbors in what was then Geauga County, but later become LeRoy Twp. in Lake County, the Frenches before then spreading out along the ridgeline roads overlooking Lake Erie, he said.

Piecing together other sources, the French son called David married a sister of his friend Charles, moved closer to Cleveland. He died violently in 1825. He'd been walking on the road to Newburgh, its township then still in Geauga County, not yet annexed by Cleveland. Newburgh had water power for mills, he and another with a better known name apparently having had a mill in the region. David's older brother Jacob's confirmed mill was eastward, on the Grand River, above Painesville.

Presumed robbed, David had been beaten by some of the workers building the new canal leading to the Ohio River and, thus, the Miss. River, thus giving easy access to Cincinnati, St. Louis, New Orleans and found. David was found near death, soon died, his assailants to serve time in prison, his wife to remarry, his children to be put under the guardianship of Keneippe/Keneep relatives, the Hessian name spelled so many different ways in the States, probably Kniep "back in the old country".

The canal would help make Cleveland matter. Suddenly, Cleveland's Great Lake access via the Cuyahoga River was superior to that of the Grand River, its port town of Painesville having no canal leading to the busy Ohio.

Letterwriting was the main way to stay in touch, no telephones yet, so knowing the correct post office mattered. When Dorothy's grandson by Isaac, called Jehiel, b. 1810 in MA, went to Ohio to visit, he would stay with David's son Elah French. They were accidentally caught together by the 1860 US Census, pre-Civil War. Elah's location was in Concord Twp., Lake County, with Painesville listed as his Post office. He, his wife and four children ran a small boarding house, something that could be done while also starting a greenhouse operation, a type of farming still do-able as city roads extended outward into disappearing farmland.

Dorothy must have made a point of staying in touch with David's sons, again, done by letter then, no phones yet. Or her children did so? Her grandson Jehiel, never married, died in Mass. at Williamsburg,

By 1860, Elah was one of the few left, his cousin Edwin French (father Jacob French, mother Abigail Bartlett) having a son who knew how to make money out of supplying equipment to the expanding railroads. Edwin and son would be buried at the scenic Lake View Cemetery, with a towering obelisk for the resident Rockefeller family, Garfield's tomb, and parklike walkways. Is Elah there? with his knowledge of greenery, ever a contributor to what the cemetery became?

Multiple Frenches had moved to Michigan's southmost line of counties by then, with the Keneeps/Knieps having moved to south Ohio and then to Indiana, so south of the line of Michigan counties.

Meribah Miller had married a German-speaker, his true name of Christian Britishized into Christopher by some clerk for the marriage record. HIs surname, as used back in what later became northern Germany, said to be the Hesse/ Wurttemberg area, was closer to Kniep, a spelling which he attempted to use later.

Meribah's father was believed to have been Christian's employer. Christian thus fell in love with his boss's daughter.

Hessians came into American life in two ways. Christian was an ex-Hessian soldier who deserted, from the British side, to the American side, in the Revolution. The American rebels promised "bounty warrants" to Hessian soldiers, as a reward for voluntarily leaving the British side for the American. The Knieps migrated westward, to exercise those rights, about when Dorothy's brother Abiathar the younger and his wife Beriah did so. They left western Mass. very early, pre-War of 1812, off to the Western Reserve area of northeast Ohio.

The two sets became in-laws when one of Christian and Maribeth's daughters, Louise, married one of Abiather and Beriah's sons (David). David French was actually a "double nephew", his mother Beriah was spouse Jehiel's sister. There's no Mass. birth record for her double-nephew, so he's assumed younger than those of his brothers with birth records found.

Christian was not Dorothy's only Hessian in-law. British money was paid to the Hessian nobles to take the Brits' side in the War, not to the Hessian soldiers. The soldiers least "gung-ho" about this "abuse by landlords" deserted.

Others among the British-hired Hessians were captured. A case of that was in-law "John Pittsinger" (Johannes Petzinger). He married Dorothy's sister, Rhoda. Those Hessians captured received no land bounties, instead were punished with forced work contracts. Their "indenture" lasted for a time, then they were freed. They could go back home if they wished, they could stay if they'd fallen in love or now had a rewarding trade. ("Indenturing" could be kindly, learning a trade, but it could also be experienced as a temporary slavery, being forced to move wherever their master took them, do whatever work, without pay or time off. Their master's payment for their work contract went to the government, not to them.)

(1) Was Dorothy the family's modern girl?

She rejected the more biblical "Doritha", seen in one record, for the more modern "Dorothy". In contrast, others in the family still used their Old Testament names assigned at birth. These ranged from Abiathar to Jehiel. (Her brother and father were both named Abiathar French. Her husband and son were both called Jehiel Alvord.)

(2) It was still a time when the law wanted fewer orphans to support.

If all children were declared adult early? Public support was required for fewer years, when parents' deaths made them orphans, if children were already "adults" .

Girls were, thus, by laws of the time, adults at 12. (Boys were not adults until 14.)

There is much disagreement about her birth year.

If age 12 in 1778, then she was born about 1766 or 1767. (That was three years after the "about 1759", given as the date her parents left for Northampton. It was cited by an old book of the 1850s, "The Vinton Memorial". The compiler, Rev. John Vinton, was related to her grandmother, Mary Vinton French.)

How did concerned parents stop a daughter, who maybe had ignored their wishes as to her name, from then marrying at 12? Given the law said she could?

Some later-born cousins, in her children's generation, could not believe age 12 was true. One family tree appears to have adjusted birth years for other siblings, making others older, so she could be older than 12 at marriage, though twisting others' ages "like pretzels" might be needed to get that "better date".

A source not known when the older trees were made? She was 82 for her 1840 Census, one that usually did not record women's names if an adult man was in the house. Pensions were awarded to Revolutionary widows and soldiers still alive if they had exhausted savings and other resources. As "Alvord Dorothy Wd", age 82 in 1840, she would have been born in 1758, making her abut 20 at marriage.

(3) How did she meet Jehiel Alvord?

Many Alvords had long lived in Hampshire County in western Mass.,different sets quite distantly related, after four to six generations. Her family of Frenches migrated there more recently. She, the new kid in town, and Jehiel Alvord would have attended church and possibly school together, if any school were provided.

The Alvords' American history began downriver, in or near Windsor, CT. (It was a mother place, from which smaller towns could spin off. ) Her own ancestor was Alexander Alford/Alvord. A related branch was headed by Benedict Alford, as was a female branch under the married name of Fowler. According to an old book of 1864:

"Historians seem to agree that Alexander and Benedict, of Windsor, Conn., were brothers, and that Alexander's sister, Joan Alvord, married May 26, 1646, Ambrose Fowler."

For Benedict, on "Nov. 26, 1640, he was married in Windsor to Joan Newton."

For Alexander: "We find by the early records of deeds that he was an early proprietor in Windsor, Conn. ... and moved to Northampton, Mass., about the year 1661, where he died. "

SOURCE: pages 92-93 of "The Burke and Alvord Memorial", compiled by Joseph Alonzo Bottell of Woburn, Mass., for William A. Burke of Lowell, Mass.

Their surname spellings were debated. The Alvord spelling "won" inside her branch, consistently used by Dorothy's generation, after both Alvord and Alford spellings were seen earlier. Why those two? In Germanic dialects, the letter V was pronounced as an F, making Alford a sound-it-out of Alvord. (The name is/was said to be pronounced as "Al-FURD", regardless of how spelled, with "Alvuard" also among the many old spellings. Always using a V prevented mis-spellings as Alfred.

Inter-related families would be found still near each other, both decades later and a thousand miles away. Dorothy's brother Abiathar and wife Beriah had a great-granddaughter, Mary Eliza French, of Michigan, off to California. Made a young widow there by her first husband, she re-married, to fellow widower Louis Nelson Williams, in Santa Cruz County, in the late 1870s. A Joshua Fowler, distant cousin of the Alvords, would be a witness. (Joshua was a farmer and ran a post office for the now extinct mountain-top town of Patchin. Santa Cruz lay on one side of the mountain, while Los Gatos and San Jose were on the other side. Born in Wisconsin, he and other siblings were brought to San Jose after the Civil War, by their widowed father. Post wedding, for the 1880 US Census, all had moved. Joshua's home and the Williams home were then both in Redwood Twp., also now extinct, replaced by suburbs. Joshua would be known as a farmer and vintner of the Los Gatos area. Louis Nelson Williams died/disappeared, take your pick, body not found, so Mary Eliza waited, forced to ultimately seek a divorce on grounds of desertion so she could claim their child Edwin Williams. She then returned to Michigan and remarried. This writer's spouse descends of Edwin.)

(4) For Dorothy's Frenches, when still back below Boston, her parents' marriage and then her siblings' baptisms would have been in the "Third Church" precinct of old Braintree. Before their third part became Randolph, their hamlet was known as Cochato, for the small river and the village that had been alongside before its native inhabitants were wiped out by an epidemic.

Her grandparents were most likely those families named as French and Niles and cited as co-founders of South Church, as the Third was also called. The Randolph Church's 150th centennial book of 1893 indicated the church's founding was in 1743.

Church might separate from state (town subsidies) voluntarily around the time of the Revolution, but was not required by Massachusetts laws until later (1825? 1830s?). Denominations were declared. Their Third/South church, formerly non-denominational, had been governed only by a covenant that new members were asked to sign, but would now have an allegiance to a national denomination, so turned into First Congregational of Randolph.

The congregation was smaller than seen in prior times. This left too little money to maintain records as well as seen for ancestors earlier at First and Second Churches. (They turn into North and Central once Third/South was named, later became Quincy's Unitarian and modern Braintree's Congregational).

Most of their baptismal records were found at one point, but not all. If not found, then what? One family tree pretended Dorothy had not existed. Another tried to infer her birth year, ran into a dilemma as they could not believe the conclusion she had to have been 12 at marriage, so, to giver her a "better" birth date, moved other sibling birth dates away from what records indicated.

family trees drawn later could drift away from true dates.

Randolph agreed to participate in sending in its records for a Vital Records book covering old Braintree, the period 1640 through 1850, for all three town-authorized churches, as if all were still in one big parish/precinct with just one church. Quincy (old First Church) was able to do this. The remnant keeping the Braintree name (old Second Church)were able to do this. However, Randolph apparently could not find the resources to follow through, perhaps discovered everything in a jumbled mess in the church attic? The big book edited by Bates describes marriages, births, deaths, wills, town minutes, through 1850 with baptisms listed including earlier generations down through that of her father, Abiathar French the senior, son of John French and Mary. Then, things become murky for this family.

Second and Third churches were at former riverside village sites used for summer gardening and fishing by native tribes. The Monatiquot and Cochato villages, spelled many ways earlier, were named for two rivers, the Monatiquot feeding the Weymouth, the Cochato feeding into the Monatiquot. The former inhabitants were already gone before her immigrant ancestors John and Grace French arrived at the old Monatiquot site. The first whites (at a nearby trading post/ship dock, serving pre-Puritan fishermen and fur traders) perhaps brought in killing sicknesses such as measles and small pox? With pastures and orchards located near Elm & Commercial in modern Braintree, so inland, her great-great-grandparents John and Grace had no choice but to travel for church, over marshlands and uphill, to the coast. They attended the inconvenient First Church formed closer to the seaside, on and around the old trading post. The post was believed to be called Mare Mont. (Mare for marine or seaside, Mont for a hill or little mountain visible from ships out on the sea, even at a distance, so easy to find. Think of a gas station by a freeway locating to be well-seen, to get a modern variation.) Disapproving Pilgrims to the south disliked the trading post's manager offering traditional May Pole dancing on May 1, a custom carried in from England, meant to celebrate the flowering trees bursting into bloom and the end of spring plowing. Were the post's patrons (traders and fisherman and sailors, ranging from Spanish to French to British) mostly male, so a rowdy bunch? Especially on May Day? "Out you go", said the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrim's intolerance made choice spots available when Puritans arrived a few years later. John and Grace and many others went first to a "mother church" at nearby Dorchester, not yet annexed by still tiny Boston. Others spun off to go to Weymouth. Their own set waited for a newly forming church and town to be called Braintrey (old Braintree, large enough to include all three of the later church's parishioners). Their town and church welcomed a Dorchester-trained Puritan minister named William Veazie/Veasey/Vesey.

Dorothy's great-grandfather, Dependence French, would have attended both the First and Second churches of old Braintree. A Rev. Niles served for fifty years at Second Church(distant relative? came from a plantation area once called Block Island that merged into Rhode island). By the time the Frenches and Thayers and their neighbors obtained their long-requested second church and burying ground, her great-grandfather Dependence was an older man with many children by second wife Rebecca Fenno. His grown sons ready to find their own land in remote parts, creating the need of Third Church, future Randolph, upstream, on the narrower Cochato River, giving the name of the other summer village of extinct natives.

Dependence and Rebecca's eldest son was her grandfather John French. A miller/farmer and hunter/trapper he would marry newcomer Mary Vinton. She was of an initially well-off blacksmithing/oil foundry family from a town close to, but not in Salem. The latter was of ill repute near her year of birth for hanging 20 innocents as witches, its minister of questioned judgment for not protesting the wrongness. After their parents died, the adult Vinton siblings came down to Braintree to buy an ironworking facility in what become Braintree. Much to the surprise of her more business-minded brother, after his family paid whatever money they had for the old ironworks and for new acreage, then assumed mortgages for the rest, a group in town waited until all of this was accomplished and only then gained enough votes to shut down the pond and dam needed to run their business properly.

Were tears shed by women over what men might do? The stressed business-minded brother stayed. However, he was of record by a minister cousin (Rev. John Vinton) as treating a son so harshly, that the son, a cousin to Dorothy's father, ran away to England and was never seen again by his mother or siblings.

The other Vinton brother, Dorothy's great-uncle Abiathar Vinton, left. Was his move related to the loss of a job with that stressed brother, who stayed behind? A dislike of family dramas? Simply a desire to have a farm of his own, for his children? He took his family out west, to Dorothy's future home of Hampshire County. Abiathar Vinton and Abiathar Vinton the Jr. went north of Northampton. When the two Frenches named Abiather the senior and junior followed, the best "empty land" still remaining must have been southwest of Northampton, as that is where they went.

Rev. Veazie, the first minister at First Church in old Braintree, had a daughter who, once widowed, would marry Dorthy's male immigrant ancestor, John, after Grace had died. Varied Veasies/Veseys were seen migrating with Frenches everywhere (including out to Ohio, then to Michigan, then to Calif./Nevada), everywhere, that is, except Hampshire County. By 1750 or so, Hampshire County had attracted/developed a religious set calling themselves New Lights. One interpretation among several? They would make church unpleasant for anyone not as "fully committed" as they imagined themselves to be. A nephew of Rev. Williams took over the church, after training in the "colorful" preaching methods of the New Lights. Attendance went up for awhile, perhaps over the novelty of drastic things said in a quietly soothing voice? over the excitement of people shaking and chanting? Perhaps the Veazies, descended of a calmer minister, skipped that county purposely? It was certainly an incentive to pressure Northampton and the legislature to let the newcomers settling in Westhampton to have their own church.

Someone name Savage did his best to organize and copy whatever could be found at Third Church, now First Congregational of Randolph. (He submitted lists to the New England genealogical society.)

(4) She and her brother Abiathar French (the junior) married siblings.

She married Jehiel Alvord; her brother married Beriah Alvord. Their children were doubly related. They would see each other at double the normal number of weddings, baptisms and funerals.

The double connections maintained at family events would have held true until Abiathar and Beriah followed their sons out to NE Ohio. Their sons John and David went first, to clear land. Abiathar and Beriah arrived a few years later with a married son Jacob and their own youngest children. They perhaps delayed their trip while another child, the very last Abiathar French, died back in Hampshire County, Massachusetts. (His death was reported in a family tree done by descendents of Rhoda, an older sister to Dorothy and Abiathar, the one who married a Hessian named Pittsinger/ Pettsinger/ Petzinger.)

(5) Can we find more of her children, by tracking others in the family?

Not made obvious in any trees-- If one sibling takes over the family farm, no other land open nearby, the others wishing to farm have to move.

Dorothy's brother, Jonathan French, and her brother-in-law, Jonathan Alvord, apparently were the ones on each side who had inherited or bought their respective fathers' lands. Their last farms were in Hampshire County. That would put them at places known to all, for easy return, a good meeting place for reunions and summer visits.

In-laws mattered. A few people stayed local, but more moved to NY or to Ohio. Did she have children who moved with them? Or did she only have the two sons, Isaac and Jehiel the junior?

(6) A useful tree is archived at wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com, as "&db=MillerM", the Alexander Alvord section (last updated in 2006 by Marv Miller, aka Marvin G. Miller, not related to Meribah Miller). It connects Dorothy's Barker in-laws to the Alvords, Frenches and Clapps, plus to the Austins and Lambs.

The Frenches were a new family in Hampshire County around 1770 or later, as were the Barkers, while the Alvords had been local quite a long time. Originally from down river of Hampshire County, in CT, the Barkers had a ministering relative who trained at Harvard and Yale. Those places were not for rich people yet, not famed then, but begun by the towns, meant to produce educated ministers. The Barker minister went to the Cape Cod area, further south of Boston than the Frenches' old hearthplace, and further served in the Mass. legislature, so the Barker name may have already seemed familiar.

Boiling a big tree down to some basics-- In-laws could provide (a) matchmaking and(b) mutual support in and after migrations, in a day without EMS or childcare. Connected families, thus, (a) intermarried heavily and (b) informed each other when neighbors wanted to move to newly opened places. Some of the following is still being double-checked:

*Dorothy's brother, Jonathan French. He married Thankful Barker. They stayed local.

*Her spouse Jehiel's brother, Jonathan Alvord. He married Elizabeth Barker, aunt to Thankful Barker. They had a son they named Abiathar Alvord in 1774. He would die a young man, while in the military, at a battle called St. Clair's defeat. He was clearly named to honor one of the Frenches' Abiathars, probably the junior. Presumed to marry before his birth in 1774, they stayed local.

*Thankful Barker French had multiple brothers who moved to NY state, as did her father (Truman Barker, to Otsego County; Abijah, to Lebanon Springs, in Columbia County; Oliver, sufficiently young to go with their father to the town/township of Russia in Herkimer County, NY.)

*Thankful's sister Anna married Richard Clapp.

*Thankful, Lucinda, and Anna Barker shared Delight Dewey as their mother. Delight had cousins surnamed Austin, as her mother's maiden name was Priscilla Austin.

*Thankful's Lucinda would marry a Joseph Lamb. They also stayed in what became Russia, NY. She was second of two sisters named Lucinda Barker, the first a month-old infant who died in Herkimer Cty., NY, in 1790. In a day without photos, these families remembered a lost child by giving the same name to another. They did so with a new cousin or grandchild if there were no more siblings.

*Thankful's nieces included the Sarah/Sally Barker who married Dorothy's son, Isaac. This was in 1800, before the big migration of many out to Ohio.

Post-1800, not in the tree-- Two local Clapp men migrated to NE Ohio a year ahead of the Frenches and other Clapps (in 1803?). Eli Clapp went with Paul Clapp and Spencer Phelps to clear land in what became Leroy Twp. Others followed (by 1805?). Eli then married Abiathar and Beriah's daughter, Rebecca French (Dorothy's niece). They had quite a feast, said Spencer Phelps, fellow migrant out to Ohio. He said theirs was the first wedding in what later became Leroy Twp. Leroy would elect its first officials after the 1820 Census. Carved out of the wilderness, it lay up the Grand River from the mother township, Painesville, Ohio. Painesville was the main town at first, a rival to Cleveland to the west.

Pre-1800, not in the tree--- Connections of Frenches to people named Lamb dated back to Dorothy's great-grandparents. Dependence French and Rebecca Fenno of Braintree pushed to start "Second Church" and its burying ground on Elm Street. Before there was a Second Church, Dependence's older sister Mary, perhaps baptized in a mother church of Dorchester as Mercy, had married twice and died young, her marriages known, but only as her children were named in her father's will. She married first a Pool/Poole, then a Lamb, with all but one of her children by Mr. Lamb.

(7) Did any "double cousins" maintain ties later?

Out in Ohio, nephew David French was murdered in 1825.

David's attackers? Perhaps they looked for money, perhaps they were on a drunken spree. Which was not made clear in the news articles found, though the men were caught. They way-laid David on the road between Newburgh/Newburg and Cleveland. The town/township of Newburgh was still separate, not yet folded into Cleveland and its eastern suburbs. For the moment, Newburgh was still larger than Cleveland. David had some sort of business there, maybe a mill, guessing from some small hints made in local histories, plus some farmland. The road ran parallel to a new canal still under construction, about to connect big shipping lanes, linking their giant Lake Erie to the Ohio River to the south. The long and wide Ohio River fed into the wider Mississippi, giving faster access to both Minneapolis-St. Paul to New Orleans and all cities in-between. One of David's three orphaned sons, Austin French, would move down to its end by the Scipio River (check this), marry, with children and grandchildren moving down to Arkansas and a bit into Louisiana.

The canal connection, busy until canals came through, would make Cleveland attractive, but left David's children orphaned, three boys and two girls. His youngest son, named Elah, stayed in prospering NE Ohio, married, and raised a family.

A third Jehiel Alvord, a grandson, would visit this grown Elah's family. They were seen together in the 1860 Census, in Concord Twp., just west of Painesville. Elah was a hotel keeper, listed with his wife and five children, all near the bottom of this first page:

FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GBS8-9DZ6

Near the top of the next page was "Jehial", surname a bit scrawled, the Alvord almost looking like Aloord.

FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GBS8-9DCR

Did he stay at Elah's hotel for some family event? A July wedding? Lots of young men "tied the knot" before going off to the Civil War. A bachelor uncle would have been invited. His age was 50. Counting backwards 50 years from the census date of July 11, 1860 gives a birth range. His calculated birth, between July 12, 1809, and July 11, 1810, narrowed him to the grandson by Dorothy's son Isaac, as her son Jehiel also had a son called Jehiel, bring the total Jehiel Alvords with fathers known to four. This Jehiels presence at Elah's hotel shows how long-lasting were the connections with the Frenches created back in Hampshire County, from her wedding, to at least 1860.

Elah's brother Austin French was apparently named for an Alvord in-law. (Had Priscilla's family of Austins been kind and welcoming to Austin's half-Hessian mother? a daughter of Christian/Christopher Knieppe, who took his children and wifer Meribah to Ohio. (Multiple were buried in a Painesville cemetery, eventually used for a high school parking lot. The name was spelled many ways. In early Ohio, it was pronounced something like Keneepe, causing one spelling.)

Females are harder to find when records are scanty. Elah's sisters were included Elva French? The other, Almira/Elmira French, must have been 12 when, father gone, and "adult", she was ordered out of Leroy Twp., around 1828. The practice of "warning out the poor" normally meant orphans and the elderly, but sped-up in recessions and depressions, to add the unemployed. Families could "hit the skids" after a murder or other set-back, when the nation as whole was doing "just fine". Dorothy would have understood the challenges ahead for a teen treated as an adult too early? Almira French disappeared from history. Of the scenarios that can be imagined, one held, we don't know which. (Probably married? Perhaps, instead, dead early? Or, an alcoholic wanderer? Or, indentured and moved elsewhere? Or...?).

Her name would be remembered when a brother named his daughters. A much later Almira French's name was thus seen as the wife of a "Francis Boss" when her daughter Alice remarried in Geauga County, Ohio, in 1924, at age 50ish.

Elah's brother Ogden French was seen with his family in an 1870 Census that showed Austin and Elah elsewhere. He, too, would raise a family, but committed suicide. Children grieve in different ways and some never recover from the hardships created, especially if living harshly?

(8) Have we found all of Dorothy's and Jehiel's children?

It seems unlikely they had just Isaac and the second Jehiel. Finding relatives and then searching closeby led us to those two, and to Abiathar and Beriah's six who went to Ohio. That number of six was according to Spencer Phelps, when elderly, remembering on paper his youthful pioneering, moving from western Massachusetts to Ohio, with two of the Clapps. Did any of Dorothy's leave for NY with the Barkers or go a state further with Clapp and French in-laws, to Ohio or the Indiana/Michigan border?

SIDE NOTE,2023

KENEEP CONNECTION. Once out west, in Ohio, nephew David was described by neighbor Spencer Phelps, writing of old area history for a local newspaper, to have come to help relatives and a "Charles Keneep" clear land, in what became LeRoy Twp. David then married Charles' sister. Phelps said the rest of the Frenches had come, that a daughter married an Elah Clap who had arrived with Mr. Phelps. She would be widowed by Clapp and married a McMillen. Abiathar and Beriah were named, with serious mis-spellings, as parents on that daughter's gravestone, an afterthought by grandchildren who'd not known them as they'd died too early, never seen their Puritan names written out? A widowed Abiathar was cited as being "warned out" of LeRoy, in the 1820s, possibly with the dementia troubling a few relatives earlier when in the Braintree MA region, including his sister Mary, whose family donated the land for French Park in Braintree, and their uncle, the John French who died with his wife Experience Thayer in an epidemic that killed two younger brothers, contributed to the too early death of one's wife, making them among the first buried at what became Elm Street cemetery in Braintree. (Multiple of the old cemeteries had been destroyed by their era's "developers", so the daughter's cenotaph for them was a way of remembering Abiathar and Beriah.)

David and his wife Louise had gone to live in Newburgh Twp. A good site for water-powered mills, it was both high above and eastish of a still tiny Cleveland's downtown. Further east, what became Leroy Twp., was similarly on a ridge above Painesville. Both high spots overlooked Lake Erie, the height making them free of the mosquito-breeding stagnant waters that could occur down lower. Both at river mouths with shipping potential onto the Great Lakes, Painesville was at first the more important of the two. Then, in 1825, a Canal was put through, letting Cleveland's Cuyahoga connect to the larger Ohio River to the south, which connected to the Miss. R, so St Louis and New Orleans. The canal must have drained enough stagnant waters around Cleveland, that there were no more complaints. It annexed Newburgh and overtook Painesville in size and buiness activity.

==================================

Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, July 2015, revised Jan., 2016, Spring, 2016, March-April, 2017. Revisited in 2023, July. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.