So. In the spirit of discovery, I set out to untangle a couple of perpetual misdirections in the story arc of one Solomon Leonard, American progenitor.

If you surf enough family trees on Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, or even the IGI, sooner or later you’ll find Solomon Leonard called “John Solomon” Leonard, married to “Mary” rather than Sarah Chandler. “Blasphemy!” I say, as the Bible of all things Mayflower, The Mayflower Families Through Five Generations, Vol 15, p8, clearly states that:

SARAH CHANDLER³ (Isabella² Chilton, James¹)… m. Duxbury ca. 1640 SOLOMON LEONARD (LENNER or LEONARDSON), b. prob. Monmouthshire, England ca. 1610; d. Bridgewater bef. 1 May 1671.

So how did these erroneous factoids become so widespread? Well, in a word, laziness. Name collectors aren’t known for checking their sources and the sources, in this case, appeared to be valid. It all started with noted historian/judge Nathum Mitchell, who penned The History of the Early Settlement of Bridgewater, MA. in 1840. He noted, on page 244, that Solomon died in 1686, leaving a widow “Mary.”

In point of fact, Solomon died before 1671 leaving a widow Sarah, but his son Solomon died in 1686, leaving a widow “Mary.” Further complicating the story, it’s entirely possible the two of them were living on land that belonged, at one time, to Roger Chandler, leaving the impression that “Mary” must’ve inherited her “father’s” land. In actuality, it was Sarah (Chandler) Leonard who inherited land from Roger, which she and Solomon Sr. then left to their children, including son “John.” (See where this is going?)

In the settlement of Solomon Sr.’s estate in 1675, son Samuel confirmed that son John, coincidentally married to a woman named “Sarah,” got the 50 acres of land originally left to Sarah, his mother. Around and around we go.

James Savage, who wrote A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England in 1860, simply repeated Judge Mitchell’s error without much thought.

By the time Manning Leonard came along to write the most comprehensive history of Solomon’s line to date, he was well aware of some unintentional errors in The History of Bridgewater. So, too, was the original author, Judge Nathum Mitchell. Manning and Mitchell in fact collaborated, to some degree, on Manning’s Memorial: Genealogical, Historical, and Biographical of Solomon Leonard 1637 published in 1896. The two of them agreed that errors are inevitable “from frequent repetition of Christian names in different families.”

Manning Leonard, according to his Preface, “had some acquaintance with Hon. James Savage and sought to have in his great work, which was then in manuscript, a correction of the published errors in regard to our progenitors. Many of them, however, it will be seen, have been perpetuated.” That’s a left-handed compliment if ever I saw one.

Manning was the first to notice that the Solomon Leonard estate settlement of 1675 happened before Solomon Jr. had passed on. So he did untangle the Solomon-Solomon confusion, but he still had Solomon Sr. married to a “Mary” (presumably Chandler). It would be years before the editors of MF5G (Mayflower Families Through Five Generations) would track down the real spouses of the three Chandler daughters and set the record straight. To wit:

• Sarah CHANDLER m. Solomon LEONARD ca 1640
• Mary CHANDLER m. Edmund BRUFF
• Martha CHANDLER m. John BUNDY bef 1649

The moral of the story? CHECK YOUR SOURCES. And don’t assume that because three-out-of-four dentists gynecologists genealogists agree, they are right. Keep looking, until you find the most recent source, who comes closest to using primary, rather than secondary evidence.

Now, if I could just determine whether Solomon was a member of the Knights Templar….

Courtesy Wikipedia

The idea that the same Leonards who got involved in the Whiskey Rebellion eighteen years later might have a hand in forming their own state is, well, predictable I guess. But it was news to me.

Jurisdiction of the areas west of the Allegheny Mountains had been a problem for governing bodies from day one. First for the British, who were busy fighting Indians and settling border disputes between the Pennsylvania and Virgina colonies, and later, for The US Government, which had racked up some serious debt in the Revolutionary War. In either case, the official seats of government were too far removed to give much of a hoot what what happened west of the Alleghenies.

So, in the summer of 1776, several thousand southwestern Pennsylvania pioneers petitioned the Second Continental Congress to recognize Westsylvania as the fourteenth state of the United States of America. Had it been granted, the new state would’ve included parts of present day Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. The petitioners argued that the continuing border disputes were likely to result in civil war and that warring land companies were increasingly pissing off the otherwise friendly local Indians.

Separatist agitation and petitioning continued all the way up until 1782, when Pennsylvania and Virgina settled their border dispute and the Pennsylvania Assembly declared any further agitation an act of treason, punishable by death. Congress, for its part, did what Congress is wont to do and ignored the petitions for statehood entirely.

The point of this whole exercise was to point out that the Leonard clan was right smack in the middle of it all. According to Howard L. Lecky and the petition he found in the Library of Congress, brothers Caleb Jr., Silas, and Abner Leonard of the Washington-Fayette-Greene County area had signed one of the separatist documents. Or did they?

There is some evidence to suggest that those gathering signatures simply went from county to county and took their names from militia rolls. In some cases, the alleged petitioners couldn’t read or write, let alone offer a signature. And in still others, the alleged petitioner was actually dead, and that puts a real wrinkle in your John Hancock.

But I’m inclined to think the Leonard signatures are real, given that they also stepped up and spit in the government’s eye over the whole idea of a whiskey tax some years later. What do you think?

(As always, there is more to the story than I’ve related here, but Wikipedia has a decent summary over here. I’m sure there are any number of books on the subject and the Greene County Historical Society claims to have reprints of Lecky’s The Tenmile Country and Its Pioneer Families available for sale. That’s where I found the Leonard names, but I’d call to make sure they have the book before sending your money.)

Changing subjects now… with a question for those of you who signed up for e-mail notifications… when you get one, are you getting a notification, or are you getting the entire post? I only ask because I’m getting both and I haven’t quite figured out why. Technology. Ya gotta love it.

**Update 11:15am PST** I’ve just now enabled comment threading! Which means, for you non-geeks, that you can now comment on the post and reply to other people’s comments… which recreates a defacto discussion group! (Gawd [shaking head], I’m such a nerd.)

Cheers!
Rick

Related post: Inlaws and Outlaws: The Whiskey Rebellion

The Mitchell Papers

Because Family Tree Maker connects directly to Ancestry.com and uses any information you’ve added on an individual to go find that individual in other family trees, I occasionally click the “Web Search Resources” button. In this case, I was looking for info on Luzanna Leonard, daughter of Daniel and Lucretia (Jennings) Leonard, who stayed in Pennsylvania with her aging mother while Lucretia’s only son William and most of his family moved to Ohio.

Turns out Luzanna married a David Mitchell after everyone cleared out and that David Mitchell is a distant ancestor of one Jerry Zollars. Yes, that Zollars family, of Zollarsville fame. Jerry had a family tree on Ancestry and the good sense to include an email address where I could reach him. We carried on quite the digital conversation.

To make a long story short… (too late?)… Jerry had recently received four storage containers full of Mitchell family history from a Mitchell widow, including one entire binder on the Leonards. Seems the Mitchells and the Leonards liked each other very much. They intermarried at least four times and probably more. But Jerry had, in turn, delivered the material to a Mitchell family member in Irving, Texas.

Tracking that Mitchell down was easy enough, and he was kind enough to ship the Leonard binder to me, provided I promised to ship it back when I was finished reviewing it. Done deal.

Wow! That’s all I can say about William C. “Bill” Mitchell’s research. It spanned several decades, dozens of families, and he was meticulous about citing his sources. There is some evidence he may have even corresponded with Jennie Leonard Hutchinson before her death. Bill did fall victim to an erroneous biography that said Lot Leonard descended from Henry Leonard rather than Solomon, but over all, the binder spot on.

Among the new leads I picked up for future followup… 1) Caleb Jr. left a will in Washington County Orphan’s Court (none of us had ever thought to look there), 2) Luzanna left a will in Uniontown, Fayette County (who would expect a will, let alone in the “wrong” county?), and 3) Caleb Jr., Silas, and Abner all signed a petition seeking an independent state of Westsylvania.

Oh, and two of the Burt sisters (who married Leonards and Mitchellls respectively) died of typhoid within hours of each other and were buried in the same grave. I know. Macabre.

William inspired me to go out and buy a copy of Lecky’s The Tenmile Country and its Pioneer Families on Ebay… and puzzled me with a reference to source material called the “Horn Papers.” It sounded vaguely familiar, though I had never cited that source, so I did what every good researcher does and Googled it. Turns out the “Horn Papers” were an elaborate genealogical hoax and one that might be the subject of another article somewhere down the road. Needless to say, this revelation did little to change my opinion of undocumented family history.

An-n-n-ywa-a-a-y… I made copies of all 216 pages in that binder, if you’re interested. Fair warning that they’re all in William Mitchell’s not-so-great handwriting and he could write smaller than anyone I’ve ever known. You’ve been warned.

Cheers!
Rick

A sample of Leonard Ironworks, courtesy Brad Leonard

This Web site, as most of you know, focuses on the family commonly known as “The Mayflower Leonards.” That line starts with Solomon Leonard, who arrived in Plymouth Colony around 1629-30 and married the granddaughter of Mayflower passenger James Chilton. The “Iron Leonards” are actually better documented, in some ways, beginning with brothers James and Henry Leonard, who may have arrived in what would eventually become Providence, Rhode Island, as early as 1645.

Now, to make matters a little more confusing, the two families may actually be related, as they came here from two English/Welsh towns less than thirty miles apart. Solomon is said to have been born in environs of the town of Bristol in Monmouthshire, England. James and Henry, on the other hand, are said to have been born in or near Pontypool, Wales, just a stone’s throw across the Bristol Channel. We’ll leave the relationship discussion for another day.

To find Solomon, one must dig and scratch and rustle about in musty old colonial books and records. To find James and Henry, one need only drive to the present-day city of Taunton, Massachusetts. Their names are emblazoned on streets and buildings and historical monuments as far as the eye can see. One of their homes, built in 1682, is still standing. The “Iron Leonards,” you see, got very rich establishing America’s first iron smelting plants in New England. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I try not to get distracted by my wealthier cousins, given the hundreds yet to investigate on this side of the family… but I have to admit there are some fascinating stories on that side. The Iron Leonards, it seems, found a particularly iron-rich strip of land that belonged to an Indian tribe headed by a chief oddly named “King Phillip.”

King Phillip willingly granted the land to the Leonards and got along handsomely with them right up to and through what became known as “King Phillips War.” Do a Google search and you’ll find it quite easily. King Phillip specifically forbid his warriors from doing any harm to the Leonards, even as they readily slaughtered other whites in the neighborhood. In the end, however, King Phillip was killed and there’s one story that contends his head found a home in the Leonard basement until a proper burial could be arranged.

Did I mention that Bridgewater and Taunton, Massachusetts are less than ten miles apart? No? Well, they are, and you just know the Leonards would have to make things even more complicated by intermarrying, right? Yup. Levi Leonard, great-great-grandson of James Leonard, married Anna Leonard, great-granddaughter of Solomon Leonard. There were also a couple of near-misses, like Benjamin Leonard, grandson of Solomon, marrying Hannah Phillips, whose sister married a great-grandson of James Leonard.

It’s quite likely there are more intermarriages to be discovered… beyond, I mean, the obvious brother marrying his brother’s widow and vice versa. We’ll save those ramblings for another day, too. In the meantime, if you’re still wondering why some members of your immediate family may be just a leetle, uh, unusual… blame it on the Iron Leonards.

———-
Addendum 7/3/09
For those interested in pursuing the Iron Leonards further, I would refer you to William reed Deane’s A genealogical memoir of the Leonard family : containing a full account of the first three generations of the family of James Leonard or Stephen Banks Leonard of Owego, Tioga County, New York, 1909, both available online courtesy of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. James Leonard’s family tree, compiled during a Leonard family reunion in 1901, is online here.

Isaac & Daniel Leonard, twins?

So, whaddaya think? Neither of these photos is dated, but both appear to be men in their fifties. Isaac Leonard, on the left, was born in 1827 according to an early Leonard researcher. That would put him midway between firstborn Edmund (1925) and third born Daniel (1930), on the right. Unfortunately, that early researcher didn’t leave us his sources.

Both men left extensive paper trails, but neither man ever mentioned having a twin brother. Wouldn’t you think it would come up at least once? Their county of birth hadn’t started keeping birth records yet and newspapers from that time are mysteriously missing from the microfilm collection. (I suspect ancestors of Rose Mary Woods, but she passed away in 2005.)

In 1860, the first census to record ages has Issac as 28 years old, Daniel as 30, making Isaac the younger brother not the older. Isaac is missing in 1870, but in 1880 he appears as 48 years old Daniel is 50. Records of 1890 were destroyed by fire, but in 1900 Isaac lists his age as 69 and his birth month as June 1830, same as brother Daniel. but Daniel says the month was April. In 1910, both men are 80 years old, listing only the year of birth as 1830. Both men died within a few months of each other in 1913 and 1914.

Daniel consistently listed his birthday as June 24th, 1930 in multiple locations… the April date in 1900 is clearly a clerical error. Isaac, on the other hand, rarely mentioned his birthday and appeared to grow older as the decades rolled by. But his tombstone clearly says “June 24th, 1830.”

What’s a researcher to do? How ’bout you? Any twins in your line? Any unsolved mysteries?