Uncovering Thomas J. Mahoney: The Long Road to My 3rd Great-Grandfather

For quite awhile now, my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas J. Mahoney was little more than a handful of vague facts on my family tree. He was an Irish immigrant who showed up in Connecticut by 1860, raised a large family, worked every job he could to keep them afloat, and died in Worcester in 1920. I knew the broad strokes, but not the story. Not the man.

And definitely not the names of the parents he left behind in Ireland ... unless they came with him to the United States back in the 1850s.

Like so many Irish lines, the Mahoneys were swallowed up in the great silence left by missing parish books, burned civil records, and the chaos of the mid-19th century. I've searched on and off trying to figure out where in Ireland Thomas was born, and who his parents were. The answers always felt one document out of reach, and might be one of those things I'll have to leave to a professional genealogist in Ireland.

All the same, I keep digging.

My nights for the past few weeks have been spent buried in newspaper archives, cross-checking every mention of a Mahoney in the Norwich and Worcester areas. I flipped through U.S. Census pages line by line, zooming in on faint handwriting. I combed through street listings, vital records, burial notices — anything that might help link one stubborn Mahoney to another.

And finally, the last couple days, things began to click.

Pinning Down the Dates, the Moves, the Man

Census data had always given me the rough outline.

• Born May 1842 in Ireland.
• In the U.S. by 1855 or 1859 — census reports conflict here.
• In Norwich, Connecticut by 1860, a teenage laborer just starting his life in America.

But today, thanks to finally finding his death certificate, that vague birth month finally became a real date: May 2, 1842.

The obituary has added even more color. It describes Thomas as one of the strongest men in Norwich during his younger years, working as a steamer driver who handled the horses for the Wauregan engine company during fires. This wasn’t just a man who lived through the 19th century. This was a man who ran toward burning buildings.

From Norwich, the family probably followed work wherever the mills needed labor.

• 1870 Census – Thomas and his wife Bridget O’Sullivan are in Norwich with their early children. Thomas is a laborer; Bridget is “keeping house.”
• 1880 Census – They’ve moved to Richmond, Rhode Island, where Thomas, and sons John and William, all work in a woolen mill.
• 1900 Census – The family is now in Worcester, living at 140 Cambridge Street. This is where things get confusing, because Thomas’s son — also named Thomas — is head of household, and his own son named Thomas. But everyone fits: my 2nd great-grandfather Thomas (1871–1958), his wife Nora, their three young children, and the older generation of Mahoney brothers all working woolen-mill jobs.
• 1910 Census – Thomas, now widowed, is living with his son William at 80 Temple Street.
• 1920 Census – He appears as a patient at the Worcester State Hospital, likely during the final decline of his long illness.

On August 27, 1920, he died at the home of his son Daniel at 212 Franklin Street. His obituary said simply: after a long illness. His death certificate listed arteriosclerosis with broncho-pneumonia as a contributing factor.

After all those years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, he made one final journey back to Norwich, where he was buried beside his wife, Bridget.

Bridget O’Sullivan: A Brief, Bright Thread

Bridget was born in Ireland in 1844, the daughter of Eugene O’Sullivan. Her mother’s name remains one of the lingering mysteries. She and Thomas married sometime before 1864, most likely in Connecticut. She died of pneumonia on March 24, 1900, just 56 years old.

Her funeral notice describes a woman deeply loved. Dozens of floral tributes: “Dear Mother,” “Mother,” “Mother.” Four sons carrying her casket. Her body returned to Norwich — the place where the Mahoney's American story began.

The Breakthrough: Finding Thomas’s Parents

Today, after cross-matching death records, burial entries, and likely family clusters, I was finally able to identify the parents of Thomas J. Mahoney: 

• Father: yet another Thomas Mahoney, born in Ireland
• Mother: (first name unknown) Leonard, born in Ireland

For a line whose origins had been a black hole for so long, even these two names are monumental. And the Leonard surname, which is strongly associated with County Cork, reinforces the growing theory that Cork is the homeland of this Mahoney branch.

No townland yet. No parish. But a county and two parental surnames are more than I had even this morning.

Genealogy is often described as solving a puzzle, but it rarely feels that neat. It’s more like pulling threads out of dust, hoping one leads somewhere. Today, finally, a thread did. Now I continue digging to see where this latest thread will lead.

I’m actively researching both sides of my family tree and writing full family histories so these stories aren’t lost to time. Much of my ancestry leads back to Ireland, where records become difficult to trace without the help of professional Irish genealogists. Any contributions go directly toward funding this research, obtaining hard-to-access records, and preserving our history for future generations.

If you’d like to support the project, you can contribute via Venmo at: @ShaunMoriarty. Thank you for helping make this work possible.

The Disaster That Nearly Ended My Family Line

It's a family story I had never heard even the vaguest of references to. It's a major industrial accident in my own state that this history teacher was never aware of. It was nearly the end of my existence, some 120 years before I was born.

My second-great-grandparents, Patrick and Frances Hurley, had been married for about four years when they were both lucky to survive the collapse of a six-story textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The Hurleys were both employed at the Pemberton Mill, a large textile mill that stretched 280 feet long and 84 feet wide; one of the largest in the city. The mill itself was relatively new construction, having been built in 1853, but its owners crammed more and more machinery within to maximize profits. 

The construction had been locally decried as insufficient as the owners had cut corners to save money.

"The building had never been considered as staunch as it ought to have been," reported the Boston Evening Transcript the next day. "It was built about seven years since, and was then thought a sham; indeed, before the machinery was put in, the walls spread to such a degree that some twenty-two tons of iron stays were put in to save the building from falling by its own weight."

This proved to be disastrous late in the day of January 10, 1860. It was about 4:30pm that Tuesday afternoon when the mill workers, which included immigrants, women, and children, felt the building shift and heard the world around them suddenly come crashing down. 

The American Heritage magazine described the unfolding scene vividly: "Suddenly there was a sharp rattle, and then a prolonged, deafening crash. A section of the building's brick wall seemed to bulge out and explode, and then, literally in seconds, the Pemberton collapsed. Tons of machinery crashed down through crumpling floors, dragging trapped, screaming victims along in their downward path. At a few minutes after five, the factory was a heap of twisted iron, splintered beams, pulverized bricks, and agonized, imprisoned human flesh."

According to witnesses and survivors, the scene was unfathomable as the debris formed a pyramid of rubble in excess of 50 feet high. The Boston Globe reported: "The scene after the fall was one of indescribable horror. Hundreds of men, women, and children were buried in the ruins."

"The moans and cries for help of those in the ruins whose lives had not been immediately crushed out, mingled with an alarm rung out by the factory bells, called almost the entire community to the spot," reported The Boston Journal. "Darkness lent additional horror to the scene, for while a thousand hands were ready to rescue it was impossible to know whence the calls for assistance came."

A few hours after the initial disaster, at about 9:30pm, as search-and-rescue efforts continued in the darkness, rescuers employed oil lamps to guide their way. Unfortunately, one of those handheld oil lamps was inadvertently knocked over, leading to a massive fire that quickly spread through the textile mill.

"In a few moments the ruins were a sheet of flames," reported The Boston Globe. "Fourteen are known to have been burned to death in the sight of their loved ones, who were powerless to aid them."

The Boston Evening Transcript added: "The screams and moans of the poor, buried, burning and suffocating creatures can be distinctly heard, but no power on earth can save them."

 It is impossible to say how many additional lives were lost because of the fire, though the Boston Evening Transcript reported on one such fatality: "Those near the breaking out of the fire were almost on the point of extricating a woman not badly hurt, but the flames drove them back, and the woman is supposed to have perished in the flames, when delivery seemed so near." In An Authentic History of the Lawrence Calamity, published later that year, it was reported that one trapped man cut his own throat rather than be consumed by the approaching flames; he was rescued, but died from his other injuries.

In the end, according to The Boston Evening Transcript: "Brick, mortar and human bones are promiscuously mingled."

From across the Atlantic Ocean, the London Times compared the disaster to the devastation typically reserved for battlefields. “We doubt, indeed, whether in any age, so many human beings have ever perished so terribly by an accident of ordinary life. War may produce parallel scenes of horror, but the annals of peace may be searched in vain for any calamity so appalling as the disaster at Lawrence,” The London Times reported.

As for the Hurleys, both managed to escape with their lives intact, though each was injured. Patrick was just a couple weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and had come to the United States just a decade earlier from Killarney in County Kerry, Ireland. Frances, also a native of Killarney, had just turned 21 years old weeks before. According to her obituary, after she died in 1909: "She was one of the few survivors of the Pemberton mill catastrophe of the 60's. Mrs. Hurley was taken out through one of the cellar windows. The mill, after collapsing, was burned through the carelessness of some of the rescuers. Mrs. Hurley claimed to be one of the last survivors of the collapsed mill."

The Atlas and Daily Bee of Boston published a list of the victims and survivors nearly a week later, consuming nearly one-third of the front page on January 16, 1860. My great-great-grandparents are listed among the "Saved," as are 897 other names. Among them are two other Hurleys, though whether they are related is not yet known, including a Joannah Hurley listed among those killed in the disaster. Additionally, though no known relations are included, so too are a more than a half-dozen Moriarty and Mahoney names listed among those involved in the Pemberton Mill collapse.

The Hurleys soon left Lawrence, though I am quite sure January 10, 1860 never left them. They moved some 80 miles southwest to the small town of Warren. Settling in West Warren, Patrick "was one of the chief promoters in establishing the present St Thomas Roman Catholic church," according to his obituary in 1906, almost a half-century after his life was nearly extinguished.

Patrick continued working cotton mills for a number of years as a loomfixer, before saving up enough money to buy a farm in the Thorndike section of Palmer. He retired from the farm life in his early 70s, moving back to Warren for the final few years of his life, passing away at the age of 76 on September 30, 1906. Frances survived until 1909, passing away the morning of August 10 at her Summer Street home. She was 69.

It is so very sobering to realize that my family line nearly ended that January afternoon, in a mill I never even knew existed until now.

Pemberton Mill, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Source: Library of Congress.

Murdered by witchcraft

The history of colonial New England and witchcraft is certainly not limited to the infamous Salem Witch Trials. It was an area of concern strong enough to be codified in a number of laws, based in large part in scripture. While those accused of engaging in the dark arts and consorting with the Devil could be put to death, witchcraft was blamed for the death of my 10th great-grandmother.

Roughly 30 years before the hysteria of Salem was the case of an unscrupulous couple in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Local legend apparently claimed a cave, known as Mill Rock, was inhabited by witches. "Coach drivers feared passing the cave at night, because witches might throw burning wood on the carriage roofs," according to a 2012 haunting article in The Shore Line Times. "When the drivers saw the Cedar Sentinel [one large tree in a clearing], they knew they were near the witches' cave and whipped their horses to speed on by while there was still daylight. Since the witches vanished during the day and also disappeared during the summer, none were ever caught."

Mill Rock in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Though apparently unrelated to Mill Rock, there were a couple of supposed witches caught in Saybrook. Nicholas and Margaret Jennings had come to Saybrook after having previously lived in Hartford and New Haven. Nicholas fought in the Pequot War, serving under Captain John Mason, who led a horrific raid on a Pequot fort near the Mystic River, a gruesome event that became known as the Mystic Massacre. According to Damned Connecticut, it was after the war that Nicholas first met Margaret, an indentured servant.

"The young couple were smitten and soon ran off together, but didn't get too far before being apprehended," Damned Connecticut affirms. "On March 3, 1643, Nicholas was found guilty of 'fornication' and publicly whipped; a month later Margaret stood trial and was found guilty of the same crime in addition to theft. She was flogged, and then ordered by the court to marry Nicholas."

Damned Connecticut continues to note "a modest trail of troubles" followed the newlyweds, including Nicholas being prosecuted for striking a neighbor's cow in 1647. Witchcraft Trials of Connecticut informs Nicholas was punished in some form for this act of violence against the cow, which belonged to a man named Ralph Keeler. Ultimately, they would settle in Saybrook and produce three children together.

In 1659, things took a much darker turn for the star-crossed couple. That summer, according to The Shore Line Times, Nicholas had been suspected of witchcraft, resulting in the General Court sending a Mr. Willis to the town to aid the mayor in investigating Jennings.

In 1661, a neighbor of the Jennings family was embroiled in a heated land dispute. The neighbor, George Wood, ultimately accused Margaret of being possessed by Satan. Considering their past and generally unsavory social standing, such a charge would be a damning one for Mrs. Jennings. The presumption of innocence was not exactly afforded to many alleged witches. Damned Connecticut adds that Wood also accused Martha Jennings, one of the three Jennings children, of being pregnant out of wedlock — though, according to The Shore Line Times, Martha was proven not to be pregnant whatsoever.

Additionally, the Jennings witchcraft apparently was to blame for multiple deaths in the community. One of those whose passing was attributed to their witchcraft was Marie Marvin, the wife of Reinold Marvin. I've not yet uncovered Marie's age at the time of her death in 1661, but she was presumably around 60-years-old at the time of her death as Reinold had been born in 1594. The mother of eight children, including my 9th great-grandfather Lt. Reinold Marvin, was one of two individuals specifically mentioned in an indictment against Nicholas Jennings.

According to Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England, by David D. Hall, the couple was brought to court as follows:

Nicholas Jennings thou art here indicted by the name of Nicholas Jennings of Saybrook for not having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and by his help hast done works above the course of nature to the loss of the lives of several people and in particular the wife of Reinold Marvin with the child of Baalshassar de Wolfe with other sorceries for which according to the law of God and the established laws of this Commonwealth thou deservest to die.

There was a not guilty plea entered and the case was ultimately adjudicated in the fall of 1661, according to Damned Connecticut, after a jury of 10 men from neighboring colonies came back with what was essentially a hung jury.

"The major part of the jury found Nicholas guilty, but the rest only strongly suspected him, and as to Margaret, some found her guilty, and the others suspected her to be guilty," reads The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697). The Shore Line Times notes that while the jury did not convict Nicholas and Margaret, they were deemed unfit as parents and their three children were taken from them to be apprenticed to others.

Left for dead at Gaines' Mills

Your country has become embroiled in a civil war with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Your enlist, are mustered in as a private and your regiment goes on to fight in some pretty well known and important battles — Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville among them. A little more than one year into what was supposed to be a two-year hitch, you're part of what is, at that point, the second bloodiest battle in American history. There are roughly 15,500 casualties in the battle, including nearly 2,400 dead, and your brothers in arms leave you on the battlefield believing you're among the lives lost. You survive the war, you marry, your wife is pregnant with your first child, but before your little girl is born you're killed in a railroad accident at age 29.

This is the story of Grant S. Marvin, my 1st cousin 5x removed.

Grant is the sixth of eight children born to my 5th great-uncle Ransom Marvin and his wife Sophronia Hutchinson. He was born February 2, 1840 in New York, presumably in or near Camden, just north of Oneida Lake and some 30 miles southeast of Lake Ontario. Grant was raised in Camden and was 21-years-old when, in May 1861, he went to the nearby town of Rome and enlisted in Company G of the 14th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry. About one year later, in May 1862, the regiment was assigned to the famed Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by General George B. McClellan. The regiment took part in a series of fights known as Seven Days Battles in the area of Hanover County, Virginia.

On June 26, 1862, the regiment took part in the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, also known as Mechanicsville, on June 26, 1862. Slightly outnumbered, Fitz John Porter led Union troops against Confederate General Robert E. Lee and secured a Union victory, though one some concede to be a strategic victory for the South. Grant survived this first big fight, but there would be no rest for the weary.

On June 27, 1862, the regiment was right back at it in the next fight in the Seven Days Battles. This time around it was the Battle of Gaines' Mill, sometimes called the Battle of Chickahominy River. The number of combatants were nearly three times that of the prior day's battle as more than 91,000 troops — 57,000 of whom were Confederate soldiers — and there would be some 15,000 casualties by the end of the day. Grant was seriously wounded in the battle, though the nature of the wound has not yet been uncovered in my research, and left for dead on the battlefield. The Union lost the Battle of Gaines' Mill, a key early victory for Lee's time at the helm of rebellion's forces.

Though left for dead, Grant survived and was apparently able to avoid being taken prisoner. He would receive a pension for his military service, designated as an invalid as a result of the wound he suffered. The severity of the wound and its long-term impact is not currently known.

As the war raged on and 1863 was coming to a close, Grant was married on Christmas eve to Lovina D. Seymour. After several years as husband and wife, Lovina was pregnant, and the couple was apparently living in Illinois. Sadly, with Lovina several months pregnant, tragedy struck as Grant was killed in Secor, Illinois, a very small town 25-30 miles east of Peoria. Grant's death was the result of a railroad accident, though current research has not yet uncovered whether Grant was a passenger on the train, an employee of the railroad, or otherwise.

One month to the day of Grant's passing, new life was welcomed in Illinois with the birth of his daughter May L. Marvin on June 3, 1869.

I've not yet conducted much in the way of research on Grant's widow and child, though they do return to New York, settling first in Batavia and then Rochester.

America's12th President, My 5th Cousin: We're Related

Some time ago, I saw a friend on social media post about an app that indicated he was related to one historic figure or another. As a history nerd and genealogist, I was skeptical but intrigued enough to take a further look at Ancestry.com's app "We're Related."

Quite quickly, I began receiving notifications of possible relatives of note from yesterday and today. "Meghan Trainor is possibly your 9th Cousin," read one alert. "W.C. Fields is possible your 7th Cousin 4x Removed," said another. "Michael Jackson is possibly your 8th Cousin 1x Removed," suggested yet another notification. Ultimately, the list of figures potentially related to me, according to the app, included George Washington, Brad Paisley, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Kate Upton, Abraham Lincoln, Hillary Clinton, Dolly Parton, Walt Disney, Miley Cyrus, Marilyn Monroe, and both Presidents Bush — with my most closely-related possibilities being Franklin Pierce (4th Cousin 6x Removed), D. H. Lawrence (5th Cousin 4x Removed), Thomas Edison (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Edgar Allan Poe (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Johns Hopkins (5th Cousin 6x Removed), George Clinton (5th Cousin 7x Removed), Benjamin Franklin (5th Cousin 8x Removed), Thomas Jefferson (5th Cousin 8x Removed), and Jane Austen (5th Cousin 8x Removed).

The problem with these claims — which take your Ancestry.com family tree and compare it to other trees and data — is it makes links and leaps that are not easy to confirm. Each one would attempt to fill in gaps where I had not yet uncovered a direct ancestor's parents, and through those theoretical links came connections to these politicians, actors, writers, scientists, and musicians. In some cases, those efforts to fill gaps appear to be quite unlikely, sometimes with birthdates that seem to be before a mother's child-bearing age or when someone is quite elderly. All in all, I would try to investigate these leads and ultimately came up empty-handed each and every time. I was unable to independently verify with conviction that any of the data was correct.

Then, just a few days ago, came a new connection: Zachary Taylor. "We're Related" suggested Taylor, who went from hero during the Mexican-American War to President of the United States, is my 5th Cousin 7x Removed. The app laid out the connection, that we had mutual ancestors. I looked at the "Possible Common Ancestor," and I was excited to see it was someone already in my tree, my 12th great-grandmother, Mary Brewster. Mary, whose maiden name I do not currently know, was married to Mayflower passenger William Brewster. I am a direct descendant of theirs through their daughter Patience, a line I had been able to detail and verify previously.

Could it be? This app actually turned something up that is verifiable? It became time to investigate the lineage from Mary Brewster to Zachary Taylor, and I was pretty confident I'd be able to confirm or debunk the connection pretty quickly considering the amount of documentation out there for Mayflower descendants and, often times, for the genealogies surrounding our presidents.

According to "We're Related," Taylor was a descendant through William and Mary Brewster's daughter Fear, my 12th great aunt. The app said Mary's daughter Fear gave birth to Isaac Allerton in 1627, that he fathered Sarah Allerton in 1670, and she in turn gave birth to Elizabeth Lee in 1709, who then gave birth to Lt. Col. Richard Taylor, the father of Zachary Taylor.

I checked my family tree data and saw that I already had some of this information accounted for, reaching into a portion of the life of Sarah Allerton. I had an approximate date of birth for her, my 2nd Cousin 11x Removed. I also had a death date and that she married a man named Hancock Lee in 1690. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to trace Sarah to her purported great-grandson. I was able to find two published texts that each made the first confirmations. The first was George Norbury Mackenzie's "Colonial Families of the United States of America, Volume II," published in 1907 by The Grafton Press. The second was also published by The Grafton Press in 1907, part of its family histories series, and compiled by Emma C. Brewster Jones to detail the Brewster family line from 1566 to 1907. The latter text includes numerous references and citations, which proved to be helpful in further corroborating the information contained therein.

As previously noted, what was already known was that Sarah Allerton had wed Hancock Lee in 1690. I was able to confirm the Virginian couple had four children: Elizabeth, Hancock, John, and Isaac. Elizabeth Lee, my 3rd Cousin 10x Removed, was the next person to focus on as "We're Related" claimed she was Taylor's paternal grandmother. Using the previously mentioned published genealogies, as well as marriage and burial records, I was quickly able to piece together the basics on Elizabeth. She was born in Virginia in 1709, marrying a man named Zachary Taylor on February 23, 1738 in Northumberland County, Virginia, on the banks of Chesapeake Bay and about 75 miles east of Fredericksburg. The two had at least one child, the only one that mattered to me in this research effort, Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor, my 4th Cousin 9x Removed, was born in on April 3, 1744 in Orange County, Virginia, an area east of Shenandoah National Park and home to James Madison's Montpelier. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, he was able to rise to the rank of Colonel during the American Revolution. During the war, in 1779, 35-year-old Richard married 19-year-old Sarah Dabney Strother. Among their children was Zachary Taylor, the man who would go on to become the 12th President of the United States.

Success! It was official. The "We're Related" app was right in suggesting Zachary Taylor was indeed my 5th Cousin 8x Removed.

I already knew a little bit about Zachary Taylor, but he was one of those many largely obscure antebellum presidents that were a hazy bridge from the more memorable Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln. There was now a good reason to take a deep dive. While there is a load of interesting factoids surrounding Taylor, which may lead to a future post on the man's history and death, one stood out and was a bit of a kick to the gut. Taylor's daughter Sarah had married Jefferson Davis, the man who would one day be the President of the Confederate States of America. I loathe everything about Jefferson Davis and continue to be bothered by the fact that his statue stands in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., when he led an insurrection against the United States. Sarah Knox Taylor and Jefferson Davis were wed in Kentucky on June 17, 1835, some 15 years before the Civil War. I learned Zachary Taylor was not happy about his daughter marrying Taylor, though this was primarily said to be a result of the military hero's first-hand knowledge of how difficult military life is for a family, and Davis was a military man who served under Taylor.

Sarah Knox Taylor

In a bittersweet twist, I was both saddened and pleased to learn Sarah was never the First Lady of the Confederacy. She died just three months after the wedding. The newlyweds had gone to Louisiana to visit his sister when both contracted malaria. Jefferson Davis would recover, but Sarah would not. The illness claimed her life on September 15, 1835, at the tender age of 21. Her parents were devastated by her loss, and reportedly became quite angry and bitter toward Davis for taking their daughter to Louisiana during "fever season."

Counterfeiting a quarter-million in Colonial Massachusetts

As I put off a final shopping trip on the eve of Christmas Eve, I think about all the money we spend on the holidays and how I wish I could borrow a little cash from my cousin Mary. Problem is Mary has been dead more than 240 years now, and the cash she had turned out to be counterfeit bills she produced.

Mary (Peck) Butterworth was a colonial era counterfeiter, the first major counterfeiter in America's history. She is my 1st cousin 9x removed — her grandfather, Nicholas Peck (1630-1710), is my 9th great-grandfather through my maternal grandmother's line.

Mary was born on July 27, 1686, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, some 40 miles south of Boston. Her father, my 9th great-uncle, was Joseph Peck, born October 27, 1650. According to Kenneth Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Joseph was the innkeeper at the "Inn at the Sign of the Black Horse," a tavern in Rehoboth. In his book Early Rehoboth, local historian Richard LeBaron Bowen affirms that "Mary was the daughter of one of the most important and influential pioneer families in Rehoboth and was related to most of the other first families; all of the important town and colony officers were relatives." All in all, she was well-positioned to live a pretty comfortable life by colonial standards.

In 1710, 24-year-old Mary married John Butterworth, Jr., a pretty successful housewright — someone who built homes. John was well known and made good money as a housewright, resulting in the couple having "a better income than most people of the time," according to Bowen. Both Scott and Bowen note that despite his success and the societal norms of the day, John was generally known as "Mary's husband."

So what led Mary, who was quite financially secure and well-connected to the movers and shakers of the area, to the crime of counterfeiting as early as the summer of 1716? Her exact motivation is unknown, but it would seem that it was a matter of greed and convenience. "Mary was an ambitious and aggressive business woman, ruling her house and apparently everyone she met. She was passionately fond of money," Bowen notes in Early Rehoboth. "The taverns seemed to be easy places for passing counterfeit bills."

According to Scott, Mary "made and sold more than £1,000 of forged bills over a period of seven years." Accounting for inflation, that's in the neighborhood of $250,000 today. Bowen notes that she "was probably the biggest single counterfeiter in New England."

She didn't do this all on her own, however. Mary employed her brothers and a sister-in-law in the production of these phony bills. "Besides being an inventor, a skillfull workwoman and a clever saleswoman, she was also a superior organizer, developing a tight little kitchen printery employing her three brothers Nicholas, Israel, and Stephen, and the wife of Nicholas, Hannah Peck, who was also a cousin, all strictly a family affair ... over which Mary, the master craftswoman, ruled supreme," Bowen affirms. There is further evidence that Daniel Smith, Rehoboth's town clerk and a justice of the Bristol County Court of General Sessions, aided in disseminating the counterfeit bills. Smith's involvement ceased when a sheriff searched his home after tips from suspicious colleagues.

Many colonial era counterfeiters would be done in by their own operations as the copper printing plates commonly used were often the chief piece of evidence to arrest and punish these deviants. Mary's counterfeiting kitchen-based operation was simple and did not rely on the copper plates, thus different and more difficult to trace and prove. According to Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Mary's process began by "placing a damp starched muslin on top of the bill she intended to imitate and then lightly ran a hot flatiron over the cloth, causing the material to pick up the printing from the money; next she would iron the muslin hard to transfer the pattern to a blank piece of paper which was to be the counterfeit bill. The cloth, having served its purpose, was immediately thrown into the fireplace and consumed to ashes, so that no plate was left to be seized and used in court as damaging evidence ... As her next step, she would with a fine crow quill pen trace over the impression on her new bill and after that go over letters to reproduce the exact thickness of the letters on the true bill." 

The counterfeit bills produced, Scott writes, included Rhode Island bills of £5, £3, 20s., and 10s., Connecticut bills of £5, and Massachusetts bills of £5, £3, and 40s. Mary personally never passed the counterfeits, instead she used her familial network to do the dirty work, selling the fake money at half their face value.

The counterfeiting scheme began to unravel in 1722, about six years after it began. Bowen claims authorities became suspicious after Mary and John "purchased a large, expensive new home for the family." The following year, in Newport, Rhode Island, the first of Mary's associates was pinched by authorities. Arthur Noble was at an event in Newport when he came upon three young women from Rehoboth, and he wished to treat them for the evening. He passed along one of the counterfeit £5 bills, but it was quickly identified as suspect and Noble was arrested. Nicholas Peck, one of Mary's brothers and conspirators, would be arrested that summer, also in Newport, for passing a counterfeit £5 bill, and Nicholas Campe confessed what he knew to authorities. Campe's exact role in the operation isn't clear to this author, though he was likely among those used to simply pass along the counterfeit bills.

On August 15, 1723, a trio of deputy sheriffs came with warrants to apprehend John Butterworth, Jr., Mary (Peck) Butterworth, Israel Peck, Nicholas Peck, Hannah Peck, and two others. The suspects were placed in jail to await their day in court, but each was soon acquitted and released due to a lack of evidence — though a brother and Hannah did testify against Mary in court. Mary was fortunate to escape conviction, as punishment for counterfeiting could be quite severe. According to Rhode Island Historical Tracts, Rhode Island state law called for a counterfeiter to have their ears cropped (cut off), to be whipped, or fined, while being imprisoned "as the nature of the offense requires," and to also "pay double damage to the persons defrauded." If a counterfeiter could not uphold the fiscal reparations, Rhode Island law demanded "he should be set to work, or sold for any term of years which the discretion of the judges considered satisfactory."

Once acquitted of her crimes, all records and accounts suggest she gave up her counterfeiting ring and became a housewife, living the norms of a married woman in the colonial period. She and John would raise even children together before each died in old age. Mary was 88-years-old when she died in Bristol County on February 7, 1775.

The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah.

This weekend featured many genealogical discoveries, several of which I plan to write about in due time. One bit of information uncovered this evening, however, left me feeling a need to share quickly.

While working on the Ellis family line of my tree, I finally found a missing piece that unlocked an entire other surname branch that I never knew as a connection. The Freeman family of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The family is one I had some very cursory knowledge of as it is represented at one of my favorite haunts, Old Sturbridge Village — home of the Freeman Farm.

I reached out to a friend at OSV about my newly-uncovered connection to the Freeman family, and he in turn put me in touch with an OSV historian. In less than four hours on a Sunday afternoon, my initial e-mail to my contact resulted in a good deal of information from Tom Kelleher, whose official title is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts. Following up on Tom's information, tips, and leads, I came across a letter from Pliny Freeman — my 1st cousin 6x removed — to his son, Pliny Freeman Jr., dated 12 July 1835. The elder Pliny was still residing at his farm in Sturbridge, while his son had settled in Ohio. This letter carried with it the devestating news that Beulah, Pliny Jr.'s younger sister, had been tragically killed during a thunderstorm.

An excerpt from that letter:

On Sunday last, 5th instant, there were two deaths in Sutton and one in Oxford. Those in Sutton were Mr. and Mrs. King, ages 63 and 57. They were both killed at one flash and in the same room. The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah. She went upstairs to shut the windows, as was supposed, and a flash of lightening struck the chimney and threw the top mostly off. Lyman was not at the house. One of the neighbors saw the lightning strike the chimney [and] saw the bricks falling. He with one other of his neighbors immediately repaired to the house. On entering they found her [in the] up chamber dead on the floor, lying on her face and her clothes on fire. The skin on her neck and shoulders was some torn and her clothes behind were very much shattered. (If you have the opportunity you may communicate this sad intelligence to your Uncle Samuel. It seems he and family have been afflicted with a great deal of sickness but not to them like this.)

It seems the lightening passed from the top of the chimney to the bottom of the cellar. The body of the chimney is so badly shattered that it cannot be used until it repaired and every room in the house injured. Tore off plastering, chimney pieces, ceiling broke a hole through the chamber floor, shivered one cross-sill in the cellar, and shivered some posts. It shivered a board of the floor directly under the foot of the cradle that the baby was sleeping in. The scene throughout looks gloomy. Both cases occurred about four afternoon, both houses on high land and in sight of each other and about one-and-a-half miles apart. The news came to us about eight that night. The funerals at four the next day. The funerals were attended in a meetinghouse in the village nearby. Mr. Gray of Sutton and Mr. Clark of Sturbridge attended the funerals. It was a melancholy and heart-rending sight to see three coffins in the meetinghouse at the same time. There was a large collection of people. Our family and several of Lyman's cousins from Holland attended the funerals.