Revised, Feb. 2022. Next step, to cut length.
Her biblical name rhymed with Maria or Mariah. She married a neighbor in Mass., a young soldier, who, like so many in wars, returned whole, yet a bit damaged, his war, the American Revolution. He was Abiathar French, the Junior, ready to marry, post-War. His bride Beriah would find herself, decades later, hundreds of miles east and beating off a bear.
Real bears? By Cleveland? Yes, now gone. Old histories tell of both grizzlies and black bears. Grizzlies would be the meaner ones, but both liked meat.
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From "Pioneer Women of Leroy"
"The first death in the township was Patty Clapp [a young child], who died in 1806... The same year the second family moved in, Abiathan [Abiathar] French, from Massachusetts, with his wife [Beriah] and six children.
Among the vexations of that year may be mentioned the following: Mr. French had for safety built his hog-pen at one end of his house. One time during his absence, a bear entered the pen and, in spite of all Mrs. French's efforts to drive it away, succeeded in carrying off a fine shoat in broad daylight. When we consider the distance that the pig had been brought and that the pork supply for future years depended upon the few now possessed, we can realize the energy with which Mrs. French fought for the pig, and the great disappointment when it was carried off.
The first marriage in the township was held at their house in 1807, when their daughter, Rebecca, was married to Elah Clapp. This was a merry time, in which the whole settlement shared. An abundant supper was prepared out of the material at hand, and there was no lack of welcome and genuine friendliness."
Found in a larger work, "Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve", by G. Wickham, 1897.
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Did she teach her children how to to fight bears? A list is below. Pre-Civil War, but after her and Abiathar's deaths, two family members tried running for office at state legislatures and won. It was not for vanity and glory, but to get things done, in areas needing schools and roads, with one of the two clearly an abolitionist. One male descendant, a great-grandson going by "A. French", ran from a California mining camp, picking up his mail at Sacramento, as did young nephew Edwin French. By 1860, as "A. A. French", he and wife Nancy owned a hotel south of the Bay. Their last prior Census was in Michigan, Branch County, before going west in the 1850s. Was a first name of Alford, a variation of Alvord, too often mis-written as Alfred? He and the second wife who had come with him from Michigan were joined post-Civil War by his close relatives, namely, his widowed sister-in-law, Rebecca Farley French, mother to miner Edwin, and others. Nephew Eben/Ebenezer French, brother to Edwin, was a Civil War veteran whose stone is the only one of the off-to-California Frenches with his stone surviving, courtesy of upkeep by veteran's groups. Very severely damaged by his war, twice, face and leg, he would have hoped to resume his pre-War publishing work in Michigan once in San Jose, his paperwork listing that. He was in contrast to youngest brother A.O. French (Alford French, when in his mother's house), who stopped his university degree for the War, but had marriages and peach orchards in Michigan, so stayed there.
Niece Climena French boarded at A.A.'s and Nancy's hotel in 1860, before marrying fellow teacher, Mr. Shearer. His other sister, Mary Eliza French, the youngest after her sister Olive French died, was an ancestor to this writer's spouse, of marrying age post-war, her men not to live as long as Samuel Shearer.
The second legislator, serving from Lake County Ohio, married the female descendant born Amelia Climena French. Her husband, AJ Williams, was son of a Methodist minister, but trained as a lawyer, bravely abolitionist. Anti-slavery was the general mood in Lake County, a free state by choice, where escaped slaves might attempt to go along Lake Erie, finding Canada reachable by bridge at both ends. However, slave catchers initially denied chasing rights by Ohioans, were then allowed by a permissive US Congress and courts to violate Ohio laws. He won office there, after he and his wife tried out a divided Missouri and then returned. He would later merit a biography in a local history book, details accurate when checked against other sources. It cited his father-in-law as Edwin French, son to Jacob, with Beriah and Abiathar implied as Jacob's parents
Did the two men ever feel like they were beating off bears in their legislatures?
EARLIER, BEST FRIENDS, MARRIAGES, FIRE AND DEATH. Back in Mass., Beriah's mother had been widowed by a Phelps and then remarried Mr. Alvord, to have her last children by Beriah's father, Jonathan Alvord. Beriah's mother was Connecticut-born Elizabeth, maiden name Goslin, said by an old family history to die in Northampton on Feb 14, 1775. The family historian thought that Jonathan then moved his children in 1776, the next year. They went to a part of Northampton to splinter off as Westhampton, neighbors to ask for their own church. Westhampton Congregational was not given permission to form until Sept., 1779. Abiathar and Beriah courted before it opened, so married at the old church in Northampton in 1778. Siblings is rural areas were often "best friends", playing matchmaker for each other.
Another working farmer who served in the Revolution, though with just 7 days of service according to an old history of the family, was Beriah's brother, Jehiel Alvord, was introduced to and married Abiathar's younger sister, Dorothy. Both couples married at Northampton in 1778. On Feb 6 Abiathar Jr and Beriah married. On June 11 Jehiel Alvord married Dorothy French. Westhampton had no church yet. These dates are from Northampton records found at Family Search, after D. Curtis alerted us of Beriah's wedding date. A different source, with some typos noticed for dates, said the two Frenches' father, widowed by their mother, in 1789, married a Naomi Alvord, presumably of South Hadley, as married at that church, relationship to Jehiel and Beriah unspecified (alfordassociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/vitals.pdf).
Due to a fire at Westhampton, the next records, 1779-1817, burned, including the baptisms of both couple's children. Jehial and Dorothy were still living and local after 1817, but Beriah and Abiathar had moved to Ohio.
The congregation was able to reconstruct many missing records. Dorothy and Jehiel's seem pretty complete, but not those of Beriah's children. Another user at Findagrave was able to find four of the names, in re-constructed records for Westhampton. We reconstructed three more from Ohio sources, to match the number going to Ohio Abiathar and Beriah were said to have taken there.
Their cenotaphs at daughter Rebecca's stone in Lake County have named, but dates are missing. It's likely they died before 1840. Helping date their deaths, sister-in-law Dorothy, the youngest of the four, was of record in her 1840 Census as a widow, counted in Northampton. Unusual for that Census, her precise age was cited (82), as she was receiving a Revolutionary War pension. She had been youngest of the four, so they would have been accordingly older, Beriah 86 in 1840, understandable to have died. There seemed to be no pensions for the unusual names of Abiathar or Beriah French, which fits their decease. (Abiathar's military records were checked by this writer at the National Archives, so it is assumed his years of service would have qualified for a pension, given others received pensions after serving much shorter terms. He had a temporary absence that was exonerated later, its timing co-inciding with multiple from his area inoculating themselves for smallpox, then returning to their troops once the self-inoculation had taken effect. Some commanding officer refused to permit it, even though his failure to so so meant an abnormally high death rate from the disease, and some needless victories for the British.)
FROM PAPER TO ASHES. The records gathered 1779 to 1817 burned at a fire at the minister's house. Happily, Abiathar and Beriah married in 1778 at the old church in Northampton, so their marriage record survived, but Jehiel and Dorothy's did not. People were able to reconstruct many births, but not all. For Beriah, one son who died back at Westhampton had a gravestone, so he's in the Westhampton set. A son murdered in Ohio in 1825 is missing, as the news story on the murder and convictions omitted his age and birthplace, and were maybe restricted to the Cleveland area. (SIDE NOTE: The Westhampton Congregational church and ministers, to prevent future losses, allowed 17 volumes of records from 1817 through 1971 to be archived at the local University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, under "Call no.: MS 806". Their web page on Westhampton Congregational is at library.umass.edu.)
Ministers kept detailed records for their churches back then, multiple mysteries sometimes clearing up when they are found. Their Congregational Church of Westhampton formed under a brother to the hero Nathan Hale, Rev Enoch Hale, there for some decades. Ministers from the mother churches and towns at Northampton, the eldest mother town, and at Southampton, a sister town, were present for his opening ceremony. Rev Hale kept his at home, but a fire at his house, in 1817, destroyed what accumulated by then, from 1789 to 1817.
CHILDREN. Our best count is that they had seven to eight children, total.
User D. Curtis (/user/profile/47355469) found these four, of Abiathar and Beriah Alvord French, ending with their 1790 Census back in Mass., :
"John, b. 7 Dec. 1778, Westhampton, Mass.
Jacob, b. 23 May 1781, Westhampton, Mass.
Abiathar, b. 9 Apr. 1784, Westhampton, Mass., d. 5 Jul. 1800, Westhampton, Mass.
Timothy, b. 20 Jan. 1790, Westhampton, Mass."
Who were her six children named as coming to Ohio?
Their 1790 Census showed five males under 16. The 16 year old Abiathiar who died in 1800 still living, the fifth son would be the David whose 1825 death was distant and whose birth was not re-constructed in unaware Westhampton. (The search is still on for their 1800 Census to count daughters, Rebecca Clapp McMillen known ttwo ways, from the wedding story in Leroy and also from her stone surviving and namiing her parents. One source shows an earlier Timothy possibly had died before a namesake for him was born in 1790, so would not be counted in 1790 either. Namesakes were common in the families of those men sur-named French whose male DNA tracks back to Braintree, south of Boston
The son named Abiathar would have been the third and last Abiathar French. The name proved too hard to spell, so stayed unused after a namesake nephew was called Abiathar Alvord, child of Dorothy and Jehiel.
FROM WESTHAMPTON. The four sons above would have been ages 0 to 12 in the first census of the new Republic, the 1790. They were just right to be the four males under 16 in the house of an Abiathar French in Westhampton, not clear if their father or grandfather wasthe one named as head.
It was common to "double-up" back then. Only one Abiathar French household was listed that Census, not two. The two females would have been Beriah and senior's second wife, Naomi, formerly of S. Hadley.
Abiathar the senior had taken junior and his siblings from the Braintree area south of Boston, to Hampshire County, before the Revolution. Their mother, the former Margaret Niles, had died at some point, not clear when.
Their farm was in a cluster of river towns, so-called hamptons. By 1790, mother town Northampton, the county seat, had spun off three daughter towns, South, East and their West. All were in Hampshire County, only a few counties away from upstate NY. The Northampton area was reachable from the two elder Abiathars' hometown in the Boston area, by an overland route coming through what became Worcester County. It was also reachable from the sea by going up the Connecticut River past Springfield, MA. Their Hamptons were on the east side of the big River. Almost directly across, on the other side, the Springfield side, were Hadley and Hatfield. She had Alvord relatives in those places and more.
Why was Ohio a natural follow-up to Westhampton? Pre-Revolution, in colonial days, old New York province had used the Conn. River as its east boundary, but negotiations pushed the boundary westward, causing their Hampshire County to be in the Bay Colony, not New York. Connecticut formed just downriver of Springfield. In colonial days, Connecticut leaders had been told by the king's officials that their grant extended westward to the Pacific. Virginia, further south, was told the same thing. In later negotiations to draw state lines between former colonies, both newly formed states gave up having land westward. To make up for that loss, each was given a section of future Ohio instead, as compensation, to settle or sell as they wished.
Thus, Virginians and people all along the Connecticut River, Massachusetts through Vermont, with a natural mix of upstate New Yorkers, would hear about that and make their way west. Virginians mainly went north to cross the Ohio River, going into southern Ohio. The northerners mainly followed the Great Lakes shorelines west, through a long stretch of NY and past a short stretch of Penn., to the Western Reserve, in northeast Ohio.
OLD NEIGHBORS. Their US Census of 1790 in Westhampton gave each household one row on a handwritten page. Luckily for family historians, the order was not alphabetic, but named male heads or widows in the order visited by the interviewer, keeping neighbors together. People married people nearby, on the average, so key neighbors counted at Westhampton in the 1790 included Alvords and Phelps related to Beriah, with the marriages of spouse Abiather's sisters inclduing more than Dorothy, neighboring Chilsons and Pittsingers related . There were Claps/Clapps locally. Future son-in-law Elah Clapp was thus likely known by her daughter before the two sets, Clapp and French, reached Ohio, what became Leroy. (On a ridge overlooking Lake Erie, it was reached by going upstream and then uphill from Painesville, which had a river port on to the Lake. Cleveland, in contrast, was on a different river further east, also part of the Reserve.)
The handwritten census copy of 1790 was transcribed and put into printed form in 1809. (Her sisters-in-law Rebecca and Rhoda had their Chilsen and Pittsinger houses mis-transcribed as "Chalson" and "Pittinger".)
We know that more children were born. For example, her daughter Rebecca was born 1793, according to the age on her stone, so post-1790 Census. She married Elah Clapp, to see him die young, then married a McMillen, so her stone says that second surname. Someone (descendants?) attempted to redo the daughter's stone in Leroy Twp., by adding/recarving her parents' names on it. (They made errors of the kind that arise when not knowing the earlier generation personally. "Her name was something like Maria, doesn't this old stuff seem to say that that?").
There is also the possibility (not the same as a fact) of two Timothys, the younger one becoming a namesake for an older one who died earlier.
Summary--This writer believes that after omitting the son or sons who died "back there", the full list of six going to Leroy included at least one Timothy, plus John, Jacob, David, Rebecca Clapp McMillen and Rhoda Keep, their births split between Westhampton and some other place encountered before going to Leroy, the daughters names matched two of Abiathar's sisters who were twinned (maybe not biological, maybe merely baptized on the same day).
TO THE WESTERN RESERVE. What was the Western Reserve?
A multi-county district which lay along Lake Erie, in NE Ohio, its special purpose was to "make the peace" as the thirteen colonies negotiated their boundaries, something that would take two or three more generations to resolve fully. A chunk of future Ohio, still a territory, not yet a state, was given to Connecticut as a payoff, in return for CT giving up what it believed it owned, a long strip of land that went all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Connecticut then sold its pay-off in pieces, to fund its schools, specific parts allotted to buyer by lottery. Some buyers, such as Col. Amasa Clapp, were interested in starting settlements for farmers. Others wanted only money-making "land flips", to be mostly disappointed when demand for land died due to the threat of war, not done until about 1816.
Why did other settlers delay going there?
Rumors rumbled, of further war with Britain, to see who could take sole control of Detroit and other contested parts along the Canadian border. Most early settlers stayed away from Lake Erie shorelines, too close to Canada and then tiny Detroit, until 1816 or later.
Beriah's Frenches did not delay. They arrived in the Reserve well-ahead of the War of 1812. Choosing that location most likely had two causes. A party developing land there was already known to them, back in Massachusetts. (Amasa Clapp, also from Mass., Hampshire County, a purchaser of land via the Reserve's lottery, would send his sons and other neighbors to clear land. His son, Elah, was one, to be Rebecca's future spouse.) Plus, the younger French sons were coming of age at about the same time and needed their own farms, with undeveloped land left behind in Massachusetts too rocky and barren.
Two adult sons left first for future Ohio, from Westhampton, Mass. With a future in-law, they went to the Western Reserve of Ohio, locating inside the Reserve on the second major river east of an itty-bitty Cleveland. Then, Beriah and the rest followed. The reserve was still a wilderness. They would have most likely approached by coming up the Grand River from Lake Erie, to the ridge-land higher above Painesville. They were then inside future Lake County, which, until 1840, was in the northern part of mother Geauga County. (Old Geauga had, in turn, split off from Trumbull County a few years before their arrival.) Beriah's Frenches moved to the Reserve about the same time a few other families arrived from Hampshire County, Massachusetts.
Only two families surnamed French were present east of Cleveland ahead of the War of 1812, so, very, very early, for this end of Ohio. The other party name French, Peter, later gained a place in history books by selling farmland, plus a brickyard and his "hotel" (smaller, more like an inn), to the brand-new "Mormans" in the late 1820s. His spot was at a four-corners, a great location for the LDS/Latter Day Saints to build their very first temple.
Peter lived a few decades more, long enough to tell the 1850 census-taker that he had been born in NY. Local history books say he had earlier come to the local county with fur trapper David Abbot, who had been an attorney. Their party managed to arrive before the turn of their century, ahead of Beriah's Frenches.
Maybe unrelated, Peter may have been known to Beriah via people she knew with rural NY connections. These might include her half-siblings named Phelps (her mother remarried a Phelps, after Beriah's own father died).
Peter was familiar with the western end of NY state, closer to Ohio, less Dutch than parts closer to Albany, NY, and Vermont. Peter was first of record in David Abbot's traveling party to Ohio, said to briefly return to Genesee (meaning the river valley in western NY), as if it were his home, to obtain a cow for their party's food needs. That part of western NY state had Phelps connections. In particular, something called the Phelps-Gorham land grant lay on the east side of the Genesee River. Similar to the Western Reserve, the attempt to buy and develop it was too early, pre-War of 1812. Oliver Phelps went bankrupt on that land while most of his hoped-for settlers waited for war rumblings to end. (It was home to the town of Le Roy, NY, for which future Leroy Twp., Ohio, would be named, where these Frenches were said to settle by a Spencer Phelps who arrived with the Clapp brothers and decades later, aged, wrote some history and remembrance articles for a local newspaper.)
Was that Peter French related to Beriah's Abiathar? Right now, we can't be sure without DNA tests submitted for his descendants (as of 2016). The Braintree Frenches, of which Abiather was part, had their male DNA first tested circa 2014 (FamilyTreeDNA.com), not a match to Frenches north of Boston. Peter had two known children (Robert, Angeline). Their names are not Puritan, like Abiather and Beriah, instead lean culturally French, but they were of a later generation.
Second, Colonel Clapp did not come to settle on any of the land himself, but stayed back in Hampshire County, Mass. He had bought land in three future Ohio counties, to develop and sell to others, but arranged for others to do the clearing and planting that would both give the next settlers an initial food supply and convince others that the region was fertile. In 1798, the Col. sent NY-born Peter French to Mantua, in Portage County. ("The first improvements in Mantua were made in the fall of 1798, by Peter French, on the northwest corner of Lot 24, upon which he sowed a few acres of wheat. This was the first wheat sown in the County. It was harvested the following summer by Rufus Edwards, who took possession of of this parcel in the spring of 1799", according to SidneyRigdon.com/RigdonO3.htm.) Around 1803, Clapp sent two sons, Paul and Elah, to future Leroy Twp., in the Col's second county, to the second county, to become modern Lake County later. Coming with the Clapp sons in 1803 was their neighbor Spencer Phelps and a hired hand, Jonathan Russel. (Peter would very soon marry a Sarah Russel, before the local counties had split off from mother Trumbull, so his records are at that county courthouse.) Peter's earlier voyageur companion, David Abbot, would go later to Col. Clapp's third county, Medina (not clear, was he working for Co. Clapp or there as he had earned his own land? Earned by building a mill on the Chagrin River, in a place then called Chagrin, now called Willoughby, called that after the township was realigned to be in Lake County. One of Beriah's grandsons, Edgar French, would die in Willoughby.)
MASSACHUSETTS, CHILDREN HAD "DOUBLE COUSINS". Back in Mass., the record of her marriage to her Abiathar French, second of three, is found in Northampton. The Frenches lived on its western and rural edge, not yet split off as Westhampton.
Beriah's Alvord ancestors were in Hadley. Neither place had its own church at the time. They missed having a double wedding by a few years. Abiathar married Beriah, while Beriah's younger brother had earlier wed Abiathar's younger sister. (Her younger brother was Jehiel Alvord. He married Dorothy/Doritha French. She was at the legal age for females being adults, able to marry or work without parent permission, so she married at 12, shocking our modern minds. Her young age is confirmed by her cemetery stone. Contrary dates, this writer believes, appear in some family trees. Their minds could not comprehend 12 either, so they "adjusted" some other family members' ages upward so Dorothy could be made to appear older at marriage.)
Since two French siblings married two Alvord siblings, their children were "double cousins". Double cousins are often favorite cousins, seen at both family reunions and events at both grandparents' houses. A doubly-related descendant of Jehiel and Dorothy, from MA, would be of record in a later census visiting one of Abiathar's grandchildren in OH. Thus, family ties continued for decades.
Ohio was not good at record-keeping yet, so we find dates for Abiathar and Beriah in non-modern ways. The Alvords have a family history with names and dates, with the pre-Revolution part covering a time when the main church in their area of Hampshire County was at Northampton. (The families, however, lived in places that were, later, post-Revolution, allowed their own town names and churches. At that point, the families ceased to be in Northampton records. The reason is not given, but, in this branch, the Alvords changed the spelling from Alford, to Alvord, perhaps as Alford too often would be sounded out as Alfred.) SOURCE: p.117 of "The Alvord Family", archived at
AlfordAssociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/buralv_5.pdf
Beriah's baptism was at the Northampton church back in Mass., recorded as Feb. 10, 1754, with her younger brother Jehial born Jan. 7 and baptized Jan. 11, 1756.
Beriah's father and grandfather were both named Jonathan. (Her great-grandfather was Alexander, the immigrant? Must check this.) The name Thankful Alvord was used multiple times in her family, including her elder sister, but began with their grandmother Thankful, who had been born Miller.
Only four of her own children's births are in the Massachusetts records, all of them sons. Notice in the bear story chose to call her only "Mrs. French" (despite giving the first names of other women). People did not understand her name, so mis-spelled it or used Mrs. French, with her spouse mis-written also. Thus, the four children's birth records were transcribed to say "Abiather French", not Abiathar. They say "Boriah", not Beriah. (Blobby ink from a quill pen or fountain pen could make a handwritten E appear to be an O.)
Abiathar III died before they left Massachusetts. The three sons coming to Ohio would be John, Jacob, and Timothy. John then disappeared from the news and local history books; he wasn't Peter French, was he? Did he die in the War of 1812? Return to Massachusetts, name too common to find him?
If only three of those coming had birth records showing both parents' names, how do we know that Beriah and Abiathar were their parents? The biggest reason is that no other Frenches, apart from Peter, were present in the marriage records. Found in those marriage records was David French, married by the same traveling minister as Timothy, that minister, Shadrack Ruark, different from the men marrying later settlers. Also in the records were two daughters, women who were possibly twins or close-in-age sisters, Rebecca and Rhoda. The sisters married in the early years, as did Timothy and David, did so before other Frenches of alternative DNAs arrived to mix up the parentage.
Rhoda married Luther Keep. Rebecca's wedding to Elah Clapp (a first marriage, second was to William McMillen) is in the above excerpt, where parentage is clearly listed. The excerpt mis-spelled Abiathar as "Abiathan", but who else could it mean? Beriah's is not guessed, too hard, everybody was dead or had moved by the time of the writing, and the tombstones were already gone. She is thus "Mrs. French". This helps make make clear that Rebecca's tombstone memorial to them (as "Abiather" and "Maria") was retrospective, done some decades after they all had died, so could not object to wrong spellings of rare Biblical names. Did descendants recarving the fading stone not believe it said Beriah when they saw it, presumed it "should be" Maria? David's murder story in the newspapers did not indicate his connection. Not stone remains. However, his land records tie him to Jacob and Timothy, with an court case resulting from David being intoxicated at the time, so too incompetent to sign.
When did she die? Probably before Abiathar, but when did his death occur? Painesville, where her son Jacob had a distillery, in addition to farming, put a high school over its big old cemetery. Her daughter Rebecca's stone showed names, not dates.
She and her father had been churchgoers back in Westhampton, both on the list of the town church's founding members. Perhaps we will find a church record of her death someday [UPDATE, Feb, 2022, we infer she died before 1840, as she and Abiathar are not cited in the 1840 Census, unlike sister-in-law Dorothy Alvord, widow, named as age 82 and receiving a Rev. War pension in her Census back in Hampshire County, MA . We infer Abiathar's birth as 1755-1756, due to his being "written up" as age 20 in a military record in 1776. We don't believe the ages in family trees adjusted upward to make 12 year-old Dorothy Alvord look 15. Dorothy's family was fine with the real birth year for her tombstone, why shouldn't we be?
In the 1830's, Abiathar the junior was still alive, but elderly. Was he perhaps growing senile, as some in the French family did earlier, of record as confused, etc, back in Braintree? There is a last record for him.
Some neighbor must have found him wandering about, confused, and taken him to the town hall. They gave his name as "Abiattur". Whoever was in charge reacted maliciously by "warning out" the early settler. Many people Abiathar knew, back when younger and clear-minded, had left, including his own children, David by death, most of the others by moving to Michigan and Indiana. Did Rebecca still live? Her children by Elah Clapp? David's children, semi-orphaned, were where? watched from afar by their mother's half-Hessian father, Christian Kneip/Kneippe, of about the same age as Abiathar, both relics of the same war back in 1776? Christian and his son Charles, who came early with David and John to clear land, also dead? Spencer Phelps, his sons' age, from Hampshire County, Mass., had moved to Mentor, was no longer in LeRoy. Elah Clapp had died long ago and Paul Clapp had moved (recently? to Huntsburg?).
Around that time, some left due to land challenges legally. Col Amasa Clapp had signed a bond guaranteeing someone's performance as a tax collector in Massachusetts. The collector's performance failed, with claims then made to cover what the collector owed, decades later, against the deceased Clapp's Ohio lands. The claims were successful due to a new precedent-setting ruling. Did this provoke Lake County into separating from Geauga, where one man ruling against them lived? The resulting state case said statutes of limitations against a property owner expired, whenever a property-owner crossed a state line, setting a precedent. Now, we have title insurance used by banks giving mortgages, to protect against that. Those holding affect land in Leroy, did not have it. Rebecca kept McMillen land for her children, lost the land from her first spouse they had cleared when first going to Ohio.
Luther Keep, daughter Rhoda's husband, had taken their family to farm in what is now Fawn River, Mich.. Their house would end across the state line, however, in Indiana (officials "up above" moved the state line to resolve bickering over who could collect taxes, letting Indiana have the Keeps and others).
Abiathar was "warned out" despite being nigh 80. Beriah was not warned out, so she must have already died. Abiathar must have been a widower by then.
Some stories by in-laws named Farley, leaving Kirtland to go to the south end of Michigan, said they walked from Detroit southward. Abiathar, at his age, was most likely too frail to make such a trip, so allowed to care for himself back in Leroy.
Because of the warning, without any outcome described, we do not know where he ended. Presumedly someone came to get him, notified by mail. We do not know who did what.
Was it Ransom? Grandson Ransom French definitely did return to Ohio for a bit around that time. Son Alford/Alfred Orin French was born there, in Mentor, in that interval, unlike both earlier and later children of Ransom French and Rebecca Farley, instead born down in Michigan. They could have gone back to Ohio briefly, just until Abiathar died, to settle things with the Edwin French who never left Ohio, buried at the Cleveland cemetery above Little Italy (one access by Mayfield Rd).
FOLLOWING TO BE REMOVED:
An 1840 atlas showed Ransom on a farm west of the Mentor village site, on the main road out. It's a site we know was temporary.
He had land transactions with a known son of Jacob, Edwin French, using mutual "quit claim deeds". If Edwin was not Ransom's brother, was he a close cousin? Ransom started a foundry on his return to Mich., but died there in 1852, with his youngest two, an infant, Olive, and a three-year-old, Mary Eliza, ancestor to this writer's spouse. A Jacob French, perhaps a brother, as about the same age, was also of record as a supervisor of public schools. He died a year after Ransom. Both were put in a pioneer cemetery located across the street from an M-E church that later turned plain Methodist. The Lutheran church later took over that cemetery. Both graves were then moved, to a public cemetery. The same people who buried them moved them? Maybe the Lutherans did it as a courtesy?
Those were cholera years for people along waterways, infected by others careless when disposing human waste in to the water? Weren't they close to the St. Joseph R.?
There was also a likely third brother or cousin nearby in the Michigan years, a state legislator for a while. He went by "A. French", for Alford French, most likely as people who could not spell Beriah also mis-rendered the name as Alfred? He was a distiller and miller (both processed farmers' grain) when in Michigan in 1850, in an era when steam power was replacing water power, about to put his mill out of business. Then he went off to California, first to Sacramento, seen first of record in newspapers with Ransom's son Edwin as having letters to pick-up. He became of record again as a legislator, for a gold camp. He then moved south of San Francisco, near San Jose (Alviso and Milpitas), seen with his Michigan family and owning a hotel by 1860. Ransom's daughter Climena French boarded at the hotel while she worked as a teacher, in the year or two before she married fellow teacher Samuel Shearer. In an obituary perhaps written by reporters, A. French was called the "Duke of Milpitas". Other sources said this referred to his knowing politics so well, letting conventions, etc meet at his hotel, that if he called an election, it went that way. "How do you think this election will turn out? Ask the Duke of Milpitas." Do we think the Duke of Milpitas had a grandmother who chased a bear? Yes.
A Timothy French living near Luther Keep could be Beriah's son and an alternative candidate as father to Ransom, Jacob and/or "A. French", since he was found also in Michigan and living very near them. He was of record in the Fawn River area of Mich., living very near Jacob in the 1840 and Ransom in the 1850 censuses. Were Jacob and Ransom sharing farmland to make that rotation happen while Timothy lived in Fawn River (near or spun-off from Sturgis/Sturges)?
Timothy was across the state line from the farmhouse of Luther Keep and Rhoda French Keep, but very near their farmland. In the 1850 Census, Timothy's wife Mary was named, of the right age and birthplace to be the Mary Allison whom Shadrach Ruark married to Timothy French back in tiny LeRoy Twp., not long after the family first arrived in Ohio. Mary perhaps has a death record their count in Michigan, falling between the 1850 and 1860 Censuses?. That Timothy's birth date does not exactly match that of the Massachusetts-born Timothy, but that is often the case if somebody else guessed his age for the census-taker when he was not home. Ages being "off" by three to even ten years is common if a visiting in-law answers the door.
The other (less likely) possibility, is maybe he was a younger namesake child, named for an older brother Timothy who had died young?
If Timothy was Ransom's father, he out-survived Ransom.
We have a bit more about Beriah as the Alvord family tracked her in their genealogies. She would have died in Leroy Twp., as Abiathar was still living there when warned. Do the Alvords have her death date?
Her biblical name rhymed with Maria or Mariah. She married a neighbor in Mass., a young soldier, who, like so many in wars, returned whole, yet a bit damaged, his war, the American Revolution. He was Abiathar French, the Junior, ready to marry, post-War. His bride Beriah would find herself, decades later, hundreds of miles east and beating off a bear.
Real bears? By Cleveland? Yes, now gone. Old histories tell of both grizzlies and black bears. Grizzlies would be the meaner ones, but both liked meat.
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From "Pioneer Women of Leroy"
"The first death in the township was Patty Clapp [a young child], who died in 1806... The same year the second family moved in, Abiathan [Abiathar] French, from Massachusetts, with his wife [Beriah] and six children.
Among the vexations of that year may be mentioned the following: Mr. French had for safety built his hog-pen at one end of his house. One time during his absence, a bear entered the pen and, in spite of all Mrs. French's efforts to drive it away, succeeded in carrying off a fine shoat in broad daylight. When we consider the distance that the pig had been brought and that the pork supply for future years depended upon the few now possessed, we can realize the energy with which Mrs. French fought for the pig, and the great disappointment when it was carried off.
The first marriage in the township was held at their house in 1807, when their daughter, Rebecca, was married to Elah Clapp. This was a merry time, in which the whole settlement shared. An abundant supper was prepared out of the material at hand, and there was no lack of welcome and genuine friendliness."
Found in a larger work, "Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve", by G. Wickham, 1897.
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Did she teach her children how to to fight bears? A list is below. Pre-Civil War, but after her and Abiathar's deaths, two family members tried running for office at state legislatures and won. It was not for vanity and glory, but to get things done, in areas needing schools and roads, with one of the two clearly an abolitionist. One male descendant, a great-grandson going by "A. French", ran from a California mining camp, picking up his mail at Sacramento, as did young nephew Edwin French. By 1860, as "A. A. French", he and wife Nancy owned a hotel south of the Bay. Their last prior Census was in Michigan, Branch County, before going west in the 1850s. Was a first name of Alford, a variation of Alvord, too often mis-written as Alfred? He and the second wife who had come with him from Michigan were joined post-Civil War by his close relatives, namely, his widowed sister-in-law, Rebecca Farley French, mother to miner Edwin, and others. Nephew Eben/Ebenezer French, brother to Edwin, was a Civil War veteran whose stone is the only one of the off-to-California Frenches with his stone surviving, courtesy of upkeep by veteran's groups. Very severely damaged by his war, twice, face and leg, he would have hoped to resume his pre-War publishing work in Michigan once in San Jose, his paperwork listing that. He was in contrast to youngest brother A.O. French (Alford French, when in his mother's house), who stopped his university degree for the War, but had marriages and peach orchards in Michigan, so stayed there.
Niece Climena French boarded at A.A.'s and Nancy's hotel in 1860, before marrying fellow teacher, Mr. Shearer. His other sister, Mary Eliza French, the youngest after her sister Olive French died, was an ancestor to this writer's spouse, of marrying age post-war, her men not to live as long as Samuel Shearer.
The second legislator, serving from Lake County Ohio, married the female descendant born Amelia Climena French. Her husband, AJ Williams, was son of a Methodist minister, but trained as a lawyer, bravely abolitionist. Anti-slavery was the general mood in Lake County, a free state by choice, where escaped slaves might attempt to go along Lake Erie, finding Canada reachable by bridge at both ends. However, slave catchers initially denied chasing rights by Ohioans, were then allowed by a permissive US Congress and courts to violate Ohio laws. He won office there, after he and his wife tried out a divided Missouri and then returned. He would later merit a biography in a local history book, details accurate when checked against other sources. It cited his father-in-law as Edwin French, son to Jacob, with Beriah and Abiathar implied as Jacob's parents
Did the two men ever feel like they were beating off bears in their legislatures?
EARLIER, BEST FRIENDS, MARRIAGES, FIRE AND DEATH. Back in Mass., Beriah's mother had been widowed by a Phelps and then remarried Mr. Alvord, to have her last children by Beriah's father, Jonathan Alvord. Beriah's mother was Connecticut-born Elizabeth, maiden name Goslin, said by an old family history to die in Northampton on Feb 14, 1775. The family historian thought that Jonathan then moved his children in 1776, the next year. They went to a part of Northampton to splinter off as Westhampton, neighbors to ask for their own church. Westhampton Congregational was not given permission to form until Sept., 1779. Abiathar and Beriah courted before it opened, so married at the old church in Northampton in 1778. Siblings is rural areas were often "best friends", playing matchmaker for each other.
Another working farmer who served in the Revolution, though with just 7 days of service according to an old history of the family, was Beriah's brother, Jehiel Alvord, was introduced to and married Abiathar's younger sister, Dorothy. Both couples married at Northampton in 1778. On Feb 6 Abiathar Jr and Beriah married. On June 11 Jehiel Alvord married Dorothy French. Westhampton had no church yet. These dates are from Northampton records found at Family Search, after D. Curtis alerted us of Beriah's wedding date. A different source, with some typos noticed for dates, said the two Frenches' father, widowed by their mother, in 1789, married a Naomi Alvord, presumably of South Hadley, as married at that church, relationship to Jehiel and Beriah unspecified (alfordassociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/vitals.pdf).
Due to a fire at Westhampton, the next records, 1779-1817, burned, including the baptisms of both couple's children. Jehial and Dorothy were still living and local after 1817, but Beriah and Abiathar had moved to Ohio.
The congregation was able to reconstruct many missing records. Dorothy and Jehiel's seem pretty complete, but not those of Beriah's children. Another user at Findagrave was able to find four of the names, in re-constructed records for Westhampton. We reconstructed three more from Ohio sources, to match the number going to Ohio Abiathar and Beriah were said to have taken there.
Their cenotaphs at daughter Rebecca's stone in Lake County have named, but dates are missing. It's likely they died before 1840. Helping date their deaths, sister-in-law Dorothy, the youngest of the four, was of record in her 1840 Census as a widow, counted in Northampton. Unusual for that Census, her precise age was cited (82), as she was receiving a Revolutionary War pension. She had been youngest of the four, so they would have been accordingly older, Beriah 86 in 1840, understandable to have died. There seemed to be no pensions for the unusual names of Abiathar or Beriah French, which fits their decease. (Abiathar's military records were checked by this writer at the National Archives, so it is assumed his years of service would have qualified for a pension, given others received pensions after serving much shorter terms. He had a temporary absence that was exonerated later, its timing co-inciding with multiple from his area inoculating themselves for smallpox, then returning to their troops once the self-inoculation had taken effect. Some commanding officer refused to permit it, even though his failure to so so meant an abnormally high death rate from the disease, and some needless victories for the British.)
FROM PAPER TO ASHES. The records gathered 1779 to 1817 burned at a fire at the minister's house. Happily, Abiathar and Beriah married in 1778 at the old church in Northampton, so their marriage record survived, but Jehiel and Dorothy's did not. People were able to reconstruct many births, but not all. For Beriah, one son who died back at Westhampton had a gravestone, so he's in the Westhampton set. A son murdered in Ohio in 1825 is missing, as the news story on the murder and convictions omitted his age and birthplace, and were maybe restricted to the Cleveland area. (SIDE NOTE: The Westhampton Congregational church and ministers, to prevent future losses, allowed 17 volumes of records from 1817 through 1971 to be archived at the local University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, under "Call no.: MS 806". Their web page on Westhampton Congregational is at library.umass.edu.)
Ministers kept detailed records for their churches back then, multiple mysteries sometimes clearing up when they are found. Their Congregational Church of Westhampton formed under a brother to the hero Nathan Hale, Rev Enoch Hale, there for some decades. Ministers from the mother churches and towns at Northampton, the eldest mother town, and at Southampton, a sister town, were present for his opening ceremony. Rev Hale kept his at home, but a fire at his house, in 1817, destroyed what accumulated by then, from 1789 to 1817.
CHILDREN. Our best count is that they had seven to eight children, total.
User D. Curtis (/user/profile/47355469) found these four, of Abiathar and Beriah Alvord French, ending with their 1790 Census back in Mass., :
"John, b. 7 Dec. 1778, Westhampton, Mass.
Jacob, b. 23 May 1781, Westhampton, Mass.
Abiathar, b. 9 Apr. 1784, Westhampton, Mass., d. 5 Jul. 1800, Westhampton, Mass.
Timothy, b. 20 Jan. 1790, Westhampton, Mass."
Who were her six children named as coming to Ohio?
Their 1790 Census showed five males under 16. The 16 year old Abiathiar who died in 1800 still living, the fifth son would be the David whose 1825 death was distant and whose birth was not re-constructed in unaware Westhampton. (The search is still on for their 1800 Census to count daughters, Rebecca Clapp McMillen known ttwo ways, from the wedding story in Leroy and also from her stone surviving and namiing her parents. One source shows an earlier Timothy possibly had died before a namesake for him was born in 1790, so would not be counted in 1790 either. Namesakes were common in the families of those men sur-named French whose male DNA tracks back to Braintree, south of Boston
The son named Abiathar would have been the third and last Abiathar French. The name proved too hard to spell, so stayed unused after a namesake nephew was called Abiathar Alvord, child of Dorothy and Jehiel.
FROM WESTHAMPTON. The four sons above would have been ages 0 to 12 in the first census of the new Republic, the 1790. They were just right to be the four males under 16 in the house of an Abiathar French in Westhampton, not clear if their father or grandfather wasthe one named as head.
It was common to "double-up" back then. Only one Abiathar French household was listed that Census, not two. The two females would have been Beriah and senior's second wife, Naomi, formerly of S. Hadley.
Abiathar the senior had taken junior and his siblings from the Braintree area south of Boston, to Hampshire County, before the Revolution. Their mother, the former Margaret Niles, had died at some point, not clear when.
Their farm was in a cluster of river towns, so-called hamptons. By 1790, mother town Northampton, the county seat, had spun off three daughter towns, South, East and their West. All were in Hampshire County, only a few counties away from upstate NY. The Northampton area was reachable from the two elder Abiathars' hometown in the Boston area, by an overland route coming through what became Worcester County. It was also reachable from the sea by going up the Connecticut River past Springfield, MA. Their Hamptons were on the east side of the big River. Almost directly across, on the other side, the Springfield side, were Hadley and Hatfield. She had Alvord relatives in those places and more.
Why was Ohio a natural follow-up to Westhampton? Pre-Revolution, in colonial days, old New York province had used the Conn. River as its east boundary, but negotiations pushed the boundary westward, causing their Hampshire County to be in the Bay Colony, not New York. Connecticut formed just downriver of Springfield. In colonial days, Connecticut leaders had been told by the king's officials that their grant extended westward to the Pacific. Virginia, further south, was told the same thing. In later negotiations to draw state lines between former colonies, both newly formed states gave up having land westward. To make up for that loss, each was given a section of future Ohio instead, as compensation, to settle or sell as they wished.
Thus, Virginians and people all along the Connecticut River, Massachusetts through Vermont, with a natural mix of upstate New Yorkers, would hear about that and make their way west. Virginians mainly went north to cross the Ohio River, going into southern Ohio. The northerners mainly followed the Great Lakes shorelines west, through a long stretch of NY and past a short stretch of Penn., to the Western Reserve, in northeast Ohio.
OLD NEIGHBORS. Their US Census of 1790 in Westhampton gave each household one row on a handwritten page. Luckily for family historians, the order was not alphabetic, but named male heads or widows in the order visited by the interviewer, keeping neighbors together. People married people nearby, on the average, so key neighbors counted at Westhampton in the 1790 included Alvords and Phelps related to Beriah, with the marriages of spouse Abiather's sisters inclduing more than Dorothy, neighboring Chilsons and Pittsingers related . There were Claps/Clapps locally. Future son-in-law Elah Clapp was thus likely known by her daughter before the two sets, Clapp and French, reached Ohio, what became Leroy. (On a ridge overlooking Lake Erie, it was reached by going upstream and then uphill from Painesville, which had a river port on to the Lake. Cleveland, in contrast, was on a different river further east, also part of the Reserve.)
The handwritten census copy of 1790 was transcribed and put into printed form in 1809. (Her sisters-in-law Rebecca and Rhoda had their Chilsen and Pittsinger houses mis-transcribed as "Chalson" and "Pittinger".)
We know that more children were born. For example, her daughter Rebecca was born 1793, according to the age on her stone, so post-1790 Census. She married Elah Clapp, to see him die young, then married a McMillen, so her stone says that second surname. Someone (descendants?) attempted to redo the daughter's stone in Leroy Twp., by adding/recarving her parents' names on it. (They made errors of the kind that arise when not knowing the earlier generation personally. "Her name was something like Maria, doesn't this old stuff seem to say that that?").
There is also the possibility (not the same as a fact) of two Timothys, the younger one becoming a namesake for an older one who died earlier.
Summary--This writer believes that after omitting the son or sons who died "back there", the full list of six going to Leroy included at least one Timothy, plus John, Jacob, David, Rebecca Clapp McMillen and Rhoda Keep, their births split between Westhampton and some other place encountered before going to Leroy, the daughters names matched two of Abiathar's sisters who were twinned (maybe not biological, maybe merely baptized on the same day).
TO THE WESTERN RESERVE. What was the Western Reserve?
A multi-county district which lay along Lake Erie, in NE Ohio, its special purpose was to "make the peace" as the thirteen colonies negotiated their boundaries, something that would take two or three more generations to resolve fully. A chunk of future Ohio, still a territory, not yet a state, was given to Connecticut as a payoff, in return for CT giving up what it believed it owned, a long strip of land that went all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Connecticut then sold its pay-off in pieces, to fund its schools, specific parts allotted to buyer by lottery. Some buyers, such as Col. Amasa Clapp, were interested in starting settlements for farmers. Others wanted only money-making "land flips", to be mostly disappointed when demand for land died due to the threat of war, not done until about 1816.
Why did other settlers delay going there?
Rumors rumbled, of further war with Britain, to see who could take sole control of Detroit and other contested parts along the Canadian border. Most early settlers stayed away from Lake Erie shorelines, too close to Canada and then tiny Detroit, until 1816 or later.
Beriah's Frenches did not delay. They arrived in the Reserve well-ahead of the War of 1812. Choosing that location most likely had two causes. A party developing land there was already known to them, back in Massachusetts. (Amasa Clapp, also from Mass., Hampshire County, a purchaser of land via the Reserve's lottery, would send his sons and other neighbors to clear land. His son, Elah, was one, to be Rebecca's future spouse.) Plus, the younger French sons were coming of age at about the same time and needed their own farms, with undeveloped land left behind in Massachusetts too rocky and barren.
Two adult sons left first for future Ohio, from Westhampton, Mass. With a future in-law, they went to the Western Reserve of Ohio, locating inside the Reserve on the second major river east of an itty-bitty Cleveland. Then, Beriah and the rest followed. The reserve was still a wilderness. They would have most likely approached by coming up the Grand River from Lake Erie, to the ridge-land higher above Painesville. They were then inside future Lake County, which, until 1840, was in the northern part of mother Geauga County. (Old Geauga had, in turn, split off from Trumbull County a few years before their arrival.) Beriah's Frenches moved to the Reserve about the same time a few other families arrived from Hampshire County, Massachusetts.
Only two families surnamed French were present east of Cleveland ahead of the War of 1812, so, very, very early, for this end of Ohio. The other party name French, Peter, later gained a place in history books by selling farmland, plus a brickyard and his "hotel" (smaller, more like an inn), to the brand-new "Mormans" in the late 1820s. His spot was at a four-corners, a great location for the LDS/Latter Day Saints to build their very first temple.
Peter lived a few decades more, long enough to tell the 1850 census-taker that he had been born in NY. Local history books say he had earlier come to the local county with fur trapper David Abbot, who had been an attorney. Their party managed to arrive before the turn of their century, ahead of Beriah's Frenches.
Maybe unrelated, Peter may have been known to Beriah via people she knew with rural NY connections. These might include her half-siblings named Phelps (her mother remarried a Phelps, after Beriah's own father died).
Peter was familiar with the western end of NY state, closer to Ohio, less Dutch than parts closer to Albany, NY, and Vermont. Peter was first of record in David Abbot's traveling party to Ohio, said to briefly return to Genesee (meaning the river valley in western NY), as if it were his home, to obtain a cow for their party's food needs. That part of western NY state had Phelps connections. In particular, something called the Phelps-Gorham land grant lay on the east side of the Genesee River. Similar to the Western Reserve, the attempt to buy and develop it was too early, pre-War of 1812. Oliver Phelps went bankrupt on that land while most of his hoped-for settlers waited for war rumblings to end. (It was home to the town of Le Roy, NY, for which future Leroy Twp., Ohio, would be named, where these Frenches were said to settle by a Spencer Phelps who arrived with the Clapp brothers and decades later, aged, wrote some history and remembrance articles for a local newspaper.)
Was that Peter French related to Beriah's Abiathar? Right now, we can't be sure without DNA tests submitted for his descendants (as of 2016). The Braintree Frenches, of which Abiather was part, had their male DNA first tested circa 2014 (FamilyTreeDNA.com), not a match to Frenches north of Boston. Peter had two known children (Robert, Angeline). Their names are not Puritan, like Abiather and Beriah, instead lean culturally French, but they were of a later generation.
Second, Colonel Clapp did not come to settle on any of the land himself, but stayed back in Hampshire County, Mass. He had bought land in three future Ohio counties, to develop and sell to others, but arranged for others to do the clearing and planting that would both give the next settlers an initial food supply and convince others that the region was fertile. In 1798, the Col. sent NY-born Peter French to Mantua, in Portage County. ("The first improvements in Mantua were made in the fall of 1798, by Peter French, on the northwest corner of Lot 24, upon which he sowed a few acres of wheat. This was the first wheat sown in the County. It was harvested the following summer by Rufus Edwards, who took possession of of this parcel in the spring of 1799", according to SidneyRigdon.com/RigdonO3.htm.) Around 1803, Clapp sent two sons, Paul and Elah, to future Leroy Twp., in the Col's second county, to the second county, to become modern Lake County later. Coming with the Clapp sons in 1803 was their neighbor Spencer Phelps and a hired hand, Jonathan Russel. (Peter would very soon marry a Sarah Russel, before the local counties had split off from mother Trumbull, so his records are at that county courthouse.) Peter's earlier voyageur companion, David Abbot, would go later to Col. Clapp's third county, Medina (not clear, was he working for Co. Clapp or there as he had earned his own land? Earned by building a mill on the Chagrin River, in a place then called Chagrin, now called Willoughby, called that after the township was realigned to be in Lake County. One of Beriah's grandsons, Edgar French, would die in Willoughby.)
MASSACHUSETTS, CHILDREN HAD "DOUBLE COUSINS". Back in Mass., the record of her marriage to her Abiathar French, second of three, is found in Northampton. The Frenches lived on its western and rural edge, not yet split off as Westhampton.
Beriah's Alvord ancestors were in Hadley. Neither place had its own church at the time. They missed having a double wedding by a few years. Abiathar married Beriah, while Beriah's younger brother had earlier wed Abiathar's younger sister. (Her younger brother was Jehiel Alvord. He married Dorothy/Doritha French. She was at the legal age for females being adults, able to marry or work without parent permission, so she married at 12, shocking our modern minds. Her young age is confirmed by her cemetery stone. Contrary dates, this writer believes, appear in some family trees. Their minds could not comprehend 12 either, so they "adjusted" some other family members' ages upward so Dorothy could be made to appear older at marriage.)
Since two French siblings married two Alvord siblings, their children were "double cousins". Double cousins are often favorite cousins, seen at both family reunions and events at both grandparents' houses. A doubly-related descendant of Jehiel and Dorothy, from MA, would be of record in a later census visiting one of Abiathar's grandchildren in OH. Thus, family ties continued for decades.
Ohio was not good at record-keeping yet, so we find dates for Abiathar and Beriah in non-modern ways. The Alvords have a family history with names and dates, with the pre-Revolution part covering a time when the main church in their area of Hampshire County was at Northampton. (The families, however, lived in places that were, later, post-Revolution, allowed their own town names and churches. At that point, the families ceased to be in Northampton records. The reason is not given, but, in this branch, the Alvords changed the spelling from Alford, to Alvord, perhaps as Alford too often would be sounded out as Alfred.) SOURCE: p.117 of "The Alvord Family", archived at
AlfordAssociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/buralv_5.pdf
Beriah's baptism was at the Northampton church back in Mass., recorded as Feb. 10, 1754, with her younger brother Jehial born Jan. 7 and baptized Jan. 11, 1756.
Beriah's father and grandfather were both named Jonathan. (Her great-grandfather was Alexander, the immigrant? Must check this.) The name Thankful Alvord was used multiple times in her family, including her elder sister, but began with their grandmother Thankful, who had been born Miller.
Only four of her own children's births are in the Massachusetts records, all of them sons. Notice in the bear story chose to call her only "Mrs. French" (despite giving the first names of other women). People did not understand her name, so mis-spelled it or used Mrs. French, with her spouse mis-written also. Thus, the four children's birth records were transcribed to say "Abiather French", not Abiathar. They say "Boriah", not Beriah. (Blobby ink from a quill pen or fountain pen could make a handwritten E appear to be an O.)
Abiathar III died before they left Massachusetts. The three sons coming to Ohio would be John, Jacob, and Timothy. John then disappeared from the news and local history books; he wasn't Peter French, was he? Did he die in the War of 1812? Return to Massachusetts, name too common to find him?
If only three of those coming had birth records showing both parents' names, how do we know that Beriah and Abiathar were their parents? The biggest reason is that no other Frenches, apart from Peter, were present in the marriage records. Found in those marriage records was David French, married by the same traveling minister as Timothy, that minister, Shadrack Ruark, different from the men marrying later settlers. Also in the records were two daughters, women who were possibly twins or close-in-age sisters, Rebecca and Rhoda. The sisters married in the early years, as did Timothy and David, did so before other Frenches of alternative DNAs arrived to mix up the parentage.
Rhoda married Luther Keep. Rebecca's wedding to Elah Clapp (a first marriage, second was to William McMillen) is in the above excerpt, where parentage is clearly listed. The excerpt mis-spelled Abiathar as "Abiathan", but who else could it mean? Beriah's is not guessed, too hard, everybody was dead or had moved by the time of the writing, and the tombstones were already gone. She is thus "Mrs. French". This helps make make clear that Rebecca's tombstone memorial to them (as "Abiather" and "Maria") was retrospective, done some decades after they all had died, so could not object to wrong spellings of rare Biblical names. Did descendants recarving the fading stone not believe it said Beriah when they saw it, presumed it "should be" Maria? David's murder story in the newspapers did not indicate his connection. Not stone remains. However, his land records tie him to Jacob and Timothy, with an court case resulting from David being intoxicated at the time, so too incompetent to sign.
When did she die? Probably before Abiathar, but when did his death occur? Painesville, where her son Jacob had a distillery, in addition to farming, put a high school over its big old cemetery. Her daughter Rebecca's stone showed names, not dates.
She and her father had been churchgoers back in Westhampton, both on the list of the town church's founding members. Perhaps we will find a church record of her death someday [UPDATE, Feb, 2022, we infer she died before 1840, as she and Abiathar are not cited in the 1840 Census, unlike sister-in-law Dorothy Alvord, widow, named as age 82 and receiving a Rev. War pension in her Census back in Hampshire County, MA . We infer Abiathar's birth as 1755-1756, due to his being "written up" as age 20 in a military record in 1776. We don't believe the ages in family trees adjusted upward to make 12 year-old Dorothy Alvord look 15. Dorothy's family was fine with the real birth year for her tombstone, why shouldn't we be?
In the 1830's, Abiathar the junior was still alive, but elderly. Was he perhaps growing senile, as some in the French family did earlier, of record as confused, etc, back in Braintree? There is a last record for him.
Some neighbor must have found him wandering about, confused, and taken him to the town hall. They gave his name as "Abiattur". Whoever was in charge reacted maliciously by "warning out" the early settler. Many people Abiathar knew, back when younger and clear-minded, had left, including his own children, David by death, most of the others by moving to Michigan and Indiana. Did Rebecca still live? Her children by Elah Clapp? David's children, semi-orphaned, were where? watched from afar by their mother's half-Hessian father, Christian Kneip/Kneippe, of about the same age as Abiathar, both relics of the same war back in 1776? Christian and his son Charles, who came early with David and John to clear land, also dead? Spencer Phelps, his sons' age, from Hampshire County, Mass., had moved to Mentor, was no longer in LeRoy. Elah Clapp had died long ago and Paul Clapp had moved (recently? to Huntsburg?).
Around that time, some left due to land challenges legally. Col Amasa Clapp had signed a bond guaranteeing someone's performance as a tax collector in Massachusetts. The collector's performance failed, with claims then made to cover what the collector owed, decades later, against the deceased Clapp's Ohio lands. The claims were successful due to a new precedent-setting ruling. Did this provoke Lake County into separating from Geauga, where one man ruling against them lived? The resulting state case said statutes of limitations against a property owner expired, whenever a property-owner crossed a state line, setting a precedent. Now, we have title insurance used by banks giving mortgages, to protect against that. Those holding affect land in Leroy, did not have it. Rebecca kept McMillen land for her children, lost the land from her first spouse they had cleared when first going to Ohio.
Luther Keep, daughter Rhoda's husband, had taken their family to farm in what is now Fawn River, Mich.. Their house would end across the state line, however, in Indiana (officials "up above" moved the state line to resolve bickering over who could collect taxes, letting Indiana have the Keeps and others).
Abiathar was "warned out" despite being nigh 80. Beriah was not warned out, so she must have already died. Abiathar must have been a widower by then.
Some stories by in-laws named Farley, leaving Kirtland to go to the south end of Michigan, said they walked from Detroit southward. Abiathar, at his age, was most likely too frail to make such a trip, so allowed to care for himself back in Leroy.
Because of the warning, without any outcome described, we do not know where he ended. Presumedly someone came to get him, notified by mail. We do not know who did what.
Was it Ransom? Grandson Ransom French definitely did return to Ohio for a bit around that time. Son Alford/Alfred Orin French was born there, in Mentor, in that interval, unlike both earlier and later children of Ransom French and Rebecca Farley, instead born down in Michigan. They could have gone back to Ohio briefly, just until Abiathar died, to settle things with the Edwin French who never left Ohio, buried at the Cleveland cemetery above Little Italy (one access by Mayfield Rd).
FOLLOWING TO BE REMOVED:
An 1840 atlas showed Ransom on a farm west of the Mentor village site, on the main road out. It's a site we know was temporary.
He had land transactions with a known son of Jacob, Edwin French, using mutual "quit claim deeds". If Edwin was not Ransom's brother, was he a close cousin? Ransom started a foundry on his return to Mich., but died there in 1852, with his youngest two, an infant, Olive, and a three-year-old, Mary Eliza, ancestor to this writer's spouse. A Jacob French, perhaps a brother, as about the same age, was also of record as a supervisor of public schools. He died a year after Ransom. Both were put in a pioneer cemetery located across the street from an M-E church that later turned plain Methodist. The Lutheran church later took over that cemetery. Both graves were then moved, to a public cemetery. The same people who buried them moved them? Maybe the Lutherans did it as a courtesy?
Those were cholera years for people along waterways, infected by others careless when disposing human waste in to the water? Weren't they close to the St. Joseph R.?
There was also a likely third brother or cousin nearby in the Michigan years, a state legislator for a while. He went by "A. French", for Alford French, most likely as people who could not spell Beriah also mis-rendered the name as Alfred? He was a distiller and miller (both processed farmers' grain) when in Michigan in 1850, in an era when steam power was replacing water power, about to put his mill out of business. Then he went off to California, first to Sacramento, seen first of record in newspapers with Ransom's son Edwin as having letters to pick-up. He became of record again as a legislator, for a gold camp. He then moved south of San Francisco, near San Jose (Alviso and Milpitas), seen with his Michigan family and owning a hotel by 1860. Ransom's daughter Climena French boarded at the hotel while she worked as a teacher, in the year or two before she married fellow teacher Samuel Shearer. In an obituary perhaps written by reporters, A. French was called the "Duke of Milpitas". Other sources said this referred to his knowing politics so well, letting conventions, etc meet at his hotel, that if he called an election, it went that way. "How do you think this election will turn out? Ask the Duke of Milpitas." Do we think the Duke of Milpitas had a grandmother who chased a bear? Yes.
A Timothy French living near Luther Keep could be Beriah's son and an alternative candidate as father to Ransom, Jacob and/or "A. French", since he was found also in Michigan and living very near them. He was of record in the Fawn River area of Mich., living very near Jacob in the 1840 and Ransom in the 1850 censuses. Were Jacob and Ransom sharing farmland to make that rotation happen while Timothy lived in Fawn River (near or spun-off from Sturgis/Sturges)?
Timothy was across the state line from the farmhouse of Luther Keep and Rhoda French Keep, but very near their farmland. In the 1850 Census, Timothy's wife Mary was named, of the right age and birthplace to be the Mary Allison whom Shadrach Ruark married to Timothy French back in tiny LeRoy Twp., not long after the family first arrived in Ohio. Mary perhaps has a death record their count in Michigan, falling between the 1850 and 1860 Censuses?. That Timothy's birth date does not exactly match that of the Massachusetts-born Timothy, but that is often the case if somebody else guessed his age for the census-taker when he was not home. Ages being "off" by three to even ten years is common if a visiting in-law answers the door.
The other (less likely) possibility, is maybe he was a younger namesake child, named for an older brother Timothy who had died young?
If Timothy was Ransom's father, he out-survived Ransom.
We have a bit more about Beriah as the Alvord family tracked her in their genealogies. She would have died in Leroy Twp., as Abiathar was still living there when warned. Do the Alvords have her death date?
Revised, Feb. 2022. Next step, to cut length.
Her biblical name rhymed with Maria or Mariah. She married a neighbor in Mass., a young soldier, who, like so many in wars, returned whole, yet a bit damaged, his war, the American Revolution. He was Abiathar French, the Junior, ready to marry, post-War. His bride Beriah would find herself, decades later, hundreds of miles east and beating off a bear.
Real bears? By Cleveland? Yes, now gone. Old histories tell of both grizzlies and black bears. Grizzlies would be the meaner ones, but both liked meat.
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From "Pioneer Women of Leroy"
"The first death in the township was Patty Clapp [a young child], who died in 1806... The same year the second family moved in, Abiathan [Abiathar] French, from Massachusetts, with his wife [Beriah] and six children.
Among the vexations of that year may be mentioned the following: Mr. French had for safety built his hog-pen at one end of his house. One time during his absence, a bear entered the pen and, in spite of all Mrs. French's efforts to drive it away, succeeded in carrying off a fine shoat in broad daylight. When we consider the distance that the pig had been brought and that the pork supply for future years depended upon the few now possessed, we can realize the energy with which Mrs. French fought for the pig, and the great disappointment when it was carried off.
The first marriage in the township was held at their house in 1807, when their daughter, Rebecca, was married to Elah Clapp. This was a merry time, in which the whole settlement shared. An abundant supper was prepared out of the material at hand, and there was no lack of welcome and genuine friendliness."
Found in a larger work, "Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve", by G. Wickham, 1897.
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Did she teach her children how to to fight bears? A list is below. Pre-Civil War, but after her and Abiathar's deaths, two family members tried running for office at state legislatures and won. It was not for vanity and glory, but to get things done, in areas needing schools and roads, with one of the two clearly an abolitionist. One male descendant, a great-grandson going by "A. French", ran from a California mining camp, picking up his mail at Sacramento, as did young nephew Edwin French. By 1860, as "A. A. French", he and wife Nancy owned a hotel south of the Bay. Their last prior Census was in Michigan, Branch County, before going west in the 1850s. Was a first name of Alford, a variation of Alvord, too often mis-written as Alfred? He and the second wife who had come with him from Michigan were joined post-Civil War by his close relatives, namely, his widowed sister-in-law, Rebecca Farley French, mother to miner Edwin, and others. Nephew Eben/Ebenezer French, brother to Edwin, was a Civil War veteran whose stone is the only one of the off-to-California Frenches with his stone surviving, courtesy of upkeep by veteran's groups. Very severely damaged by his war, twice, face and leg, he would have hoped to resume his pre-War publishing work in Michigan once in San Jose, his paperwork listing that. He was in contrast to youngest brother A.O. French (Alford French, when in his mother's house), who stopped his university degree for the War, but had marriages and peach orchards in Michigan, so stayed there.
Niece Climena French boarded at A.A.'s and Nancy's hotel in 1860, before marrying fellow teacher, Mr. Shearer. His other sister, Mary Eliza French, the youngest after her sister Olive French died, was an ancestor to this writer's spouse, of marrying age post-war, her men not to live as long as Samuel Shearer.
The second legislator, serving from Lake County Ohio, married the female descendant born Amelia Climena French. Her husband, AJ Williams, was son of a Methodist minister, but trained as a lawyer, bravely abolitionist. Anti-slavery was the general mood in Lake County, a free state by choice, where escaped slaves might attempt to go along Lake Erie, finding Canada reachable by bridge at both ends. However, slave catchers initially denied chasing rights by Ohioans, were then allowed by a permissive US Congress and courts to violate Ohio laws. He won office there, after he and his wife tried out a divided Missouri and then returned. He would later merit a biography in a local history book, details accurate when checked against other sources. It cited his father-in-law as Edwin French, son to Jacob, with Beriah and Abiathar implied as Jacob's parents
Did the two men ever feel like they were beating off bears in their legislatures?
EARLIER, BEST FRIENDS, MARRIAGES, FIRE AND DEATH. Back in Mass., Beriah's mother had been widowed by a Phelps and then remarried Mr. Alvord, to have her last children by Beriah's father, Jonathan Alvord. Beriah's mother was Connecticut-born Elizabeth, maiden name Goslin, said by an old family history to die in Northampton on Feb 14, 1775. The family historian thought that Jonathan then moved his children in 1776, the next year. They went to a part of Northampton to splinter off as Westhampton, neighbors to ask for their own church. Westhampton Congregational was not given permission to form until Sept., 1779. Abiathar and Beriah courted before it opened, so married at the old church in Northampton in 1778. Siblings is rural areas were often "best friends", playing matchmaker for each other.
Another working farmer who served in the Revolution, though with just 7 days of service according to an old history of the family, was Beriah's brother, Jehiel Alvord, was introduced to and married Abiathar's younger sister, Dorothy. Both couples married at Northampton in 1778. On Feb 6 Abiathar Jr and Beriah married. On June 11 Jehiel Alvord married Dorothy French. Westhampton had no church yet. These dates are from Northampton records found at Family Search, after D. Curtis alerted us of Beriah's wedding date. A different source, with some typos noticed for dates, said the two Frenches' father, widowed by their mother, in 1789, married a Naomi Alvord, presumably of South Hadley, as married at that church, relationship to Jehiel and Beriah unspecified (alfordassociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/vitals.pdf).
Due to a fire at Westhampton, the next records, 1779-1817, burned, including the baptisms of both couple's children. Jehial and Dorothy were still living and local after 1817, but Beriah and Abiathar had moved to Ohio.
The congregation was able to reconstruct many missing records. Dorothy and Jehiel's seem pretty complete, but not those of Beriah's children. Another user at Findagrave was able to find four of the names, in re-constructed records for Westhampton. We reconstructed three more from Ohio sources, to match the number going to Ohio Abiathar and Beriah were said to have taken there.
Their cenotaphs at daughter Rebecca's stone in Lake County have named, but dates are missing. It's likely they died before 1840. Helping date their deaths, sister-in-law Dorothy, the youngest of the four, was of record in her 1840 Census as a widow, counted in Northampton. Unusual for that Census, her precise age was cited (82), as she was receiving a Revolutionary War pension. She had been youngest of the four, so they would have been accordingly older, Beriah 86 in 1840, understandable to have died. There seemed to be no pensions for the unusual names of Abiathar or Beriah French, which fits their decease. (Abiathar's military records were checked by this writer at the National Archives, so it is assumed his years of service would have qualified for a pension, given others received pensions after serving much shorter terms. He had a temporary absence that was exonerated later, its timing co-inciding with multiple from his area inoculating themselves for smallpox, then returning to their troops once the self-inoculation had taken effect. Some commanding officer refused to permit it, even though his failure to so so meant an abnormally high death rate from the disease, and some needless victories for the British.)
FROM PAPER TO ASHES. The records gathered 1779 to 1817 burned at a fire at the minister's house. Happily, Abiathar and Beriah married in 1778 at the old church in Northampton, so their marriage record survived, but Jehiel and Dorothy's did not. People were able to reconstruct many births, but not all. For Beriah, one son who died back at Westhampton had a gravestone, so he's in the Westhampton set. A son murdered in Ohio in 1825 is missing, as the news story on the murder and convictions omitted his age and birthplace, and were maybe restricted to the Cleveland area. (SIDE NOTE: The Westhampton Congregational church and ministers, to prevent future losses, allowed 17 volumes of records from 1817 through 1971 to be archived at the local University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, under "Call no.: MS 806". Their web page on Westhampton Congregational is at library.umass.edu.)
Ministers kept detailed records for their churches back then, multiple mysteries sometimes clearing up when they are found. Their Congregational Church of Westhampton formed under a brother to the hero Nathan Hale, Rev Enoch Hale, there for some decades. Ministers from the mother churches and towns at Northampton, the eldest mother town, and at Southampton, a sister town, were present for his opening ceremony. Rev Hale kept his at home, but a fire at his house, in 1817, destroyed what accumulated by then, from 1789 to 1817.
CHILDREN. Our best count is that they had seven to eight children, total.
User D. Curtis (/user/profile/47355469) found these four, of Abiathar and Beriah Alvord French, ending with their 1790 Census back in Mass., :
"John, b. 7 Dec. 1778, Westhampton, Mass.
Jacob, b. 23 May 1781, Westhampton, Mass.
Abiathar, b. 9 Apr. 1784, Westhampton, Mass., d. 5 Jul. 1800, Westhampton, Mass.
Timothy, b. 20 Jan. 1790, Westhampton, Mass."
Who were her six children named as coming to Ohio?
Their 1790 Census showed five males under 16. The 16 year old Abiathiar who died in 1800 still living, the fifth son would be the David whose 1825 death was distant and whose birth was not re-constructed in unaware Westhampton. (The search is still on for their 1800 Census to count daughters, Rebecca Clapp McMillen known ttwo ways, from the wedding story in Leroy and also from her stone surviving and namiing her parents. One source shows an earlier Timothy possibly had died before a namesake for him was born in 1790, so would not be counted in 1790 either. Namesakes were common in the families of those men sur-named French whose male DNA tracks back to Braintree, south of Boston
The son named Abiathar would have been the third and last Abiathar French. The name proved too hard to spell, so stayed unused after a namesake nephew was called Abiathar Alvord, child of Dorothy and Jehiel.
FROM WESTHAMPTON. The four sons above would have been ages 0 to 12 in the first census of the new Republic, the 1790. They were just right to be the four males under 16 in the house of an Abiathar French in Westhampton, not clear if their father or grandfather wasthe one named as head.
It was common to "double-up" back then. Only one Abiathar French household was listed that Census, not two. The two females would have been Beriah and senior's second wife, Naomi, formerly of S. Hadley.
Abiathar the senior had taken junior and his siblings from the Braintree area south of Boston, to Hampshire County, before the Revolution. Their mother, the former Margaret Niles, had died at some point, not clear when.
Their farm was in a cluster of river towns, so-called hamptons. By 1790, mother town Northampton, the county seat, had spun off three daughter towns, South, East and their West. All were in Hampshire County, only a few counties away from upstate NY. The Northampton area was reachable from the two elder Abiathars' hometown in the Boston area, by an overland route coming through what became Worcester County. It was also reachable from the sea by going up the Connecticut River past Springfield, MA. Their Hamptons were on the east side of the big River. Almost directly across, on the other side, the Springfield side, were Hadley and Hatfield. She had Alvord relatives in those places and more.
Why was Ohio a natural follow-up to Westhampton? Pre-Revolution, in colonial days, old New York province had used the Conn. River as its east boundary, but negotiations pushed the boundary westward, causing their Hampshire County to be in the Bay Colony, not New York. Connecticut formed just downriver of Springfield. In colonial days, Connecticut leaders had been told by the king's officials that their grant extended westward to the Pacific. Virginia, further south, was told the same thing. In later negotiations to draw state lines between former colonies, both newly formed states gave up having land westward. To make up for that loss, each was given a section of future Ohio instead, as compensation, to settle or sell as they wished.
Thus, Virginians and people all along the Connecticut River, Massachusetts through Vermont, with a natural mix of upstate New Yorkers, would hear about that and make their way west. Virginians mainly went north to cross the Ohio River, going into southern Ohio. The northerners mainly followed the Great Lakes shorelines west, through a long stretch of NY and past a short stretch of Penn., to the Western Reserve, in northeast Ohio.
OLD NEIGHBORS. Their US Census of 1790 in Westhampton gave each household one row on a handwritten page. Luckily for family historians, the order was not alphabetic, but named male heads or widows in the order visited by the interviewer, keeping neighbors together. People married people nearby, on the average, so key neighbors counted at Westhampton in the 1790 included Alvords and Phelps related to Beriah, with the marriages of spouse Abiather's sisters inclduing more than Dorothy, neighboring Chilsons and Pittsingers related . There were Claps/Clapps locally. Future son-in-law Elah Clapp was thus likely known by her daughter before the two sets, Clapp and French, reached Ohio, what became Leroy. (On a ridge overlooking Lake Erie, it was reached by going upstream and then uphill from Painesville, which had a river port on to the Lake. Cleveland, in contrast, was on a different river further east, also part of the Reserve.)
The handwritten census copy of 1790 was transcribed and put into printed form in 1809. (Her sisters-in-law Rebecca and Rhoda had their Chilsen and Pittsinger houses mis-transcribed as "Chalson" and "Pittinger".)
We know that more children were born. For example, her daughter Rebecca was born 1793, according to the age on her stone, so post-1790 Census. She married Elah Clapp, to see him die young, then married a McMillen, so her stone says that second surname. Someone (descendants?) attempted to redo the daughter's stone in Leroy Twp., by adding/recarving her parents' names on it. (They made errors of the kind that arise when not knowing the earlier generation personally. "Her name was something like Maria, doesn't this old stuff seem to say that that?").
There is also the possibility (not the same as a fact) of two Timothys, the younger one becoming a namesake for an older one who died earlier.
Summary--This writer believes that after omitting the son or sons who died "back there", the full list of six going to Leroy included at least one Timothy, plus John, Jacob, David, Rebecca Clapp McMillen and Rhoda Keep, their births split between Westhampton and some other place encountered before going to Leroy, the daughters names matched two of Abiathar's sisters who were twinned (maybe not biological, maybe merely baptized on the same day).
TO THE WESTERN RESERVE. What was the Western Reserve?
A multi-county district which lay along Lake Erie, in NE Ohio, its special purpose was to "make the peace" as the thirteen colonies negotiated their boundaries, something that would take two or three more generations to resolve fully. A chunk of future Ohio, still a territory, not yet a state, was given to Connecticut as a payoff, in return for CT giving up what it believed it owned, a long strip of land that went all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Connecticut then sold its pay-off in pieces, to fund its schools, specific parts allotted to buyer by lottery. Some buyers, such as Col. Amasa Clapp, were interested in starting settlements for farmers. Others wanted only money-making "land flips", to be mostly disappointed when demand for land died due to the threat of war, not done until about 1816.
Why did other settlers delay going there?
Rumors rumbled, of further war with Britain, to see who could take sole control of Detroit and other contested parts along the Canadian border. Most early settlers stayed away from Lake Erie shorelines, too close to Canada and then tiny Detroit, until 1816 or later.
Beriah's Frenches did not delay. They arrived in the Reserve well-ahead of the War of 1812. Choosing that location most likely had two causes. A party developing land there was already known to them, back in Massachusetts. (Amasa Clapp, also from Mass., Hampshire County, a purchaser of land via the Reserve's lottery, would send his sons and other neighbors to clear land. His son, Elah, was one, to be Rebecca's future spouse.) Plus, the younger French sons were coming of age at about the same time and needed their own farms, with undeveloped land left behind in Massachusetts too rocky and barren.
Two adult sons left first for future Ohio, from Westhampton, Mass. With a future in-law, they went to the Western Reserve of Ohio, locating inside the Reserve on the second major river east of an itty-bitty Cleveland. Then, Beriah and the rest followed. The reserve was still a wilderness. They would have most likely approached by coming up the Grand River from Lake Erie, to the ridge-land higher above Painesville. They were then inside future Lake County, which, until 1840, was in the northern part of mother Geauga County. (Old Geauga had, in turn, split off from Trumbull County a few years before their arrival.) Beriah's Frenches moved to the Reserve about the same time a few other families arrived from Hampshire County, Massachusetts.
Only two families surnamed French were present east of Cleveland ahead of the War of 1812, so, very, very early, for this end of Ohio. The other party name French, Peter, later gained a place in history books by selling farmland, plus a brickyard and his "hotel" (smaller, more like an inn), to the brand-new "Mormans" in the late 1820s. His spot was at a four-corners, a great location for the LDS/Latter Day Saints to build their very first temple.
Peter lived a few decades more, long enough to tell the 1850 census-taker that he had been born in NY. Local history books say he had earlier come to the local county with fur trapper David Abbot, who had been an attorney. Their party managed to arrive before the turn of their century, ahead of Beriah's Frenches.
Maybe unrelated, Peter may have been known to Beriah via people she knew with rural NY connections. These might include her half-siblings named Phelps (her mother remarried a Phelps, after Beriah's own father died).
Peter was familiar with the western end of NY state, closer to Ohio, less Dutch than parts closer to Albany, NY, and Vermont. Peter was first of record in David Abbot's traveling party to Ohio, said to briefly return to Genesee (meaning the river valley in western NY), as if it were his home, to obtain a cow for their party's food needs. That part of western NY state had Phelps connections. In particular, something called the Phelps-Gorham land grant lay on the east side of the Genesee River. Similar to the Western Reserve, the attempt to buy and develop it was too early, pre-War of 1812. Oliver Phelps went bankrupt on that land while most of his hoped-for settlers waited for war rumblings to end. (It was home to the town of Le Roy, NY, for which future Leroy Twp., Ohio, would be named, where these Frenches were said to settle by a Spencer Phelps who arrived with the Clapp brothers and decades later, aged, wrote some history and remembrance articles for a local newspaper.)
Was that Peter French related to Beriah's Abiathar? Right now, we can't be sure without DNA tests submitted for his descendants (as of 2016). The Braintree Frenches, of which Abiather was part, had their male DNA first tested circa 2014 (FamilyTreeDNA.com), not a match to Frenches north of Boston. Peter had two known children (Robert, Angeline). Their names are not Puritan, like Abiather and Beriah, instead lean culturally French, but they were of a later generation.
Second, Colonel Clapp did not come to settle on any of the land himself, but stayed back in Hampshire County, Mass. He had bought land in three future Ohio counties, to develop and sell to others, but arranged for others to do the clearing and planting that would both give the next settlers an initial food supply and convince others that the region was fertile. In 1798, the Col. sent NY-born Peter French to Mantua, in Portage County. ("The first improvements in Mantua were made in the fall of 1798, by Peter French, on the northwest corner of Lot 24, upon which he sowed a few acres of wheat. This was the first wheat sown in the County. It was harvested the following summer by Rufus Edwards, who took possession of of this parcel in the spring of 1799", according to SidneyRigdon.com/RigdonO3.htm.) Around 1803, Clapp sent two sons, Paul and Elah, to future Leroy Twp., in the Col's second county, to the second county, to become modern Lake County later. Coming with the Clapp sons in 1803 was their neighbor Spencer Phelps and a hired hand, Jonathan Russel. (Peter would very soon marry a Sarah Russel, before the local counties had split off from mother Trumbull, so his records are at that county courthouse.) Peter's earlier voyageur companion, David Abbot, would go later to Col. Clapp's third county, Medina (not clear, was he working for Co. Clapp or there as he had earned his own land? Earned by building a mill on the Chagrin River, in a place then called Chagrin, now called Willoughby, called that after the township was realigned to be in Lake County. One of Beriah's grandsons, Edgar French, would die in Willoughby.)
MASSACHUSETTS, CHILDREN HAD "DOUBLE COUSINS". Back in Mass., the record of her marriage to her Abiathar French, second of three, is found in Northampton. The Frenches lived on its western and rural edge, not yet split off as Westhampton.
Beriah's Alvord ancestors were in Hadley. Neither place had its own church at the time. They missed having a double wedding by a few years. Abiathar married Beriah, while Beriah's younger brother had earlier wed Abiathar's younger sister. (Her younger brother was Jehiel Alvord. He married Dorothy/Doritha French. She was at the legal age for females being adults, able to marry or work without parent permission, so she married at 12, shocking our modern minds. Her young age is confirmed by her cemetery stone. Contrary dates, this writer believes, appear in some family trees. Their minds could not comprehend 12 either, so they "adjusted" some other family members' ages upward so Dorothy could be made to appear older at marriage.)
Since two French siblings married two Alvord siblings, their children were "double cousins". Double cousins are often favorite cousins, seen at both family reunions and events at both grandparents' houses. A doubly-related descendant of Jehiel and Dorothy, from MA, would be of record in a later census visiting one of Abiathar's grandchildren in OH. Thus, family ties continued for decades.
Ohio was not good at record-keeping yet, so we find dates for Abiathar and Beriah in non-modern ways. The Alvords have a family history with names and dates, with the pre-Revolution part covering a time when the main church in their area of Hampshire County was at Northampton. (The families, however, lived in places that were, later, post-Revolution, allowed their own town names and churches. At that point, the families ceased to be in Northampton records. The reason is not given, but, in this branch, the Alvords changed the spelling from Alford, to Alvord, perhaps as Alford too often would be sounded out as Alfred.) SOURCE: p.117 of "The Alvord Family", archived at
AlfordAssociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/buralv_5.pdf
Beriah's baptism was at the Northampton church back in Mass., recorded as Feb. 10, 1754, with her younger brother Jehial born Jan. 7 and baptized Jan. 11, 1756.
Beriah's father and grandfather were both named Jonathan. (Her great-grandfather was Alexander, the immigrant? Must check this.) The name Thankful Alvord was used multiple times in her family, including her elder sister, but began with their grandmother Thankful, who had been born Miller.
Only four of her own children's births are in the Massachusetts records, all of them sons. Notice in the bear story chose to call her only "Mrs. French" (despite giving the first names of other women). People did not understand her name, so mis-spelled it or used Mrs. French, with her spouse mis-written also. Thus, the four children's birth records were transcribed to say "Abiather French", not Abiathar. They say "Boriah", not Beriah. (Blobby ink from a quill pen or fountain pen could make a handwritten E appear to be an O.)
Abiathar III died before they left Massachusetts. The three sons coming to Ohio would be John, Jacob, and Timothy. John then disappeared from the news and local history books; he wasn't Peter French, was he? Did he die in the War of 1812? Return to Massachusetts, name too common to find him?
If only three of those coming had birth records showing both parents' names, how do we know that Beriah and Abiathar were their parents? The biggest reason is that no other Frenches, apart from Peter, were present in the marriage records. Found in those marriage records was David French, married by the same traveling minister as Timothy, that minister, Shadrack Ruark, different from the men marrying later settlers. Also in the records were two daughters, women who were possibly twins or close-in-age sisters, Rebecca and Rhoda. The sisters married in the early years, as did Timothy and David, did so before other Frenches of alternative DNAs arrived to mix up the parentage.
Rhoda married Luther Keep. Rebecca's wedding to Elah Clapp (a first marriage, second was to William McMillen) is in the above excerpt, where parentage is clearly listed. The excerpt mis-spelled Abiathar as "Abiathan", but who else could it mean? Beriah's is not guessed, too hard, everybody was dead or had moved by the time of the writing, and the tombstones were already gone. She is thus "Mrs. French". This helps make make clear that Rebecca's tombstone memorial to them (as "Abiather" and "Maria") was retrospective, done some decades after they all had died, so could not object to wrong spellings of rare Biblical names. Did descendants recarving the fading stone not believe it said Beriah when they saw it, presumed it "should be" Maria? David's murder story in the newspapers did not indicate his connection. Not stone remains. However, his land records tie him to Jacob and Timothy, with an court case resulting from David being intoxicated at the time, so too incompetent to sign.
When did she die? Probably before Abiathar, but when did his death occur? Painesville, where her son Jacob had a distillery, in addition to farming, put a high school over its big old cemetery. Her daughter Rebecca's stone showed names, not dates.
She and her father had been churchgoers back in Westhampton, both on the list of the town church's founding members. Perhaps we will find a church record of her death someday [UPDATE, Feb, 2022, we infer she died before 1840, as she and Abiathar are not cited in the 1840 Census, unlike sister-in-law Dorothy Alvord, widow, named as age 82 and receiving a Rev. War pension in her Census back in Hampshire County, MA . We infer Abiathar's birth as 1755-1756, due to his being "written up" as age 20 in a military record in 1776. We don't believe the ages in family trees adjusted upward to make 12 year-old Dorothy Alvord look 15. Dorothy's family was fine with the real birth year for her tombstone, why shouldn't we be?
In the 1830's, Abiathar the junior was still alive, but elderly. Was he perhaps growing senile, as some in the French family did earlier, of record as confused, etc, back in Braintree? There is a last record for him.
Some neighbor must have found him wandering about, confused, and taken him to the town hall. They gave his name as "Abiattur". Whoever was in charge reacted maliciously by "warning out" the early settler. Many people Abiathar knew, back when younger and clear-minded, had left, including his own children, David by death, most of the others by moving to Michigan and Indiana. Did Rebecca still live? Her children by Elah Clapp? David's children, semi-orphaned, were where? watched from afar by their mother's half-Hessian father, Christian Kneip/Kneippe, of about the same age as Abiathar, both relics of the same war back in 1776? Christian and his son Charles, who came early with David and John to clear land, also dead? Spencer Phelps, his sons' age, from Hampshire County, Mass., had moved to Mentor, was no longer in LeRoy. Elah Clapp had died long ago and Paul Clapp had moved (recently? to Huntsburg?).
Around that time, some left due to land challenges legally. Col Amasa Clapp had signed a bond guaranteeing someone's performance as a tax collector in Massachusetts. The collector's performance failed, with claims then made to cover what the collector owed, decades later, against the deceased Clapp's Ohio lands. The claims were successful due to a new precedent-setting ruling. Did this provoke Lake County into separating from Geauga, where one man ruling against them lived? The resulting state case said statutes of limitations against a property owner expired, whenever a property-owner crossed a state line, setting a precedent. Now, we have title insurance used by banks giving mortgages, to protect against that. Those holding affect land in Leroy, did not have it. Rebecca kept McMillen land for her children, lost the land from her first spouse they had cleared when first going to Ohio.
Luther Keep, daughter Rhoda's husband, had taken their family to farm in what is now Fawn River, Mich.. Their house would end across the state line, however, in Indiana (officials "up above" moved the state line to resolve bickering over who could collect taxes, letting Indiana have the Keeps and others).
Abiathar was "warned out" despite being nigh 80. Beriah was not warned out, so she must have already died. Abiathar must have been a widower by then.
Some stories by in-laws named Farley, leaving Kirtland to go to the south end of Michigan, said they walked from Detroit southward. Abiathar, at his age, was most likely too frail to make such a trip, so allowed to care for himself back in Leroy.
Because of the warning, without any outcome described, we do not know where he ended. Presumedly someone came to get him, notified by mail. We do not know who did what.
Was it Ransom? Grandson Ransom French definitely did return to Ohio for a bit around that time. Son Alford/Alfred Orin French was born there, in Mentor, in that interval, unlike both earlier and later children of Ransom French and Rebecca Farley, instead born down in Michigan. They could have gone back to Ohio briefly, just until Abiathar died, to settle things with the Edwin French who never left Ohio, buried at the Cleveland cemetery above Little Italy (one access by Mayfield Rd).
FOLLOWING TO BE REMOVED:
An 1840 atlas showed Ransom on a farm west of the Mentor village site, on the main road out. It's a site we know was temporary.
He had land transactions with a known son of Jacob, Edwin French, using mutual "quit claim deeds". If Edwin was not Ransom's brother, was he a close cousin? Ransom started a foundry on his return to Mich., but died there in 1852, with his youngest two, an infant, Olive, and a three-year-old, Mary Eliza, ancestor to this writer's spouse. A Jacob French, perhaps a brother, as about the same age, was also of record as a supervisor of public schools. He died a year after Ransom. Both were put in a pioneer cemetery located across the street from an M-E church that later turned plain Methodist. The Lutheran church later took over that cemetery. Both graves were then moved, to a public cemetery. The same people who buried them moved them? Maybe the Lutherans did it as a courtesy?
Those were cholera years for people along waterways, infected by others careless when disposing human waste in to the water? Weren't they close to the St. Joseph R.?
There was also a likely third brother or cousin nearby in the Michigan years, a state legislator for a while. He went by "A. French", for Alford French, most likely as people who could not spell Beriah also mis-rendered the name as Alfred? He was a distiller and miller (both processed farmers' grain) when in Michigan in 1850, in an era when steam power was replacing water power, about to put his mill out of business. Then he went off to California, first to Sacramento, seen first of record in newspapers with Ransom's son Edwin as having letters to pick-up. He became of record again as a legislator, for a gold camp. He then moved south of San Francisco, near San Jose (Alviso and Milpitas), seen with his Michigan family and owning a hotel by 1860. Ransom's daughter Climena French boarded at the hotel while she worked as a teacher, in the year or two before she married fellow teacher Samuel Shearer. In an obituary perhaps written by reporters, A. French was called the "Duke of Milpitas". Other sources said this referred to his knowing politics so well, letting conventions, etc meet at his hotel, that if he called an election, it went that way. "How do you think this election will turn out? Ask the Duke of Milpitas." Do we think the Duke of Milpitas had a grandmother who chased a bear? Yes.
A Timothy French living near Luther Keep could be Beriah's son and an alternative candidate as father to Ransom, Jacob and/or "A. French", since he was found also in Michigan and living very near them. He was of record in the Fawn River area of Mich., living very near Jacob in the 1840 and Ransom in the 1850 censuses. Were Jacob and Ransom sharing farmland to make that rotation happen while Timothy lived in Fawn River (near or spun-off from Sturgis/Sturges)?
Timothy was across the state line from the farmhouse of Luther Keep and Rhoda French Keep, but very near their farmland. In the 1850 Census, Timothy's wife Mary was named, of the right age and birthplace to be the Mary Allison whom Shadrach Ruark married to Timothy French back in tiny LeRoy Twp., not long after the family first arrived in Ohio. Mary perhaps has a death record their count in Michigan, falling between the 1850 and 1860 Censuses?. That Timothy's birth date does not exactly match that of the Massachusetts-born Timothy, but that is often the case if somebody else guessed his age for the census-taker when he was not home. Ages being "off" by three to even ten years is common if a visiting in-law answers the door.
The other (less likely) possibility, is maybe he was a younger namesake child, named for an older brother Timothy who had died young?
If Timothy was Ransom's father, he out-survived Ransom.
We have a bit more about Beriah as the Alvord family tracked her in their genealogies. She would have died in Leroy Twp., as Abiathar was still living there when warned. Do the Alvords have her death date?
Her biblical name rhymed with Maria or Mariah. She married a neighbor in Mass., a young soldier, who, like so many in wars, returned whole, yet a bit damaged, his war, the American Revolution. He was Abiathar French, the Junior, ready to marry, post-War. His bride Beriah would find herself, decades later, hundreds of miles east and beating off a bear.
Real bears? By Cleveland? Yes, now gone. Old histories tell of both grizzlies and black bears. Grizzlies would be the meaner ones, but both liked meat.
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From "Pioneer Women of Leroy"
"The first death in the township was Patty Clapp [a young child], who died in 1806... The same year the second family moved in, Abiathan [Abiathar] French, from Massachusetts, with his wife [Beriah] and six children.
Among the vexations of that year may be mentioned the following: Mr. French had for safety built his hog-pen at one end of his house. One time during his absence, a bear entered the pen and, in spite of all Mrs. French's efforts to drive it away, succeeded in carrying off a fine shoat in broad daylight. When we consider the distance that the pig had been brought and that the pork supply for future years depended upon the few now possessed, we can realize the energy with which Mrs. French fought for the pig, and the great disappointment when it was carried off.
The first marriage in the township was held at their house in 1807, when their daughter, Rebecca, was married to Elah Clapp. This was a merry time, in which the whole settlement shared. An abundant supper was prepared out of the material at hand, and there was no lack of welcome and genuine friendliness."
Found in a larger work, "Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve", by G. Wickham, 1897.
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Did she teach her children how to to fight bears? A list is below. Pre-Civil War, but after her and Abiathar's deaths, two family members tried running for office at state legislatures and won. It was not for vanity and glory, but to get things done, in areas needing schools and roads, with one of the two clearly an abolitionist. One male descendant, a great-grandson going by "A. French", ran from a California mining camp, picking up his mail at Sacramento, as did young nephew Edwin French. By 1860, as "A. A. French", he and wife Nancy owned a hotel south of the Bay. Their last prior Census was in Michigan, Branch County, before going west in the 1850s. Was a first name of Alford, a variation of Alvord, too often mis-written as Alfred? He and the second wife who had come with him from Michigan were joined post-Civil War by his close relatives, namely, his widowed sister-in-law, Rebecca Farley French, mother to miner Edwin, and others. Nephew Eben/Ebenezer French, brother to Edwin, was a Civil War veteran whose stone is the only one of the off-to-California Frenches with his stone surviving, courtesy of upkeep by veteran's groups. Very severely damaged by his war, twice, face and leg, he would have hoped to resume his pre-War publishing work in Michigan once in San Jose, his paperwork listing that. He was in contrast to youngest brother A.O. French (Alford French, when in his mother's house), who stopped his university degree for the War, but had marriages and peach orchards in Michigan, so stayed there.
Niece Climena French boarded at A.A.'s and Nancy's hotel in 1860, before marrying fellow teacher, Mr. Shearer. His other sister, Mary Eliza French, the youngest after her sister Olive French died, was an ancestor to this writer's spouse, of marrying age post-war, her men not to live as long as Samuel Shearer.
The second legislator, serving from Lake County Ohio, married the female descendant born Amelia Climena French. Her husband, AJ Williams, was son of a Methodist minister, but trained as a lawyer, bravely abolitionist. Anti-slavery was the general mood in Lake County, a free state by choice, where escaped slaves might attempt to go along Lake Erie, finding Canada reachable by bridge at both ends. However, slave catchers initially denied chasing rights by Ohioans, were then allowed by a permissive US Congress and courts to violate Ohio laws. He won office there, after he and his wife tried out a divided Missouri and then returned. He would later merit a biography in a local history book, details accurate when checked against other sources. It cited his father-in-law as Edwin French, son to Jacob, with Beriah and Abiathar implied as Jacob's parents
Did the two men ever feel like they were beating off bears in their legislatures?
EARLIER, BEST FRIENDS, MARRIAGES, FIRE AND DEATH. Back in Mass., Beriah's mother had been widowed by a Phelps and then remarried Mr. Alvord, to have her last children by Beriah's father, Jonathan Alvord. Beriah's mother was Connecticut-born Elizabeth, maiden name Goslin, said by an old family history to die in Northampton on Feb 14, 1775. The family historian thought that Jonathan then moved his children in 1776, the next year. They went to a part of Northampton to splinter off as Westhampton, neighbors to ask for their own church. Westhampton Congregational was not given permission to form until Sept., 1779. Abiathar and Beriah courted before it opened, so married at the old church in Northampton in 1778. Siblings is rural areas were often "best friends", playing matchmaker for each other.
Another working farmer who served in the Revolution, though with just 7 days of service according to an old history of the family, was Beriah's brother, Jehiel Alvord, was introduced to and married Abiathar's younger sister, Dorothy. Both couples married at Northampton in 1778. On Feb 6 Abiathar Jr and Beriah married. On June 11 Jehiel Alvord married Dorothy French. Westhampton had no church yet. These dates are from Northampton records found at Family Search, after D. Curtis alerted us of Beriah's wedding date. A different source, with some typos noticed for dates, said the two Frenches' father, widowed by their mother, in 1789, married a Naomi Alvord, presumably of South Hadley, as married at that church, relationship to Jehiel and Beriah unspecified (alfordassociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/vitals.pdf).
Due to a fire at Westhampton, the next records, 1779-1817, burned, including the baptisms of both couple's children. Jehial and Dorothy were still living and local after 1817, but Beriah and Abiathar had moved to Ohio.
The congregation was able to reconstruct many missing records. Dorothy and Jehiel's seem pretty complete, but not those of Beriah's children. Another user at Findagrave was able to find four of the names, in re-constructed records for Westhampton. We reconstructed three more from Ohio sources, to match the number going to Ohio Abiathar and Beriah were said to have taken there.
Their cenotaphs at daughter Rebecca's stone in Lake County have named, but dates are missing. It's likely they died before 1840. Helping date their deaths, sister-in-law Dorothy, the youngest of the four, was of record in her 1840 Census as a widow, counted in Northampton. Unusual for that Census, her precise age was cited (82), as she was receiving a Revolutionary War pension. She had been youngest of the four, so they would have been accordingly older, Beriah 86 in 1840, understandable to have died. There seemed to be no pensions for the unusual names of Abiathar or Beriah French, which fits their decease. (Abiathar's military records were checked by this writer at the National Archives, so it is assumed his years of service would have qualified for a pension, given others received pensions after serving much shorter terms. He had a temporary absence that was exonerated later, its timing co-inciding with multiple from his area inoculating themselves for smallpox, then returning to their troops once the self-inoculation had taken effect. Some commanding officer refused to permit it, even though his failure to so so meant an abnormally high death rate from the disease, and some needless victories for the British.)
FROM PAPER TO ASHES. The records gathered 1779 to 1817 burned at a fire at the minister's house. Happily, Abiathar and Beriah married in 1778 at the old church in Northampton, so their marriage record survived, but Jehiel and Dorothy's did not. People were able to reconstruct many births, but not all. For Beriah, one son who died back at Westhampton had a gravestone, so he's in the Westhampton set. A son murdered in Ohio in 1825 is missing, as the news story on the murder and convictions omitted his age and birthplace, and were maybe restricted to the Cleveland area. (SIDE NOTE: The Westhampton Congregational church and ministers, to prevent future losses, allowed 17 volumes of records from 1817 through 1971 to be archived at the local University of Massachusetts, at Amherst, under "Call no.: MS 806". Their web page on Westhampton Congregational is at library.umass.edu.)
Ministers kept detailed records for their churches back then, multiple mysteries sometimes clearing up when they are found. Their Congregational Church of Westhampton formed under a brother to the hero Nathan Hale, Rev Enoch Hale, there for some decades. Ministers from the mother churches and towns at Northampton, the eldest mother town, and at Southampton, a sister town, were present for his opening ceremony. Rev Hale kept his at home, but a fire at his house, in 1817, destroyed what accumulated by then, from 1789 to 1817.
CHILDREN. Our best count is that they had seven to eight children, total.
User D. Curtis (/user/profile/47355469) found these four, of Abiathar and Beriah Alvord French, ending with their 1790 Census back in Mass., :
"John, b. 7 Dec. 1778, Westhampton, Mass.
Jacob, b. 23 May 1781, Westhampton, Mass.
Abiathar, b. 9 Apr. 1784, Westhampton, Mass., d. 5 Jul. 1800, Westhampton, Mass.
Timothy, b. 20 Jan. 1790, Westhampton, Mass."
Who were her six children named as coming to Ohio?
Their 1790 Census showed five males under 16. The 16 year old Abiathiar who died in 1800 still living, the fifth son would be the David whose 1825 death was distant and whose birth was not re-constructed in unaware Westhampton. (The search is still on for their 1800 Census to count daughters, Rebecca Clapp McMillen known ttwo ways, from the wedding story in Leroy and also from her stone surviving and namiing her parents. One source shows an earlier Timothy possibly had died before a namesake for him was born in 1790, so would not be counted in 1790 either. Namesakes were common in the families of those men sur-named French whose male DNA tracks back to Braintree, south of Boston
The son named Abiathar would have been the third and last Abiathar French. The name proved too hard to spell, so stayed unused after a namesake nephew was called Abiathar Alvord, child of Dorothy and Jehiel.
FROM WESTHAMPTON. The four sons above would have been ages 0 to 12 in the first census of the new Republic, the 1790. They were just right to be the four males under 16 in the house of an Abiathar French in Westhampton, not clear if their father or grandfather wasthe one named as head.
It was common to "double-up" back then. Only one Abiathar French household was listed that Census, not two. The two females would have been Beriah and senior's second wife, Naomi, formerly of S. Hadley.
Abiathar the senior had taken junior and his siblings from the Braintree area south of Boston, to Hampshire County, before the Revolution. Their mother, the former Margaret Niles, had died at some point, not clear when.
Their farm was in a cluster of river towns, so-called hamptons. By 1790, mother town Northampton, the county seat, had spun off three daughter towns, South, East and their West. All were in Hampshire County, only a few counties away from upstate NY. The Northampton area was reachable from the two elder Abiathars' hometown in the Boston area, by an overland route coming through what became Worcester County. It was also reachable from the sea by going up the Connecticut River past Springfield, MA. Their Hamptons were on the east side of the big River. Almost directly across, on the other side, the Springfield side, were Hadley and Hatfield. She had Alvord relatives in those places and more.
Why was Ohio a natural follow-up to Westhampton? Pre-Revolution, in colonial days, old New York province had used the Conn. River as its east boundary, but negotiations pushed the boundary westward, causing their Hampshire County to be in the Bay Colony, not New York. Connecticut formed just downriver of Springfield. In colonial days, Connecticut leaders had been told by the king's officials that their grant extended westward to the Pacific. Virginia, further south, was told the same thing. In later negotiations to draw state lines between former colonies, both newly formed states gave up having land westward. To make up for that loss, each was given a section of future Ohio instead, as compensation, to settle or sell as they wished.
Thus, Virginians and people all along the Connecticut River, Massachusetts through Vermont, with a natural mix of upstate New Yorkers, would hear about that and make their way west. Virginians mainly went north to cross the Ohio River, going into southern Ohio. The northerners mainly followed the Great Lakes shorelines west, through a long stretch of NY and past a short stretch of Penn., to the Western Reserve, in northeast Ohio.
OLD NEIGHBORS. Their US Census of 1790 in Westhampton gave each household one row on a handwritten page. Luckily for family historians, the order was not alphabetic, but named male heads or widows in the order visited by the interviewer, keeping neighbors together. People married people nearby, on the average, so key neighbors counted at Westhampton in the 1790 included Alvords and Phelps related to Beriah, with the marriages of spouse Abiather's sisters inclduing more than Dorothy, neighboring Chilsons and Pittsingers related . There were Claps/Clapps locally. Future son-in-law Elah Clapp was thus likely known by her daughter before the two sets, Clapp and French, reached Ohio, what became Leroy. (On a ridge overlooking Lake Erie, it was reached by going upstream and then uphill from Painesville, which had a river port on to the Lake. Cleveland, in contrast, was on a different river further east, also part of the Reserve.)
The handwritten census copy of 1790 was transcribed and put into printed form in 1809. (Her sisters-in-law Rebecca and Rhoda had their Chilsen and Pittsinger houses mis-transcribed as "Chalson" and "Pittinger".)
We know that more children were born. For example, her daughter Rebecca was born 1793, according to the age on her stone, so post-1790 Census. She married Elah Clapp, to see him die young, then married a McMillen, so her stone says that second surname. Someone (descendants?) attempted to redo the daughter's stone in Leroy Twp., by adding/recarving her parents' names on it. (They made errors of the kind that arise when not knowing the earlier generation personally. "Her name was something like Maria, doesn't this old stuff seem to say that that?").
There is also the possibility (not the same as a fact) of two Timothys, the younger one becoming a namesake for an older one who died earlier.
Summary--This writer believes that after omitting the son or sons who died "back there", the full list of six going to Leroy included at least one Timothy, plus John, Jacob, David, Rebecca Clapp McMillen and Rhoda Keep, their births split between Westhampton and some other place encountered before going to Leroy, the daughters names matched two of Abiathar's sisters who were twinned (maybe not biological, maybe merely baptized on the same day).
TO THE WESTERN RESERVE. What was the Western Reserve?
A multi-county district which lay along Lake Erie, in NE Ohio, its special purpose was to "make the peace" as the thirteen colonies negotiated their boundaries, something that would take two or three more generations to resolve fully. A chunk of future Ohio, still a territory, not yet a state, was given to Connecticut as a payoff, in return for CT giving up what it believed it owned, a long strip of land that went all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Connecticut then sold its pay-off in pieces, to fund its schools, specific parts allotted to buyer by lottery. Some buyers, such as Col. Amasa Clapp, were interested in starting settlements for farmers. Others wanted only money-making "land flips", to be mostly disappointed when demand for land died due to the threat of war, not done until about 1816.
Why did other settlers delay going there?
Rumors rumbled, of further war with Britain, to see who could take sole control of Detroit and other contested parts along the Canadian border. Most early settlers stayed away from Lake Erie shorelines, too close to Canada and then tiny Detroit, until 1816 or later.
Beriah's Frenches did not delay. They arrived in the Reserve well-ahead of the War of 1812. Choosing that location most likely had two causes. A party developing land there was already known to them, back in Massachusetts. (Amasa Clapp, also from Mass., Hampshire County, a purchaser of land via the Reserve's lottery, would send his sons and other neighbors to clear land. His son, Elah, was one, to be Rebecca's future spouse.) Plus, the younger French sons were coming of age at about the same time and needed their own farms, with undeveloped land left behind in Massachusetts too rocky and barren.
Two adult sons left first for future Ohio, from Westhampton, Mass. With a future in-law, they went to the Western Reserve of Ohio, locating inside the Reserve on the second major river east of an itty-bitty Cleveland. Then, Beriah and the rest followed. The reserve was still a wilderness. They would have most likely approached by coming up the Grand River from Lake Erie, to the ridge-land higher above Painesville. They were then inside future Lake County, which, until 1840, was in the northern part of mother Geauga County. (Old Geauga had, in turn, split off from Trumbull County a few years before their arrival.) Beriah's Frenches moved to the Reserve about the same time a few other families arrived from Hampshire County, Massachusetts.
Only two families surnamed French were present east of Cleveland ahead of the War of 1812, so, very, very early, for this end of Ohio. The other party name French, Peter, later gained a place in history books by selling farmland, plus a brickyard and his "hotel" (smaller, more like an inn), to the brand-new "Mormans" in the late 1820s. His spot was at a four-corners, a great location for the LDS/Latter Day Saints to build their very first temple.
Peter lived a few decades more, long enough to tell the 1850 census-taker that he had been born in NY. Local history books say he had earlier come to the local county with fur trapper David Abbot, who had been an attorney. Their party managed to arrive before the turn of their century, ahead of Beriah's Frenches.
Maybe unrelated, Peter may have been known to Beriah via people she knew with rural NY connections. These might include her half-siblings named Phelps (her mother remarried a Phelps, after Beriah's own father died).
Peter was familiar with the western end of NY state, closer to Ohio, less Dutch than parts closer to Albany, NY, and Vermont. Peter was first of record in David Abbot's traveling party to Ohio, said to briefly return to Genesee (meaning the river valley in western NY), as if it were his home, to obtain a cow for their party's food needs. That part of western NY state had Phelps connections. In particular, something called the Phelps-Gorham land grant lay on the east side of the Genesee River. Similar to the Western Reserve, the attempt to buy and develop it was too early, pre-War of 1812. Oliver Phelps went bankrupt on that land while most of his hoped-for settlers waited for war rumblings to end. (It was home to the town of Le Roy, NY, for which future Leroy Twp., Ohio, would be named, where these Frenches were said to settle by a Spencer Phelps who arrived with the Clapp brothers and decades later, aged, wrote some history and remembrance articles for a local newspaper.)
Was that Peter French related to Beriah's Abiathar? Right now, we can't be sure without DNA tests submitted for his descendants (as of 2016). The Braintree Frenches, of which Abiather was part, had their male DNA first tested circa 2014 (FamilyTreeDNA.com), not a match to Frenches north of Boston. Peter had two known children (Robert, Angeline). Their names are not Puritan, like Abiather and Beriah, instead lean culturally French, but they were of a later generation.
Second, Colonel Clapp did not come to settle on any of the land himself, but stayed back in Hampshire County, Mass. He had bought land in three future Ohio counties, to develop and sell to others, but arranged for others to do the clearing and planting that would both give the next settlers an initial food supply and convince others that the region was fertile. In 1798, the Col. sent NY-born Peter French to Mantua, in Portage County. ("The first improvements in Mantua were made in the fall of 1798, by Peter French, on the northwest corner of Lot 24, upon which he sowed a few acres of wheat. This was the first wheat sown in the County. It was harvested the following summer by Rufus Edwards, who took possession of of this parcel in the spring of 1799", according to SidneyRigdon.com/RigdonO3.htm.) Around 1803, Clapp sent two sons, Paul and Elah, to future Leroy Twp., in the Col's second county, to the second county, to become modern Lake County later. Coming with the Clapp sons in 1803 was their neighbor Spencer Phelps and a hired hand, Jonathan Russel. (Peter would very soon marry a Sarah Russel, before the local counties had split off from mother Trumbull, so his records are at that county courthouse.) Peter's earlier voyageur companion, David Abbot, would go later to Col. Clapp's third county, Medina (not clear, was he working for Co. Clapp or there as he had earned his own land? Earned by building a mill on the Chagrin River, in a place then called Chagrin, now called Willoughby, called that after the township was realigned to be in Lake County. One of Beriah's grandsons, Edgar French, would die in Willoughby.)
MASSACHUSETTS, CHILDREN HAD "DOUBLE COUSINS". Back in Mass., the record of her marriage to her Abiathar French, second of three, is found in Northampton. The Frenches lived on its western and rural edge, not yet split off as Westhampton.
Beriah's Alvord ancestors were in Hadley. Neither place had its own church at the time. They missed having a double wedding by a few years. Abiathar married Beriah, while Beriah's younger brother had earlier wed Abiathar's younger sister. (Her younger brother was Jehiel Alvord. He married Dorothy/Doritha French. She was at the legal age for females being adults, able to marry or work without parent permission, so she married at 12, shocking our modern minds. Her young age is confirmed by her cemetery stone. Contrary dates, this writer believes, appear in some family trees. Their minds could not comprehend 12 either, so they "adjusted" some other family members' ages upward so Dorothy could be made to appear older at marriage.)
Since two French siblings married two Alvord siblings, their children were "double cousins". Double cousins are often favorite cousins, seen at both family reunions and events at both grandparents' houses. A doubly-related descendant of Jehiel and Dorothy, from MA, would be of record in a later census visiting one of Abiathar's grandchildren in OH. Thus, family ties continued for decades.
Ohio was not good at record-keeping yet, so we find dates for Abiathar and Beriah in non-modern ways. The Alvords have a family history with names and dates, with the pre-Revolution part covering a time when the main church in their area of Hampshire County was at Northampton. (The families, however, lived in places that were, later, post-Revolution, allowed their own town names and churches. At that point, the families ceased to be in Northampton records. The reason is not given, but, in this branch, the Alvords changed the spelling from Alford, to Alvord, perhaps as Alford too often would be sounded out as Alfred.) SOURCE: p.117 of "The Alvord Family", archived at
AlfordAssociation.org/OTHER_PUB/BURKE/buralv_5.pdf
Beriah's baptism was at the Northampton church back in Mass., recorded as Feb. 10, 1754, with her younger brother Jehial born Jan. 7 and baptized Jan. 11, 1756.
Beriah's father and grandfather were both named Jonathan. (Her great-grandfather was Alexander, the immigrant? Must check this.) The name Thankful Alvord was used multiple times in her family, including her elder sister, but began with their grandmother Thankful, who had been born Miller.
Only four of her own children's births are in the Massachusetts records, all of them sons. Notice in the bear story chose to call her only "Mrs. French" (despite giving the first names of other women). People did not understand her name, so mis-spelled it or used Mrs. French, with her spouse mis-written also. Thus, the four children's birth records were transcribed to say "Abiather French", not Abiathar. They say "Boriah", not Beriah. (Blobby ink from a quill pen or fountain pen could make a handwritten E appear to be an O.)
Abiathar III died before they left Massachusetts. The three sons coming to Ohio would be John, Jacob, and Timothy. John then disappeared from the news and local history books; he wasn't Peter French, was he? Did he die in the War of 1812? Return to Massachusetts, name too common to find him?
If only three of those coming had birth records showing both parents' names, how do we know that Beriah and Abiathar were their parents? The biggest reason is that no other Frenches, apart from Peter, were present in the marriage records. Found in those marriage records was David French, married by the same traveling minister as Timothy, that minister, Shadrack Ruark, different from the men marrying later settlers. Also in the records were two daughters, women who were possibly twins or close-in-age sisters, Rebecca and Rhoda. The sisters married in the early years, as did Timothy and David, did so before other Frenches of alternative DNAs arrived to mix up the parentage.
Rhoda married Luther Keep. Rebecca's wedding to Elah Clapp (a first marriage, second was to William McMillen) is in the above excerpt, where parentage is clearly listed. The excerpt mis-spelled Abiathar as "Abiathan", but who else could it mean? Beriah's is not guessed, too hard, everybody was dead or had moved by the time of the writing, and the tombstones were already gone. She is thus "Mrs. French". This helps make make clear that Rebecca's tombstone memorial to them (as "Abiather" and "Maria") was retrospective, done some decades after they all had died, so could not object to wrong spellings of rare Biblical names. Did descendants recarving the fading stone not believe it said Beriah when they saw it, presumed it "should be" Maria? David's murder story in the newspapers did not indicate his connection. Not stone remains. However, his land records tie him to Jacob and Timothy, with an court case resulting from David being intoxicated at the time, so too incompetent to sign.
When did she die? Probably before Abiathar, but when did his death occur? Painesville, where her son Jacob had a distillery, in addition to farming, put a high school over its big old cemetery. Her daughter Rebecca's stone showed names, not dates.
She and her father had been churchgoers back in Westhampton, both on the list of the town church's founding members. Perhaps we will find a church record of her death someday [UPDATE, Feb, 2022, we infer she died before 1840, as she and Abiathar are not cited in the 1840 Census, unlike sister-in-law Dorothy Alvord, widow, named as age 82 and receiving a Rev. War pension in her Census back in Hampshire County, MA . We infer Abiathar's birth as 1755-1756, due to his being "written up" as age 20 in a military record in 1776. We don't believe the ages in family trees adjusted upward to make 12 year-old Dorothy Alvord look 15. Dorothy's family was fine with the real birth year for her tombstone, why shouldn't we be?
In the 1830's, Abiathar the junior was still alive, but elderly. Was he perhaps growing senile, as some in the French family did earlier, of record as confused, etc, back in Braintree? There is a last record for him.
Some neighbor must have found him wandering about, confused, and taken him to the town hall. They gave his name as "Abiattur". Whoever was in charge reacted maliciously by "warning out" the early settler. Many people Abiathar knew, back when younger and clear-minded, had left, including his own children, David by death, most of the others by moving to Michigan and Indiana. Did Rebecca still live? Her children by Elah Clapp? David's children, semi-orphaned, were where? watched from afar by their mother's half-Hessian father, Christian Kneip/Kneippe, of about the same age as Abiathar, both relics of the same war back in 1776? Christian and his son Charles, who came early with David and John to clear land, also dead? Spencer Phelps, his sons' age, from Hampshire County, Mass., had moved to Mentor, was no longer in LeRoy. Elah Clapp had died long ago and Paul Clapp had moved (recently? to Huntsburg?).
Around that time, some left due to land challenges legally. Col Amasa Clapp had signed a bond guaranteeing someone's performance as a tax collector in Massachusetts. The collector's performance failed, with claims then made to cover what the collector owed, decades later, against the deceased Clapp's Ohio lands. The claims were successful due to a new precedent-setting ruling. Did this provoke Lake County into separating from Geauga, where one man ruling against them lived? The resulting state case said statutes of limitations against a property owner expired, whenever a property-owner crossed a state line, setting a precedent. Now, we have title insurance used by banks giving mortgages, to protect against that. Those holding affect land in Leroy, did not have it. Rebecca kept McMillen land for her children, lost the land from her first spouse they had cleared when first going to Ohio.
Luther Keep, daughter Rhoda's husband, had taken their family to farm in what is now Fawn River, Mich.. Their house would end across the state line, however, in Indiana (officials "up above" moved the state line to resolve bickering over who could collect taxes, letting Indiana have the Keeps and others).
Abiathar was "warned out" despite being nigh 80. Beriah was not warned out, so she must have already died. Abiathar must have been a widower by then.
Some stories by in-laws named Farley, leaving Kirtland to go to the south end of Michigan, said they walked from Detroit southward. Abiathar, at his age, was most likely too frail to make such a trip, so allowed to care for himself back in Leroy.
Because of the warning, without any outcome described, we do not know where he ended. Presumedly someone came to get him, notified by mail. We do not know who did what.
Was it Ransom? Grandson Ransom French definitely did return to Ohio for a bit around that time. Son Alford/Alfred Orin French was born there, in Mentor, in that interval, unlike both earlier and later children of Ransom French and Rebecca Farley, instead born down in Michigan. They could have gone back to Ohio briefly, just until Abiathar died, to settle things with the Edwin French who never left Ohio, buried at the Cleveland cemetery above Little Italy (one access by Mayfield Rd).
FOLLOWING TO BE REMOVED:
An 1840 atlas showed Ransom on a farm west of the Mentor village site, on the main road out. It's a site we know was temporary.
He had land transactions with a known son of Jacob, Edwin French, using mutual "quit claim deeds". If Edwin was not Ransom's brother, was he a close cousin? Ransom started a foundry on his return to Mich., but died there in 1852, with his youngest two, an infant, Olive, and a three-year-old, Mary Eliza, ancestor to this writer's spouse. A Jacob French, perhaps a brother, as about the same age, was also of record as a supervisor of public schools. He died a year after Ransom. Both were put in a pioneer cemetery located across the street from an M-E church that later turned plain Methodist. The Lutheran church later took over that cemetery. Both graves were then moved, to a public cemetery. The same people who buried them moved them? Maybe the Lutherans did it as a courtesy?
Those were cholera years for people along waterways, infected by others careless when disposing human waste in to the water? Weren't they close to the St. Joseph R.?
There was also a likely third brother or cousin nearby in the Michigan years, a state legislator for a while. He went by "A. French", for Alford French, most likely as people who could not spell Beriah also mis-rendered the name as Alfred? He was a distiller and miller (both processed farmers' grain) when in Michigan in 1850, in an era when steam power was replacing water power, about to put his mill out of business. Then he went off to California, first to Sacramento, seen first of record in newspapers with Ransom's son Edwin as having letters to pick-up. He became of record again as a legislator, for a gold camp. He then moved south of San Francisco, near San Jose (Alviso and Milpitas), seen with his Michigan family and owning a hotel by 1860. Ransom's daughter Climena French boarded at the hotel while she worked as a teacher, in the year or two before she married fellow teacher Samuel Shearer. In an obituary perhaps written by reporters, A. French was called the "Duke of Milpitas". Other sources said this referred to his knowing politics so well, letting conventions, etc meet at his hotel, that if he called an election, it went that way. "How do you think this election will turn out? Ask the Duke of Milpitas." Do we think the Duke of Milpitas had a grandmother who chased a bear? Yes.
A Timothy French living near Luther Keep could be Beriah's son and an alternative candidate as father to Ransom, Jacob and/or "A. French", since he was found also in Michigan and living very near them. He was of record in the Fawn River area of Mich., living very near Jacob in the 1840 and Ransom in the 1850 censuses. Were Jacob and Ransom sharing farmland to make that rotation happen while Timothy lived in Fawn River (near or spun-off from Sturgis/Sturges)?
Timothy was across the state line from the farmhouse of Luther Keep and Rhoda French Keep, but very near their farmland. In the 1850 Census, Timothy's wife Mary was named, of the right age and birthplace to be the Mary Allison whom Shadrach Ruark married to Timothy French back in tiny LeRoy Twp., not long after the family first arrived in Ohio. Mary perhaps has a death record their count in Michigan, falling between the 1850 and 1860 Censuses?. That Timothy's birth date does not exactly match that of the Massachusetts-born Timothy, but that is often the case if somebody else guessed his age for the census-taker when he was not home. Ages being "off" by three to even ten years is common if a visiting in-law answers the door.
The other (less likely) possibility, is maybe he was a younger namesake child, named for an older brother Timothy who had died young?
If Timothy was Ransom's father, he out-survived Ransom.
We have a bit more about Beriah as the Alvord family tracked her in their genealogies. She would have died in Leroy Twp., as Abiathar was still living there when warned. Do the Alvords have her death date?
Gravesite Details
Faded cenotaph (without body) at daughter Rebecca's stone, Abiathar and Beriah, mis-written an unknown time after their deaths as "Abiather" and "Maria"
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