I’m looking at the silhouettes of Nancy and James Locke. When and where they were made, I can’t say, but I believe they would have been made in Maine, likely in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. I’d like to think they were made by William Basche, whose work is on display in the Smithsonian; he was working the east coast at the same time this couple were living in New England.
Over the course of nine years, Basche traveled with his patented physiognotrace, making thousands of silhouette portraits—the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery acquired a ledger of his in 2002 with portraits that include Thomas Jefferson and bothGeorge and Martha Washington. Illustrious people, for sure, but then there are hundreds of ordinary people as well. I’d like to think that this couple, the Lockes, could have afforded such a portrait. I’m almost certain they could have—James Locke’s near ancestors fought in the Revolution, for one, and were prominent citizens of Massachusetts.
But these people, these shadows, mere images cast upon paper—who were they beside their family histories?
I’d discovered James Locke, first, from a book written by a distant relative. My father gave me this book before he died.
The book is titled Elisha S. and Lavina (Locke) Andrus: Their Ancestors and Descendants. It was written by one John V. Beck, who at the time lived in Bloomington, Indiana. He self-published the book in 1985 as a large, burgundy-red clothbound edition printed by a small publisher in Decorah, Iowa. There are many books like this, as I’ve come to learn, but they are often rare and can be hard to find.
I’d had this book a number of years, packed away in a closet, and I’d only perused it forward in time from Lavina Locke down to my father, who actually had an entry in the book, the last generation to be documented. I hadn’t however, gone backwards, and when I did, in the summer of 2023, I discovered Lavina’s father, James Locke.
According to Beck’s research, James Locke was born January 28, 1778 in West Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father Jonathan was apparently a soldier in the Revolution—family records, Beck reports, say he first enlisted in March of 1776, at the age of twenty-three, then again in another regiment in September—and had a house in West Cambridge on the Woburn Road, near what is by tradition called “The Foot of the Rocks.” Presumably, James was born in that house, and Woburn is where the Lockes began in this country.
“In his youth he was distinguished for great musical talents, being an exceptional singer and performer on several musical instruments,” writes Beck. Locke’s nephew reported that his uncle had attended Harvard, which I don’t doubt. That same nephew said that James also was a soldier in the War of 1812.
In early September, 1811, James married Nancy Perkins (she’s also called “Anna”), who was born in Wells, Maine, the daughter of a deacon. Why James made his way to Maine is unknown, writes Beck, though he did have a brother there, Thomas, who had a farm in the town of Temple. The couple lived in Maine until 1818 when, again for unknown reasons, they removed to Cortland, New York with their three children.
Nancy Perkins died in Cortland in the summer of 1820 at the age of thirty-three, and I know of no records that say why. Lavina, her oldest child, my fourth great-grandmother, would have been only eight years old when her mother died.
James remarried in 1821 and moved, with his children, to Chemung County, to the foot of South Mountain, settling on what came to be known as “The Locke Place.” In the last seventeen years of his life, Locke was a minister. He died of cholera in 1849 and was buried, presumably, in a grave beside the Watkins Road, just opposite his house.
When I had read this information about James Locke, I went looking for him, as I often do with ancestors, on the Find A Grave website. It was there I found the article about the body discovered along the highway, published in 2011 by the Elmira Star-Gazette, that led me to write J. Kelsey Jones, the county historian who had posted it.