Have you ever visited a castle? I’ve been to a few in Wales and Ireland, and they’re incredible, of course, to consider the people who must have lived in them. But imagine what that might feel like if you knew, beyond all doubt, that your ancestors lived in those halls.
In America, we don’t have anything close to a castle—at least not in age. But how often have you considered what seems, on reflection, a simple question: Where did my ancestors actually live? That is to say, what kind of house did they occupy? And where are those houses today?
This is something I’d never thought about. Until I began to find them.
In 1853, John Goodwin Locke of Massachusetts published a book with the wonderful title the Book of the Lockes. I enjoy it both because of the title’s metaphorical meanings (who wouldn’t want a “Book of Locks”?) and also because of its subject, which just happens to be my own ancestors.
I learned about this book via another author, John V. Beck, whose self-published book on the descendants of Elisha And Lavina (Locke) Andrus had belonged to my father. After my father died, the book came into my hands, though it took me years to fully peruse it. When I initially looked at it, I started from Elisha and Lavina and followed the line only forward to my father.
Lavina Locke, my fourth great-grandmother, owned a copy of the Book of the Lockes. It would have been published four years after the death of her father, James Locke, who lived out at the edge of Chemung County, New York in a house on the lip of the Catharine Valley, before he died of cholera brought in by railroad workers. Lavina was, reportedly, quite proud of her heritage. Beck, too, drew on the Book of the Lockes in his own research.
John Goodwin Locke begins his survey with the first Locke to arrive in the colonies: William Locke, who landed in Boston and eventually settled in Woburn. The frontpiece of Locke’s book, as you’ll see above, is an image of the house of William Locke in Woburn. The origins of William Locke in America, as the author has it, begins with his being orphaned by the age of five.
He draws on the writing of one James Savage (the Honorable James Savage, no less), whose writing appears in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collections. Savage apparently got his information from a folio in Westminster Hall, in London, in 1842. The manuscript he found there, he writes, “contains the names of persons permitted to embark at the port of London after Christmas 1634, to the same period in the following year, kept generally in regular succession.”
In those records appears “William Lock,” aged six, from Stepney Parish, a subdivision of London in the County of Middlesex. On March 22, 1634, his name was signed to the register of passengers of the Planter, bound for America, but there is no other “Lock” listed. His mother had died—Savage found her death notice—and the father may have died shortly after that.
Savage researched parish records, and found a record of baptism for William on the 20th of December, 1628, only seven days old. It lists him as the son of William Lock, a mariner, and Elizabeth, his wife (Stepney was, in fact, a district of sailors, encompassing docks and wharves along the Thames; the name is said to derive from Saxon for wharf or haven). The age of William Locke of Woburn, as he declared in the Massachusetts courts, aligns with the age presented in the baptismal record, writes John G. Locke.
The next record he found was the burial of Elizabeth on June 27, 1631. As for William, the father, we don’t know, but given that his son, at only five years of age, boards a ship with no parent, we might assume the father met with an accident. Perhaps he drowned at sea. Perhaps he saw a better opportunity for his son in a ship to America and sent him off.
In the Planter’s ship log, is one Nicholas Davies, forty years old, and his family, including his wife, Sara, and thirteen-year-old son Joseph. Davies settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and eventually moved to Woburn. Davies’ relation to the young William Locke is made clear in his will, dated 1667 and probated a few years later, which Savage found by miraculous luck in the county office of York County, Maine, which reads, “I give unto my cossen William Locke of Owborne [Woburn, clearly] two silver spoones and five shillings in silver.”
Cossen—in another place in the will he cites another cossin—may refer to Locke as a cousin or, as it may also have meant at the time, a nephew. In either case, we can presume he was a relative, so it may have been that Davies adopted the young William at the death of his parents or, in the off chance that Locke’s father survived, at the request of the elder William, though that scenario seems unlikely to me. Who, following the death of their wife, the mother of their son, would surrender their child?
The next we hear of the child is as a grown man. On Christmas Day, 1655, William Locke of Woburn married Mary Clarke, also of Woburn. Beyond her parents, named William and Margery, nothing more is known. Mary was fifteen years old when she married, and William twenty-seven. Eight of their children would survive into adulthood.
What we know of who was to become the Deacon William Locke can be found mostly in his buying and selling of land. “An examination of the Records at the Registry of Deeds Office, in Middlesex Co.,” writes John Goodwin Locke, “of the Woburn Town Records, and of many original deeds now in my possession, shows that if our Patriarch was an Orphan boy, he knew how to take care of himself; for he soon became owner of real estate, and eventually was a man of property.” The author goes on to list pages of real estate transactions, purchases and grants and exchanges that amounted to hundreds of acres.
The house pictured on the frontpiece, I presume, was built at some point in the latter half of the seventeenth century—it was detailed in William’s will, dated 1703, though by 1697 he had given half the house to a son, Ebenezer.
Further, the author has this to say: “But little is known of the personal character of Dea. Locke. He filled no high stations. He was an humble cultivator of the soil, or at most an artisan [a carpenter, according to several deeds], capable of planning and erecting a comfortable dwelling for himself or his neighbors. He was one among a great class in every country, that we sometimes are apt to attempt to look down upon. But honest labor in every pursuit is honorable, and the husbandman and mechanic of New England are as much to be respected as any class in the community.” He held committee posts, and acted in the capacity of constable, selectman and, in one case, a grand juror. The Deacon William Locke died at the age of ninety-one in the late spring of 1720.
This was the “William Lock” I wrote about last week, the orphan whose parents survived the initial wave of the bubonic plague but died soon after.
The house that this carpenter built was known (at the time of the writing of Book of the Lockes, at any rate) as the “Fox House,” and was still on the Lexington Road in the year of publication, west of Woburn. William had given it to his son Ebenezer, who gave it to his son Samuel, who operated an inn there until 1741, when he sold the property. Naturally, I wanted to know if the house still stood. I made a few calls.