The Beginningless Beginning
Or, Into the Ancestral Rabbit Hole
This is probably a frustration particular to genealogists, and certainly amateurs like me, and it centers on this: the one ancestor who you can find no precedent for. That is, the ancestor whom you know for sure is yours but can find no parent for. No link.
Take the Hill’s for example. What I know about my own namesake line comes from a book written by George J. Hill, The Ferry Keeper’s Family. George, whom I’ve spoken with, drew on some earlier genealogical work his father had passed down to him, and he’d done his own investigations as well, but like them he hit the wall—as most lines do, eventually.
The earliest ancestors he’d found was the ferry keeper himself, Luke Hill, and his wife, born Mary Hout (or Hoyt, as many contend). The one proof—and in all things, we rely on this proof—is a single sentence, written in the annals of Windsor, Connecticut in 1651: “Luke Hill married Mary Hout.” And aside from some other records, which New Englanders were generally good at keeping, like tax records and meetings at court, where Luke and Mary appear often enough, we have nothing earlier than 1651.
That means, of course, no parentage. It also means no origin; where were they from, originally? England, we can assume, but where? And when? Given what was likely their age at marriage (which can be derived, imperfectly, from ages given in other documents, especially Luke’s will and testament), they were not born in New England—after all, the Mayflower had only landed thirty years before, and there are no Hill’s or Hoyt’s aboard that vessel. There are no ship manifests at all that we could point to and even say, maybe.
There were Hill’s and Hout’s in New England at the time, but without documentation, any guess as to who may have been a predescessor remains circumstantial at best. Thus, as I’ve written before, Luke and Adam become, essentially, an Adam and Eve, created out of nowhere.
This came up lately, too, when writing about Jesse and Martha Havens. Originally, I’d followed some commonalities I’d seen written elsewhere: that they were from Southampton, in Suffolk County, at the eastern edge of Long Island (although I’d seen written that Martha, born a Goodale, was born on Shelter Island, just to the north). Anything prior to them—at least what I’d seen published on the Find A Grave site—was mere conjecture.
Southampton, by the way, beginning in 1874 published eight volumes of their early records, with the earliest covering the span of 1639 to the 1660’s. I went through several volumes and found plenty of Goodales and, in time, Havens. But no Jesse, no Martha.
Then I found a page online. Now, I admit I can’t quite remember how I landed there—the search engine, obviously, though I don’t recall exactly what I typed—but I landed on the Wiki Tree site and, lo and behold, a new door opened. Several, in fact, though I’m not entirely confident on where they lead.
First, there is an image of a handwritten page, an anonymously written family document, that lists Jesse and Martha’s birthdates—January 8, 1765 for Jesse and 1768 for Martha—and the place of their birth as, surprisingly, Sag Harbor. Like Southampton, Sag Harbor was also a whaling town, and its position on the water, a bay inlet that gave good access to the Sound and the Atlantic, gave it prominence economically. Whether in Sag Harbor or Southampton, Jesse’s being a shipbuilder makes sense.
It is the 1800 federal census, the second in this country, that places them in South Hampton, Suffolk, New York. The 1810 census places them far upstate in Benton, New York, the town just to the north of Torrey where, in 1811, their son, William—my ancestor, as well—was born. In the 1892 book, History of Yates County, N.Y., edited by Lewis Cass Aldrich, on page 360, there is this sentence: “The name Havens stands for pioneership in Benton, the representatives coming to the town in 1810 and the years following. The family is numerous in the town to-day.” But there is no distinct mention of Jesse.
There are, however, a lot of Havens. Were they relatives? Did one follow the other, or did several travel together? We’ll never know, I’m afraid.
The Wiki Tree is connected to a site called, specifically, Long Island Surnames, part of Long Island Genealogy, which boasts nearly 190,000 sources, over 1,300,000 families, and an impressive number of individual people, nearly 3,500,000 of them. Two of them are Jesse and Martha, and it was there I began to discern possible paths—if not forward, then most certainly backward.
But I still can’t be certain. Still, here’s what’s suggested: Jesse was the son of one Captain William Havens and his wife, his second cousin Desire Havens. The information comes from a 1975 book I found, The Havens Family in Suffolk County, New York: A Genealogical Survey of Some of the Descendants of William S. Havens, 17th Century Settler in Aquidneck, Rhode Island.
The author, Barrington Havens, drew on a number of previous sources to establish the history of William, who was born on Shelter Island in 1747. During the Revolution, he commanded the sloop Beaver; his “bravery and skill were unsurpassed in their harassing of an enemy or defense of a coast.” And in 1794, he apparently made an affidavit at Southampton, saying “he was the only surviving officer of Capt. Davis’ company, 4th Line,” where he served as liutenant. In 1790, he was granted land as a veteran of the Revolution.
His wife Desire died young, sometime around 1775, but not before she’d had at least a few children. Censuses in 1776 and 1790 establish that William had a son, but, of course, no name for that child is given—the federal census, for one, only lists the men who are effectively head-of-households, and the earlier one, for Suffolk County, was undoubtedly the same.
Captain William Havens died in a shipwreck off Cape Cod. An issue of the Long Island Herald from December 3, 1798 reads: “On the 21st of November last the brig 'Lucy' of this port (Sag Harbor), James Terry master, belonging to Col. Benjamin Huntting from Machias, Maine, laden with lumber on her homeward bound passage, was cast ashore on Cape Cod and entirely lost, and melancholy to add, Capt. William Havens, pilot, Jeremiah Rogers, mate, and a black man all perished in attempting to gain the shore. Capt. William Havens was an inhabitant of this place. In nautical knowledge very few excelled him. During the last Revolution he distinguished himself as a real Boanerges in the cause of freedom; he ever felt ready to fall or rise with the ruin or happiness of his country. But alas, the cause of liberty is not always the channel of preferment and reward, and he was possessed of too great an enlargement of heart ever to mourn his own misery or fortunes. As he lived generally esteemed, lo his death is universally lamented.”
Boanerges means, from the Greek, “sons of thunder,” which Jesus gave as surnames to James and John, as detailed in the Book of Mark. And the fact that a “black man” was present indicates early slavery, an unfortunate fact.
Barrington Havens lists two unnamed sons of the captain, born before 1776. One is supposed by him to be another William, but the other is unnamed. Perhaps it is Jesse; perhaps not.
If all the Havens were descended from the namesake of his book, William Havens of Rhode Island, the first Havens in the country, then I might rest there. The origin goes back as far as 1635. The family spread, the author says, from Shelter Island, when William’s son George purchased land there. Judging by the census of Suffolk County in 1776, Jesse would have been part of one of the eighteen heads of Havens families. The federal census of 1790 lists twenty-three Havens families in Suffolk.
No one can say for sure where this original Havens came from—perhaps Wales, or else the west of England. He apparently joined the original Rhode Island settlement established by Roger Williams.
“As in so many similar situations,” writes Barrington Havens, “it is not always easy to determine who, among the various chroniclers, has done original research on the subject, in view of the rather common custom — as in my own case here — of relying on others for information. As I have done no original research of my own on this question, I have had to rely on the writings of others.”
Jesse would have left, as the author has it, because of “the lure of the frontier.” This is not unlike, I realize, the frontier I seek in trying to find my own origins. Jesse, for his part, went forward into the dark forests of upstate New York. And I am continually going backwards into the dark recesses of the past.
This is the strangest obsession: that of following lines backwards, and backwards, until one comes to the abyss and can go no further. And why is that? What is it in me that compels this search? Is it just, what, curiosity? What is it I hope to find?
I’ve been asking this for nearly five years now.
I wonder that I find things to identify with. I am the descendant, I might say, of a shipbuilder. I am the descendant of numerous soldiers in the Revolution. I may be the descendant of a man who died in a shipwreck off the coast of Cape Cod. I may be, I discovered last year, the descendant of slaveholders.
More recently, regarding the son of Jesse, William Pomeroy Havens (and I pause to think, did he name this son after his own father?), I can say I am the descendant of a sign painter for the Fall Brook Railroad. I am the descendant of housewives, one generation after another.
I know of those family genealogists of the nineteenth century, who went looking for pedigrees, for coats-of-arms to post on their carriages, for verifiable attachments to kings and nobles. They wanted to be something other than what they were, I suppose.
I understand, as well, the desire to be associated with the earliest American history—the Daughters of the American Revolution is one organization that celebrates this. My father always wanted to know if any of his ancestors fought in the Revolution. Since his death, I’ve found many.
But it isn’t those things that draw me. Not for me. I don’t care to know what knight I was descended from—though it is fascinating for sure (and I am, in fact, descended from at least a few, apparently)—but that I descended from anyone at all. I also take great pleasure in knowing I was descended from common people—and if someone extraordinary comes up, like the Reverend John Cotton, then I take that in stride, too.
I go down the rabbit hole, devouring names as I fall. I’ll likely never be full. But then, I doubt I’ll ever stop hungering, until there is no one left to find.