From 1902 book, Lane Genealogies, vol. III, p.58.
"Ralph Hill and George Farley purchased the Edward Oaks grant at Shawshine in 1661"..
Ralph and George were her father and future father-in-law. Her father was said to like the name Billerica, then presumed by others to have been born at a place once called that. (Pronounced "Billericay", it was of Essex County, England. Its spelling since has changed to match the pronunciation . That older Billericay, in modern times, become a commuters' suburb of London.)
Historians checking old records for Ralph's family merely found an otherwise anonymous Rev. Hill nearby. He circulated across neighboring English towns, in the same period that her own father, Ralph, was making land transactions in two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. (If Rev. Hill also had male descendants survive until modern times, male DNA could prove or disprove a blood relationship.)
Her parents, the Hills, were both British immigrants to America. Arriving separately, they were widowed before marrying each other in America. Each had begun in Plymouth, then together moved north up the Atlantic coast, almost to Salem. They bypassed future Boston's bays as a home, as Charlestown and Watertown were considered better, though experience later would show otherwise. Woburn, aka "Wooburn", her birthplace, was a granddaughter town, spun off by settlers expanding out from Charlestown and its earlier daughter of Watertown. Woburn would then become a mother town of sorts for soon-to-emerge Billerica, the town co-founded by her parents, the Hills, with others.
The two families, Hill and Farley, went to future Billerica along with the Jefts. (The Jefts were already Farley in-laws, as the two women heads were sisters, both daughters of the Bietres/Bietris who died back in Woburn), They had settled years before the 1661 purchase date, in what was still called Shawshine then. The regional name now is Shawsheen, matching the spelling used for the Shawsheen River. (The Shawheen's flow angles down, past mutltiple towns, including Andover. Its angle heads toward the more critical Merrimac River, which then flows to the Atlantic, reminding us that shipping jobs would quickly offer alternatives as side-occupations to farming The factories at Lowell would come much, much later, with unrelated famine Irish then to become the Farleys filling the graveyards.)
Rebeckah was said to be the youngest in her family. Her older siblings were teens for the purchase of Shawshine in 1661. When father Ralph Hill moved his family there, significantly earlier, in 1653, she and her elder brothers were still too young to marry, though infant baptisms were of record in the new place by 1654.
The baptisms of the Hill siblings' first infants would wait a decade, then went in this order: 1) Her brother Ralph Hill Jr. and his wife Martha baptized daughter Deborah in Dec., 1663. 2) Rebeckah Hill and spouse Caleb Farley baptized son Caleb in June, 1667. 3) Jonathan Hill, with wife Mary, had daughter Mary in Sept., 1667. 4) Abraham/Abram Hill and wife Hannah baptized daughter Hannah in Dec., 1667. 5) Nathaniel Hill and wife "Elisabeth" had son Nathaniel in Mar.,1668.
Each baptism might mean a baptismal feast where family and neighbors would gather. With birth years placed so close together, some of the first cousins would be natural playmates, if not best friends.
Giving each first newborn the same name as a parent would do what? It would cause issues, never being sure which person was meant, parent or adult child, without seeing a birth year or spouse alongside. Their new custom served to hide forever the identities of grandparents, uncles and aunts, left behind in England.
Requiring an earlier feast, Rebeckah had married someone she had long known, Caleb Farley. Records give the date as Dec. of 1666. (BEWARE: The "1650" for her birth date is only an estimate, explained below A problem? The "round number estimate" of 1850 would make her only 16 when marrying Caleb, . This was too young? Puritans often, not the same as always, delayed courting and marriage, to be sure daughters could survive childbirth. Lessons had been learned from rearing and breeding of livestock, a sign of past ruralness A too-young mother might survive a first birth, but be so damaged inside, that the second or third birth could not complete properly. In a day without ultrasound and C-sections to assist with a poorly turned child, a too-young mother might easily die.)
Her second child with spouse Caleb Farlet, a daughter, was born March 10, 1869. This Rebeckah's death came a few weeks later. She left Caleb a widower, as of March 29, 1669. Her funeral was perhaps the next day. Thus, Mar. 30, appeared in county death records (controlled by colony officials), while the 29th was put in church/town records by local people who better knew her family. Who would care for her children? She had to be thinking as her end came closer.
Their church was unusual, in that their burying grounds were probably no easy walk from their church. Instead of hand-carrying the coffin from church to grave as done at many other churches, their custom may have been to put the coffin in a cart, implying a road system better than average.
Keeping the town tiny, Billerica now had one less person.
Someone else would need to care for his children while Caleb worked. Looking forward, spouse Caleb would need to find a second wife quickly so he could have this two tiny ones back, the first child not to have his second birthday for a few months, the other an infant. He would travel to marry again, finding Lydia all the way down in Roxbury, marrying her by Nov., after Rebeckah died in March. The tiny one's second mother would be the only mother they would remember. Rebeckah would have known this too. Cale would have a big family with his second wife. (This writer's husband descends of him and the second wife, we think via their son called Ebenezer. Ebenezer the named one of his sons Caleb, both for Rebekah's spouse, his father, and also Rebeckah's son, an older half-brother. The last of the Ebenezer Farleys died in California tending his orchards, where he had gone to explore for gold, after serving as a steamboat captain back in Michigan, where his children had been born. Our side descends of Capt. Ebenezer Farley's sister, the Rebecca Farley who married Ransom French, we hope not the last of the Rebecca Farleys.)
Caleb married Lydia/Lidia in Roxbury at the end of 1669. Caleb's church announced his intent to marry a week before their wedding at the bride's church. This was similar to old-time "banns" being done three weeks in a row in advance of a wedding. The idea was to give people objecting to a marriage time to travel, and give notice. Did three weeks of warning being replaced by one mean bigamy was a lesser concern among the Puritans? .
Roxbury was a semi-distant place, as on the other side of Boston. He may have been the Caleb Farley identified as a carter with service to Boston in old source materials on Boston. Young farmers could "do better" if they had such a side occupation. Old Boston was still a peninsula then. Carters of goods (farm produce, cut wood) had to enter old Boston by the peninsula's neck, at Boston's south end. In contrast, Woburn and Billerica were to Boston's north end, water-surrounded. In their case, the peninsula's neck was called the Dorchester Neck due to the town called that, with the old sister town of Roxbury alongside . The two sister towns would spin off multiple daughter towns (Braintree, for example, from Dorchester, its "freemen" declared about 1640). Once their spin-offs made them tiny enough, Boston felt it logical to annex both, done in the mid-1800s. The two are now neighborhoods on the so-called "south side" of modern Boston.
In widower Caleb's time, neighbors having extra rooms allowed travelers coming through (for example, while waiting to cross the neck) to board overnight. One story (recently seen in a book, NOT someone's old memory memory passed down to this writer's spouse) was that Lydia's father was called Golden More, that he let a room to Caleb for his Boston trips. This explained how a man from Billerica could meet a woman from Roxbury. Either the name of Lydia was extra-liked or his new wife was such a good mother and best friend to many of his kin, that many Lydias would accumulate, named for her. (While Lydia/Lidea's maiden name is often remembered as More or Moore, her relatives used Moaar later. By that time Lydia's kin had migrated, with varied Farleys, to the far north edge of old Middlesex County. Their new locations were part of a grant in and around future Hollis, NH, to be re-assigned later, from MA, to NH. This was back when back when the latter was still called the Hampshire Grants, before half split off as Vermont. The moving of the MA-NH line southward ruined the attendance zones of some early-founded churches.
The church used most often once Hollis formed would be Congregational. The old Puritan church in Billerica, at first Congregational, ultimately declared itself Unitarian/Universalist, causing another church to form and call itself "orthodox Congregational". (These Farleys were probably gone from Billerica well before that division.)
Her daughter Rebeckah Farley grew up, married a decade-older widower named Frost. They had multiple children, stayed in Billerica until, "like mother, like daughter", Rebeckah's daughter had her own too early death, 1704/1705. She, however, made it to her mid-thirties. Her now twice-widowed spouse, Thomas Frost Sr., named the new baby Rebeckah, for its mother and grandmother. That new baby grew up, did anyone think of her as Rebeckah Frost the junior? Had her Frosts gone to Mendon by 1718. The Billerica records say a Joseph Frost still in Billerica married a Rebecca Frost in Mendon that year. They must have sent a notice of their wedding back to Billerica so friends and relatives could come.
This Rebeckah's son, Caleb Farley, not yet two when she died, is said by some to be the Caleb who would marry Sarah Godfrey, in 1686. That would make him about 21, with the junior Caleb then able to have a big family, just as his father had done.
The simplest story of her son's final outcome is only that he died in Billerica in 1733. That is confused by the possibility that some other relative named Caleb Farley was the one who died in 1733. Facts for him in the Billerica Vitals are at the end, name his ten children, but lack his death date.
Billerica kept shrinking, new generations moved out at times. Other times a boundary change caused the little farm where one had always lived to have a new address. People sometimes learned about new places by doing business there. Twenty years after this Rebecca's death, her elder half-brother, Roger Toothaker, farmed in the part of Billerica that would later become Tewksbury. It was hard to live on farming alone, so he but would also would administer his potions, going to Salem for added business. People used foolish statements made by him to accuse him of witchcraft in a "mass hysteria" of 1692-1693. (Massive rumors were encouraged by a devil-hating minister, believed by too many. They told of witches flying people over trees, making their neighbors or animals sick by using the evil eye or chanting spells or making promises to the Devil).
The idea was to torture accused witches until they confessed to the scientifically impossible. Around 20 people were tried and hung on the basis of false confessions, sometimes their own, the case of a slave woman (Tabitha) owned by the belatedly tossed out minister. Up to another 10-15 died in jail or prison before trial, presumably while refusing to confess, Roger one of them. The number who died without making it to trial is sometimes instead minimized down to 1 or 2, in which case Roger is not mentioned. Accounting for the difference in counts, neighbors went in to view the body and said, while he had not been murdered, his body was severely abused. Some people thought that only clear murder should be counted, not internal bleeding nor heart attacks and strokes or ruined livers or kidneys caused by torture Toothaker's wife and pre-teen daughter would be released after the wife implicated many whose names had been suggested to her by the ambitious interrogators. However, the wife and daughter would soon be subtracted from the Tewksbury end of old Billerica, too, in 1695, after attacks by warring natives angry about the takeover of former Shawshine by whites (the buffer zone of "praying villages" having been removed by then?) The wife was killed outright, Roger's daughter taken away and not seen again..
Billerica shrank again and again, as growing parts revised their bounds or split off as brand-new towns. This Rebeckah's brother, Nathaniel Hill, was once a cornet player in the local militia. He would see a boundary change pushing him to the other side of the Billerica lines in 1701. That brother's death and cornet playing would thus be of record in neighboring Chelmsford, not Billerica..
That brother, Nathaniel, died in 1706. Both year and age of death were still viewable on his stone circa 1900-1910, the period when inscriptions still readable were transcribed for saving, paid for by the Eddy Town Fund. Now, over a century later, the age (AE) portion on his stone is obliterated.
His birth year was thus calculated as 1646, done by subtracting his age at death, from the death year. Her birth, in contrast, is merely estimated, done by taking a round number year, 1650, the last before her father's migration to Billerica in 1653.
His was the only sibling stone with both year and AE still visible, circa 1900-1910. Volunteers from the NE Historic Genealogical Society and town and county clerks gathered up the remaining paper records and tried to read whatever on old stones could still be read. Under "Deaths", then under "Hill", Chelmsford's "Vital Records" said,
"Nathaniell, Cornet, May 14, 1706. [a. 64 y. GR1]"
Further shrinking Billerica, Bedford split apart in 1729 and Tewksbury, in 1734. How often did this cause graves of related families once inside Billerica to suddenly lie outside Billerica? There is a Shawsheen Cemetery that opened too late for their use, postal address now Bedford.. However, it was said to have had burials for some graves at the oldest cemeteries moved to its grounds. (Its name reminds all of her father's Shawshin/Shawshine purchase agreement in 1661, that native tribes had been there first, either convinced or forced into the transfer of lands. Some of the tribes that remained were said by one historian to form "Praying villages" nearby, meaning churched, with a minister, active in farming and gardening, with elected officials. This was permitted until their land was also desired and/or intolerance set in.)
Once those villages were gone, decimated by disease or chased out, the non-friendly natives had little reason to stay away and thus attacked? The minsters and missionaries would write and gave examples of whites to blame for escalating bad feelings, but once things became bad, they could be very bad, atrocities by both sides
In progress, more research needed
HER SON'S MANY CHILDREN. Called "Caleb Jr' in the Vitals, he would have three daughters and seven sons, only one son to die early. His first wife was Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverhill, again according to the Billerica Vitals. Sarah's death in 1704 required finding a new mother for the smallest of her children as well.
MISSING DATES. Caleb Jr's death date is not in the Billerica Vitals. Nor is that of his second wife, nor is their marriage date, nor the date of any intent to marry her. The second mother to his children, Deborah Chamberlain, was of record just one time, in 1708, when their son Samuel was born/baptised there. ( He was a namesake for Sarah's Samuel, born 1703, who apparently had died young)
Why come to Billerica so briefly? Maybe their new location had become unsafe (disease or attack). Maybe they wanted a feast with family and friends present for their first baptism.
OFF TO JERSEY. Rebeckah's eldest two grandsons were Georg and Caleb (Caleb III, if putting numbers on their straight line of Calebs, he to have a Caleb IV, called Caleb Jr while III still lived ).
Georg and Caleb would be the only ones leaving Billerica to go to the Jersey frontier, past NYC. They were of permanent record together with other co-founders as forming a new church there The two were maybe reaching adulthood at a wrong time, to be among those instead off to future Hollis, NH.
Its not clear to this writer what happened to Georg, as fires set by the British in the Revolution forced a migration out. Caleb III would remain amidst non-British ethnics, Lutherans and German/Dutch Reformeds, traveling with them. Caleb married a woman whose father was German Lutheran and motheer, Dutch Reformed.
British denominations had just begun to name themselves, while the Germanic speakers had long named their denominations. Long-ago tired of religious fighting, the church-state compromise was not for a king to pick just one religion for the whole kingdom/empire. Instead each little princeling could declare which religion would be subsidized inside his turf, but then tolerated, rather than forbidding some other faiths. A short distance travelled put one under a different prince, so coming to America was done for other reasons, not religion, but for economics (huge landlords in some part meant few could own property) and or to avoid the excessive warring on the northern end of the Germans by which more of the neighboring peoples to the east were conquered and put under serfdom, the main corruption which the Lutheran ministers perhaps moderated but could not or would not stop .
FISHER GENEALOGY. Caleb III's wife was the daughter of immigrant Joseph Fisher (probably spelled Fischer "over there"). Named Hannah, she was born in Jan. 1772 in what became what became Sussex County, NJ. Her spouse's name was spelled as "Caleb Farlee Jr", perhaps to stop her relatives from using a German pronunciation of "-ley" that would rhyme with "day". (See archive.org/details/genealogyofjosep00fish/page/n13)
The father of Caleb's German Lutheran spouse had immigrated to avoid the excesses, the extra-long military service, not done for defense, but to expand the land holdings of the big landlords. If someone left, they were not allowed back in, as they had refused to pay that "tax" on their lives.
The Fisher-Farleys migrated away, from old West Jersey, into PA and NY. For example, that Hannah and Caleb's son John was of record as born Feb. 9, 1792, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, on their farm in Shamokin Twp. He married, turned Methodist, farmed in Rush Twp., and was buried July 18,1871 at the cemetery on Sharp Ridge (p. 118). His widow was still living "in the vicinity of Union Corners" as data was collected for the Fisher book, able to help with the whereabouts and names of descendants.
SIDE NOTE. Both the Puritans and the Lutherans preferred baptizing children as infants, so named parents with the child in records. One difference-- the German and Dutch records also named godparents.
This implied an intent to not let the child be indentured out, should the parents die, as godparents could easily be called in as the deceased parents' choice for substitute parenting. Godparents were often trusted siblings of the parents, less often, trusted cousins or a maturing child. Those fuller records are a great assist to the Fisher side in re-constructing family history.
SWEDISH ANCESTRY? The Fisher version of the Farley family history has an important pre-America part that rings true. The Fisher book noted that grandmother Christian Bietris Farley was Swedish. Her first name is certainly Scandinavian.
The Danes, in particular, often used Christian, both for people and for places, as a first or middle name and to honor Kings called Christian by naming Danish outposts for them. Swedish raiders captured the Danish outpost of Christianstad in olden times, taking control of the surrounding Scania/Scandia region. Properly spelled by Swedish rules, it is now Kristianstad in Sweden's Skåne county/province. There are similarly named places in Norway, formerly once under Danish control. (Modern Oslo was called Christiania/Kristiania while under Danish rulers.)
For people, the name is seen most famously for the wonderful children's writer, the Dane called Hans Christian Anderson. His stories are best when not Disneyized to remove unhappiness, as they were realistic in that way, preparing children for scary things they might encounter in real life should their support system of story-telling relatives go away ("The Little Match Girl").
Did Christian Bietris Farley follow the old custom of telling her grandchildren fairy tales? Were her Scandinavian stories and the Fishers' north German stories told to children maybe among those gathered up and retold by Hans Christian Anderson and the German Grimm brothers?
In Chapter IX, the Fisher genealogy begins by saying the surname Farley originally was "De Falaise", with two lords Walter and William at the castle called Falaise, one to conquer England
Another Farley family history, not the Fisher one, but the one with stories about steamboat captain Ebenezer Farley, whose father began in Marlow NH before going to Estrie in Canada and then returning via Ohio, had the boy walk with him from Detroit to south Michigan (implying they could not afford horses for everyone). It ,has a portion going back to England and the castle in France with a fairy tale ring to it. It, too, speaks in a magical way of the Farley name, of a royal ancestor having come from the Castle Falais. In fairy tale style, it uses a verse that rhymes Farley with Falais, a teacher's trick to get children to memorize something .
In reality, the very British, non-French name of Farley is a plainer "topological" name relevant to farmers and herdsmen. In Britain, a "ley" was an old-time name for a woodside meadow.
Similar names would be Hindley (where a female deer took her fawns to feed), Oxley (where oxen could be fed), Huntley, Brinkley, and so on, each describing the nature of the ley. In the Farley case, the ley was edged with ferns or possibly used for sheep, depending on what particular old-time version of Far was meant.
Further, multiple places, including numerous tiny hamlets or farmsteds now extinct, could have once had the same old British name. Thus, multiple men can have the same "topological" surname, despite having different DNAs, many fern-lined pasture tucked into the woods, a servant with children from a castle, as well as the nobility living there .
BEING SWEDISH VS. FROM SWEDEN. It's not clear whether the Fisher-Farley side had been told by Caleb III that their great-grandmother Christian Bietris was from a specific Swedish place or instead was "Swedish is some way". A specific Swedish birthplaces could range from regions, such as Scania/Scandia, to seacoast cities such as Gothenburg
The other way of being Swedish would mean ethnicity, regardless of where born. "Swedish in some way" thus includes the Lombards, a Swedish people who spent considerable time in Italy before making their way to London, the church of St. Olave in London being named for a Swedish church-going war hero. (St. Olave is very likely a re-spelling of St. Olaf.)
"Somehow Swedish" would also include Swedish seamen who roamed, but whose home cities belonged to the old Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic cities were ones that long ago agreed to co-operate in sea trading. They were widespread across the north seacoasts, multi-ethnic, ranging from seaside cities of the Netherlands (Holland, Belgium), to Bergen in Norway, to Copenhagen in Denmark, to Riga, the capital of Latvia, at Russia's northern edge.
Hanseatic origins might explain a Scandinavian father landing somewhere long enough to marry a woman with a non-Swedsh, yet, still ethnic name, multiple spellings of Beatris/Beatrix used by Belgian royals, re-cast as Beatrice by the British. (Note that many old Europeans liked the same names as did royals, without being a child of nobility.)
WHEN TO STOP? The Ralph Hill story, as stated above, was not a fairy tale. It ended with a Rev. Hill found, but whose few remaining records showed no kin named who were clearly connected to Ralph. The Hills accepted that. (If still curious now, they could do DNA and find a match still in England or here).
In stating that Christian Bietris was Swedish, maybe meaning ethnically, not by place of birth, they accepted the absence of a royal heritage. There was no attempt to make her descend of Harold Bluetooth or Erik the Red or Queen Mathilde.
The Farley historians, however, did not want to accept that George Farleys history was unknown or ordinary.
We have been lectured about putting a "ringer" George Farleys in our trees, by a Farley still in England. She named herself, called herself a professional genealogist, said she knows that one George Farley seen in our trees never came to America, as he stayed in England to produce her family, and, yes, they know where that George is buried, and it's not in the States. She did not say which of the magical Georges was meant. Does it matter? Several versions of false George's have come up. One hint is when the British part off the trees show a Frankenstein quality, an English mother from here, an English grandfather from there, maybe a loosely stitched-on piece for William the Conqueror, even though inherited, permanent surnames for men did not appear until hundreds of years after his ruthless takeover of England.
Maybe some need to do the DNA work so we can see which British George Farley of the multiple that were our Georg's age in the tax and other records is a match? The two American sets already done with their tests show that their two DNAs are not a match. One set of immigrant early Farleys ran the plantation called Archer's Hope near Henrico, Virginia, their line headed by Thomas Farley. The other set of non-Irish Farleys with DNA went to Massachusetts under Lord Saltonstall, their male immigrants with names like Meshack and Medad Farley, their later generation made of note by a Brigadier General named Michael Farley. Their Essex County was a mere one county over from Billerica's Middlesex County.
The tested Farleys located closest to Billerica, were similar in religion, Puritans. They were millers of modest means, successful enough to ultimately own their mills, but initially brought in to work as managing millers for the Protestant colony developer called Lord Salstonstall. The faraway Thomas Farley near Henrico, Virginia, is thought/proven descended of one of the two early Fabyan Farleys of Britain, apparently with a compete line of baptism records from first one to last one, so their tree makes sense. Both George and Thomas were common names that the George Farley who DID live near that Thomas, might or might not be related. A Cromwellian known as a gifted mathematician, of the right generation to be an older son or younger brother or cousin of Thomas, that George could easily have spent military time in Boston in the Cromwell years. However, his DNA is uncheckable, as his branch stopped with a son, an only child, possibly. That George believed he had fully paid passage to America for the boy, then was told at the scheduled arrival that the amount paid was not enough. The son would be be put into an indenture, the whole thing cruelly done. (The outcome was not really stated, but typical outcomes of early indenture in Virginia were that 50% of the indentured were said to die before their freedom year. A child might be purposely maimed to stop its running away, could be shipped to the worse place of Barbados, never to return, could be killed by disease, starvation or overwork, etc.)
An angry and grieving George, now without child, used his Cromwellian military experience to become a leader in the local uprising by Virginians (Bacon's Rebellion), then was captured by King's soldiers. A married niece of a different surname tried to come to his rescue, but was turned away. . Having his name mis-recorded as George Farlow/Farlo before his trial and hanging would avoid implicating others (any nearby plantation-owning relatives) in his crime. (Punishment for treason was not just hanging, but dis-inheriting anyone remotely connected, a so-called "guilt by association". "Attainder" was a legal confiscation of land. It happened as soon as anyone was accused, no actual conviction needed.)
Bacon's Rebellion was Virginia's prelude to the American Revolution. His hanging caused that George Farley/Farlow to be viewed as a hero by many locals, a traitor by loyalists to the King, and a common criminal by those witnessing wartime barbarities by his recruits.
Reconstructing earlier history accurately was often impossible, without DNA, yet Farley descendants tried anyway. None in the 1700s or early 1800s were interested. Instead, they waited until the late 1800s, probably as libraries showed up around them. The impression was created that anything could be looked up. A search of the tax records and sheriff records in old England will show the multiple George Farleys with no surviving baptismal records. Instead searches for the Billerica George Farley when back in England stuck with mainly the few baptismal records remaining from George's era, after many burnings of church records affecting older ancestors had been done in the monastery closing days (to prevent the gentry that had originally donated land for the Monasteries from proving the land should be returned to them, or the tenants from claiming that their donations "in kind" to keep the monastery chapels, breeding stations, orchards, hospices and student dorms and other services going, had better claim to the land than the confiscating King.
By sticking to Georges with baptisms (allowed to keep their churches open for the time being), the Fisher set came up with Thomas Farley, but did not find the Catholic cousins of Thomas' wife living across the Maryland line, and missed the George Farley hung in Virginia. Libraries had no complete lists of millers and farmers and tailors and servants were given, but offered complete lists of British inventors and complete lists of noted nobles with their castle names. Finding somebody deeper in the ancestry who lived in a castle was maybe what people checking library books on British ancestry maybe thought was needed.
BILLERICA'S OUTCOME. Due to small population counts, the "vital records" have less identity issues than seen in the old British records, even if allowing confusion of father's death with sons, or cousin with cousin, as they clearly separate unrelated families until "too much" migration in and out happens. The population still inside Billerica was at just 1364 people in 1765, when counted for the last British census ("Provincial").
By 1765, many people attending Rebeckah's funeral over 90 years earlier, were replaced by more numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the siblings of George and Caleb not going to NJ. The town/township would not reach 1500 people until post-Revolution, over a century past her death.
There would be population losses 1800-1820 as the War of 1812 took its toll, as did bad weather for crops in some places and migations "west" (to NY, to Ohio), as the new frontiers opened. But, then, growth resumed.
The population was up to 2775 when the Eddy Town Fund decided to help certain Mass.towns publish their old records, before the old paperwork and gravestones disappeared, faded, or were eaten by moths or mice.
The 1908 publication is called "Vital Events of Billerica, through 1850". It is viewable in full at archive.org, no charge, though donations are welcome. It is the best source of family dates and names while in Billerica, showing old spellings. Due to relying heavily on infant baptisms when stones are missing it does better for families attending church than for those staying away. Those going to Canads commented that the old-time Billerica stones were simply made of too-poor materials, that what they would quarry in Canada would be more reliable for grave markers goind forward.
The Vitals confirm that the ethnic (Dutch/Hanseatic) spelling of "Georg" was used despite those more fully English shifting to the George spelling. "Rebeckah" was used for generations, before county officials and descendants simplified it into Rebecca. (The old Hebrew spelling was four Semitic characters read from right to left, so no British spelling matched.)
REBECCA'S FARLEY GRANDCHILDREN, Who might provide the DNA needed to determine which. if any, of the family trees is correct about the deep ancestry of the first Georg Farley, father to many and spouse of Christian Bietris? It would not be the three daughters of this Rebeckah's son Calelb Jr, nor the children of daughter Rebeckah Farley Frost, as male DNA surnamed Farley is required. Caleb Jr, apparently had six of his seven sons survive to adulthood .
SUMMARY for Caleb Farley ["Caleb Jr", aka Farly, 10 children 1686-1708, by 2 women , no death for him in Billerica records.
m.Sarah 1686, who d. Nov. 13, 1704
m. or other relationship Deborah Chamberlain
9 children with Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverill/Haverhill, her children b. in Billerica 1686-1703,
1 child with Deborah Chamberlain b. 1708, Billerica
Sarah's sons
Georg 1686/1687, Caleb b. 1688/1689, John 1690, James 1697, Jonathan 1701, The one known to die young was Samuel Apr. 1703, replaced by a namesake later
Sarah's dtrs
Sarah 1692, Mary 1694, Deborah 1698/1699, marriages not clear
Deborah Chamberlain's known son,
Samuel Farley, b.1708, namesake for the deceased boy and for his father's youngest half-brother
The Billerica Vitals say little about Deborah. A family tree as well-done as possible when death records, paper or stone, are missing, say her parents were William Chamberlain and Deborah Jaquith.
Rebecka's son Caleb Jr may have long been in the Bedford part of Billerica, farming, on land, with his first wife, as he was said to sell land there to a Lane in Apr. of 1700, before she died in 1703. His eldest half-brother, Ebenezer (to be re-checked) had taken over the "Billerica homestead" after caring for Christian and George in their old age. Born well after them was Lidea's Samuel, Samuel's children to young to play with Calebs' and Ebenezers' children, but were presumably aware of them. Samuel and his wife died young, by 1718, a year when "it", a mystery illness, slowly began to spread. "It" took others in Roxbury (a Benjamin Farley there?) and the Frenches in Braintree (unrelated to the Frenches of Cambridge and Billerica thought to be brothers or cousins to Rebeckah's mother Margaret Toothaker Hill).
Samuel's two boys were put under their aging uncle Ebenezer's care. Their aunt Hannah had married an Abram/Abraham Jaquith. She also seemed to be living near her elder brother Ebenezer's house, maybe inside to care for him pre-death. When Ebenezer died, care of the orphans passed to her. Abram was an in-law to Rebeckah's son Caleb Jr in two ways, via his marriage to half-sister Hannah, and via Caleb Jr's 2nd wife, about whom little is known except what the Jaquiths say about her parents. The 2nd wife's mother was said to be Deborah Jaquith. The shared immigrant ancestor of all the Jaquiths in the area was an older Abram Jaquith, from France, who was a member of the First Church in Charlestown (admitted 1643), before he and the wife he met in America had children baptized in Woburn later in the 1640s.
After Ebenezer died, Hannah and Abram assumed care of the two boys who were Lidea's grandsons and Hannah's nephews, all apparently living in the old stone garrison house. Once they matured, the orphans' interest in the Billerica garrison house and land was sold to the Jaquiths, giving the young men funds to go elsewhere.
The last non-Irish Farleys then quickly disappeared from Billerica. The Vitals' last recorded Farley deaths were in 1753, the widow and son of Joseph Farley. Hannah's stone still stands, with many empty, letterless stones behind hers. Typically, the families last to leave have the stones in the best shape, as people "did things" longer to maintain them.
The Jaquiths remained at the big stone garrison house for many generations, that house built, originally, to withstand attacks in warring times and have room for neighbors to shelter, one of 12 built in Billerica.. The last garrison house was dismantled by a Jaquith descendent in 2000, to save it from land development, then taken to NH. It has since been reassembled with a modern interior. (For details and sources, see the Jaquith-Farley connections at freepages.rootsweb.com/~qvarizona/family/jaquith.html It is an ancestry.com adaptation of what used to be the volunteer-run site called rootsweb.)
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Copyright by JBrown, Austin, Texas, 2018, last revised April, 2019, with permission granted for use at this FindaGrave page. Portions may be quoted by relatives in their private materials meant for family, if author and web link are also given, next to the quote marks.
Most leaving Billerica went to Hollis, NH, to take advantage of land grants. The Farley ancestor of this writer's spouse, an Amos Farley who died in Mich. in the 1830's, was born in and/or grew up in Marlow, NH, a step west of Hollis, NH. As young men, he and his brother Jesse had recently married sisters named Hall. They left with other New Englanders, for Estrie, East Canada/Quebec, a quarrying town on the Vermont-Canada line.)
NOTE ON STONES, By 1800, many had already decided the Billerica stones were of the wrong type to last. Some of the stronger stone materials that accidentally survive were noted as of different rock, such as the "blue stone" of one of he youngest Ebenezer Farley in this Rebeckah's cemetery. Those leaving the Hollis NH area to go up to quarry rock at the Vermont-Estrie, Canada line noticed this, their rock probably then used in Hollis, NH, in Estrie, East Canada (Quebec province), and in Mic., following the migration path. The stones are still pretty readable and intact. Interestingly, there is a Woburn, Canada. The Farleys did not seem to care whether new places settled were named for where-ever they had previously been, but others moving with them did.
"Ralph Hill and George Farley purchased the Edward Oaks grant at Shawshine in 1661"..
Ralph and George were her father and future father-in-law. Her father was said to like the name Billerica, then presumed by others to have been born at a place once called that. (Pronounced "Billericay", it was of Essex County, England. Its spelling since has changed to match the pronunciation . That older Billericay, in modern times, become a commuters' suburb of London.)
Historians checking old records for Ralph's family merely found an otherwise anonymous Rev. Hill nearby. He circulated across neighboring English towns, in the same period that her own father, Ralph, was making land transactions in two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. (If Rev. Hill also had male descendants survive until modern times, male DNA could prove or disprove a blood relationship.)
Her parents, the Hills, were both British immigrants to America. Arriving separately, they were widowed before marrying each other in America. Each had begun in Plymouth, then together moved north up the Atlantic coast, almost to Salem. They bypassed future Boston's bays as a home, as Charlestown and Watertown were considered better, though experience later would show otherwise. Woburn, aka "Wooburn", her birthplace, was a granddaughter town, spun off by settlers expanding out from Charlestown and its earlier daughter of Watertown. Woburn would then become a mother town of sorts for soon-to-emerge Billerica, the town co-founded by her parents, the Hills, with others.
The two families, Hill and Farley, went to future Billerica along with the Jefts. (The Jefts were already Farley in-laws, as the two women heads were sisters, both daughters of the Bietres/Bietris who died back in Woburn), They had settled years before the 1661 purchase date, in what was still called Shawshine then. The regional name now is Shawsheen, matching the spelling used for the Shawsheen River. (The Shawheen's flow angles down, past mutltiple towns, including Andover. Its angle heads toward the more critical Merrimac River, which then flows to the Atlantic, reminding us that shipping jobs would quickly offer alternatives as side-occupations to farming The factories at Lowell would come much, much later, with unrelated famine Irish then to become the Farleys filling the graveyards.)
Rebeckah was said to be the youngest in her family. Her older siblings were teens for the purchase of Shawshine in 1661. When father Ralph Hill moved his family there, significantly earlier, in 1653, she and her elder brothers were still too young to marry, though infant baptisms were of record in the new place by 1654.
The baptisms of the Hill siblings' first infants would wait a decade, then went in this order: 1) Her brother Ralph Hill Jr. and his wife Martha baptized daughter Deborah in Dec., 1663. 2) Rebeckah Hill and spouse Caleb Farley baptized son Caleb in June, 1667. 3) Jonathan Hill, with wife Mary, had daughter Mary in Sept., 1667. 4) Abraham/Abram Hill and wife Hannah baptized daughter Hannah in Dec., 1667. 5) Nathaniel Hill and wife "Elisabeth" had son Nathaniel in Mar.,1668.
Each baptism might mean a baptismal feast where family and neighbors would gather. With birth years placed so close together, some of the first cousins would be natural playmates, if not best friends.
Giving each first newborn the same name as a parent would do what? It would cause issues, never being sure which person was meant, parent or adult child, without seeing a birth year or spouse alongside. Their new custom served to hide forever the identities of grandparents, uncles and aunts, left behind in England.
Requiring an earlier feast, Rebeckah had married someone she had long known, Caleb Farley. Records give the date as Dec. of 1666. (BEWARE: The "1650" for her birth date is only an estimate, explained below A problem? The "round number estimate" of 1850 would make her only 16 when marrying Caleb, . This was too young? Puritans often, not the same as always, delayed courting and marriage, to be sure daughters could survive childbirth. Lessons had been learned from rearing and breeding of livestock, a sign of past ruralness A too-young mother might survive a first birth, but be so damaged inside, that the second or third birth could not complete properly. In a day without ultrasound and C-sections to assist with a poorly turned child, a too-young mother might easily die.)
Her second child with spouse Caleb Farlet, a daughter, was born March 10, 1869. This Rebeckah's death came a few weeks later. She left Caleb a widower, as of March 29, 1669. Her funeral was perhaps the next day. Thus, Mar. 30, appeared in county death records (controlled by colony officials), while the 29th was put in church/town records by local people who better knew her family. Who would care for her children? She had to be thinking as her end came closer.
Their church was unusual, in that their burying grounds were probably no easy walk from their church. Instead of hand-carrying the coffin from church to grave as done at many other churches, their custom may have been to put the coffin in a cart, implying a road system better than average.
Keeping the town tiny, Billerica now had one less person.
Someone else would need to care for his children while Caleb worked. Looking forward, spouse Caleb would need to find a second wife quickly so he could have this two tiny ones back, the first child not to have his second birthday for a few months, the other an infant. He would travel to marry again, finding Lydia all the way down in Roxbury, marrying her by Nov., after Rebeckah died in March. The tiny one's second mother would be the only mother they would remember. Rebeckah would have known this too. Cale would have a big family with his second wife. (This writer's husband descends of him and the second wife, we think via their son called Ebenezer. Ebenezer the named one of his sons Caleb, both for Rebekah's spouse, his father, and also Rebeckah's son, an older half-brother. The last of the Ebenezer Farleys died in California tending his orchards, where he had gone to explore for gold, after serving as a steamboat captain back in Michigan, where his children had been born. Our side descends of Capt. Ebenezer Farley's sister, the Rebecca Farley who married Ransom French, we hope not the last of the Rebecca Farleys.)
Caleb married Lydia/Lidia in Roxbury at the end of 1669. Caleb's church announced his intent to marry a week before their wedding at the bride's church. This was similar to old-time "banns" being done three weeks in a row in advance of a wedding. The idea was to give people objecting to a marriage time to travel, and give notice. Did three weeks of warning being replaced by one mean bigamy was a lesser concern among the Puritans? .
Roxbury was a semi-distant place, as on the other side of Boston. He may have been the Caleb Farley identified as a carter with service to Boston in old source materials on Boston. Young farmers could "do better" if they had such a side occupation. Old Boston was still a peninsula then. Carters of goods (farm produce, cut wood) had to enter old Boston by the peninsula's neck, at Boston's south end. In contrast, Woburn and Billerica were to Boston's north end, water-surrounded. In their case, the peninsula's neck was called the Dorchester Neck due to the town called that, with the old sister town of Roxbury alongside . The two sister towns would spin off multiple daughter towns (Braintree, for example, from Dorchester, its "freemen" declared about 1640). Once their spin-offs made them tiny enough, Boston felt it logical to annex both, done in the mid-1800s. The two are now neighborhoods on the so-called "south side" of modern Boston.
In widower Caleb's time, neighbors having extra rooms allowed travelers coming through (for example, while waiting to cross the neck) to board overnight. One story (recently seen in a book, NOT someone's old memory memory passed down to this writer's spouse) was that Lydia's father was called Golden More, that he let a room to Caleb for his Boston trips. This explained how a man from Billerica could meet a woman from Roxbury. Either the name of Lydia was extra-liked or his new wife was such a good mother and best friend to many of his kin, that many Lydias would accumulate, named for her. (While Lydia/Lidea's maiden name is often remembered as More or Moore, her relatives used Moaar later. By that time Lydia's kin had migrated, with varied Farleys, to the far north edge of old Middlesex County. Their new locations were part of a grant in and around future Hollis, NH, to be re-assigned later, from MA, to NH. This was back when back when the latter was still called the Hampshire Grants, before half split off as Vermont. The moving of the MA-NH line southward ruined the attendance zones of some early-founded churches.
The church used most often once Hollis formed would be Congregational. The old Puritan church in Billerica, at first Congregational, ultimately declared itself Unitarian/Universalist, causing another church to form and call itself "orthodox Congregational". (These Farleys were probably gone from Billerica well before that division.)
Her daughter Rebeckah Farley grew up, married a decade-older widower named Frost. They had multiple children, stayed in Billerica until, "like mother, like daughter", Rebeckah's daughter had her own too early death, 1704/1705. She, however, made it to her mid-thirties. Her now twice-widowed spouse, Thomas Frost Sr., named the new baby Rebeckah, for its mother and grandmother. That new baby grew up, did anyone think of her as Rebeckah Frost the junior? Had her Frosts gone to Mendon by 1718. The Billerica records say a Joseph Frost still in Billerica married a Rebecca Frost in Mendon that year. They must have sent a notice of their wedding back to Billerica so friends and relatives could come.
This Rebeckah's son, Caleb Farley, not yet two when she died, is said by some to be the Caleb who would marry Sarah Godfrey, in 1686. That would make him about 21, with the junior Caleb then able to have a big family, just as his father had done.
The simplest story of her son's final outcome is only that he died in Billerica in 1733. That is confused by the possibility that some other relative named Caleb Farley was the one who died in 1733. Facts for him in the Billerica Vitals are at the end, name his ten children, but lack his death date.
Billerica kept shrinking, new generations moved out at times. Other times a boundary change caused the little farm where one had always lived to have a new address. People sometimes learned about new places by doing business there. Twenty years after this Rebecca's death, her elder half-brother, Roger Toothaker, farmed in the part of Billerica that would later become Tewksbury. It was hard to live on farming alone, so he but would also would administer his potions, going to Salem for added business. People used foolish statements made by him to accuse him of witchcraft in a "mass hysteria" of 1692-1693. (Massive rumors were encouraged by a devil-hating minister, believed by too many. They told of witches flying people over trees, making their neighbors or animals sick by using the evil eye or chanting spells or making promises to the Devil).
The idea was to torture accused witches until they confessed to the scientifically impossible. Around 20 people were tried and hung on the basis of false confessions, sometimes their own, the case of a slave woman (Tabitha) owned by the belatedly tossed out minister. Up to another 10-15 died in jail or prison before trial, presumably while refusing to confess, Roger one of them. The number who died without making it to trial is sometimes instead minimized down to 1 or 2, in which case Roger is not mentioned. Accounting for the difference in counts, neighbors went in to view the body and said, while he had not been murdered, his body was severely abused. Some people thought that only clear murder should be counted, not internal bleeding nor heart attacks and strokes or ruined livers or kidneys caused by torture Toothaker's wife and pre-teen daughter would be released after the wife implicated many whose names had been suggested to her by the ambitious interrogators. However, the wife and daughter would soon be subtracted from the Tewksbury end of old Billerica, too, in 1695, after attacks by warring natives angry about the takeover of former Shawshine by whites (the buffer zone of "praying villages" having been removed by then?) The wife was killed outright, Roger's daughter taken away and not seen again..
Billerica shrank again and again, as growing parts revised their bounds or split off as brand-new towns. This Rebeckah's brother, Nathaniel Hill, was once a cornet player in the local militia. He would see a boundary change pushing him to the other side of the Billerica lines in 1701. That brother's death and cornet playing would thus be of record in neighboring Chelmsford, not Billerica..
That brother, Nathaniel, died in 1706. Both year and age of death were still viewable on his stone circa 1900-1910, the period when inscriptions still readable were transcribed for saving, paid for by the Eddy Town Fund. Now, over a century later, the age (AE) portion on his stone is obliterated.
His birth year was thus calculated as 1646, done by subtracting his age at death, from the death year. Her birth, in contrast, is merely estimated, done by taking a round number year, 1650, the last before her father's migration to Billerica in 1653.
His was the only sibling stone with both year and AE still visible, circa 1900-1910. Volunteers from the NE Historic Genealogical Society and town and county clerks gathered up the remaining paper records and tried to read whatever on old stones could still be read. Under "Deaths", then under "Hill", Chelmsford's "Vital Records" said,
"Nathaniell, Cornet, May 14, 1706. [a. 64 y. GR1]"
Further shrinking Billerica, Bedford split apart in 1729 and Tewksbury, in 1734. How often did this cause graves of related families once inside Billerica to suddenly lie outside Billerica? There is a Shawsheen Cemetery that opened too late for their use, postal address now Bedford.. However, it was said to have had burials for some graves at the oldest cemeteries moved to its grounds. (Its name reminds all of her father's Shawshin/Shawshine purchase agreement in 1661, that native tribes had been there first, either convinced or forced into the transfer of lands. Some of the tribes that remained were said by one historian to form "Praying villages" nearby, meaning churched, with a minister, active in farming and gardening, with elected officials. This was permitted until their land was also desired and/or intolerance set in.)
Once those villages were gone, decimated by disease or chased out, the non-friendly natives had little reason to stay away and thus attacked? The minsters and missionaries would write and gave examples of whites to blame for escalating bad feelings, but once things became bad, they could be very bad, atrocities by both sides
In progress, more research needed
HER SON'S MANY CHILDREN. Called "Caleb Jr' in the Vitals, he would have three daughters and seven sons, only one son to die early. His first wife was Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverhill, again according to the Billerica Vitals. Sarah's death in 1704 required finding a new mother for the smallest of her children as well.
MISSING DATES. Caleb Jr's death date is not in the Billerica Vitals. Nor is that of his second wife, nor is their marriage date, nor the date of any intent to marry her. The second mother to his children, Deborah Chamberlain, was of record just one time, in 1708, when their son Samuel was born/baptised there. ( He was a namesake for Sarah's Samuel, born 1703, who apparently had died young)
Why come to Billerica so briefly? Maybe their new location had become unsafe (disease or attack). Maybe they wanted a feast with family and friends present for their first baptism.
OFF TO JERSEY. Rebeckah's eldest two grandsons were Georg and Caleb (Caleb III, if putting numbers on their straight line of Calebs, he to have a Caleb IV, called Caleb Jr while III still lived ).
Georg and Caleb would be the only ones leaving Billerica to go to the Jersey frontier, past NYC. They were of permanent record together with other co-founders as forming a new church there The two were maybe reaching adulthood at a wrong time, to be among those instead off to future Hollis, NH.
Its not clear to this writer what happened to Georg, as fires set by the British in the Revolution forced a migration out. Caleb III would remain amidst non-British ethnics, Lutherans and German/Dutch Reformeds, traveling with them. Caleb married a woman whose father was German Lutheran and motheer, Dutch Reformed.
British denominations had just begun to name themselves, while the Germanic speakers had long named their denominations. Long-ago tired of religious fighting, the church-state compromise was not for a king to pick just one religion for the whole kingdom/empire. Instead each little princeling could declare which religion would be subsidized inside his turf, but then tolerated, rather than forbidding some other faiths. A short distance travelled put one under a different prince, so coming to America was done for other reasons, not religion, but for economics (huge landlords in some part meant few could own property) and or to avoid the excessive warring on the northern end of the Germans by which more of the neighboring peoples to the east were conquered and put under serfdom, the main corruption which the Lutheran ministers perhaps moderated but could not or would not stop .
FISHER GENEALOGY. Caleb III's wife was the daughter of immigrant Joseph Fisher (probably spelled Fischer "over there"). Named Hannah, she was born in Jan. 1772 in what became what became Sussex County, NJ. Her spouse's name was spelled as "Caleb Farlee Jr", perhaps to stop her relatives from using a German pronunciation of "-ley" that would rhyme with "day". (See archive.org/details/genealogyofjosep00fish/page/n13)
The father of Caleb's German Lutheran spouse had immigrated to avoid the excesses, the extra-long military service, not done for defense, but to expand the land holdings of the big landlords. If someone left, they were not allowed back in, as they had refused to pay that "tax" on their lives.
The Fisher-Farleys migrated away, from old West Jersey, into PA and NY. For example, that Hannah and Caleb's son John was of record as born Feb. 9, 1792, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, on their farm in Shamokin Twp. He married, turned Methodist, farmed in Rush Twp., and was buried July 18,1871 at the cemetery on Sharp Ridge (p. 118). His widow was still living "in the vicinity of Union Corners" as data was collected for the Fisher book, able to help with the whereabouts and names of descendants.
SIDE NOTE. Both the Puritans and the Lutherans preferred baptizing children as infants, so named parents with the child in records. One difference-- the German and Dutch records also named godparents.
This implied an intent to not let the child be indentured out, should the parents die, as godparents could easily be called in as the deceased parents' choice for substitute parenting. Godparents were often trusted siblings of the parents, less often, trusted cousins or a maturing child. Those fuller records are a great assist to the Fisher side in re-constructing family history.
SWEDISH ANCESTRY? The Fisher version of the Farley family history has an important pre-America part that rings true. The Fisher book noted that grandmother Christian Bietris Farley was Swedish. Her first name is certainly Scandinavian.
The Danes, in particular, often used Christian, both for people and for places, as a first or middle name and to honor Kings called Christian by naming Danish outposts for them. Swedish raiders captured the Danish outpost of Christianstad in olden times, taking control of the surrounding Scania/Scandia region. Properly spelled by Swedish rules, it is now Kristianstad in Sweden's Skåne county/province. There are similarly named places in Norway, formerly once under Danish control. (Modern Oslo was called Christiania/Kristiania while under Danish rulers.)
For people, the name is seen most famously for the wonderful children's writer, the Dane called Hans Christian Anderson. His stories are best when not Disneyized to remove unhappiness, as they were realistic in that way, preparing children for scary things they might encounter in real life should their support system of story-telling relatives go away ("The Little Match Girl").
Did Christian Bietris Farley follow the old custom of telling her grandchildren fairy tales? Were her Scandinavian stories and the Fishers' north German stories told to children maybe among those gathered up and retold by Hans Christian Anderson and the German Grimm brothers?
In Chapter IX, the Fisher genealogy begins by saying the surname Farley originally was "De Falaise", with two lords Walter and William at the castle called Falaise, one to conquer England
Another Farley family history, not the Fisher one, but the one with stories about steamboat captain Ebenezer Farley, whose father began in Marlow NH before going to Estrie in Canada and then returning via Ohio, had the boy walk with him from Detroit to south Michigan (implying they could not afford horses for everyone). It ,has a portion going back to England and the castle in France with a fairy tale ring to it. It, too, speaks in a magical way of the Farley name, of a royal ancestor having come from the Castle Falais. In fairy tale style, it uses a verse that rhymes Farley with Falais, a teacher's trick to get children to memorize something .
In reality, the very British, non-French name of Farley is a plainer "topological" name relevant to farmers and herdsmen. In Britain, a "ley" was an old-time name for a woodside meadow.
Similar names would be Hindley (where a female deer took her fawns to feed), Oxley (where oxen could be fed), Huntley, Brinkley, and so on, each describing the nature of the ley. In the Farley case, the ley was edged with ferns or possibly used for sheep, depending on what particular old-time version of Far was meant.
Further, multiple places, including numerous tiny hamlets or farmsteds now extinct, could have once had the same old British name. Thus, multiple men can have the same "topological" surname, despite having different DNAs, many fern-lined pasture tucked into the woods, a servant with children from a castle, as well as the nobility living there .
BEING SWEDISH VS. FROM SWEDEN. It's not clear whether the Fisher-Farley side had been told by Caleb III that their great-grandmother Christian Bietris was from a specific Swedish place or instead was "Swedish is some way". A specific Swedish birthplaces could range from regions, such as Scania/Scandia, to seacoast cities such as Gothenburg
The other way of being Swedish would mean ethnicity, regardless of where born. "Swedish in some way" thus includes the Lombards, a Swedish people who spent considerable time in Italy before making their way to London, the church of St. Olave in London being named for a Swedish church-going war hero. (St. Olave is very likely a re-spelling of St. Olaf.)
"Somehow Swedish" would also include Swedish seamen who roamed, but whose home cities belonged to the old Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic cities were ones that long ago agreed to co-operate in sea trading. They were widespread across the north seacoasts, multi-ethnic, ranging from seaside cities of the Netherlands (Holland, Belgium), to Bergen in Norway, to Copenhagen in Denmark, to Riga, the capital of Latvia, at Russia's northern edge.
Hanseatic origins might explain a Scandinavian father landing somewhere long enough to marry a woman with a non-Swedsh, yet, still ethnic name, multiple spellings of Beatris/Beatrix used by Belgian royals, re-cast as Beatrice by the British. (Note that many old Europeans liked the same names as did royals, without being a child of nobility.)
WHEN TO STOP? The Ralph Hill story, as stated above, was not a fairy tale. It ended with a Rev. Hill found, but whose few remaining records showed no kin named who were clearly connected to Ralph. The Hills accepted that. (If still curious now, they could do DNA and find a match still in England or here).
In stating that Christian Bietris was Swedish, maybe meaning ethnically, not by place of birth, they accepted the absence of a royal heritage. There was no attempt to make her descend of Harold Bluetooth or Erik the Red or Queen Mathilde.
The Farley historians, however, did not want to accept that George Farleys history was unknown or ordinary.
We have been lectured about putting a "ringer" George Farleys in our trees, by a Farley still in England. She named herself, called herself a professional genealogist, said she knows that one George Farley seen in our trees never came to America, as he stayed in England to produce her family, and, yes, they know where that George is buried, and it's not in the States. She did not say which of the magical Georges was meant. Does it matter? Several versions of false George's have come up. One hint is when the British part off the trees show a Frankenstein quality, an English mother from here, an English grandfather from there, maybe a loosely stitched-on piece for William the Conqueror, even though inherited, permanent surnames for men did not appear until hundreds of years after his ruthless takeover of England.
Maybe some need to do the DNA work so we can see which British George Farley of the multiple that were our Georg's age in the tax and other records is a match? The two American sets already done with their tests show that their two DNAs are not a match. One set of immigrant early Farleys ran the plantation called Archer's Hope near Henrico, Virginia, their line headed by Thomas Farley. The other set of non-Irish Farleys with DNA went to Massachusetts under Lord Saltonstall, their male immigrants with names like Meshack and Medad Farley, their later generation made of note by a Brigadier General named Michael Farley. Their Essex County was a mere one county over from Billerica's Middlesex County.
The tested Farleys located closest to Billerica, were similar in religion, Puritans. They were millers of modest means, successful enough to ultimately own their mills, but initially brought in to work as managing millers for the Protestant colony developer called Lord Salstonstall. The faraway Thomas Farley near Henrico, Virginia, is thought/proven descended of one of the two early Fabyan Farleys of Britain, apparently with a compete line of baptism records from first one to last one, so their tree makes sense. Both George and Thomas were common names that the George Farley who DID live near that Thomas, might or might not be related. A Cromwellian known as a gifted mathematician, of the right generation to be an older son or younger brother or cousin of Thomas, that George could easily have spent military time in Boston in the Cromwell years. However, his DNA is uncheckable, as his branch stopped with a son, an only child, possibly. That George believed he had fully paid passage to America for the boy, then was told at the scheduled arrival that the amount paid was not enough. The son would be be put into an indenture, the whole thing cruelly done. (The outcome was not really stated, but typical outcomes of early indenture in Virginia were that 50% of the indentured were said to die before their freedom year. A child might be purposely maimed to stop its running away, could be shipped to the worse place of Barbados, never to return, could be killed by disease, starvation or overwork, etc.)
An angry and grieving George, now without child, used his Cromwellian military experience to become a leader in the local uprising by Virginians (Bacon's Rebellion), then was captured by King's soldiers. A married niece of a different surname tried to come to his rescue, but was turned away. . Having his name mis-recorded as George Farlow/Farlo before his trial and hanging would avoid implicating others (any nearby plantation-owning relatives) in his crime. (Punishment for treason was not just hanging, but dis-inheriting anyone remotely connected, a so-called "guilt by association". "Attainder" was a legal confiscation of land. It happened as soon as anyone was accused, no actual conviction needed.)
Bacon's Rebellion was Virginia's prelude to the American Revolution. His hanging caused that George Farley/Farlow to be viewed as a hero by many locals, a traitor by loyalists to the King, and a common criminal by those witnessing wartime barbarities by his recruits.
Reconstructing earlier history accurately was often impossible, without DNA, yet Farley descendants tried anyway. None in the 1700s or early 1800s were interested. Instead, they waited until the late 1800s, probably as libraries showed up around them. The impression was created that anything could be looked up. A search of the tax records and sheriff records in old England will show the multiple George Farleys with no surviving baptismal records. Instead searches for the Billerica George Farley when back in England stuck with mainly the few baptismal records remaining from George's era, after many burnings of church records affecting older ancestors had been done in the monastery closing days (to prevent the gentry that had originally donated land for the Monasteries from proving the land should be returned to them, or the tenants from claiming that their donations "in kind" to keep the monastery chapels, breeding stations, orchards, hospices and student dorms and other services going, had better claim to the land than the confiscating King.
By sticking to Georges with baptisms (allowed to keep their churches open for the time being), the Fisher set came up with Thomas Farley, but did not find the Catholic cousins of Thomas' wife living across the Maryland line, and missed the George Farley hung in Virginia. Libraries had no complete lists of millers and farmers and tailors and servants were given, but offered complete lists of British inventors and complete lists of noted nobles with their castle names. Finding somebody deeper in the ancestry who lived in a castle was maybe what people checking library books on British ancestry maybe thought was needed.
BILLERICA'S OUTCOME. Due to small population counts, the "vital records" have less identity issues than seen in the old British records, even if allowing confusion of father's death with sons, or cousin with cousin, as they clearly separate unrelated families until "too much" migration in and out happens. The population still inside Billerica was at just 1364 people in 1765, when counted for the last British census ("Provincial").
By 1765, many people attending Rebeckah's funeral over 90 years earlier, were replaced by more numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the siblings of George and Caleb not going to NJ. The town/township would not reach 1500 people until post-Revolution, over a century past her death.
There would be population losses 1800-1820 as the War of 1812 took its toll, as did bad weather for crops in some places and migations "west" (to NY, to Ohio), as the new frontiers opened. But, then, growth resumed.
The population was up to 2775 when the Eddy Town Fund decided to help certain Mass.towns publish their old records, before the old paperwork and gravestones disappeared, faded, or were eaten by moths or mice.
The 1908 publication is called "Vital Events of Billerica, through 1850". It is viewable in full at archive.org, no charge, though donations are welcome. It is the best source of family dates and names while in Billerica, showing old spellings. Due to relying heavily on infant baptisms when stones are missing it does better for families attending church than for those staying away. Those going to Canads commented that the old-time Billerica stones were simply made of too-poor materials, that what they would quarry in Canada would be more reliable for grave markers goind forward.
The Vitals confirm that the ethnic (Dutch/Hanseatic) spelling of "Georg" was used despite those more fully English shifting to the George spelling. "Rebeckah" was used for generations, before county officials and descendants simplified it into Rebecca. (The old Hebrew spelling was four Semitic characters read from right to left, so no British spelling matched.)
REBECCA'S FARLEY GRANDCHILDREN, Who might provide the DNA needed to determine which. if any, of the family trees is correct about the deep ancestry of the first Georg Farley, father to many and spouse of Christian Bietris? It would not be the three daughters of this Rebeckah's son Calelb Jr, nor the children of daughter Rebeckah Farley Frost, as male DNA surnamed Farley is required. Caleb Jr, apparently had six of his seven sons survive to adulthood .
SUMMARY for Caleb Farley ["Caleb Jr", aka Farly, 10 children 1686-1708, by 2 women , no death for him in Billerica records.
m.Sarah 1686, who d. Nov. 13, 1704
m. or other relationship Deborah Chamberlain
9 children with Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverill/Haverhill, her children b. in Billerica 1686-1703,
1 child with Deborah Chamberlain b. 1708, Billerica
Sarah's sons
Georg 1686/1687, Caleb b. 1688/1689, John 1690, James 1697, Jonathan 1701, The one known to die young was Samuel Apr. 1703, replaced by a namesake later
Sarah's dtrs
Sarah 1692, Mary 1694, Deborah 1698/1699, marriages not clear
Deborah Chamberlain's known son,
Samuel Farley, b.1708, namesake for the deceased boy and for his father's youngest half-brother
The Billerica Vitals say little about Deborah. A family tree as well-done as possible when death records, paper or stone, are missing, say her parents were William Chamberlain and Deborah Jaquith.
Rebecka's son Caleb Jr may have long been in the Bedford part of Billerica, farming, on land, with his first wife, as he was said to sell land there to a Lane in Apr. of 1700, before she died in 1703. His eldest half-brother, Ebenezer (to be re-checked) had taken over the "Billerica homestead" after caring for Christian and George in their old age. Born well after them was Lidea's Samuel, Samuel's children to young to play with Calebs' and Ebenezers' children, but were presumably aware of them. Samuel and his wife died young, by 1718, a year when "it", a mystery illness, slowly began to spread. "It" took others in Roxbury (a Benjamin Farley there?) and the Frenches in Braintree (unrelated to the Frenches of Cambridge and Billerica thought to be brothers or cousins to Rebeckah's mother Margaret Toothaker Hill).
Samuel's two boys were put under their aging uncle Ebenezer's care. Their aunt Hannah had married an Abram/Abraham Jaquith. She also seemed to be living near her elder brother Ebenezer's house, maybe inside to care for him pre-death. When Ebenezer died, care of the orphans passed to her. Abram was an in-law to Rebeckah's son Caleb Jr in two ways, via his marriage to half-sister Hannah, and via Caleb Jr's 2nd wife, about whom little is known except what the Jaquiths say about her parents. The 2nd wife's mother was said to be Deborah Jaquith. The shared immigrant ancestor of all the Jaquiths in the area was an older Abram Jaquith, from France, who was a member of the First Church in Charlestown (admitted 1643), before he and the wife he met in America had children baptized in Woburn later in the 1640s.
After Ebenezer died, Hannah and Abram assumed care of the two boys who were Lidea's grandsons and Hannah's nephews, all apparently living in the old stone garrison house. Once they matured, the orphans' interest in the Billerica garrison house and land was sold to the Jaquiths, giving the young men funds to go elsewhere.
The last non-Irish Farleys then quickly disappeared from Billerica. The Vitals' last recorded Farley deaths were in 1753, the widow and son of Joseph Farley. Hannah's stone still stands, with many empty, letterless stones behind hers. Typically, the families last to leave have the stones in the best shape, as people "did things" longer to maintain them.
The Jaquiths remained at the big stone garrison house for many generations, that house built, originally, to withstand attacks in warring times and have room for neighbors to shelter, one of 12 built in Billerica.. The last garrison house was dismantled by a Jaquith descendent in 2000, to save it from land development, then taken to NH. It has since been reassembled with a modern interior. (For details and sources, see the Jaquith-Farley connections at freepages.rootsweb.com/~qvarizona/family/jaquith.html It is an ancestry.com adaptation of what used to be the volunteer-run site called rootsweb.)
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Copyright by JBrown, Austin, Texas, 2018, last revised April, 2019, with permission granted for use at this FindaGrave page. Portions may be quoted by relatives in their private materials meant for family, if author and web link are also given, next to the quote marks.
Most leaving Billerica went to Hollis, NH, to take advantage of land grants. The Farley ancestor of this writer's spouse, an Amos Farley who died in Mich. in the 1830's, was born in and/or grew up in Marlow, NH, a step west of Hollis, NH. As young men, he and his brother Jesse had recently married sisters named Hall. They left with other New Englanders, for Estrie, East Canada/Quebec, a quarrying town on the Vermont-Canada line.)
NOTE ON STONES, By 1800, many had already decided the Billerica stones were of the wrong type to last. Some of the stronger stone materials that accidentally survive were noted as of different rock, such as the "blue stone" of one of he youngest Ebenezer Farley in this Rebeckah's cemetery. Those leaving the Hollis NH area to go up to quarry rock at the Vermont-Estrie, Canada line noticed this, their rock probably then used in Hollis, NH, in Estrie, East Canada (Quebec province), and in Mic., following the migration path. The stones are still pretty readable and intact. Interestingly, there is a Woburn, Canada. The Farleys did not seem to care whether new places settled were named for where-ever they had previously been, but others moving with them did.
From 1902 book, Lane Genealogies, vol. III, p.58.
"Ralph Hill and George Farley purchased the Edward Oaks grant at Shawshine in 1661"..
Ralph and George were her father and future father-in-law. Her father was said to like the name Billerica, then presumed by others to have been born at a place once called that. (Pronounced "Billericay", it was of Essex County, England. Its spelling since has changed to match the pronunciation . That older Billericay, in modern times, become a commuters' suburb of London.)
Historians checking old records for Ralph's family merely found an otherwise anonymous Rev. Hill nearby. He circulated across neighboring English towns, in the same period that her own father, Ralph, was making land transactions in two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. (If Rev. Hill also had male descendants survive until modern times, male DNA could prove or disprove a blood relationship.)
Her parents, the Hills, were both British immigrants to America. Arriving separately, they were widowed before marrying each other in America. Each had begun in Plymouth, then together moved north up the Atlantic coast, almost to Salem. They bypassed future Boston's bays as a home, as Charlestown and Watertown were considered better, though experience later would show otherwise. Woburn, aka "Wooburn", her birthplace, was a granddaughter town, spun off by settlers expanding out from Charlestown and its earlier daughter of Watertown. Woburn would then become a mother town of sorts for soon-to-emerge Billerica, the town co-founded by her parents, the Hills, with others.
The two families, Hill and Farley, went to future Billerica along with the Jefts. (The Jefts were already Farley in-laws, as the two women heads were sisters, both daughters of the Bietres/Bietris who died back in Woburn), They had settled years before the 1661 purchase date, in what was still called Shawshine then. The regional name now is Shawsheen, matching the spelling used for the Shawsheen River. (The Shawheen's flow angles down, past mutltiple towns, including Andover. Its angle heads toward the more critical Merrimac River, which then flows to the Atlantic, reminding us that shipping jobs would quickly offer alternatives as side-occupations to farming The factories at Lowell would come much, much later, with unrelated famine Irish then to become the Farleys filling the graveyards.)
Rebeckah was said to be the youngest in her family. Her older siblings were teens for the purchase of Shawshine in 1661. When father Ralph Hill moved his family there, significantly earlier, in 1653, she and her elder brothers were still too young to marry, though infant baptisms were of record in the new place by 1654.
The baptisms of the Hill siblings' first infants would wait a decade, then went in this order: 1) Her brother Ralph Hill Jr. and his wife Martha baptized daughter Deborah in Dec., 1663. 2) Rebeckah Hill and spouse Caleb Farley baptized son Caleb in June, 1667. 3) Jonathan Hill, with wife Mary, had daughter Mary in Sept., 1667. 4) Abraham/Abram Hill and wife Hannah baptized daughter Hannah in Dec., 1667. 5) Nathaniel Hill and wife "Elisabeth" had son Nathaniel in Mar.,1668.
Each baptism might mean a baptismal feast where family and neighbors would gather. With birth years placed so close together, some of the first cousins would be natural playmates, if not best friends.
Giving each first newborn the same name as a parent would do what? It would cause issues, never being sure which person was meant, parent or adult child, without seeing a birth year or spouse alongside. Their new custom served to hide forever the identities of grandparents, uncles and aunts, left behind in England.
Requiring an earlier feast, Rebeckah had married someone she had long known, Caleb Farley. Records give the date as Dec. of 1666. (BEWARE: The "1650" for her birth date is only an estimate, explained below A problem? The "round number estimate" of 1850 would make her only 16 when marrying Caleb, . This was too young? Puritans often, not the same as always, delayed courting and marriage, to be sure daughters could survive childbirth. Lessons had been learned from rearing and breeding of livestock, a sign of past ruralness A too-young mother might survive a first birth, but be so damaged inside, that the second or third birth could not complete properly. In a day without ultrasound and C-sections to assist with a poorly turned child, a too-young mother might easily die.)
Her second child with spouse Caleb Farlet, a daughter, was born March 10, 1869. This Rebeckah's death came a few weeks later. She left Caleb a widower, as of March 29, 1669. Her funeral was perhaps the next day. Thus, Mar. 30, appeared in county death records (controlled by colony officials), while the 29th was put in church/town records by local people who better knew her family. Who would care for her children? She had to be thinking as her end came closer.
Their church was unusual, in that their burying grounds were probably no easy walk from their church. Instead of hand-carrying the coffin from church to grave as done at many other churches, their custom may have been to put the coffin in a cart, implying a road system better than average.
Keeping the town tiny, Billerica now had one less person.
Someone else would need to care for his children while Caleb worked. Looking forward, spouse Caleb would need to find a second wife quickly so he could have this two tiny ones back, the first child not to have his second birthday for a few months, the other an infant. He would travel to marry again, finding Lydia all the way down in Roxbury, marrying her by Nov., after Rebeckah died in March. The tiny one's second mother would be the only mother they would remember. Rebeckah would have known this too. Cale would have a big family with his second wife. (This writer's husband descends of him and the second wife, we think via their son called Ebenezer. Ebenezer the named one of his sons Caleb, both for Rebekah's spouse, his father, and also Rebeckah's son, an older half-brother. The last of the Ebenezer Farleys died in California tending his orchards, where he had gone to explore for gold, after serving as a steamboat captain back in Michigan, where his children had been born. Our side descends of Capt. Ebenezer Farley's sister, the Rebecca Farley who married Ransom French, we hope not the last of the Rebecca Farleys.)
Caleb married Lydia/Lidia in Roxbury at the end of 1669. Caleb's church announced his intent to marry a week before their wedding at the bride's church. This was similar to old-time "banns" being done three weeks in a row in advance of a wedding. The idea was to give people objecting to a marriage time to travel, and give notice. Did three weeks of warning being replaced by one mean bigamy was a lesser concern among the Puritans? .
Roxbury was a semi-distant place, as on the other side of Boston. He may have been the Caleb Farley identified as a carter with service to Boston in old source materials on Boston. Young farmers could "do better" if they had such a side occupation. Old Boston was still a peninsula then. Carters of goods (farm produce, cut wood) had to enter old Boston by the peninsula's neck, at Boston's south end. In contrast, Woburn and Billerica were to Boston's north end, water-surrounded. In their case, the peninsula's neck was called the Dorchester Neck due to the town called that, with the old sister town of Roxbury alongside . The two sister towns would spin off multiple daughter towns (Braintree, for example, from Dorchester, its "freemen" declared about 1640). Once their spin-offs made them tiny enough, Boston felt it logical to annex both, done in the mid-1800s. The two are now neighborhoods on the so-called "south side" of modern Boston.
In widower Caleb's time, neighbors having extra rooms allowed travelers coming through (for example, while waiting to cross the neck) to board overnight. One story (recently seen in a book, NOT someone's old memory memory passed down to this writer's spouse) was that Lydia's father was called Golden More, that he let a room to Caleb for his Boston trips. This explained how a man from Billerica could meet a woman from Roxbury. Either the name of Lydia was extra-liked or his new wife was such a good mother and best friend to many of his kin, that many Lydias would accumulate, named for her. (While Lydia/Lidea's maiden name is often remembered as More or Moore, her relatives used Moaar later. By that time Lydia's kin had migrated, with varied Farleys, to the far north edge of old Middlesex County. Their new locations were part of a grant in and around future Hollis, NH, to be re-assigned later, from MA, to NH. This was back when back when the latter was still called the Hampshire Grants, before half split off as Vermont. The moving of the MA-NH line southward ruined the attendance zones of some early-founded churches.
The church used most often once Hollis formed would be Congregational. The old Puritan church in Billerica, at first Congregational, ultimately declared itself Unitarian/Universalist, causing another church to form and call itself "orthodox Congregational". (These Farleys were probably gone from Billerica well before that division.)
Her daughter Rebeckah Farley grew up, married a decade-older widower named Frost. They had multiple children, stayed in Billerica until, "like mother, like daughter", Rebeckah's daughter had her own too early death, 1704/1705. She, however, made it to her mid-thirties. Her now twice-widowed spouse, Thomas Frost Sr., named the new baby Rebeckah, for its mother and grandmother. That new baby grew up, did anyone think of her as Rebeckah Frost the junior? Had her Frosts gone to Mendon by 1718. The Billerica records say a Joseph Frost still in Billerica married a Rebecca Frost in Mendon that year. They must have sent a notice of their wedding back to Billerica so friends and relatives could come.
This Rebeckah's son, Caleb Farley, not yet two when she died, is said by some to be the Caleb who would marry Sarah Godfrey, in 1686. That would make him about 21, with the junior Caleb then able to have a big family, just as his father had done.
The simplest story of her son's final outcome is only that he died in Billerica in 1733. That is confused by the possibility that some other relative named Caleb Farley was the one who died in 1733. Facts for him in the Billerica Vitals are at the end, name his ten children, but lack his death date.
Billerica kept shrinking, new generations moved out at times. Other times a boundary change caused the little farm where one had always lived to have a new address. People sometimes learned about new places by doing business there. Twenty years after this Rebecca's death, her elder half-brother, Roger Toothaker, farmed in the part of Billerica that would later become Tewksbury. It was hard to live on farming alone, so he but would also would administer his potions, going to Salem for added business. People used foolish statements made by him to accuse him of witchcraft in a "mass hysteria" of 1692-1693. (Massive rumors were encouraged by a devil-hating minister, believed by too many. They told of witches flying people over trees, making their neighbors or animals sick by using the evil eye or chanting spells or making promises to the Devil).
The idea was to torture accused witches until they confessed to the scientifically impossible. Around 20 people were tried and hung on the basis of false confessions, sometimes their own, the case of a slave woman (Tabitha) owned by the belatedly tossed out minister. Up to another 10-15 died in jail or prison before trial, presumably while refusing to confess, Roger one of them. The number who died without making it to trial is sometimes instead minimized down to 1 or 2, in which case Roger is not mentioned. Accounting for the difference in counts, neighbors went in to view the body and said, while he had not been murdered, his body was severely abused. Some people thought that only clear murder should be counted, not internal bleeding nor heart attacks and strokes or ruined livers or kidneys caused by torture Toothaker's wife and pre-teen daughter would be released after the wife implicated many whose names had been suggested to her by the ambitious interrogators. However, the wife and daughter would soon be subtracted from the Tewksbury end of old Billerica, too, in 1695, after attacks by warring natives angry about the takeover of former Shawshine by whites (the buffer zone of "praying villages" having been removed by then?) The wife was killed outright, Roger's daughter taken away and not seen again..
Billerica shrank again and again, as growing parts revised their bounds or split off as brand-new towns. This Rebeckah's brother, Nathaniel Hill, was once a cornet player in the local militia. He would see a boundary change pushing him to the other side of the Billerica lines in 1701. That brother's death and cornet playing would thus be of record in neighboring Chelmsford, not Billerica..
That brother, Nathaniel, died in 1706. Both year and age of death were still viewable on his stone circa 1900-1910, the period when inscriptions still readable were transcribed for saving, paid for by the Eddy Town Fund. Now, over a century later, the age (AE) portion on his stone is obliterated.
His birth year was thus calculated as 1646, done by subtracting his age at death, from the death year. Her birth, in contrast, is merely estimated, done by taking a round number year, 1650, the last before her father's migration to Billerica in 1653.
His was the only sibling stone with both year and AE still visible, circa 1900-1910. Volunteers from the NE Historic Genealogical Society and town and county clerks gathered up the remaining paper records and tried to read whatever on old stones could still be read. Under "Deaths", then under "Hill", Chelmsford's "Vital Records" said,
"Nathaniell, Cornet, May 14, 1706. [a. 64 y. GR1]"
Further shrinking Billerica, Bedford split apart in 1729 and Tewksbury, in 1734. How often did this cause graves of related families once inside Billerica to suddenly lie outside Billerica? There is a Shawsheen Cemetery that opened too late for their use, postal address now Bedford.. However, it was said to have had burials for some graves at the oldest cemeteries moved to its grounds. (Its name reminds all of her father's Shawshin/Shawshine purchase agreement in 1661, that native tribes had been there first, either convinced or forced into the transfer of lands. Some of the tribes that remained were said by one historian to form "Praying villages" nearby, meaning churched, with a minister, active in farming and gardening, with elected officials. This was permitted until their land was also desired and/or intolerance set in.)
Once those villages were gone, decimated by disease or chased out, the non-friendly natives had little reason to stay away and thus attacked? The minsters and missionaries would write and gave examples of whites to blame for escalating bad feelings, but once things became bad, they could be very bad, atrocities by both sides
In progress, more research needed
HER SON'S MANY CHILDREN. Called "Caleb Jr' in the Vitals, he would have three daughters and seven sons, only one son to die early. His first wife was Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverhill, again according to the Billerica Vitals. Sarah's death in 1704 required finding a new mother for the smallest of her children as well.
MISSING DATES. Caleb Jr's death date is not in the Billerica Vitals. Nor is that of his second wife, nor is their marriage date, nor the date of any intent to marry her. The second mother to his children, Deborah Chamberlain, was of record just one time, in 1708, when their son Samuel was born/baptised there. ( He was a namesake for Sarah's Samuel, born 1703, who apparently had died young)
Why come to Billerica so briefly? Maybe their new location had become unsafe (disease or attack). Maybe they wanted a feast with family and friends present for their first baptism.
OFF TO JERSEY. Rebeckah's eldest two grandsons were Georg and Caleb (Caleb III, if putting numbers on their straight line of Calebs, he to have a Caleb IV, called Caleb Jr while III still lived ).
Georg and Caleb would be the only ones leaving Billerica to go to the Jersey frontier, past NYC. They were of permanent record together with other co-founders as forming a new church there The two were maybe reaching adulthood at a wrong time, to be among those instead off to future Hollis, NH.
Its not clear to this writer what happened to Georg, as fires set by the British in the Revolution forced a migration out. Caleb III would remain amidst non-British ethnics, Lutherans and German/Dutch Reformeds, traveling with them. Caleb married a woman whose father was German Lutheran and motheer, Dutch Reformed.
British denominations had just begun to name themselves, while the Germanic speakers had long named their denominations. Long-ago tired of religious fighting, the church-state compromise was not for a king to pick just one religion for the whole kingdom/empire. Instead each little princeling could declare which religion would be subsidized inside his turf, but then tolerated, rather than forbidding some other faiths. A short distance travelled put one under a different prince, so coming to America was done for other reasons, not religion, but for economics (huge landlords in some part meant few could own property) and or to avoid the excessive warring on the northern end of the Germans by which more of the neighboring peoples to the east were conquered and put under serfdom, the main corruption which the Lutheran ministers perhaps moderated but could not or would not stop .
FISHER GENEALOGY. Caleb III's wife was the daughter of immigrant Joseph Fisher (probably spelled Fischer "over there"). Named Hannah, she was born in Jan. 1772 in what became what became Sussex County, NJ. Her spouse's name was spelled as "Caleb Farlee Jr", perhaps to stop her relatives from using a German pronunciation of "-ley" that would rhyme with "day". (See archive.org/details/genealogyofjosep00fish/page/n13)
The father of Caleb's German Lutheran spouse had immigrated to avoid the excesses, the extra-long military service, not done for defense, but to expand the land holdings of the big landlords. If someone left, they were not allowed back in, as they had refused to pay that "tax" on their lives.
The Fisher-Farleys migrated away, from old West Jersey, into PA and NY. For example, that Hannah and Caleb's son John was of record as born Feb. 9, 1792, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, on their farm in Shamokin Twp. He married, turned Methodist, farmed in Rush Twp., and was buried July 18,1871 at the cemetery on Sharp Ridge (p. 118). His widow was still living "in the vicinity of Union Corners" as data was collected for the Fisher book, able to help with the whereabouts and names of descendants.
SIDE NOTE. Both the Puritans and the Lutherans preferred baptizing children as infants, so named parents with the child in records. One difference-- the German and Dutch records also named godparents.
This implied an intent to not let the child be indentured out, should the parents die, as godparents could easily be called in as the deceased parents' choice for substitute parenting. Godparents were often trusted siblings of the parents, less often, trusted cousins or a maturing child. Those fuller records are a great assist to the Fisher side in re-constructing family history.
SWEDISH ANCESTRY? The Fisher version of the Farley family history has an important pre-America part that rings true. The Fisher book noted that grandmother Christian Bietris Farley was Swedish. Her first name is certainly Scandinavian.
The Danes, in particular, often used Christian, both for people and for places, as a first or middle name and to honor Kings called Christian by naming Danish outposts for them. Swedish raiders captured the Danish outpost of Christianstad in olden times, taking control of the surrounding Scania/Scandia region. Properly spelled by Swedish rules, it is now Kristianstad in Sweden's Skåne county/province. There are similarly named places in Norway, formerly once under Danish control. (Modern Oslo was called Christiania/Kristiania while under Danish rulers.)
For people, the name is seen most famously for the wonderful children's writer, the Dane called Hans Christian Anderson. His stories are best when not Disneyized to remove unhappiness, as they were realistic in that way, preparing children for scary things they might encounter in real life should their support system of story-telling relatives go away ("The Little Match Girl").
Did Christian Bietris Farley follow the old custom of telling her grandchildren fairy tales? Were her Scandinavian stories and the Fishers' north German stories told to children maybe among those gathered up and retold by Hans Christian Anderson and the German Grimm brothers?
In Chapter IX, the Fisher genealogy begins by saying the surname Farley originally was "De Falaise", with two lords Walter and William at the castle called Falaise, one to conquer England
Another Farley family history, not the Fisher one, but the one with stories about steamboat captain Ebenezer Farley, whose father began in Marlow NH before going to Estrie in Canada and then returning via Ohio, had the boy walk with him from Detroit to south Michigan (implying they could not afford horses for everyone). It ,has a portion going back to England and the castle in France with a fairy tale ring to it. It, too, speaks in a magical way of the Farley name, of a royal ancestor having come from the Castle Falais. In fairy tale style, it uses a verse that rhymes Farley with Falais, a teacher's trick to get children to memorize something .
In reality, the very British, non-French name of Farley is a plainer "topological" name relevant to farmers and herdsmen. In Britain, a "ley" was an old-time name for a woodside meadow.
Similar names would be Hindley (where a female deer took her fawns to feed), Oxley (where oxen could be fed), Huntley, Brinkley, and so on, each describing the nature of the ley. In the Farley case, the ley was edged with ferns or possibly used for sheep, depending on what particular old-time version of Far was meant.
Further, multiple places, including numerous tiny hamlets or farmsteds now extinct, could have once had the same old British name. Thus, multiple men can have the same "topological" surname, despite having different DNAs, many fern-lined pasture tucked into the woods, a servant with children from a castle, as well as the nobility living there .
BEING SWEDISH VS. FROM SWEDEN. It's not clear whether the Fisher-Farley side had been told by Caleb III that their great-grandmother Christian Bietris was from a specific Swedish place or instead was "Swedish is some way". A specific Swedish birthplaces could range from regions, such as Scania/Scandia, to seacoast cities such as Gothenburg
The other way of being Swedish would mean ethnicity, regardless of where born. "Swedish in some way" thus includes the Lombards, a Swedish people who spent considerable time in Italy before making their way to London, the church of St. Olave in London being named for a Swedish church-going war hero. (St. Olave is very likely a re-spelling of St. Olaf.)
"Somehow Swedish" would also include Swedish seamen who roamed, but whose home cities belonged to the old Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic cities were ones that long ago agreed to co-operate in sea trading. They were widespread across the north seacoasts, multi-ethnic, ranging from seaside cities of the Netherlands (Holland, Belgium), to Bergen in Norway, to Copenhagen in Denmark, to Riga, the capital of Latvia, at Russia's northern edge.
Hanseatic origins might explain a Scandinavian father landing somewhere long enough to marry a woman with a non-Swedsh, yet, still ethnic name, multiple spellings of Beatris/Beatrix used by Belgian royals, re-cast as Beatrice by the British. (Note that many old Europeans liked the same names as did royals, without being a child of nobility.)
WHEN TO STOP? The Ralph Hill story, as stated above, was not a fairy tale. It ended with a Rev. Hill found, but whose few remaining records showed no kin named who were clearly connected to Ralph. The Hills accepted that. (If still curious now, they could do DNA and find a match still in England or here).
In stating that Christian Bietris was Swedish, maybe meaning ethnically, not by place of birth, they accepted the absence of a royal heritage. There was no attempt to make her descend of Harold Bluetooth or Erik the Red or Queen Mathilde.
The Farley historians, however, did not want to accept that George Farleys history was unknown or ordinary.
We have been lectured about putting a "ringer" George Farleys in our trees, by a Farley still in England. She named herself, called herself a professional genealogist, said she knows that one George Farley seen in our trees never came to America, as he stayed in England to produce her family, and, yes, they know where that George is buried, and it's not in the States. She did not say which of the magical Georges was meant. Does it matter? Several versions of false George's have come up. One hint is when the British part off the trees show a Frankenstein quality, an English mother from here, an English grandfather from there, maybe a loosely stitched-on piece for William the Conqueror, even though inherited, permanent surnames for men did not appear until hundreds of years after his ruthless takeover of England.
Maybe some need to do the DNA work so we can see which British George Farley of the multiple that were our Georg's age in the tax and other records is a match? The two American sets already done with their tests show that their two DNAs are not a match. One set of immigrant early Farleys ran the plantation called Archer's Hope near Henrico, Virginia, their line headed by Thomas Farley. The other set of non-Irish Farleys with DNA went to Massachusetts under Lord Saltonstall, their male immigrants with names like Meshack and Medad Farley, their later generation made of note by a Brigadier General named Michael Farley. Their Essex County was a mere one county over from Billerica's Middlesex County.
The tested Farleys located closest to Billerica, were similar in religion, Puritans. They were millers of modest means, successful enough to ultimately own their mills, but initially brought in to work as managing millers for the Protestant colony developer called Lord Salstonstall. The faraway Thomas Farley near Henrico, Virginia, is thought/proven descended of one of the two early Fabyan Farleys of Britain, apparently with a compete line of baptism records from first one to last one, so their tree makes sense. Both George and Thomas were common names that the George Farley who DID live near that Thomas, might or might not be related. A Cromwellian known as a gifted mathematician, of the right generation to be an older son or younger brother or cousin of Thomas, that George could easily have spent military time in Boston in the Cromwell years. However, his DNA is uncheckable, as his branch stopped with a son, an only child, possibly. That George believed he had fully paid passage to America for the boy, then was told at the scheduled arrival that the amount paid was not enough. The son would be be put into an indenture, the whole thing cruelly done. (The outcome was not really stated, but typical outcomes of early indenture in Virginia were that 50% of the indentured were said to die before their freedom year. A child might be purposely maimed to stop its running away, could be shipped to the worse place of Barbados, never to return, could be killed by disease, starvation or overwork, etc.)
An angry and grieving George, now without child, used his Cromwellian military experience to become a leader in the local uprising by Virginians (Bacon's Rebellion), then was captured by King's soldiers. A married niece of a different surname tried to come to his rescue, but was turned away. . Having his name mis-recorded as George Farlow/Farlo before his trial and hanging would avoid implicating others (any nearby plantation-owning relatives) in his crime. (Punishment for treason was not just hanging, but dis-inheriting anyone remotely connected, a so-called "guilt by association". "Attainder" was a legal confiscation of land. It happened as soon as anyone was accused, no actual conviction needed.)
Bacon's Rebellion was Virginia's prelude to the American Revolution. His hanging caused that George Farley/Farlow to be viewed as a hero by many locals, a traitor by loyalists to the King, and a common criminal by those witnessing wartime barbarities by his recruits.
Reconstructing earlier history accurately was often impossible, without DNA, yet Farley descendants tried anyway. None in the 1700s or early 1800s were interested. Instead, they waited until the late 1800s, probably as libraries showed up around them. The impression was created that anything could be looked up. A search of the tax records and sheriff records in old England will show the multiple George Farleys with no surviving baptismal records. Instead searches for the Billerica George Farley when back in England stuck with mainly the few baptismal records remaining from George's era, after many burnings of church records affecting older ancestors had been done in the monastery closing days (to prevent the gentry that had originally donated land for the Monasteries from proving the land should be returned to them, or the tenants from claiming that their donations "in kind" to keep the monastery chapels, breeding stations, orchards, hospices and student dorms and other services going, had better claim to the land than the confiscating King.
By sticking to Georges with baptisms (allowed to keep their churches open for the time being), the Fisher set came up with Thomas Farley, but did not find the Catholic cousins of Thomas' wife living across the Maryland line, and missed the George Farley hung in Virginia. Libraries had no complete lists of millers and farmers and tailors and servants were given, but offered complete lists of British inventors and complete lists of noted nobles with their castle names. Finding somebody deeper in the ancestry who lived in a castle was maybe what people checking library books on British ancestry maybe thought was needed.
BILLERICA'S OUTCOME. Due to small population counts, the "vital records" have less identity issues than seen in the old British records, even if allowing confusion of father's death with sons, or cousin with cousin, as they clearly separate unrelated families until "too much" migration in and out happens. The population still inside Billerica was at just 1364 people in 1765, when counted for the last British census ("Provincial").
By 1765, many people attending Rebeckah's funeral over 90 years earlier, were replaced by more numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the siblings of George and Caleb not going to NJ. The town/township would not reach 1500 people until post-Revolution, over a century past her death.
There would be population losses 1800-1820 as the War of 1812 took its toll, as did bad weather for crops in some places and migations "west" (to NY, to Ohio), as the new frontiers opened. But, then, growth resumed.
The population was up to 2775 when the Eddy Town Fund decided to help certain Mass.towns publish their old records, before the old paperwork and gravestones disappeared, faded, or were eaten by moths or mice.
The 1908 publication is called "Vital Events of Billerica, through 1850". It is viewable in full at archive.org, no charge, though donations are welcome. It is the best source of family dates and names while in Billerica, showing old spellings. Due to relying heavily on infant baptisms when stones are missing it does better for families attending church than for those staying away. Those going to Canads commented that the old-time Billerica stones were simply made of too-poor materials, that what they would quarry in Canada would be more reliable for grave markers goind forward.
The Vitals confirm that the ethnic (Dutch/Hanseatic) spelling of "Georg" was used despite those more fully English shifting to the George spelling. "Rebeckah" was used for generations, before county officials and descendants simplified it into Rebecca. (The old Hebrew spelling was four Semitic characters read from right to left, so no British spelling matched.)
REBECCA'S FARLEY GRANDCHILDREN, Who might provide the DNA needed to determine which. if any, of the family trees is correct about the deep ancestry of the first Georg Farley, father to many and spouse of Christian Bietris? It would not be the three daughters of this Rebeckah's son Calelb Jr, nor the children of daughter Rebeckah Farley Frost, as male DNA surnamed Farley is required. Caleb Jr, apparently had six of his seven sons survive to adulthood .
SUMMARY for Caleb Farley ["Caleb Jr", aka Farly, 10 children 1686-1708, by 2 women , no death for him in Billerica records.
m.Sarah 1686, who d. Nov. 13, 1704
m. or other relationship Deborah Chamberlain
9 children with Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverill/Haverhill, her children b. in Billerica 1686-1703,
1 child with Deborah Chamberlain b. 1708, Billerica
Sarah's sons
Georg 1686/1687, Caleb b. 1688/1689, John 1690, James 1697, Jonathan 1701, The one known to die young was Samuel Apr. 1703, replaced by a namesake later
Sarah's dtrs
Sarah 1692, Mary 1694, Deborah 1698/1699, marriages not clear
Deborah Chamberlain's known son,
Samuel Farley, b.1708, namesake for the deceased boy and for his father's youngest half-brother
The Billerica Vitals say little about Deborah. A family tree as well-done as possible when death records, paper or stone, are missing, say her parents were William Chamberlain and Deborah Jaquith.
Rebecka's son Caleb Jr may have long been in the Bedford part of Billerica, farming, on land, with his first wife, as he was said to sell land there to a Lane in Apr. of 1700, before she died in 1703. His eldest half-brother, Ebenezer (to be re-checked) had taken over the "Billerica homestead" after caring for Christian and George in their old age. Born well after them was Lidea's Samuel, Samuel's children to young to play with Calebs' and Ebenezers' children, but were presumably aware of them. Samuel and his wife died young, by 1718, a year when "it", a mystery illness, slowly began to spread. "It" took others in Roxbury (a Benjamin Farley there?) and the Frenches in Braintree (unrelated to the Frenches of Cambridge and Billerica thought to be brothers or cousins to Rebeckah's mother Margaret Toothaker Hill).
Samuel's two boys were put under their aging uncle Ebenezer's care. Their aunt Hannah had married an Abram/Abraham Jaquith. She also seemed to be living near her elder brother Ebenezer's house, maybe inside to care for him pre-death. When Ebenezer died, care of the orphans passed to her. Abram was an in-law to Rebeckah's son Caleb Jr in two ways, via his marriage to half-sister Hannah, and via Caleb Jr's 2nd wife, about whom little is known except what the Jaquiths say about her parents. The 2nd wife's mother was said to be Deborah Jaquith. The shared immigrant ancestor of all the Jaquiths in the area was an older Abram Jaquith, from France, who was a member of the First Church in Charlestown (admitted 1643), before he and the wife he met in America had children baptized in Woburn later in the 1640s.
After Ebenezer died, Hannah and Abram assumed care of the two boys who were Lidea's grandsons and Hannah's nephews, all apparently living in the old stone garrison house. Once they matured, the orphans' interest in the Billerica garrison house and land was sold to the Jaquiths, giving the young men funds to go elsewhere.
The last non-Irish Farleys then quickly disappeared from Billerica. The Vitals' last recorded Farley deaths were in 1753, the widow and son of Joseph Farley. Hannah's stone still stands, with many empty, letterless stones behind hers. Typically, the families last to leave have the stones in the best shape, as people "did things" longer to maintain them.
The Jaquiths remained at the big stone garrison house for many generations, that house built, originally, to withstand attacks in warring times and have room for neighbors to shelter, one of 12 built in Billerica.. The last garrison house was dismantled by a Jaquith descendent in 2000, to save it from land development, then taken to NH. It has since been reassembled with a modern interior. (For details and sources, see the Jaquith-Farley connections at freepages.rootsweb.com/~qvarizona/family/jaquith.html It is an ancestry.com adaptation of what used to be the volunteer-run site called rootsweb.)
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Copyright by JBrown, Austin, Texas, 2018, last revised April, 2019, with permission granted for use at this FindaGrave page. Portions may be quoted by relatives in their private materials meant for family, if author and web link are also given, next to the quote marks.
Most leaving Billerica went to Hollis, NH, to take advantage of land grants. The Farley ancestor of this writer's spouse, an Amos Farley who died in Mich. in the 1830's, was born in and/or grew up in Marlow, NH, a step west of Hollis, NH. As young men, he and his brother Jesse had recently married sisters named Hall. They left with other New Englanders, for Estrie, East Canada/Quebec, a quarrying town on the Vermont-Canada line.)
NOTE ON STONES, By 1800, many had already decided the Billerica stones were of the wrong type to last. Some of the stronger stone materials that accidentally survive were noted as of different rock, such as the "blue stone" of one of he youngest Ebenezer Farley in this Rebeckah's cemetery. Those leaving the Hollis NH area to go up to quarry rock at the Vermont-Estrie, Canada line noticed this, their rock probably then used in Hollis, NH, in Estrie, East Canada (Quebec province), and in Mic., following the migration path. The stones are still pretty readable and intact. Interestingly, there is a Woburn, Canada. The Farleys did not seem to care whether new places settled were named for where-ever they had previously been, but others moving with them did.
"Ralph Hill and George Farley purchased the Edward Oaks grant at Shawshine in 1661"..
Ralph and George were her father and future father-in-law. Her father was said to like the name Billerica, then presumed by others to have been born at a place once called that. (Pronounced "Billericay", it was of Essex County, England. Its spelling since has changed to match the pronunciation . That older Billericay, in modern times, become a commuters' suburb of London.)
Historians checking old records for Ralph's family merely found an otherwise anonymous Rev. Hill nearby. He circulated across neighboring English towns, in the same period that her own father, Ralph, was making land transactions in two New England colonies, Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. (If Rev. Hill also had male descendants survive until modern times, male DNA could prove or disprove a blood relationship.)
Her parents, the Hills, were both British immigrants to America. Arriving separately, they were widowed before marrying each other in America. Each had begun in Plymouth, then together moved north up the Atlantic coast, almost to Salem. They bypassed future Boston's bays as a home, as Charlestown and Watertown were considered better, though experience later would show otherwise. Woburn, aka "Wooburn", her birthplace, was a granddaughter town, spun off by settlers expanding out from Charlestown and its earlier daughter of Watertown. Woburn would then become a mother town of sorts for soon-to-emerge Billerica, the town co-founded by her parents, the Hills, with others.
The two families, Hill and Farley, went to future Billerica along with the Jefts. (The Jefts were already Farley in-laws, as the two women heads were sisters, both daughters of the Bietres/Bietris who died back in Woburn), They had settled years before the 1661 purchase date, in what was still called Shawshine then. The regional name now is Shawsheen, matching the spelling used for the Shawsheen River. (The Shawheen's flow angles down, past mutltiple towns, including Andover. Its angle heads toward the more critical Merrimac River, which then flows to the Atlantic, reminding us that shipping jobs would quickly offer alternatives as side-occupations to farming The factories at Lowell would come much, much later, with unrelated famine Irish then to become the Farleys filling the graveyards.)
Rebeckah was said to be the youngest in her family. Her older siblings were teens for the purchase of Shawshine in 1661. When father Ralph Hill moved his family there, significantly earlier, in 1653, she and her elder brothers were still too young to marry, though infant baptisms were of record in the new place by 1654.
The baptisms of the Hill siblings' first infants would wait a decade, then went in this order: 1) Her brother Ralph Hill Jr. and his wife Martha baptized daughter Deborah in Dec., 1663. 2) Rebeckah Hill and spouse Caleb Farley baptized son Caleb in June, 1667. 3) Jonathan Hill, with wife Mary, had daughter Mary in Sept., 1667. 4) Abraham/Abram Hill and wife Hannah baptized daughter Hannah in Dec., 1667. 5) Nathaniel Hill and wife "Elisabeth" had son Nathaniel in Mar.,1668.
Each baptism might mean a baptismal feast where family and neighbors would gather. With birth years placed so close together, some of the first cousins would be natural playmates, if not best friends.
Giving each first newborn the same name as a parent would do what? It would cause issues, never being sure which person was meant, parent or adult child, without seeing a birth year or spouse alongside. Their new custom served to hide forever the identities of grandparents, uncles and aunts, left behind in England.
Requiring an earlier feast, Rebeckah had married someone she had long known, Caleb Farley. Records give the date as Dec. of 1666. (BEWARE: The "1650" for her birth date is only an estimate, explained below A problem? The "round number estimate" of 1850 would make her only 16 when marrying Caleb, . This was too young? Puritans often, not the same as always, delayed courting and marriage, to be sure daughters could survive childbirth. Lessons had been learned from rearing and breeding of livestock, a sign of past ruralness A too-young mother might survive a first birth, but be so damaged inside, that the second or third birth could not complete properly. In a day without ultrasound and C-sections to assist with a poorly turned child, a too-young mother might easily die.)
Her second child with spouse Caleb Farlet, a daughter, was born March 10, 1869. This Rebeckah's death came a few weeks later. She left Caleb a widower, as of March 29, 1669. Her funeral was perhaps the next day. Thus, Mar. 30, appeared in county death records (controlled by colony officials), while the 29th was put in church/town records by local people who better knew her family. Who would care for her children? She had to be thinking as her end came closer.
Their church was unusual, in that their burying grounds were probably no easy walk from their church. Instead of hand-carrying the coffin from church to grave as done at many other churches, their custom may have been to put the coffin in a cart, implying a road system better than average.
Keeping the town tiny, Billerica now had one less person.
Someone else would need to care for his children while Caleb worked. Looking forward, spouse Caleb would need to find a second wife quickly so he could have this two tiny ones back, the first child not to have his second birthday for a few months, the other an infant. He would travel to marry again, finding Lydia all the way down in Roxbury, marrying her by Nov., after Rebeckah died in March. The tiny one's second mother would be the only mother they would remember. Rebeckah would have known this too. Cale would have a big family with his second wife. (This writer's husband descends of him and the second wife, we think via their son called Ebenezer. Ebenezer the named one of his sons Caleb, both for Rebekah's spouse, his father, and also Rebeckah's son, an older half-brother. The last of the Ebenezer Farleys died in California tending his orchards, where he had gone to explore for gold, after serving as a steamboat captain back in Michigan, where his children had been born. Our side descends of Capt. Ebenezer Farley's sister, the Rebecca Farley who married Ransom French, we hope not the last of the Rebecca Farleys.)
Caleb married Lydia/Lidia in Roxbury at the end of 1669. Caleb's church announced his intent to marry a week before their wedding at the bride's church. This was similar to old-time "banns" being done three weeks in a row in advance of a wedding. The idea was to give people objecting to a marriage time to travel, and give notice. Did three weeks of warning being replaced by one mean bigamy was a lesser concern among the Puritans? .
Roxbury was a semi-distant place, as on the other side of Boston. He may have been the Caleb Farley identified as a carter with service to Boston in old source materials on Boston. Young farmers could "do better" if they had such a side occupation. Old Boston was still a peninsula then. Carters of goods (farm produce, cut wood) had to enter old Boston by the peninsula's neck, at Boston's south end. In contrast, Woburn and Billerica were to Boston's north end, water-surrounded. In their case, the peninsula's neck was called the Dorchester Neck due to the town called that, with the old sister town of Roxbury alongside . The two sister towns would spin off multiple daughter towns (Braintree, for example, from Dorchester, its "freemen" declared about 1640). Once their spin-offs made them tiny enough, Boston felt it logical to annex both, done in the mid-1800s. The two are now neighborhoods on the so-called "south side" of modern Boston.
In widower Caleb's time, neighbors having extra rooms allowed travelers coming through (for example, while waiting to cross the neck) to board overnight. One story (recently seen in a book, NOT someone's old memory memory passed down to this writer's spouse) was that Lydia's father was called Golden More, that he let a room to Caleb for his Boston trips. This explained how a man from Billerica could meet a woman from Roxbury. Either the name of Lydia was extra-liked or his new wife was such a good mother and best friend to many of his kin, that many Lydias would accumulate, named for her. (While Lydia/Lidea's maiden name is often remembered as More or Moore, her relatives used Moaar later. By that time Lydia's kin had migrated, with varied Farleys, to the far north edge of old Middlesex County. Their new locations were part of a grant in and around future Hollis, NH, to be re-assigned later, from MA, to NH. This was back when back when the latter was still called the Hampshire Grants, before half split off as Vermont. The moving of the MA-NH line southward ruined the attendance zones of some early-founded churches.
The church used most often once Hollis formed would be Congregational. The old Puritan church in Billerica, at first Congregational, ultimately declared itself Unitarian/Universalist, causing another church to form and call itself "orthodox Congregational". (These Farleys were probably gone from Billerica well before that division.)
Her daughter Rebeckah Farley grew up, married a decade-older widower named Frost. They had multiple children, stayed in Billerica until, "like mother, like daughter", Rebeckah's daughter had her own too early death, 1704/1705. She, however, made it to her mid-thirties. Her now twice-widowed spouse, Thomas Frost Sr., named the new baby Rebeckah, for its mother and grandmother. That new baby grew up, did anyone think of her as Rebeckah Frost the junior? Had her Frosts gone to Mendon by 1718. The Billerica records say a Joseph Frost still in Billerica married a Rebecca Frost in Mendon that year. They must have sent a notice of their wedding back to Billerica so friends and relatives could come.
This Rebeckah's son, Caleb Farley, not yet two when she died, is said by some to be the Caleb who would marry Sarah Godfrey, in 1686. That would make him about 21, with the junior Caleb then able to have a big family, just as his father had done.
The simplest story of her son's final outcome is only that he died in Billerica in 1733. That is confused by the possibility that some other relative named Caleb Farley was the one who died in 1733. Facts for him in the Billerica Vitals are at the end, name his ten children, but lack his death date.
Billerica kept shrinking, new generations moved out at times. Other times a boundary change caused the little farm where one had always lived to have a new address. People sometimes learned about new places by doing business there. Twenty years after this Rebecca's death, her elder half-brother, Roger Toothaker, farmed in the part of Billerica that would later become Tewksbury. It was hard to live on farming alone, so he but would also would administer his potions, going to Salem for added business. People used foolish statements made by him to accuse him of witchcraft in a "mass hysteria" of 1692-1693. (Massive rumors were encouraged by a devil-hating minister, believed by too many. They told of witches flying people over trees, making their neighbors or animals sick by using the evil eye or chanting spells or making promises to the Devil).
The idea was to torture accused witches until they confessed to the scientifically impossible. Around 20 people were tried and hung on the basis of false confessions, sometimes their own, the case of a slave woman (Tabitha) owned by the belatedly tossed out minister. Up to another 10-15 died in jail or prison before trial, presumably while refusing to confess, Roger one of them. The number who died without making it to trial is sometimes instead minimized down to 1 or 2, in which case Roger is not mentioned. Accounting for the difference in counts, neighbors went in to view the body and said, while he had not been murdered, his body was severely abused. Some people thought that only clear murder should be counted, not internal bleeding nor heart attacks and strokes or ruined livers or kidneys caused by torture Toothaker's wife and pre-teen daughter would be released after the wife implicated many whose names had been suggested to her by the ambitious interrogators. However, the wife and daughter would soon be subtracted from the Tewksbury end of old Billerica, too, in 1695, after attacks by warring natives angry about the takeover of former Shawshine by whites (the buffer zone of "praying villages" having been removed by then?) The wife was killed outright, Roger's daughter taken away and not seen again..
Billerica shrank again and again, as growing parts revised their bounds or split off as brand-new towns. This Rebeckah's brother, Nathaniel Hill, was once a cornet player in the local militia. He would see a boundary change pushing him to the other side of the Billerica lines in 1701. That brother's death and cornet playing would thus be of record in neighboring Chelmsford, not Billerica..
That brother, Nathaniel, died in 1706. Both year and age of death were still viewable on his stone circa 1900-1910, the period when inscriptions still readable were transcribed for saving, paid for by the Eddy Town Fund. Now, over a century later, the age (AE) portion on his stone is obliterated.
His birth year was thus calculated as 1646, done by subtracting his age at death, from the death year. Her birth, in contrast, is merely estimated, done by taking a round number year, 1650, the last before her father's migration to Billerica in 1653.
His was the only sibling stone with both year and AE still visible, circa 1900-1910. Volunteers from the NE Historic Genealogical Society and town and county clerks gathered up the remaining paper records and tried to read whatever on old stones could still be read. Under "Deaths", then under "Hill", Chelmsford's "Vital Records" said,
"Nathaniell, Cornet, May 14, 1706. [a. 64 y. GR1]"
Further shrinking Billerica, Bedford split apart in 1729 and Tewksbury, in 1734. How often did this cause graves of related families once inside Billerica to suddenly lie outside Billerica? There is a Shawsheen Cemetery that opened too late for their use, postal address now Bedford.. However, it was said to have had burials for some graves at the oldest cemeteries moved to its grounds. (Its name reminds all of her father's Shawshin/Shawshine purchase agreement in 1661, that native tribes had been there first, either convinced or forced into the transfer of lands. Some of the tribes that remained were said by one historian to form "Praying villages" nearby, meaning churched, with a minister, active in farming and gardening, with elected officials. This was permitted until their land was also desired and/or intolerance set in.)
Once those villages were gone, decimated by disease or chased out, the non-friendly natives had little reason to stay away and thus attacked? The minsters and missionaries would write and gave examples of whites to blame for escalating bad feelings, but once things became bad, they could be very bad, atrocities by both sides
In progress, more research needed
HER SON'S MANY CHILDREN. Called "Caleb Jr' in the Vitals, he would have three daughters and seven sons, only one son to die early. His first wife was Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverhill, again according to the Billerica Vitals. Sarah's death in 1704 required finding a new mother for the smallest of her children as well.
MISSING DATES. Caleb Jr's death date is not in the Billerica Vitals. Nor is that of his second wife, nor is their marriage date, nor the date of any intent to marry her. The second mother to his children, Deborah Chamberlain, was of record just one time, in 1708, when their son Samuel was born/baptised there. ( He was a namesake for Sarah's Samuel, born 1703, who apparently had died young)
Why come to Billerica so briefly? Maybe their new location had become unsafe (disease or attack). Maybe they wanted a feast with family and friends present for their first baptism.
OFF TO JERSEY. Rebeckah's eldest two grandsons were Georg and Caleb (Caleb III, if putting numbers on their straight line of Calebs, he to have a Caleb IV, called Caleb Jr while III still lived ).
Georg and Caleb would be the only ones leaving Billerica to go to the Jersey frontier, past NYC. They were of permanent record together with other co-founders as forming a new church there The two were maybe reaching adulthood at a wrong time, to be among those instead off to future Hollis, NH.
Its not clear to this writer what happened to Georg, as fires set by the British in the Revolution forced a migration out. Caleb III would remain amidst non-British ethnics, Lutherans and German/Dutch Reformeds, traveling with them. Caleb married a woman whose father was German Lutheran and motheer, Dutch Reformed.
British denominations had just begun to name themselves, while the Germanic speakers had long named their denominations. Long-ago tired of religious fighting, the church-state compromise was not for a king to pick just one religion for the whole kingdom/empire. Instead each little princeling could declare which religion would be subsidized inside his turf, but then tolerated, rather than forbidding some other faiths. A short distance travelled put one under a different prince, so coming to America was done for other reasons, not religion, but for economics (huge landlords in some part meant few could own property) and or to avoid the excessive warring on the northern end of the Germans by which more of the neighboring peoples to the east were conquered and put under serfdom, the main corruption which the Lutheran ministers perhaps moderated but could not or would not stop .
FISHER GENEALOGY. Caleb III's wife was the daughter of immigrant Joseph Fisher (probably spelled Fischer "over there"). Named Hannah, she was born in Jan. 1772 in what became what became Sussex County, NJ. Her spouse's name was spelled as "Caleb Farlee Jr", perhaps to stop her relatives from using a German pronunciation of "-ley" that would rhyme with "day". (See archive.org/details/genealogyofjosep00fish/page/n13)
The father of Caleb's German Lutheran spouse had immigrated to avoid the excesses, the extra-long military service, not done for defense, but to expand the land holdings of the big landlords. If someone left, they were not allowed back in, as they had refused to pay that "tax" on their lives.
The Fisher-Farleys migrated away, from old West Jersey, into PA and NY. For example, that Hannah and Caleb's son John was of record as born Feb. 9, 1792, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, on their farm in Shamokin Twp. He married, turned Methodist, farmed in Rush Twp., and was buried July 18,1871 at the cemetery on Sharp Ridge (p. 118). His widow was still living "in the vicinity of Union Corners" as data was collected for the Fisher book, able to help with the whereabouts and names of descendants.
SIDE NOTE. Both the Puritans and the Lutherans preferred baptizing children as infants, so named parents with the child in records. One difference-- the German and Dutch records also named godparents.
This implied an intent to not let the child be indentured out, should the parents die, as godparents could easily be called in as the deceased parents' choice for substitute parenting. Godparents were often trusted siblings of the parents, less often, trusted cousins or a maturing child. Those fuller records are a great assist to the Fisher side in re-constructing family history.
SWEDISH ANCESTRY? The Fisher version of the Farley family history has an important pre-America part that rings true. The Fisher book noted that grandmother Christian Bietris Farley was Swedish. Her first name is certainly Scandinavian.
The Danes, in particular, often used Christian, both for people and for places, as a first or middle name and to honor Kings called Christian by naming Danish outposts for them. Swedish raiders captured the Danish outpost of Christianstad in olden times, taking control of the surrounding Scania/Scandia region. Properly spelled by Swedish rules, it is now Kristianstad in Sweden's Skåne county/province. There are similarly named places in Norway, formerly once under Danish control. (Modern Oslo was called Christiania/Kristiania while under Danish rulers.)
For people, the name is seen most famously for the wonderful children's writer, the Dane called Hans Christian Anderson. His stories are best when not Disneyized to remove unhappiness, as they were realistic in that way, preparing children for scary things they might encounter in real life should their support system of story-telling relatives go away ("The Little Match Girl").
Did Christian Bietris Farley follow the old custom of telling her grandchildren fairy tales? Were her Scandinavian stories and the Fishers' north German stories told to children maybe among those gathered up and retold by Hans Christian Anderson and the German Grimm brothers?
In Chapter IX, the Fisher genealogy begins by saying the surname Farley originally was "De Falaise", with two lords Walter and William at the castle called Falaise, one to conquer England
Another Farley family history, not the Fisher one, but the one with stories about steamboat captain Ebenezer Farley, whose father began in Marlow NH before going to Estrie in Canada and then returning via Ohio, had the boy walk with him from Detroit to south Michigan (implying they could not afford horses for everyone). It ,has a portion going back to England and the castle in France with a fairy tale ring to it. It, too, speaks in a magical way of the Farley name, of a royal ancestor having come from the Castle Falais. In fairy tale style, it uses a verse that rhymes Farley with Falais, a teacher's trick to get children to memorize something .
In reality, the very British, non-French name of Farley is a plainer "topological" name relevant to farmers and herdsmen. In Britain, a "ley" was an old-time name for a woodside meadow.
Similar names would be Hindley (where a female deer took her fawns to feed), Oxley (where oxen could be fed), Huntley, Brinkley, and so on, each describing the nature of the ley. In the Farley case, the ley was edged with ferns or possibly used for sheep, depending on what particular old-time version of Far was meant.
Further, multiple places, including numerous tiny hamlets or farmsteds now extinct, could have once had the same old British name. Thus, multiple men can have the same "topological" surname, despite having different DNAs, many fern-lined pasture tucked into the woods, a servant with children from a castle, as well as the nobility living there .
BEING SWEDISH VS. FROM SWEDEN. It's not clear whether the Fisher-Farley side had been told by Caleb III that their great-grandmother Christian Bietris was from a specific Swedish place or instead was "Swedish is some way". A specific Swedish birthplaces could range from regions, such as Scania/Scandia, to seacoast cities such as Gothenburg
The other way of being Swedish would mean ethnicity, regardless of where born. "Swedish in some way" thus includes the Lombards, a Swedish people who spent considerable time in Italy before making their way to London, the church of St. Olave in London being named for a Swedish church-going war hero. (St. Olave is very likely a re-spelling of St. Olaf.)
"Somehow Swedish" would also include Swedish seamen who roamed, but whose home cities belonged to the old Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic cities were ones that long ago agreed to co-operate in sea trading. They were widespread across the north seacoasts, multi-ethnic, ranging from seaside cities of the Netherlands (Holland, Belgium), to Bergen in Norway, to Copenhagen in Denmark, to Riga, the capital of Latvia, at Russia's northern edge.
Hanseatic origins might explain a Scandinavian father landing somewhere long enough to marry a woman with a non-Swedsh, yet, still ethnic name, multiple spellings of Beatris/Beatrix used by Belgian royals, re-cast as Beatrice by the British. (Note that many old Europeans liked the same names as did royals, without being a child of nobility.)
WHEN TO STOP? The Ralph Hill story, as stated above, was not a fairy tale. It ended with a Rev. Hill found, but whose few remaining records showed no kin named who were clearly connected to Ralph. The Hills accepted that. (If still curious now, they could do DNA and find a match still in England or here).
In stating that Christian Bietris was Swedish, maybe meaning ethnically, not by place of birth, they accepted the absence of a royal heritage. There was no attempt to make her descend of Harold Bluetooth or Erik the Red or Queen Mathilde.
The Farley historians, however, did not want to accept that George Farleys history was unknown or ordinary.
We have been lectured about putting a "ringer" George Farleys in our trees, by a Farley still in England. She named herself, called herself a professional genealogist, said she knows that one George Farley seen in our trees never came to America, as he stayed in England to produce her family, and, yes, they know where that George is buried, and it's not in the States. She did not say which of the magical Georges was meant. Does it matter? Several versions of false George's have come up. One hint is when the British part off the trees show a Frankenstein quality, an English mother from here, an English grandfather from there, maybe a loosely stitched-on piece for William the Conqueror, even though inherited, permanent surnames for men did not appear until hundreds of years after his ruthless takeover of England.
Maybe some need to do the DNA work so we can see which British George Farley of the multiple that were our Georg's age in the tax and other records is a match? The two American sets already done with their tests show that their two DNAs are not a match. One set of immigrant early Farleys ran the plantation called Archer's Hope near Henrico, Virginia, their line headed by Thomas Farley. The other set of non-Irish Farleys with DNA went to Massachusetts under Lord Saltonstall, their male immigrants with names like Meshack and Medad Farley, their later generation made of note by a Brigadier General named Michael Farley. Their Essex County was a mere one county over from Billerica's Middlesex County.
The tested Farleys located closest to Billerica, were similar in religion, Puritans. They were millers of modest means, successful enough to ultimately own their mills, but initially brought in to work as managing millers for the Protestant colony developer called Lord Salstonstall. The faraway Thomas Farley near Henrico, Virginia, is thought/proven descended of one of the two early Fabyan Farleys of Britain, apparently with a compete line of baptism records from first one to last one, so their tree makes sense. Both George and Thomas were common names that the George Farley who DID live near that Thomas, might or might not be related. A Cromwellian known as a gifted mathematician, of the right generation to be an older son or younger brother or cousin of Thomas, that George could easily have spent military time in Boston in the Cromwell years. However, his DNA is uncheckable, as his branch stopped with a son, an only child, possibly. That George believed he had fully paid passage to America for the boy, then was told at the scheduled arrival that the amount paid was not enough. The son would be be put into an indenture, the whole thing cruelly done. (The outcome was not really stated, but typical outcomes of early indenture in Virginia were that 50% of the indentured were said to die before their freedom year. A child might be purposely maimed to stop its running away, could be shipped to the worse place of Barbados, never to return, could be killed by disease, starvation or overwork, etc.)
An angry and grieving George, now without child, used his Cromwellian military experience to become a leader in the local uprising by Virginians (Bacon's Rebellion), then was captured by King's soldiers. A married niece of a different surname tried to come to his rescue, but was turned away. . Having his name mis-recorded as George Farlow/Farlo before his trial and hanging would avoid implicating others (any nearby plantation-owning relatives) in his crime. (Punishment for treason was not just hanging, but dis-inheriting anyone remotely connected, a so-called "guilt by association". "Attainder" was a legal confiscation of land. It happened as soon as anyone was accused, no actual conviction needed.)
Bacon's Rebellion was Virginia's prelude to the American Revolution. His hanging caused that George Farley/Farlow to be viewed as a hero by many locals, a traitor by loyalists to the King, and a common criminal by those witnessing wartime barbarities by his recruits.
Reconstructing earlier history accurately was often impossible, without DNA, yet Farley descendants tried anyway. None in the 1700s or early 1800s were interested. Instead, they waited until the late 1800s, probably as libraries showed up around them. The impression was created that anything could be looked up. A search of the tax records and sheriff records in old England will show the multiple George Farleys with no surviving baptismal records. Instead searches for the Billerica George Farley when back in England stuck with mainly the few baptismal records remaining from George's era, after many burnings of church records affecting older ancestors had been done in the monastery closing days (to prevent the gentry that had originally donated land for the Monasteries from proving the land should be returned to them, or the tenants from claiming that their donations "in kind" to keep the monastery chapels, breeding stations, orchards, hospices and student dorms and other services going, had better claim to the land than the confiscating King.
By sticking to Georges with baptisms (allowed to keep their churches open for the time being), the Fisher set came up with Thomas Farley, but did not find the Catholic cousins of Thomas' wife living across the Maryland line, and missed the George Farley hung in Virginia. Libraries had no complete lists of millers and farmers and tailors and servants were given, but offered complete lists of British inventors and complete lists of noted nobles with their castle names. Finding somebody deeper in the ancestry who lived in a castle was maybe what people checking library books on British ancestry maybe thought was needed.
BILLERICA'S OUTCOME. Due to small population counts, the "vital records" have less identity issues than seen in the old British records, even if allowing confusion of father's death with sons, or cousin with cousin, as they clearly separate unrelated families until "too much" migration in and out happens. The population still inside Billerica was at just 1364 people in 1765, when counted for the last British census ("Provincial").
By 1765, many people attending Rebeckah's funeral over 90 years earlier, were replaced by more numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the siblings of George and Caleb not going to NJ. The town/township would not reach 1500 people until post-Revolution, over a century past her death.
There would be population losses 1800-1820 as the War of 1812 took its toll, as did bad weather for crops in some places and migations "west" (to NY, to Ohio), as the new frontiers opened. But, then, growth resumed.
The population was up to 2775 when the Eddy Town Fund decided to help certain Mass.towns publish their old records, before the old paperwork and gravestones disappeared, faded, or were eaten by moths or mice.
The 1908 publication is called "Vital Events of Billerica, through 1850". It is viewable in full at archive.org, no charge, though donations are welcome. It is the best source of family dates and names while in Billerica, showing old spellings. Due to relying heavily on infant baptisms when stones are missing it does better for families attending church than for those staying away. Those going to Canads commented that the old-time Billerica stones were simply made of too-poor materials, that what they would quarry in Canada would be more reliable for grave markers goind forward.
The Vitals confirm that the ethnic (Dutch/Hanseatic) spelling of "Georg" was used despite those more fully English shifting to the George spelling. "Rebeckah" was used for generations, before county officials and descendants simplified it into Rebecca. (The old Hebrew spelling was four Semitic characters read from right to left, so no British spelling matched.)
REBECCA'S FARLEY GRANDCHILDREN, Who might provide the DNA needed to determine which. if any, of the family trees is correct about the deep ancestry of the first Georg Farley, father to many and spouse of Christian Bietris? It would not be the three daughters of this Rebeckah's son Calelb Jr, nor the children of daughter Rebeckah Farley Frost, as male DNA surnamed Farley is required. Caleb Jr, apparently had six of his seven sons survive to adulthood .
SUMMARY for Caleb Farley ["Caleb Jr", aka Farly, 10 children 1686-1708, by 2 women , no death for him in Billerica records.
m.Sarah 1686, who d. Nov. 13, 1704
m. or other relationship Deborah Chamberlain
9 children with Sarah Godfry/Godfrey of Haverill/Haverhill, her children b. in Billerica 1686-1703,
1 child with Deborah Chamberlain b. 1708, Billerica
Sarah's sons
Georg 1686/1687, Caleb b. 1688/1689, John 1690, James 1697, Jonathan 1701, The one known to die young was Samuel Apr. 1703, replaced by a namesake later
Sarah's dtrs
Sarah 1692, Mary 1694, Deborah 1698/1699, marriages not clear
Deborah Chamberlain's known son,
Samuel Farley, b.1708, namesake for the deceased boy and for his father's youngest half-brother
The Billerica Vitals say little about Deborah. A family tree as well-done as possible when death records, paper or stone, are missing, say her parents were William Chamberlain and Deborah Jaquith.
Rebecka's son Caleb Jr may have long been in the Bedford part of Billerica, farming, on land, with his first wife, as he was said to sell land there to a Lane in Apr. of 1700, before she died in 1703. His eldest half-brother, Ebenezer (to be re-checked) had taken over the "Billerica homestead" after caring for Christian and George in their old age. Born well after them was Lidea's Samuel, Samuel's children to young to play with Calebs' and Ebenezers' children, but were presumably aware of them. Samuel and his wife died young, by 1718, a year when "it", a mystery illness, slowly began to spread. "It" took others in Roxbury (a Benjamin Farley there?) and the Frenches in Braintree (unrelated to the Frenches of Cambridge and Billerica thought to be brothers or cousins to Rebeckah's mother Margaret Toothaker Hill).
Samuel's two boys were put under their aging uncle Ebenezer's care. Their aunt Hannah had married an Abram/Abraham Jaquith. She also seemed to be living near her elder brother Ebenezer's house, maybe inside to care for him pre-death. When Ebenezer died, care of the orphans passed to her. Abram was an in-law to Rebeckah's son Caleb Jr in two ways, via his marriage to half-sister Hannah, and via Caleb Jr's 2nd wife, about whom little is known except what the Jaquiths say about her parents. The 2nd wife's mother was said to be Deborah Jaquith. The shared immigrant ancestor of all the Jaquiths in the area was an older Abram Jaquith, from France, who was a member of the First Church in Charlestown (admitted 1643), before he and the wife he met in America had children baptized in Woburn later in the 1640s.
After Ebenezer died, Hannah and Abram assumed care of the two boys who were Lidea's grandsons and Hannah's nephews, all apparently living in the old stone garrison house. Once they matured, the orphans' interest in the Billerica garrison house and land was sold to the Jaquiths, giving the young men funds to go elsewhere.
The last non-Irish Farleys then quickly disappeared from Billerica. The Vitals' last recorded Farley deaths were in 1753, the widow and son of Joseph Farley. Hannah's stone still stands, with many empty, letterless stones behind hers. Typically, the families last to leave have the stones in the best shape, as people "did things" longer to maintain them.
The Jaquiths remained at the big stone garrison house for many generations, that house built, originally, to withstand attacks in warring times and have room for neighbors to shelter, one of 12 built in Billerica.. The last garrison house was dismantled by a Jaquith descendent in 2000, to save it from land development, then taken to NH. It has since been reassembled with a modern interior. (For details and sources, see the Jaquith-Farley connections at freepages.rootsweb.com/~qvarizona/family/jaquith.html It is an ancestry.com adaptation of what used to be the volunteer-run site called rootsweb.)
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Copyright by JBrown, Austin, Texas, 2018, last revised April, 2019, with permission granted for use at this FindaGrave page. Portions may be quoted by relatives in their private materials meant for family, if author and web link are also given, next to the quote marks.
Most leaving Billerica went to Hollis, NH, to take advantage of land grants. The Farley ancestor of this writer's spouse, an Amos Farley who died in Mich. in the 1830's, was born in and/or grew up in Marlow, NH, a step west of Hollis, NH. As young men, he and his brother Jesse had recently married sisters named Hall. They left with other New Englanders, for Estrie, East Canada/Quebec, a quarrying town on the Vermont-Canada line.)
NOTE ON STONES, By 1800, many had already decided the Billerica stones were of the wrong type to last. Some of the stronger stone materials that accidentally survive were noted as of different rock, such as the "blue stone" of one of he youngest Ebenezer Farley in this Rebeckah's cemetery. Those leaving the Hollis NH area to go up to quarry rock at the Vermont-Estrie, Canada line noticed this, their rock probably then used in Hollis, NH, in Estrie, East Canada (Quebec province), and in Mic., following the migration path. The stones are still pretty readable and intact. Interestingly, there is a Woburn, Canada. The Farleys did not seem to care whether new places settled were named for where-ever they had previously been, but others moving with them did.
Gravesite Details
Her father, a town co-founder, donated a half-acre of land for this cemetery before his own death and burial, just six years prior to hers. Death date from "Billerica Vital Records" (church/town/county records transcribed). Birth a loose estimate.
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