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Info to supplement Abiathar Jr.'s grave page (may be redundant):
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He married Beriah Alvord in Hampshire County in 1778, in the era of the American Revolution. His father was Abiathar French Sr., his mother was called Margaret Niles before marrying Sr. The Niles family has looked up or kept records of dates that would otherwise be missing, so reported that he and Beriah married Feb. 6, 1778, in Hatfield, Mass., and that one son, a third Abiathar, died July 5, 1800, when they all still lived in Westhampton, Mass. The Niles noted that Beriah died Oct. 21, 1829. We believe her death happened in Ohio, as the family had moved there by 1806, but the Niles tree does not give her death place. (NOTE: The Niles family published its tree at genealogy.com. Abiathar and Beriah and four children are in the section listed as Stephen-S-Niles/GENE12-0061.html,
It was the usual custom to marry at the bride's church, so in the Hatfield/Hadley area. However, another record, also dated Feb. 6, 1778, was kept in Northampton, Mass., dated before Westhampton split off from Northampton as its own town and church. The so-called marriage intention might be announced at the groom's church, not the actual wedding record?
Beriah and Abiathar's three surviving sons (John, Jacob, Timothy) are assumed to have moved to Ohio. However, an Ohio source said six children moved to Ohio en total. The three not given by the Mass. birth records are seen instead in very early marriage records for northeast Ohio dated before the War of 1812. The only other family named French nearby in Ohio was that of the Peter French who sold land later to the Mormans, at about the time of Beriah's death. Peter's relationship to Abiathar is currently unknown, but Peter was said to have been from NY, perhaps the Genesee River Valley, as he was said to have gone there to bring a cow back to Ohio, to benefit a small settling party headed by a David Abbot. "Peter" sounds more Dutch or Church of England than Old Testament and Puritan, increasing the odds that the two sets of Frenches were unrelated. (No known DNA from Peter's male descendants has been submitted at this writing to FamilyTreeDNA.com, where a study of male Frenches is administered by Julia Woods, co-operating with FrenchFamilyAssoc.com.)
SHAY'S REBELLION vs. THE SILENT REBELLION. Why were the last three believed to be his and Beriah's children, names found in Ohio by marriage circumstances and timing, not in the usually very good Massachusetts birth records? Those three were David French (died after accosted by canal workers while walking along the road to Newburgh, then in that part of old Geauga County to be annexed by Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, his grandson would be visited in Ohio by Jehiel/Jehial Alvord, doubly-related, as he was grandson of both Abiathar's sister Dorothy and Beriah's brother Jehial), Rebecca French Clapp McMillen (names of her parents on grher gravestone, with Beriah recarved as Maria, ; mentioned with brothers John and David and future brother-in-law Charles Knieppe/Kneip; died in Leroy Twp., which spun off from old Painesville Twp., both townships in that part of Geauga County to become Lake County), and Rhoda French Keep (married Luther Keep, a fellow Massahusettsian, while old Painesville and Leroy Twps. were still in Geauga County, then went with him and other Frenches to settle along both sides of the Michigan/Indiana border near/in Fawn River/Sturges, Mich). Some say Shay's Rebellion intervened. Many localities quit sending their town records to the county courthouse, to show sympathy for soldier-farmers seeing foreclosure at the courthouses post-War. (War pay was too often in nearly worthless "scrip", essentially IOUs. Soldiers lost most of their regular income due to not being at home enough in war time.)
