March, 2000 Collier Research Notes Trip to NEHGS, and other recent research March 15 - 17, 2000 As I reported, I went in to the New England Historic Genealogical Society last Thursday, and spent about 7 hours there. My primary goal was to locate records of Bosworth Collier, his wife Ann House, a possible second wife, Mary Rumrell/Rumrill, and "our" Gershom, of Boston and Chesterfield, with his presumed sisters, Anna and Rebecca Collier, who also moved to Chesterfield, Hampshire County, Mass. This is the haziest area in our overall picture of the Thomas Collier family -- we have a well documented record of the early generations, those branches which stayed in the Hingham, Cohasset and Scituate areas, the branch which moved to Northport, Maine, and quite a bit on some of the Chesterfield group. We also are starting to get a good picture of the Moses Collier/Collyer branch, which moved to New Jersey. There is, however, only indirect evidence linking Gershom of Chesterfield to Bosworth and Ann House Collier, to complete that branch. After spending a good part of my visit to the NEHGS looking for those Boston records, I conclude that we are not going to find them in print, if at all. One of the librarians told me that it is his opinion that 80 - 90 % of the Boston "Vital Records" for the approximate period 1760 - 1800 are non-existent. I have seen similar comments in print, and was told the same by the Haverhill librarian on one of my visits there. The remaining hope for a record of Bosworth and family is in a search of microfilm of Boston church records, or Suffolk probate records. That will be one of my next research projects. I spent some time looking through the extensive collection of printed genealogies at the NEHGS. There are 2 Collier genealogies, neither one concerning the Thomas Collier family, except a mention as one of the first to come to America. There is a Ketel genealogy, but of a Hudson Valley family, not the Charlestown, Mass. one. Most of the family histories I have looked at in online versions are there -- the several Harwood books, my Harshman family, Sampson/Samson, Souther, Southworth, Winslow, and the 2 Viets books on my mother's family -- and on and on. If there is a published genealogy on a New England family, it is probably there at the NEHGS. I confirmed some information I had already, but really didn't find anything startlingly new in the volumes I checked. So much for what I did not find. I have found some useful material lately, at the NEHGS, and at the Fitchburg Library, in addition to what I have passed on already, and I have grouped it in roughly chronological order: Some negative evidence on the origin of Thomas Collier (1) - In the NEHGR, Vol. 15 (1861), pages 25 - 27, is a contemporary record by Daniel Cushing, sometime Town Clerk of early "New" Hingham, Mass., of the early settlers who had come from "Old" Hingham, Norfolk, England. Some of this I had seen in Lincoln's History of Hingham (1895, I believe), but in a very garbled form. Of the 206 persons Cushing names, who followed that route between 1633 and 1639, including the names Cushing, Tower, March 17, 2000 Page 2 Lincoln, Hobart, James, etc., some of whom were in Charlestown before moving finally to Hingham, the name of Thomas Collier is NOT recorded as from "Old" Hingham. On the boundaries of the towns of Hingham and Cohasset - I had vaguely been aware that Cohasset was formed from Hingham, but hadn't looked at the matter very deeply. Thomas (1 - died 6 April, 1647) settled in Hingham, of course, and his son Moses (2) inherited his lands there. Thomas (2) was already in neighboring Hull in 1647, and some of his lands there may have been given him by his father. I haven't made a real study of these various Hingham lands, and probably won't, but at least some of them were in the area that later became Cohasset. There are some details on various pages of A Narrative History of the Town of Cohasset, Massachusetts, E. Victor Bigelow, Committee on Town History ( the Committee including Edmund Pomeroy and George Washington Collier, brothers, of our family, Aaron Pratt, Esq, and Newcomb B. Tower), 1898: at a final division of Common Lands in 1670, made by a committee of 6 which included Moses Collier, an area that looks to be most of the current Town of Cohasset was divided up among many then -Hingham families, including Moses Collier (2 lots), Lorings, Lincolns, Towers, etc. Another item indicates that in 1649 - 50 the Widow Collier (Susannah ____, widow of Thomas (1)) was given an area of land in what is now Cohasset, as part of a division of lands in that year. Some lands now in Cohasset were also divided among Hingham residents as early as 1637-38, only a few years after the settlement of Hingham. When Colliers begin showing up in Cohasset records about 1800 (the family of ship owners and mariners), they may have been living at locations that family members had already owned for 150 years. The Precinct of Cohasset, part of Hingham, was formed in 1717, and became the Town of Cohasset about 1769-1770. In checking for Boston records, I had hoped to find something new in the death records. There at least three published, the latest being Deaths in Boston, 1700-1799, R. J. Dunkle and Ann S. Lainhart, NEHGS, 1999 (2 Vols, A-L and M-Z). There were only a few Colliers in this reference, either "unknown or uncertain," as far as our family is concerned. The sources for this new book include period newspapers, church records, etc. Another, older reference, issued by the Boston Athenaeum, mostly a collection of newspaper obituaries, had deaths of some Connecticut Colliers, and some of the Coller/Collar family (unrelated to our line), but no certain ones on "our" Collier family. [Newspaper obituaries of the period were often limited to more noted individuals -- they were not complete records.] The only print reference I found that was of use on "our" Boston family was Index of Deaths in Massachusetts Centinel and Columbian Centinel, 1784-1840, 12 Vols., American Antiquarian Society, 1952. In Vol. 3 (pages not numbered) are listed the deaths of 17 Colliers, several of them already in my database (i.e., family of Rev. William Collier, of Charlestown, etc.). On the Boston - Chesterfield connection, there were two confirming entries: March 17, 2000 Page 3 "Collier, Mary (Mrs.), widow of the late Gershom Collier, formerly of Boston, d. in Chesterfield, aged 68 (C. C. Dec. 30, 1837)" [Maiden name Mary Kittle - Wade C. Note] ... "Collier, Parnell (Mrs.), wife of Wm. Collier, and dau. of Asa Shaw, of Westhampton, d. in Chesterfield, aged 26. (C. C. Apr 14, & 28, 1832)" We can speculate about how these deaths in a town 90 miles west of Boston came to be reported in a Boston paper, but I would think it just confirms that there were still family members in the Boston and South Shore area. (Parnell Shaw was the first wife of William Collier, son of Gershom and Mary Kittle Collier. It was his 2d wife, Rebekah Hathaway, who was the ancestor of Linda Ayukawa and Paul Watson.) On the subject of Mary Kittle -- after I had exhausted the Boston records, I rechecked the information I had on her and her family. As I have reported before, there were Kettells/Kettles/Kittles in Charlestown, Boston, Medford, Concord, and other Massachusetts towns. Most were related, and the spelling of the surname was random, to say the least. Mary Kittle, as the name is spelled in the Boston marriage record, daughter of John and Katharine Souther, born May 17, 1769, in Charlestown, is the only Mary I find with the correct birth year ( see her obituary, above). In the 1790 Federal census, the widow Katharine Kittle, of Charlestown, was the only member of the extended family to spell her name that way. The Charlestown Vital Records have an entry for the marriage intention of Mary Kettell and John Gardner, both of Charlestown, on Mar 18, 1792. There is no record of the actual marriage, as there usually was in the Charlestown records, and the LDS Family Search site has none. I find no further record of a John Gardner in Charlestown in that period. My working assumption is that, for some unknown reason, Mary and John did not actually marry, and she then married Gershom Collier, in Boston, June 16, 1793. I did confirm the family histories of the Kittles (many spelling variations) and the Southers, both early New England families. They are essentially as I have given them to you previously. March 17, 2000 Within the last two days, I have been in touch with Mr. Joel S. Pratt, of the Cohasset, Mass. clan of Collier descendants. His ancestors were Aaron Pratt and Bridget Collier, sister of Bosworth and Jane Collier House, rather than the line descended from William Collier (1721-1794) and Judith Briggs, of Scituate, which included the family of noted sea-captains. Some of Mr. Pratt's family still live in Cohasset, although he now lives in Maine, and he knew the other family as a child and young man in Cohasset. He also knew Gilbert S. Tower, the author of the elusive Colliers of Cohasset genealogy, and March 17, 2000 Page 4 gave a couple of suggestions as to where to locate it. I have sent him our overall family tree, and other materials, and he will be sending along more Cohasset material as time goes on. Our overall view of the Cohasset families seems to be correct, although I may have a couple of family relationships wrong. So, we continue to establish connections to more Thomas Collier branches. Wade Collier Trumbull County, Ohio and Lunenburg, Mass.