VITAL RECORDS SANDWICH MASSACHUSETTS TO Volume One. compiled by. Caroline Lewis Kardell and Russell A. Lovell, Jr.

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1 VITAL RECORDS OF SANDWICH MASSACHUSETTS TO 1885 Volume One compiled by Caroline Lewis Kardell and Russell A. Lovell, Jr. New England Historic Genealogical Society Boston, 1996

2 Foreword The vital records in this publication are drawn from the following sources: Plymouth Colony Records Seven volumes of Town Clerks' records held at the Sandwich Town Hall Surviving volumes of First Parish Church, Quaker records and certain later church records Inventories of burial markers in Sandwich and Sagamore Obituaries in early Sandwich newspapers Local diaries and Bible entries We regret the lack of inventories of other burial markers in the Bourne villages, and the incompleteness of church records. Our data extends through the end of 1884, the year in which the town of Bourne was established from the western parts of original Sandwich. This publication therefore gives Bourne a nearly complete set of vital records up to the date when it commenced its own. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, 12 volumes (Boston, ), commonly referred to as Plymouth Colony Records. Volumes 1-6 containing Court Orders list four marriages performed in Sandwich by the Colony Governor or one of the Assistants. Volume 8 (Miscellaneous Records) contains certain Sandwich vital records for and When Town Clerks were first appointed about 1646, they were expected to report vital records to Plymouth Court, but much of this body of information, if ever sent, was lost by the time the Colony Records were transcribed and published in the 1850s. Sandwich Book 1, "General Records , Births, Marriages and Deaths, Town of Sandwich." This volume is the earliest of Sandwich's own records. It has 256 surviving pages and includes vital records on 41 pages among entries of town meetings, earmarks, deeds, and agreements. The pages were not originally numbered and the town meeting notes are not chronological, so that the original page order cannot be ascertained. A few pages are undoubtedly missing, since the vital records pages are topped by a large capital letter, of which C and N were not present when ix

3 the pages available in 1901 were treated by the Emery Process and bound. The vital records in this book had been copied by Town Clerk Harrison G. O. Ellis into another of the early books of Town Vital Records, namely pages 496 through 508 of Book 3 below. Mr. Ellis was not familiar with the usage to 1752 of the double-date period, January 1 - March 24, or with the numbered months beginning with March; he made mistakes in reading names, as well, and omitted records he could not read at all. The page numbers used in our present text for Book 1 were added in pencil by the compilers from the order as of Town meeting minutes survive from a meeting in January 1650/1. Births of children before this date, found in the book, were doubtless contributed by the families. The Ellis copy of Book 1, vital records, contains four Skiff family births which are not in the rebound volume, but otherwise there seems to have been no loss of pages in Book 1 between 1869 and Sandwich Book 2, "Births, Marriages and Deaths, Earmarks, Town of Sandwich." Its contents are Births , Deaths , Marriages and Intentions Like Book 1, this volume was badly worn with loose and missing pages when it was copied by scribe Thomas G. Newcomb (not a Town Clerk) in 1893; the pages were then treated by the Emery Process in 1901 and bound. Mr. Newcomb made the same kinds of mistakes in names and dates as Ellis. Unlike Book 1, however, this volume had numbered pages and also an index in a small separate volume, which has survived intact. The use of this index has enabled us to reconstruct the nature of what was on each of the original 252 pages of Book 2. A total of eight sheets, with sixteen written sides, were missing when this volume was rebound in However, the contents of pages 1-2 and 5-6 were found to comprise a block of data at the end of the Ellis copy (pages of Book 3), where it had been appended as though part of Book 1. The contents of pages 1-2 contained deaths , and of pages 5-6, births in the families of Samuel Prince, Mathias Ellis, Thomas Smith and Elisha Bourne. The two original sheets were clearly badly damaged, with top and page numbers and edges missing in 1869: page 1-2 is among those lost, but page 5-6 was correctly identified and bound into Book 2 in Hence, the Ellis copy is the sole source for the data on page 1-2 of Book 2. We have been at pains to reconstruct the incomplete data on these pages from other sources because of gratuitous errors made in the Ellis copy. For example, Mr. Ellis reported the death of Rev. Rowland Cotton as "1700", where he should have written "17_ (worn)". The actual date was 1718, as shown in the diary of Samuel Sewall.

4 The Index to Book 2 does not record names of the deceased or of those married, only the fact that deaths are found on pages 1, 2, 3, 7, etc., and marriages on pages 11,16,23, etc. The index does reports the name of the father and the year of birth of the first child, valuable information when the original page is lost. The Newcomb copy of Book 2 does not include any data not now present in Book 2, so that the Newcomb copy is not a source for any part of this publication. However, since it is more easily readable, it has been used by others and its mistakes were widely copied in the past. Sandwich Book 3 "Births , Deaths , Intentions of Marriage and Marriages " This book contains 495 pages of original records. At the end, on pages , is the Ellis copy of Book 1, vital records, and of pages 1-2 and 5-6 of Book 2. A separate index of names, in a pocket-size book, was apparently carried about by the Town Clerks, who noted certain births and deaths in the margin of this index. Since not all these notes were transferred to Book 3, the index is itself a source, called Book 3 A. Sandwich Book 4 "Records of Births & Deaths 1836 to Records of old marriages where one or both of the parties belonged to this town & were married in the different towns in the Commonwealth." Pages are births and deaths in family sets. The out-of-town marriages are reported on pages A state law, in 1857, asked Town Clerks to report local marriages of persons from others Towns to the Town Clerk of that town, from the beginning of records to Several nearby towns complied, but the evidence in published vital records and genealogies is that overall compliance left much to be desired. Sandwich Book 5 "Intentions , Earmarks." The pages were not originally numbered. This book was rebound in 1901 by the Emery Process and now contains 56 pages of intentions and 5 pages of earmarks. There is no title page, and the present first page begins abruptly, without headings. We strongly suspect that an earlier section is missing, possibly dating from 1753, when intentions in Book 2 terminate. The information in this book of intentions is particularly valuable because of the many person whose marriages are not recorded here. Many families and individuals before and after the Revolution moved from Sandwich to Connecticut, Berkshire and Worcester counties, Maine and Nova Scotia.

5 Sandwich Book 6 "Intentions of Marriage , Marriages " There are 116 pages of intentions, 13 pages of marriages, and the rest of the 360 pages are blank, as new reprinted pages from the Commonwealth were issued in 1843 and came to form Book 7. Sandwich Book 7 "Births, Marriages, and Deaths " This is an oversize book bound from reprinted pages authorized by the Commonwealth. Each numbered page consists of a two-page spread. Under the births section, pages 1-79 run to 1868 and then a new format of 43 more pages extends to The new format pages were numbered 1-43, causing confusion with the earlier section. These later pages have been renumbered, 1A, 2A, etc. in this publication. In the marriage section pages 1-21 (to 1856) are in one format, followed by pages in another format, followed by pages in another. In the deaths section pages 1-40 are in one format. All the data in Book 7 have been supplied for this publication with the sole exception of "Disease or cause of death." We would note that in these seven books of Sandwich vital records, the identification of non-white members of the community has been erratic, with some failure to identify race as Indian, Black, or Mulatto even when reprinted forms invited this information. We have followed the Town Clerks' entries in this respect. Residents of Herring Pond Reservation and of Mashpee Reservation and District periodically came to Sandwich for employment; their intentions, marriages, and births were recorded here. We will now summarize the various published sources in which Sandwich vital records have appeared prior to this publication: The Sandwich Observer, a weekly newspaper published in Sandwich from 1845 through 1851, ran a column of vital records from Book 1 in ten successive issues from July 13 through September 14,1850. The issues of September 21 and 28 are missing in the set we have used, but if of equal length to the others would have completed the vital record data in Book 1 (as rebound in 1901). Our set of the Observer (1846 through 1850) was preserved by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. The originals are now at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, with microfilm at Sandwich Archives, Graphic Microfilm (Stoughton, Massachusetts) and the Boston Public Library. Frederick Freeman assembled his History of Cape Cod (volume 1, the Annals of Barnstable County, 1858; volume 2, The Annals of the Thirteen Towns, 1861)

6 during the 1850s, with much detailed genealogy, particularly in volume 2. He did not provide his sources, but must have used Sandwich Vital Records for much of his Sandwich family data, especially in the 17th and 18th century. In particular, Freeman provides more complete information on the John Smith, Rowland Cotton, Thomas Smith, Samuel Prince and other families than is now visible on the damaged pages of Books 1 and 2. We have added as footnotes at various points what seems to be consistent data provided by Freeman. Plymouth Colony Records. We referred to this 12-volume set above as a key resource. We have consulted the original documents used in Volume 8, Miscellaneous Records, preserved at the Plymouth County Commissioners' office, in order to check published transcriptions such as the Kirby entries. This one volume of Plymouth Colony Records was reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Company of Baltimore in 1976 and includes some of the revisions and comments found by editor George E. Bowman of The Mayflower Descendant. The Genealogical Advertiser: A Quarterly Magazine of Family History published in four volumes from 1898 through 1901 by Lucy Hall Greenlaw in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was reprinted in one volume by Genealogical Publishing Co. in Records in Sandwich Book 1 and early pages of Book 2 are on the following pages: Vol. 3, No. 2 [June 1900]:33-36 Vol. 3, No. 3 [September 1900]:73-77 Vol. 4, No. 1 [March 1901]:9-14 Vol. 4, no. 4 [December 1901]: Unfortunately, all were taken from the Ellis and Newcomb copies rather than from the original books, so that they include errors made by these scribes in names and dates. The Mayflower Descendant, under editor George Ernest Bowman, went back to original sources and carefully transcribed Sandwich vital records as follows: 13 [1911]: : marriages recorded in Plymouth Colony Court Orders, vols. I-IV 14 [1912]: : these entries are transcriptions of Sandwich Book 1, and identify some of the errors made by Ellis in his 1869 copies

7 15 [1913]: 25-28: Sandwich vital records from Plymouth Colony Records, vol. 8, with corrections. 16 [1914]: 122, 236, 238: Plymouth Colony Records, vol. 8, entries of [1919]: 39-40: NCR, vol. 8, entries for [1920]: 92: NCR, vol. 8, entries for [1931]: 21-33, 68-75: Sandwich Book 2, pages 1-2 and 5-21 with certain corrections to Ellis's mistakes on pages 1,2,5,6 30 [1932]: 58-68,99-104: Sandwich Book2, pages The Sandwich data in the above volumes 14, 29 and 30 were reproduced and published by Col. Leonard H. Smith, Jr. in Vital Records of Southeastern Massachusetts, Volume 3, Barnstable and Sandwich (Clearwater, Fla., 1982). Sandwich Town Clerks' File of 3 x 5 Cards. In the 1930s a group paid by WPA (Works Progress Administration), funds prepared 3x5 index cards on much of the existing Sandwich Vital Records. These were filed alphabetically on white, pink and blue cards for births, marriages and deaths respectively. These cards at the Town Clerk's office have been a great convenience to the public but unfortunately were drawn from the Ellis and Newcomb copies of Books 1 and 2, so that the cards contain these errors, plus further new errors or omissions of reading. Also the contents of Books 5 and 6 were not put onto cards, and neither were the Plymouth Colony records portions, nor Bowman's work in The Mayflower Descendant, as listed above. Since the formation of the Sandwich Archives in 1977, corrections have been noted on the cards and many revised cards created as specific family studies have been completed. However, there has not been a comprehensive program to create new cards from unused sources, including cemeteries or church records, or to check existing cards against originals, so that the public card files have to be viewed with caution and have been so marked. Other Records. In July 1972 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints microfilmed the Sandwich books of Vital Records, and also the Proprietors' Records (Woodlots), and Military and Town Meeting Records. In September 1985 the Holbrook Research Institute of Oxford, Massachusetts photographed the books of Sandwich Vital records and related indices, and published this raw data on microfiche.

8 Sandwich, Barnstable County Mar. 6 Certain persons were ordered to "... goe to Sanditch, and set forth their bounds of the lands graunted to them". (Ply. Col. Rec., Vol. I, p. 80.) Mar. 3 Bounds between Sandwich and Barnstable to be established June 10 Bounds between Sandwich and Barnstable to be established June 7 Bounds between Sandwich and Plymouth as established Jan. 19,* 1663, ordered to be recorded Oct. 29 Bounds between Sandwich and Barnstable established July 7 Bounds between Sandwich and "Suckanesset" established Oct. 28 Bounds established Nov. 28 Bounds between Sandwich and lands of the proprietors of Mashpee confirmed Feb. 26 Part of the plantation of "Marshpee" annexed Apr. 1 Part of the district of "Marshpee" annexed Mar. 13 Part of the district of "Marshpee" annexed Mar. 19 Part re-annexed to Mashpee Mar. 19 Bounds between Sandwich and Falmouth established Apr. 2 Part established as Bourne May 27 Bounds between Sandwich and Mashpee established and part annexed to Mashpee Apr. 20 Bounds between Sandwich and Mashpee established and part annexed to Mashpee Apr. 24 Part annexed to Barnstable. Archaic Names of the Municipality: Pocasset, Pokesset, Sanditch, Scusset, Shaume. Section/Village Names: East Sandwich, Farmersville, Forestdale, Greenville (extinct), Jarvesville, Monument Village (current town of Bourne), Plowed Neck, Sagamore Hill, Sand Hill, Scorton, South Sandwich, Spectacle Pond, Spring Hill, Wakeby. (From: Historical Data Relating to Counties, Cities and Towns in Massachusetts. Prepared by William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth. Boston:New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1997.)