Tracing our family lines back through the Colonial Cande we might've been overwhelmed by piecemeal information found in the "low-lying fruits" of data online, but we were able to turn to a real and thorough genealogy book and found this work as good a foundation as any in our research.
We are referring of course, to Charles Candee Baldwin's THE CANDEE GENEALOGY: WITH NOTICES OF ALLIED FAMILIES OF ALLYN, CATLIN, COOKE, MALLERY, NEWELL, NORTON, PYNCHON, AND WADSWORTH (Cleveland, Ohio, 1882).
Truly a treasure in our family tree treasure chest. And available online for the reading. We've posted a link to it below. While nothing compares to holding actual books in hand and sinking into the hallowed grounds of the book's pages, this version of online book comes pretty close to satisfying the need to dig through a work again and again, somewhat manually, giving the mind the space to absorb the materials and the hand the chance to make it's own way through research.
Baldwin's GENEALOGY starts out with Charles saying, "I believe every person in the world named Candee is descended from Zaccheus Candee, found in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1670" (Preface).
Capturing the work done in Baldwin's book here in the Quilt gives us the opportunity to transfer the information verbatim and then add online dimensions to the work! I've seen it posted online where the text of a work is available already uploaded, however, our preference is to transcribe the information directly from the book ourselves so as to avoid the sorts of errors that transpire in moving overload. Moving overload seems to happen the more people cut and paste information. Plus with so many different types of computering there is no small amount of electronic haphazard in which dates get transposed and text transmuted without proper grammar and other critical symbols get tumbled. It's a slower method of plunking research into a blog but it's the more sound path for us to follow.
Plus, such laborious tasks provide the opportunity to consider each little tidbit more fully. Every detail preserved can lead to the maximum contemporary research possible.
What does seem prudent to lose for the purposes of our blog are Baldwin's numbers which correlate people's names with connective links elsewhere in his book. So we'll include those in an effort to keep better track of so many people up in the canopy of our family tree, but not use the same numerical coding in this Quilt. We'll include Baldwin's temple numbers with the other information we glean from his book in quotes.
The Quilt has been more of a singling out of information than a building of standard genealogical temple so far. Although we're working towards producing the standard information for all the Way Backs' descendents.
Baldwin's GENEALOGY tells us that his number "1 Zaccheus Candee, settled in New Haven, Connecticut (pg. 5, 1882 edition)." And this helps us distinguish him from other Zaccheus Candees we might come across in research. Perhaps his father was named Zaccheus or a sibling used the same name in written records or there were a number of uncles that bore the name Zaccheus...that's the kind of detail sorting that comes about in thorough research.
We do know that is was biblical. Zaccheus from Zechariah, the son of Berechiah in turn the son of the prophet Iddo. And that biblical story had to do with the Lord yet comforting Zion and choosing Jerusalem as a place where so much human story would take root. It had to do with walking in the ways of the Lord and keeping His charge, so that a man would be a good and fair judge in God's "house."
"His name is spelled in the early records Kembee, Kambee, Canbee, Candee, but generally Cande" (5 Baldwin).
This is a lot of information! It means that we have to widen our searching past the first spelling of our name that comes to mind. Thinking this way can save a research trip from the disaster of just missing the information and help us to not only search through the Cees of indices but to extend our perusing in a couple different directions as well. This clue also ties the work of historical research into some standards regarding the study of languages. In the history of the English language, for example, there were time period distinctions between when somebody used the letter "C" instead of "K." But reading a lower case "d" on a gravestone as a "b" may have had less to do with language propers and more to do with issues like illiteracy and/or transcribing letters in the engraving processes. Likewise, since they didn't have typewriters in the colonial days, hand writing often varies the look of the same letters.
There's lots to learn about on this family tree journey.
At any rate, Baldwin tells us of the Zaccheus who settled in New Haven colony, "When married, he is called Cambee; his wife, Bristow" (5).
We want to connect this statement to actual instance and can do that in the online environment and this is another reason why we are breaking down Baldwin's pages here. We can use the work as foundation from which to launch in some different directions but to be able to come back to this site as a home base in our traveling.
Baldwin gives us "evidence" of there being different spellings of the same family name when he tells us about finding offspring and relations in the records.
"His daughter Rebecca is daughter of Kembee; Zaccheus is son of Candee; Abigail, daughter of Cande" (5 Baldwin's GENEALOGY).
We can use the information from Bladwin's book to make a digital notebook page on Rebecca...
You can tell from the data on the card that the information did not come from Baldwin's Candee genealogy! You can also tell that there is a discoloration on the card. If you don't have the temperament for dicking around with digital notebooking as a piece of art, make sure you record EVERY detail of how you constructed the piece of artwork. In this case we needed room to add Rebecca's birthdate to the card and we had put Rebecca and Thomas' marriage date in the upper right hand corner, so when we added information to the card we had difficulty matching the background color to the unique background color that was originally used. This happens in house painting too! Adding a fresh patch of paint to an existing wall is almost impossible to blend. Even if the color on the can is named exactly the same as the swatch you used to name the color on the wall, factors like kitchen grease and sunlight may have altered the coloring and so made an exact matching even more challenging! That's why housepainters usually need to paint an entire panel when they are touching up any paint job.
So if we didn't get the information about the Painter children from Baldwin, where did we get it? That's a good question and one which cannot be answered by the information on our larger notebook page with hand scribbles all over it! There we just have an arrow pointing to the sentence: Rebecca married Thomas Painter and had the children -- Rebecca, Thomas, Shrebal, Mary, Deliverance, Mercy, Elizabeth, Rachel and Margaret (all Painters). We must have got that from somewhere, but we didn't cite the fact in our notes. As it stands it's just like an unclaimed piece of laundry hanging on a line somewhere blowing in the wind.
I can leave an author's memo attached to the piece of laundry...based on how I've gathered information for this person so far I can reasonably deduce that it came from somebody else's genealogy lists--"temples"--or maybe out of Orcutt and Beardsley's book about Derby or maybe it came from someplace in Malia's VISIBLE SAINTS. That's a lot to put on a memo and it doesn't REALLY help anyone interested in doing the detective work on Rebecca Cande quickly. And part of the point of participating in research and development is to AID in the ability of others to solidly and efficiently find their ways between facts and/or talking points. Whether it's a guess on maybe who might have a name written down in a Bible or a Will, or, it's a pretty good deduction between links in thought patterns of a population, attaching SOME reasoning to the signposts in all this running around just makes the most sense. A sojourner doesn't have to limit the work to the given signposts, but most people who undertake doing ANY task NEED some impetus to be interested and/or to pursue a course.
OKAY, I found it...it was another genealogy work that I stumbled across through GOOGLING "Thomas and Rebecca Painter" and it's a very nice looking production!
It is technically at the address:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~clintonct/painter.html
So one way we might combine the information from both genealogies is to start by calling this one something, like what we found, "The Painter Family of Connecticut/RI & Related Families."
It doesn't give us an author to attribute the title to...so this will be hard to list in a bibliography. It could be attributed to Anonymous, technically. And since it doesn't have an author listed it's "easier" to just scoop up the information and incorporate it into one of our run-on sentences.
Whereas being able to attribute origins of information to a person in the on-and-on helps us slim down all this conversating.
Although, "His children are generally called Cande, (Baldwin 5), 'His grandson Samuel appears in New Haven Probate Records as Candy--so far as I know, a solitary instance" (5 Baldwin).
Already as we wander from standard temple information we can see that it can get confusing! Now we have more than one author of information so the "I" is getting broader than me writing this blog.
And the facts not enumerated and otherwise clarified can quickly tumble into a pile. Zaccheus, for example, had a grandson named Samuel, but he also had a son named Samuel. We wouldn't know this from the sentence given. But the sentence given is important for the information that is does give us, in that, very often, to learn about family we need to gather a diversity of information and this helps us determine best scenario.
We can even develop the art of writing in the voice of a loaded "I" and so invest our "I" with more authority that just me. Just about every "I" or objectively declared voice of authority can be broken down into an exposure of the conversation within the -logue. What I mean is that if you look at that digital notebooking card you see what looks like generic information, but now that we've assessed it's construction just a little bit, we know that the information presented comes from two specific sources!
I hesitate to link the family tree found in "The Painter Family of Connecticut/RI & Related Families" into this blog because for a cursory journey through direct line of ancestors, it's necessary to keep things simple as a guide.
However, it's such a great example of official looking genealogy online I am compelled as self-explaining blogsite moderator to link to it.
Us linking to it doesn't mean that we have checked it all out for veracity, God knows we're already bogged down with the work of trying to verify all the information of our direct line ancestors. Of course, we haven't verified all the information in the Candee genealogy either! So you can see why, as researchers, we are limited to what's available in terms of materials to compare and contrast to add up to "fact." About the best we can do is cite sources and to keep track of all the stuff we do find that is part of this larger discussion. Then our "audience" can see the logic of what we are doing and can choose whether or not s/he is interested in hanging out at our "home base"/"webcluster".
And just as with having Baldwin's book handy, being able to read what's in "The Painter Family of Connecticut/RI & Related Families" deepens what we've got for family AND community information! Turns out that Rebecca is buried in the Congregational Graveyard!
As Mama reminds about people being buried next to each other after life, plots don't always tell us about a person's politics, religion, and/or social lives, but that kind of clue can point us in a direction. It can also help us get a time frame if we don't know specific dates. For example, the Congregationalists were not so-called before a certain time in history, so if our folks are buried in a specifically denominated graveyard, they may have been living in a time frame when that denomination had more of an individualized identity than it did before or after. Of course, churches and other civil organizations often take over the rights and responsibilities of a functionary mechanism in place, so the fact that a graveyard is Congregational or Lutheran or Jewish or Catholic, that may have happened after our folks were buried there! Yet more reason to know all about the evolution of the standards in history and genealogy for the guide. And the more foundation and innovation a guide knows the more license to credibly make suggestions.
I'm sure you can hear the not-totally-knowledgeable in my additional comment to Baldwin's above sentence...Just knowing that a grandson appears in Court Records opens up some different possibilities as to what the something was that happened to cause us to find official records. That's diplomatic-sounding and it's putting a sturdy but shy foot forward. I am shy about not being omniscient and about being as much of a student of genealogical research as I am an accomplished student in general. But not knowing all about something doesn't mean my ignorance has to STAY ignorance or that I'm any "less" than thorough when I stay true to my commitment of being thorough. Being thorough, at least, gets me through temporary walls and stumbling blocks. And I am committed, personally, to being a lifelong learner all about life, but I still want to be honest about, to date, my work hasn't brought me into the realm of wills and land inheritances.
Researching wills and land inheritances is another component of all this family history. Records and paperworks regarding philosophical concepts are manisfestations.
But I can tell you that such manifestations can be searched for around the dates of major life events like births, deaths, and marriages.
Every vital statistic is a chance to envision the whole family and community at that time!
"In the town records of Stratford, Vol. 1, page 69, is a deed from Thomas Sherwood to John Burritt, witnessed by Zaccheus Canby or Conby. It is perhaps impossible, at this date, to tell whether a or o was intended. The other witness is Daniel Gun. The deed is dated May 17, 1675, and marked: 'Exactly recorded from ye originall'" (5 Baldwin's GENEALOGY).
It might seem strange to hear of Stratford, Connecticut in conjunction with the Zaccheus Cande of New Haven. By reading some standards on pre-Revolutionary colonial existence in America we're gathering insights into such finer details about the whole story. In these works we find out that Stratford, Connecticut was part of the old colony of New Haven. Not all of New Haven's settlements were within a stone's throw of the Nine Squares. Pomfret tells us in his book, FOUNDING THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1583-1660 (NY, Evanston & London, 1970) that in 1660 New Haven was the largest town in the colony, followed by Milford, Guilford, Stamford, Southold (on Long Island), and Branford. But he also tells us that by 1662 the jurisdiction of the New Haven colony was down to three towns: New Haven, Branford, and Milford. Milford broke away in 1664 although there were groups in all the towns that continued to adhere to the "New Haven Way." By narrowing down the time windows on major historical happenings and organization, we can more easily see how each family member fits into the puzzle.
We'd have to do some personal file comparison between the men named in Baldwin's tidbit to find out the specific reason why Zaccheus might have been a witness to the deed. We might find out that Zaccheus was a freeman and Sherwood and Burritt were residents of the area who were not church members and so they might have been considered householders or planters but not freemen.
All householders or planters could become members of the general court by taking an oath of fidelity but they could not vote UNLESS they were church members who had been accepted by the court as free burgesses and who had taken the freeman's charge. "As dependent towns were admitted [to the colony's jurisdiction], a hybrid arrangement was worked out allowing them representation in the general court" (266, Pomfret).
Or we may find out that Zaccheus as witness was practicing one of the duties of magistrates and commissioners in the New Haven colony. In New Haven colony magistrates and commissioners were empowered to join in marriage, to execute deeds, and to watch over the town for the preservation of order and the good of the community. In this one little wondering we have a need to understand a belnd of information, personal family story AND context which, at it's root, is often about physical place but is also about the colorings that religion and politics add to the people in place.
"It is by tracing things to their origin that we learn to understand them, and it is by keeping that line and that origin always in view that we never forget them. An inquiry into the origin of rights will demonstrate to us that rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another."
--Thomas Paine
In the old New Haven colony it was the Court of Magistrates that was the supreme judiciary and to which the whole colony was amenable. This court consisted of the Governor as chief judge, the Deputy-Governor, and all the Magistrates. "This court had the cognizance and trial of all causes, civil and criminal, and was bound to proceed and decide according to strict law and justice, and agreeable to the principles and spirit of laws in England. With this court was the probate of wills and settlement of intestate estates. From its decisions appeal could be made to the general court, as the last resort. It administered justice with much firmness, impartiality, and dignity" (25 Lambert).
I'm sure those punished on Days of Humiliation didn't feel that the court acted with dignity, but aside from Lambert's sentence of assessment of the Court of Magistrates, his summary of the system helps us understand the technical operations of things back then. Reading the old standards is critical to the thorough research of the contemporary quester. And picking some of the thickest tomes can often help a person get soaked for the swim. From there it's "easier" to investigate the edges of the pond.
We dove off Edward Rodolphus Lambert's diving board a HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF NEW HAVEN (1838) to get some further information about the core of law in the early days.
In addition to the Court of Magistrates in New Haven colony, there was a General Court which consisted of two branches (both elective in different modes by the people) [which dates Lambert's Court description]:
I. Composed of the representatives or deputies of the town
--elected 2 times a year by each town respectively
II. Composed of the other magistrates: Governor, Deputy-Governor, Assistants, Magistrates from
each town of the jurisdiction
--elected annually by the general voice of the people
"The concurrence of these two branches made a PUBLIC ACT or LAW (26, Lambert).
Lambert also tells us that the supreme administration (both civil and military) rested with the governor and deputy-governor.
Both magistrates and deputies sat in the same room.
As to the manner of election...
In April, preceding the election and session of the Court in May, the towns elected two deputies each and nominated persons for their magistrates. Nominations were sent by the governor to all the towns and the people were limited and confined to make their choice of magistrate from these names in their towns on election day.
General elections had been at first in October, but then changed to May in 1650.
The election of the supreme administration changed in 1653 to the 3rd week of May.
Election day was such a day of importance that many freemen of the jurisdiction made their ways to New Haven where a minister would preach a sermon (a custom not discontinued until 1826).
The governor and the deputy-governor were chosen first, then magistrates for each town (out of the nominations)--not as representatives for that town only (for they differed from deputies)--who were charged with the general interests of all the towns of the jurisdiction.
At this time the colonists also chose a secretary, treasurer, and marshal out of the previous nomination of the towns for general officers.
The choice thus finished on election day, the general officers and town deputies formed themselves into an organized assembly, or general court, for the jurisdiction.
In Lambert's HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF NEW HAVEN is also where we hear about "Plantation Courts" or "Particular Courts." These were constituted by each town choosing four deputies annually (who reported to the general court or assembly who approved, empowered, and established the plantation courts). These courts became, within the town districts, judiciary officers of the law, vested with civil authority and legal jursidiction. These judges were denominated "commissioners" and in conjunction with the magistrates of the town, composed the court. They sat quarterly and more often if necessary. Tried in their courts were all local civil suits and lower felonies. "From this appeals could be made to the court of assistants at New Haven" (25 Lambert).
Lambert tells us that many laws established in the early days of the New Haven colony were copied verbatim from the Pentateuch, but that, "The plantations, by experience, finding Jewish bondage rather irksome, or that the laws of Moses were not entirely applicable to their condition, the general court, in May, 1655, desired Governor Eaton to perfect a code of laws for the jurisdiction" (30). He was requested to consult both the Reverend Mr. Cotton's DISCOURSE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT and the Massachusetts code. Pomfret further suggests that the Cotton Code of 1636 owed much to Bacon's "Civil Government."
Eaton got assistance from colony co-founder Davenport and further, all the laws were examined and approved by the elders of the jurisdiction. This was presented to the general court and it was ordered that 500 copies should be printed. The manuscript was sent to England that it might be printed under the inspection of Governor Hopkins.
There is a record dated the 25th of June 1656 in which the court at New Haven is informed, there is sent over now in Mr. Gareth's ship 500 Lawe Books which Governor Hopkins got printed, 6 paper books for Records, and a seal for the colony which the governor "desireth to accept as a token of his love" (30 Lambert).
This turning of instrument from ideal to testament cost the people of New Haven ten pounds and ten shillings for the printing and paper, and 48 shillings for the blank Records books.
The court ordered divided the Lawe Books:
New Haven, 200
Milford, 80
Stamford, 70
Guilford, 60
Branford, 40
Southold, 50
For every one of which books, each plantation is to pay '12 pence in good country payment" (30 Lambert). As we know from skimming records of other colonies of the day, good country payment might be corn, wheat, pease, or some other stock. In broke New Haven most people didn't use circulating species. And there is generally no mention of silver as country payment until 1655.
From books to the masses...the LAWS were read at all town meetings and all inhabitants were expected to know and obey them.
Lambert also lets us know that a copy of these laws (the fundamental body of law contained in the Code of 1656 preserved in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Massachusetts was transcribed by the librarian Mr. Baldwin and the manuscript was presented to the legislature of the State of Connecticut at session in May 1835.
Historical research is very often running around between resources and historians are never really shocked to find one state's stuff in some remote-to-it place. Part of what makes genealogical and historical research of the 21st century so exciting is the increasing ability of a person or society to SEE stuff not right outside the door.
The 1650s on the New England/Mid-Atlantic Coast is a packed decade and allows us a look at the, oftentimes, disparity between the legislation of settlements and the activity of adventuring and boundary-pressing by distant power-overs.
For those of us studying this era it's hard not to work with transparencies or tracing paper which can be layered up and demonstrates frictions between facts and palimpsests of ourstory as it evolved towards nation.
One of the running keys between 1643 and the ensuing decades is the effort of settlements and jurisdictions to come together in confederation for the purposes of self-defense. This "minor" pre-Constitutional arrangement really set the colonists apart as Americans long before paperwork like the Declaration of Independence. It set them apart from other powers like those of the Native Americans, Spanish, French, Dutch and even the English. It also emphasized the need for a continent or an eventual nation to somehow merge their legislative judiciary powers with the command of their arms and armies. Colonial warfare on the North American continent was a pre-Revolutionary experiment of communications, delegation, and a constant lead and follow exchange amongst different kinds of people.
The work of the confederation didn't always directly solve the problems of so many people making up America as the fascinating story of New Haven colony and the Dutch shows. In that, the New England Confederation (founded in 1643) didn't have as much power to settle trans-regional dispute as the Old World diplomats and military commanders.
