Sarah was born the eldest according to Baldwin's GENEALOGY in December (the 6th) of 1773--a little bit longer than a year after Gideon and Amy were married Sarah joined the family.
Eventually she married Joseph Perkins (also born in 1773) in January of 1793.
Joseph Perkin's father was Ithiel Perkins who'd married Esther Fox.
And she died the 22nd of March 1842. (Oswego?)
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There is a curious space between the births of Sarah and sister Huldah!
The winter of 1779-1780 it snowed for forty days in a row in Connecticut. Most of the deer died from an inability to get food. There was four foot of snow in March and the winter had found people having to kill even the horses to make snowshoes which was the only way to get about, sleds or no sleds. This crippled travel and drove many people set up in little more than huts from the hamlets, groves, and countryside into the closest cities and other colonial centers of population.
The summer wasn't much time to recover. Most of the able-bodied men were stationed with troops far from their villages and the men, women, and children not in the military were spending a lot of time and energy dividing their stores between home supplies and stuff that could be sent to the soldiers. So fearful of their basic needs possibly not being met for the coming-again winter, the people of Derby, Connecticut petitioned the General Assembly to grant a permit to some person in Derby who might go from Derby to other parts of the State or neighboring States to purchase salt, a necessity.
By November the Town appointed Eliphalet Hotchkiss to receive State Salt and to put up the provisions for the Army agreeable to a late act of the assembly.
The Town also voted to draw out of the Town Treasury enough money to defray the charges of purchasing barrels and receiving and putting up said provisions.
For more on Gideon Cande's service to America we are told to see...
But keep in mind we're having to keep our Gideons sorted.
The Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (Volume 12). There was a supplement to the already published material which the Society published in 1901 (the 8th in its series of collections) called "Rolls and Lists of CT Men in the Revolution, 1773-1783." The material had already been published in 1889 in the officially issued, "Record of Service of CT Men in the War of the Revolution, 1775-1783." These were officially written lists and returns of soldiers serving in the Continental regiments of the "Connecticut Line." You'll recall that not everyone who was in the militias joined the Continental Army. You'll also recall that much of the paperwork from the Revolutionary War has not been preserved.
Returns?
Continental Regiments, 1775
Returns of Men in Service
"Each of these returns sent in to state authorities from the different towns is signed by the Selectmen of the Town from which it is sent and gives the names of the persons resident in that town who had been employed in the Continental service in 1775, and who under a law passed in December of that year were exempted from the payment of certain taxes to the State. Some of the returns give the numbers only and not the names of those who had been in service" (State Library, Revolution 6, 1-131).
Derby, Gideon Cande
A meeting of the General Assembly in Hartford, Connecticut in April of 1775 in which a law was passed to raise a quarter of the militia for the special purposes of the defense of the Colony had formed the men into Companies 100 strong. Six regiments, a Major General, two Brigadier Generals, six Colonels had been appointed a force. This force was sent to Boston immediately after the fighting at Lexington. Major Jabez Thompson and Captain Nathaniel Johnson and thirty-two men from Derby were among the companies sent. Orcutt suggests that these were among the men in the battle of Bunker Hill...that was June of 1775.
By July the Connecticut General Assembly ordered two more regiments (the 7th and 8th) "to be fitted at once and sent forward to the army at Boston." Mustered, the men set out for war. For this expedition General David Wooster (of Derby) and some associates in the legislature planned the capture of Ticonderoga. Wooster and others put up the money and then were reimbursed by the Colony.
The fall of Ticonderoga gave Congress:
120 iron cannon
50 swivels
2 mortars
1 howitzer
1 coehorn
10 tons musket balls
3 cart loads flints
30 new carriages
a large quantity of shells
100 stands of arms
10 barrels of powder
2 brass cannon
materials for ship building
pork, beans, flour, peas,
other valuables
No doubt raiding begat raiding and the British headed for Derby under the direction of General Tryon as they set fire to whatever infrastructure they came across as the war waging kept up. This roaming and plundering sometimes carried out as directives, sometimes just wanton laced it's way through Connecticut. It was some weeks prior to the burning of Danbury that the British learned of secreted military stores in Derby. These stores were mostly consisting of pork packed into an old building on the Housatonic. Which is why Captain John Tomlinson who'd been in New Haven rode "in hot haste" over the hills to the peaceful hamlet of Derby Narrows shouting, THE BRITISH ARE IN NEW HAVEN! LOOK OUT FOR YOUR PORK, LOOK OUT FOR YOUR PORK, LOOK OUT FOR YOUR PORK!!!!!
Well, it was just a-getting dark and ever on the alert in those days and ready to fight for the country and to protect Mother, the people caught the urgency in Captain Tomlinson's hollering and every man, woman and child in Derby's bosom sallied forth to ward off the enemy from starving us out of the Colony! Some militia was still in the area like old Isaac Smith and these men and their sons organized the pulling of the pork from the warehouse, see? They hauled that pork over the cart path and then through the pasture cow paths and out through those shrub oaks that haven't grown back yet to full height and by the light of the MOON they hid that pork in a scramble and not one pig or sow made a peep the whole night through...so we...
The pork was alive??????
WE SAVED OUR OWN LIVES I TELL YOU!
And Mother's?
And Mother's too, so you would come along and grow up strong and brave and AMERICAN.
Orcutt tells us that by the 3rd of July 1780 it was VOTED, that the Town of Derby "will give each man that shall enlist as a soldier into the Continental army--during the war--as a bounty, the sum of twenty pounds, to be paid in bills of credit of this state at the time they pass muster, and twenty pounds at the commencement of the second year of their service, and twenty pounds at the 3rd; and all such as as enlist for three years into the continental army, shall receive in bills of credit of this state, twenty pounds at the time of passing muster, fifteen pounds at start of second year, ten pounds at the start of the third year; and all such persons as have, or shall enlist into the continental service for one year and seven months from the date of these presents, shall receive ten pounds at passing muster and five pounds at start of second campaign, including what shall have already been given by the town" (189 DERBY).
Connecticut had been issuing bills during the war against Spain (1740-1750) and again to support war against France (1755-1763) until England ordered the Colony to stop it (about 1760) at which time it took 8 dollars of paper to buy ONE of silver...the monies were already out of synch with reality when suddenly the colonists "came to flat hard times" (166 DERBY). And that was BEFORE the Revolutionary War!
It was 1780 when committees and assemblies started exacting taxes on every item in the universe in addition to raising food and clothing for the military happenings from "the people." Towns "classed" the people and these people were forced to pay up and procure for.
In Derby there were no manufacturers to take contracts so the whole town became "a manufacturing shop" divided into twelve apartments, each with a regularly appointed overseer or "boss."
The spinning wheel of America as a warring nation became a machine from which there was no alternative path. Organized into a total army of countrypeople, America as this wheel limped along until the War of 1812 proved it an unsound design.
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Huldah (Hulday) wasn't born until March of 1782.
TEN YEARS after Gideon and Amy got married!
Just a year after a new school building was built in Derby.
It was the year of the lottery!
Highways and bridges and districts...but Huldah survived the progress.
She moved up north to Oswego, New York at the same time that her parents Gideon and Amy did. That would've been around 1806. Huldah was in her early twenties then so she really grew up a Connecticut girl. We're surmising she was named for a prophetess in the Old Testament of the Bible which is where a lot of people got their names in those days.
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Gideon, Jr. was born on the 7th of July 1784.
He moved to Whit[e]ford, Monroe County, Michigan.
Married to Elizabeth ____________ with whom he had no children.
We seem to have this picture of Gideon, Jr's gravestone showing that he died on the 18th of March 1851.
When we first looked at it we thought it might have been moths that chomped it up like that, but it seems more likely it was some sort of vandalism, like gun fire. Doesn't seem likely that it got to looking like that on account of somebody rubbing chalks over a piece of paper to take its impression, although damage does occur when people push too hard on gravestones when they do "rubbings."
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| Photographed by Caveman, 2009, posted on Find A Grave |
Gideon, Jr. and Elizabeth are buried in the Van Auken cemetery in Monroe, Michigan.
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Gideon's sister Sirene also appears in records as Cyrene, Silene)...Baldwin tells us to read Orcutt's HISTORY OF DERBY. And we've been able to read chunks of this work online!
THE HISTORY OF THE OLD TOWN OF DERBY, CT, 1642-1880
(Springfield, MA: Press of Springfield Printing Co., 1880)
Very exciting.
She was born in August of 1786 and christened the same month--such was the keeping up to date of the church with pomp and circumstance as the highways and bridges got made.
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There was Asa the baby who only lived from the 20th of December 1789 until the 21st of August 1790.
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Gideon and Amy had another boy in 1791 and this, too, was also christened Asa Cande (in July). This boy is OUR Asa who grew up and married Mary McAlpine!
Asa was christened in Oxford Parish/Town which had been effected by an agreement with Derby but not before there was discussion and disagreement between neighbors and assembly as to the establishment of another parish. While the Oxford Ecclesiastical Society had been around since 1741 (and grandfather Caleb Cande had lived in Oxford since 1730) the church members had to go through the political process of establishing Oxford as a town. This happened, technically, in 1798! All the waffling about most likely contributed to Uncle Timothy's not getting paid enough to cover his costs of building the meeting house. He moved to Saratoga.
Remember "Oxford District" had been made a Parish in 1741, but did not become a separate town until 1798 when it became a more proper place than just a collection of people moving inland from places like Stratford and New Haven. As a settlement Derby was much older. The land had been acquired from the "Pawgassett" and "Pootatuck Indians," at least, that's what the settlers called them.
There was an old English-Indian Trading Post at Birmingham Point, erected in 1642 and used by New Haven men until 1653/54. That was the year that the post was sold as a tract of land to a Company of ten men of Milford. By 1657 a Thomas Wheeler of Stratford bought 40 acres at Birmingham Point and engaged in the building of sailing vessels. Wheeler sold to Alexander Bryon also of Milford in 1664, but that was even older than Aunt Sarah.
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And that brings us to 1795. The year that the new Congregational Church at Oxford was completed. So too was Amy and Gideon's family. The last child was a boy whom they named George (a very popular name thanks to General Washington).
George (born 3 March 1795) also died in the 1840's.
He'd married Susan ______________.
They had a child, Mary J.
Mary J. died in November of 1838 and is buried in the Volney Center cemetery with her parents.
George would've been eleven years old when his family migrated north to Oswego County caught somewhere between forever sitting up straight and chasing injuns.
