[insert writing leading up to the Long Summer of 1774]


In May of 1774 at a Town Meeting in New Haven, residents took up a collection of money for the people of Boston. In fact it was the 23rd of May, a mere twelve days after Boston received word of the Boston Port Act.  The Boston Committee of Correspondence, a networking group of Patriots, had dispatched word to the other colonies...

...having just received a copy of an Act of the British Parliament...

Boston Harbor to be closed to all shipping.
British troops to be restationed in Boston.
British naval vessels to seal off Harbor.

The "Intolerable Acts" began their procession from the mouths and fists of royalty in England to the regular people of small town America.

And the people began to make decisions based on their most contemporary interests and what was forming as their own place.

"Now therefore," the letter read, "Is the time when all should be united in opposition to this violation of the liberties of all!"  The engaged men on this side of the Atlantic seized upon the Act with their pens and so delivered the talking tables to the less literary types.

[trapped Bostonians]

On the committee in New Haven to consider the plea/cause...Samuel Candee...Ensign Samuel Candee (married to Mehitable Smith of West Haven).  He was 69 years old and would die less than a year later.

Ensign Samuel Candee was born on Christmas Day in 1705, he was a brother of Gideon Cande (both the children of Captain Samuel and Abigail [Pineon] Cande).


The vote at the town meeting in New Haven that spring night...

"That we will to the utmost of our abilities assert and defend the liberties and immunities of British America and that we will cooperate with our sister towns in this and the other colonies in any constitutional measures that may be thought most conducive to the preservation of our invaluable rights and privileges.  For the maintenance of public peace and support of general union, which at this time is so absolutely requisite to be preserved throughout this continent.  That it is the opinion of this town that a subscription be set afoot for the relief of inhabitants of the town of Boston that are now suffering in the common cause of American freedom and that...

Silas Kimberly, Samuel Candee, Simeon Bristol, Isaac Beecher Jr., Timothy Ball, and Samuel Beecher be a committee to receive in subscriptions and transmit what may be collected to the selectmen of the town of Boston..."

--Found in Malia's THE VISIBLE SAINTS (pp. 89-90)



Many New Haveners joined the growing numbers of people opposing Great Britain's colonial policy, but it was "delicate" footwork since the rights and liberties were within the imperial framework.  In other words, the rights and liberties had evolved from the old culture/society, so to turn against that was a risk to that part of the new culture that was the old culture.  What would people choose to keep from the old ways and use in the new world?  What should be opposed?  How could people oppose policy?  These were the kinds of questions that people were thinking about back then.


And in addition to protesting and boycotting (acting out), the people were wisely examining their own and each others' thoughts about independence and "together."  For as much as there was anger carried out in acts of property damage and a kind of dramatic show and tell, there was even more of a calling to have conference and convention, to figure out how best the new Americans might be intercolonial.  THE VISIBLE SAINTS takes us right into the crux of the wrestle in peoples' consciences and how that wrestle played out amongst family and neighbors.


In 1774 Caleb and Lois (Mallory) Cande's youngest man-son was eighteen years old.  Justus Cande had been born in February of 1756, so he was in his first year of qualifying manhood in his community of West Haven.  He was quite a bit younger than Caleb and Lois' eldest child...Caleb, Jr.  Caleb, Jr. was already 31 years old!  Caleb, Jr. had married Anna Sperry in the spring of '64, ten years before this talk of war.

These are the nine sons!  And there were actually ten children, but one didn't survive infancy.

So we're not confused we'll go over this again.

Captain Samuel and Abigail Cande who lived on the SW corner of the West Haven Green had eight children...Hannah, Samuel, Thankful, Abigail, Gideon, Lois, Timothy, and Caleb.  That Caleb married Lois Mallory in 1742 and they had their first son, Caleb in 1743.

Caleb (born 1743) married Anna Sperry and together they had thirteen children...so that was 13 grandchildren for Caleb and Lois if you're keeping a tally out from the trunk of the tree.

It was '47 before Caleb got a brother David.  David grew up to be a Harwinton man and he married Dinah BRISTOL.  Not the first time the Cande and the Bristols picked each other for partners.

In 1749 there came Gideon who moved to Derby once Derby became a place to move to.  He married Anne Andrews otherwise known as Amy Andrus.  They got married in the Church at Oxford in April of 1774.  April, just one month before the meeting in May where Ensign Candee committed West Haven's support to the Bostonians.  It is through this Gideon that we trace our direct ancestry line (the Lanes).  And this Gideon we find in the "Rolls and Lists of CT Men in the War of the Revolution" put out by the Connecticut Historical Society.

The fourth brother was Timothy and he was born in 1751 and baptized by '52.  Timothy was part of the militia that went from Oxford/Derby to the Battle of Bunker Hill...remember all that digging of trenches that transpired at Bunker Hill?  Timothy was like that...a builder man.  He also helped build the meeting house in Oxford in 1794 and helped erect the Oxford House inn.  After he lived in Connecticut he moved upstate New York to a place called Pompey.

December was half over before the fifth brother, Samuel, graced Caleb and Lois, so it wasn't until March the following spring that he got baptized.  He also fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill even though in his civilian life he was a farmer and scythemaker.  In lucky 1777 he married Mabel Bradley.

Justus!  Justus came in 1756 and went on to become a deacon and marry Eunice Norton of Judea.  Connecticut.  They had seven children of their own!

It was two years after Justus' birth that Lois brought forth Nehemiah.  By then it was 1758 and around the same time there was a girl child born in the Andrus household to Ephraim and Sarah.  Nehemiah fell in love when he was twenty-two and he married Content Woodruff.  Slogged off to Ticonderoga with the other new Americans and fought bravely enough.  After the warring he moved to Saratoga and they called him Squire Candee.

By 1760 it was Job wiggling his way into the pile of brothers!  And then later in life into the Connecticut Legislature.  He'd become a Captain like Samuel his grandfather through the soldiering.  He was a Captain in the militia service and then "served in the army of General Washington, enlisting as a fifer, but raising to the rank of Captain before the conclusion of the war" (421, Comm. Bio).  He'd enlisted under Colonel Jabez Thompson when he was 17 in 1776 and in February of 1779 he enlisted in Captain Phineas Bradley's Company of Matrosses Artillery.  In 1780 he enlisted in Canfield's Militia Regiment at West Point.  According to Ms. Sarah Candee Fairchild, Job's "soul-stirring anecdotes of the great struggle which began in 1776, were full alike of pathos and humor, and to listen to their narration was one of [....] [the] great pleasures in early life" (421 Comm. Bio).  Job, too, received a pension from the "General government."  Both he and his brother Samuel drew pensions from that part of Derby that became Oxford.

And Job...he married Miss Sarah Benham of Middlebury in the fall of 1784.  Although they got married in the town of Southbury (according to the Commemorative Biographical Record of New Haven County, 1902).  Both Sarah and Job joined the Church at Oxford where they resided in 1788.  In the end, it was Job who was the last surviving brother of the nine.  He was buried in Oxford Congregational Cemetery in December of 1845.

Forever the baby brother it was Daniel who rounded out the sons at number nine.  Lois was forty-one years old by that time and she survived!  She chose the name Daniel after that of her father--Daniel Mallery.  Daniel Mallery had married Abigail Trowbridge and been a loyal family man.  And little Daniel turned out much the same.  He married Lydia Wilmot and together they raised half a dozen Candee.  In 1774, Daniel was only twelve with eight older brother role models plus all the Cande men who'd come before him in early America.  Daniel, too, moved north as the new lights began fighting in earnest with the old lights.  He lived not far from Timothy.

The history books give us Caleb and Lois Cande as "farming people" who gave to earliest America their nine sons, one and all.  This is why Baldwin quoted the Army and Navy Journal (of March 1880), "All of the children of Caleb were born subjects of Great Britain and all of them, we believe, served in the Revolutionary Army.

At the time Baldwin's genealogy book came out it was a John Candee who was living on Caleb's farm ;)

Both Caleb and Lois are buried in Jack's Hill Cemetery.  Lucky 1777 had it's share of sorrow when Patriarch Caleb died that autumn.  Lois lived on for another thirteen years, no doubt, busy with the golden year duties of grand/mothering.


We have plans to connect this post place to a few different links/directions on the internet.  We'll get to it and we have some graphics to locate and place in here as well.