Ancestry Magazine

When Brenton was growing up in New England , he learned from his uncle that they were both closely related to some legendary characters from the “Wild West”—the Dalton Gang of Coffeyville, Kansas-raid fame. Several years ago during a family gathering, the subject of the family’s near kinship to the Dalton Gang was being discussed when an elderly relative exclaimed “It’s nothing to be proud of!”

Michael, on the other hand, discovered an ancestor’s name the old fashioned way—while thumbing through the newly published Maine State Prisoners, 1824—1915. Wanting to keep up-to-date on resources for research, he casually flipped through the book and unexpectedly discovered the name of his own ancestor.

For some family historians, being descended from upstanding citizens and patriots is key. But others of us prefer a more colorful brand of ancestor or kinsman—the proverbial black sheep. Be it a pirate, witch, counterfeiter, bootlegger, or bank robber, the black sheep is increasingly becoming a sought-after member of many families.

According to Jeffrey Scism, founder of the International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists (IBSSG), “People are fascinated with the details and motivations. A family black sheep is the most personal mystery. It involves real people, relatives and others, and it has meaning to a person’s life. A black sheep in the family gives the research more than a flat two-dimensional aspect, it gives the history character (and characters).”

Sometimes black sheep ancestors strike a chord of pride in their descendants. Marie E. Daly fondly r ecalls the antics of her Irish great-great-grandmother, Peggy (McGlinchy) Kelly, who, with two other women, threatened a priest with a pitchfork, causing him to fall in the Hillsborough River on Prince Edward Island . The priest, Father John MacDonald, was a landlord who had failed to deliver on promises of cleared lands and low rent, and who built houses and provisions for only one year. When the women saw him approaching in a boat to collect their rent, they went out with pitchforks to prevent his landing. Wild waving of pitchforks and oars ensued, and, before long, Father MacDonald ended up in the water, uninjured but considerably embarrassed.

Revenge of the Rakes and Rogues
Rather than shunning black sheep ancestors, a number of people have begun to celebrate their disreputable kinsmen and even aid others in their searches for similar odd ducks.

While his maternal ancestors were conventional, professional genealogist James W. Warren was surprised to discover that his paternal ancestors were, as he says, “all wayward.”

Warren ’s interest was piqued when he started to realize that the family stories he had heard in childhood were at conflict with information he was uncovering about his paternal line. In time, Warren discovered a completely new family background.

To his surprise, Warren found that his grandfather Michael was a bootlegger from the Ozarks. Michael was also a convicted counterfeiter who had attempted to change a $1 bill into a $10 bill, but, as a newspaper reported, it was a “very poor imitation.” For a per iod of about ten years, Michael was a fugitive from the law, living in Arizona under an assumed name. Further research by Warren revealed that the thread of scandal in the family stretched all the way back to the Revolutionary War period when ancestors were lurking “in the mountains, just one step ahead of the law.”

A favorite black sheep from the colonial period is Dr. Seth Hudson, a man who intrigues his own Hudson descendants to this day and is treated in the new book, Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in Boston, 1630—1775 [see Selected Sources from the Deep (for Researching Black Sheep Ancestors) for more information].

Hudson came to Boston in 1761 with a bold counterfeiting scheme. During his scam, Hudson lived extravagantly in the guise of a wealthy traveler. He obscured his unsavory reputation and insinuated himself into Boston society, where, as a world-class con man, he successfully targeted some of the town’s most prominent merchants as his victims in a treasury note rip-off. But before he could take flight with his ill-gotten gains, Hudson ’s fraud was discovered. He was tried and convicted. So notorious was he that his trial attracted unprecedented interest, and his subsequent punishment at Boston ’s pillory and whipping post caused a major commotion immortalized in a humorous engraving by Nathaniel Hurd.

Hudson , however, did not take to incarceration and, in an escape attempt, nearly burned down the jail. Later, after serving only four months of a one-year prison term, he was released and shipped out on the HMS Launceston bound for England , to the great relief of the townspeople of Boston . He later returned to New York and died of smallpox in miserable circumstances.

In 2001, a hereditary society was formed specifically to commemorate the contributions of pirates and privateers to American history. As Timothy Lester Jacobs, the founder of the Order of Descendants of Pirates & Privateers, says, “One can be descended from saints and sinners, but I think the sinners are more fun.”

Jacobs himself believes he may have an ancestor, Richard Singleton, who was a pirate, although he’s not certain. “Richard Singleton was a ferryman in New London in the 1600s. He left some clues that he might have been a pirate, including a stint in the Carolinas , then a hotbed for pirate activity,” notes Jacobs.

Says Jacobs, searching through chancery and admiralty records may be the best place to find a family pirate, although pirate ancestors are notoriously difficult to identify—one of the reasons Jacobs may be having problems finding more information about Singleton. According to Jacobs, the issues arise from the tendency of pirates to use aliases. “Often we can only identify pirate captains,” he says.

Privateers—men who were sanctioned by their government to privately attack or capture other vessels—are, by contrast, much more commonplace ancestors. So far, says Jacobs, all members of the Order of Descendants of Pirates & Privateers have joined as privateer descendants.

But Jacobs is not just interested in the maritime black sheep in his family. He also celebrates the memory of another wayward ancestor, John Billington, a Mayflower passenger who was hanged in 1630 for the murder of another man. “I have five Mayflower lines,” he says, “but I joined the Mayflower Society first on my Billington line.”

Christopher Child has an interesting black sheep ancestor in William Healey of Cambridge (ca. 1613—83). Married five times, Healey was involved in several court proceedings over his temperament with his fourth spouse (although new evidence suggests the allegations against him may have been fabricated). Later he became keeper of the Cambridge jail. But in 1682, at around seventy years of age, William Healey was discovered with a pregnant inmate at the jail in compromising circumstances. He was dismissed from his post and spent the winter in the very same cell he was originally employed to guard.

Descended from a Witch
Catherine Moore is an eighth great-granddaughter of Mary Perkins Bradbury—a witch, according to the Salem witch trials.

Mary’s husband was Captain Thomas Bradbury, a prominent member of the Salem community and one of the original proprietors of the town of Salisbury . Mary’s daughter Jane was married to Henry True, who served as a representative to the General Court.

Mary’s principal accusers on her charge of witchcraft were the members of the Carr family. George Carr claimed Mary turned herself into a blue boar and attacked his horse as he rode by her house. William Carr claimed Mary caused his brother John to sicken and die. (In actuality, John Carr had been courting Henry True’s younger sister, and Henry and Jane objected to this courtship, so when John s ubsequently died, his family decided Jane’s mother Mary was the cause of all their troubles. The witch trials presented a great opportunity to get even.)

As part of her defense, Mary’s attorney presented a petition signed by 110 members of the Salem-Salisbury community attesting to her good character. Mary maintained her innocence throughout the ordeal. She was convicted and jailed in spite of her protestations, but her family reportedly bribed the jailer to look the other way one night while they spirited Mary away.

Says Moore of her sordid family tree, “I love the cachet of having such a notorious but well-liked person decorating my family tree, but mostly I love the corollary benefit of the transcripts and records of the trial. There is a wealth of information about Mary and her life, her family, and her neighbors, depositions and testimony in her own words, family relationships and interactions revealed. The trial provides a crystal clear window into the life of my family more than three hundred years ago.”

Invasion of the Researchers
Jeffrey Scism of IBSSG reminds us to keep in mind that black sheep are people, too. The incident(s) which make them black sheep are almost always singular events in their lives—lives that must be reviewed in totality.

“The first step is to get the people you interview to see that whatever made the black sheep . . . unacknowledged or rejected in family matters, is `just history’ and [the events or incidents] should be recorded factually,” says Scism. “It may be the only way to set the rec ord straight, and it should be factually supported as a non-judgmental report of events. Joe Friday said it best—`Just the Facts,’ with a clearly annotated coverage of the `rumor,’ if you choose, so those who follow know that you are aware of what was rumor, and what was true,” Scism continues.

As witch-descendant Moore points out, one of the benefits of researching nefarious family members is the possibility that more information may be available regarding them. Many of these scalawags faced criminal or civil trials for their deeds. The resulting court records can shed light on their origins and their family members or, at the very least, provide insight into their character.

Not all scurrilous individuals were tried in court. But the society our ancestors lived in was often very gossipy, and as such many other records exist to help in finding a black sheep ancestor’s story. People kept diaries that may contain goldmines of information. Remember, though, that the people writing these diaries were writing from their perspectives—the source was rarely impartial.

Newspapers have always included tales of embezzlers, cheats, thieves, and other scandals, as have magazines. Often, however, these sources had a tendency to dramatize events, so be sure to try to document from other sources (such as transcriptions of court proceedings) every fact stated in a newspaper article.

Historical journals as well as genealogical journals and magazines can also provide valuable information on black sheep ancestors. In Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 108, 1996 , for example, is an article entitled “New Light on the Bathsheba Spooner Execution” by Deborah Navas. In the article, Navas provides a brief outline of the events surrounding Bathsheba’s involvement in the murder of her husband, Joshua. (Bathsheba was subsequently hanged for her crime. Revelation of the fact that she was five months pregnant at the time of her execution subsequently led to a ban on execution of women in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.) If Bathsheba were perched in your family tree, this would be required reading.

And, lastly, you might get lucky and get the story directly from the source—some black sheep left autobiographical accounts of their lives and criminal careers. A great example is The Autobiography of a Criminal , by Henry Tufts, a scoundrel from New Hampshire who perpetrated innumerable crimes in the colonies in the late 1700s. His autobiography was reprinted as recently as 1993.

Tales from the Family Historian
Researching the antics of a black sheep ancestor can provide a welcome respite from comparatively drab lists of dates and places of vital events. A black sheep ancestor can add a new dimension to your family history and shed new light on your family. Keeping events in perspective and including them as part of the entirety of an ancestor’s life, however, will give you and everyone a more accurate picture of these colorful characters.

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D. Brenton Simons is Chief Operating Officer of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston , the oldest nonprofit genealogical organization in the United State s . The author of Witches, Rakes, and Rogues , he is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Michael J. Leclerc is Director of Special Projects at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and is Vice President of Administration of the Federation of Genealogical Societies.

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The Two Faces of Genealogical Sources

Not sure you’ll find information on a black sheep ancestor in a local history or genealogy journal? A keyword search of the PERiodical Source Index (PERSI) for “killer” returned 23 results; “thief” returned 43 results; “pirate” returned 63 results; “robber” returned 65 results; and “murder” returned 1,242 results.

And, as you’re looking for your black sheep ties, consider enlisting help. In 2004, genealogists James W. Warren and Sharon DeBartolo Carmack founded a hereditary society, Descendants of Wayward Ancestors, to help other family historians find their often slippery or disreputable ancestors. The organization’s plans include the production of a quarterly newsletter and annual yearbook aptly titled Ancestors Hanging on Your Family Tree. Visit www.waywardancestors.com for more information.

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Quest for the Black Sheep Keyword searches of newspapers can be a very useful tool for discovering black sheep stories about your ancestors. To get started, go to the Ancestry.com homepage and select the “Newspapers & Periodicals” link. There you will find a space for a keyword search or a name search. Plug in a term like “thief,” and you could get hundreds of thousands of results (more than 155,000 in this case) in dozens of newspapers. Other frequently used sources include court records, diaries, local histories, and obituaries.

Sometimes more unusual sources can be helpful in black sheep research. In early Massachusetts , for example, such stories often appeared in broadsides—inexpensively produced scandal sheets that appealed to a mass market. A great reference work for broadsides is Broadsides, Ballads &c. Printed in Massachusetts , 1639—1800 (Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, volume 75). Boston : Massachusetts Historical Society, 1922.

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Selected Sources from the DeepOrganizations

Descendants of Wayward Ancestors
“Every family has ancestors or cousins who were criminals, misfits, mysteries, or just plain odd,” states this new hereditary organization. Formed to aid its members in researching, documenting, and enjoying black sheep of every variety, Descendants of Wayward Ancestors is cu rrently accepting charter membership applications.

International Black Sheep Society of Genealogists
An active chat list is maintained by this Society for the purpose of discussing black sheep ancestors and relatives.

Order of Descendants of Pirates and Privateers

Websites

Discover links to hundreds of paid and free sources on the Internet for finding scandalous ancestors. In addition to the United States , there are links to sources from Canada and the United Kingdom , and information on international pirates and buccaneers.

My Favorite Ancestor or Black Sheep
Stories of rascals and do-gooders alike, this ongoing series of stories is contributed by members of the New England Historic Genealogical Society to its magazine, website, and free weekly e-mail newsletter.

Notorious Ancestors
“Do you have a colorful character in your family tree?” asks this website. Visitors are invited to post stori es about renegades, rebels, and rogues uncovered in their family history.

Black Sheep Ancestors

Books

Legal Executions in New England, 1623—1960 and Legal Executions in New York , 1639—1963
By Daniel Allen Hearn
These volumes offer sketches of hundreds of individuals tried and executed in New England and New York from the colonial period to the 1960s for crimes ranging from murder and larceny to adultery and witchcraft.

The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630—1730
By George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds
Originally published in 1923 as a publication of the Marine Research Society in Salem , Massachusetts , this work details the lives of dozens of pirates with New England connections. Based in large part on original documents, this book contains many maps and engravings as well as information on pirates from Dixey Bull to Samuel Bellamy.

Researching Your Famous and Infamous Ancestors
By Rhonda McClure
A valuable resource for discovering new sources for researching your black sheep ancestors and tips for how to record them in your family history.

Runaways, Deserters, and Notorious Villains: From Rhode Island Newspapers, vols. 1 and 2
By Maureen Alice Taylor and John Wood Sweet
Says Amazon.com, this book contains “a wealth of fascinating detail on the lives, clothing, ages, marital status, and `moral’ conditions of many Rhode Island citizens and strangers who otherwise are unknown.” For the family historian, this book may prove an invaluable find—the majority of the people featured in this book never appeared in census records or vital records.

Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in Boston , 1630—1775
By D. Brenton Simons
When most people think of Boston between its founding in 1630 and the height of the American Revolution, they probably imagine a procession of Puritan ministers in black followed by patriots like Paul Revere on horseback. This book may change a few minds and shock a few others. Said John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University of Witches, Rakes, and Rogues, “Great stories, astonishing characters, dastardly (often quite amusing) deeds : thus the main elements of Brenton Simons’s wonderful assemblage from and about the early history of Boston ” the research is as deep as the stories are fascinating; in sum, a remarkable achievement!”