A recent posting by my fellow Wolcott historian and the
president of the Wolcott Historical Society, Florence Goodman, on the Wolcott
History website (www.wolcotthistory.org)
detailed their receiving of an old Bible that had belonged to Nancy Hall, a
Wolcott resident from nearly 200 years ago. There were a number of points in
that article that got my interest, and which related to many of my previous
blogs on Wolcott History, so I thought I’d write this as a supplement to that
article.
Nancy [Minor] Hall was the wife of Deacon Orrin Hall. She
was born in 1798 and he in 1797. Since Wolcott had only been incorporated in
1796, they were two of the earliest babies born in Wolcott after it had been renamed
from Farmingbury. As I noted in an earlier blog (*1), Wolcott was not a very
large place back then as the population was only 948 people in 1800. Nancy’s
family of her parents and eight children would have been over 1% of the entire
population of the town!
Because of the size of the town, many people in town were
related to each other (and to me) (*2). Nancy was my 3rd cousin (5
times removed) (*3) as she is the great-great-granddaughter of Stephen Upson,
my great*7 grandfather (*2). Orrin was also my 3rd cousin (5 times
removed) (*4), being the great-great-grandson of Samuel Beecher, another of my
great*7 grandfathers (*2). The Upson, Minor, Beecher, and Hall families were
all prominent families in the town.
I’ll let you read the article yourself for further details,
but the end of the article had two “mysteries” that I’d like to explore
further.
The first “mystery” is where Nancy and Orrin attended
church. Since the only church in town was the Congregational Church that had
been started in 1773 (*1), it would be tempting to give a simple answer. But I
always like to have proof for the answers I give. In Samuel Orcutt’s seminal
work, The History of Wolcott, one can find the answer. On page 114,
Orrin Hall is listed among the small group of men who subscribed to a fund in
1836 to hire a new pastor for the Congregational Church. So Orrin and Nancy
would certainly have been members of this church.
The second “mystery” is a little more involved and asks how
the Bible ended up in a yard sale in Rhode Island where it was purchased about
40 years ago. Since Nancy’s son, Heman, died six years before Nancy and her
daughter, Harriet, never married, this may be a difficult one to solve.
However, if the names/dates which are in the Bible can be researched, then we
might be able to find who might have made those entries and get a better idea
of where it might have gone initially. But without that further information,
this will have to remain a mystery for now.
References
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