Lives and Letters: Notebook of a Family Historian

By Christopher D. McManus

These pages distill some forty years of personal research on eight family lines. These family lines originated in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the West Indies. Arriving in America between 1630 and 1848, the families originally settled in New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and points west.
This narrative is enlivened and made more compelling by the inclusion of twenty-two personal letters and communications spanning nearly four hundred years.

The letters include communications sent from:
· Groton Hall, England about 1603
· Colonial Massachusetts in 1649
· Germany in 1791
· Guadeloupe, West Indies in 1798 and 1830
· rural Missouri in 1848-49
· New Orleans in 1863-64
· a Civil War camp during the siege of Atlanta
· Alaska during the 1898 gold rush
· China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900
· Berlin in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664161016

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Christopher D. McManus.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/27/2021

Xlibris

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Dedicated to the men, women, and children mentioned in these pages. We can glimpse only dimly their hopes and sorrows, struggles and accomplishments. I hope their lives serve to remind us that we are not self-made. We are the end product of their intentional and unintentional life lessons.

Whoever does not learn from the past is condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: Principal Lines

COX Family

DeCORMIS Family

DeLAUREAL Family

HORNSBY Family

KESSLER Family

McMANUS Family

RUPP Family

SHAW Family

Part II: Four Long Lines

FEAKE Family

FREY Family

WHITELOCK Family

WINTHROP Family

Appendix: Resting Places

Appendix: Hard-learned Lessons

Appendix: Some Sources

Acknowledgments

LETTERS

1. Star Venus, 1848: An imaginative valentine

2. Fredericktown, Missouri, 1849: Gold fever

3. Fort Laramie, 1849: Along the gold rush trail

4. Norfolk, 1820: Distress over a missing husband

5. Martinique, 1798: British army commission

6. Guadeloupe, 1830: French army commission

7. Kentucky, 1800 to 1804: A planter’s diary

8. St. Louis, 1862 to 1865: A doctor’s parole

9. On the ocean, 1780: Revolutionary sea-battle

10. Güttersbach, Germany, 1791: Letter to America

11. Circle City, Alaska, 1899: Mapping in winter

12. Tientsin, China, 1900: The Boxer Rebellion

13. Waterloo, Iowa, 1916: To a new mother

14. Berlin, 1989: The Wall has fallen

15. Atlanta, 1864: Siege of a doomed city

16. Macon, Georgia, 1865: A fallen soldier

17. New Orleans, 1863: Registered Enemy of the U.S.

18. New Orleans, 1864: Under enemy control

19. Connecticut, 1649: A lady fleeing for her life

20. 20. Baltimore, 1830: A fiancée’s letter

21. Baltimore, 1830: A mother’s letter

22. England, about 1603: Blustery and stormy passions

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Paternal ancestors. The four family lines, McMANUS, RUPP, KESSLER, and DeCORMIS, that merged to produce George H. ‘Mac’ McManus (1902-1978).

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Maternal ancestors. The four family lines, HORNSBY, DeLAUREAL, SHAW, and COX, that merged to produce Marie Louise ‘Nana’ McManus (1907-1991).

Introduction

Why study family history? First, because it is fun. Genealogy is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle are your ancestors, their siblings, their experiences, and where they lived. The assembled puzzle is a picture of yourself and of the myriad people and events that shaped you. Caution: The puzzle is still incomplete. More pieces of this puzzle will continue to emerge and the picture will get more complete.

Secondly, family history is a way to ground yourself in general history. Right now, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. It is helpful to remind oneself that our forebears endured similar epidemic conditions. Similarly, we can appreciate the economic and social conditions and the religious and political upheavals that dominated our ancestors’ lives, sometimes causing them to traverse oceans or other long distances.

For instance, religious tensions in American history are vividly brought home by the instance where Joseph DeCormis’ father lay in wait with a shotgun to kill his own son to prevent that son from renouncing his religious faith. The Civil War comes more to life when we study relatives who fought in that war, or Nicholas Hornsby, who was imprisoned for harboring Southern sympathizers, or Amelia Shaw, who lived in New Orleans under Union military occupation.

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This book is intended for two very different kinds of readers. Most readers will want only to skim a few pages to trace their own ancestors and so learn how various relatives fit in their family tree. For those readers, I have also added twenty-two engaging letters to help bring their ancestors to life. The letters span more than four hundred years and range from factual to humorous to dramatic or tragic. A very few readers will be family history buffs, and the extra details of places and dates are added for them, as clues to help their researches.

If you are reading this book, then you are presumably closely related to me. In that case, you are descended from at least three of the family lines in this book. If you are a McManus, Garrett, or Woodhull descendant of Nana and Mac McManus, you are descended from all twelve of the family lines in this book. If you are a McManus or Muldrow descendant of Tom and Marg McManus, you are descended from half of these lines. If you are a Dress or Bushong or Baumgardner or other descendant of Thomas and Sarah Kessler, you are descended from three of these family lines. If you are descended from Mary Alice Hicks or from James Oscar McManus, you are also descended from three of these family lines.

Several family names have been re-purposed as middle names among my relatives. These names include Hornsby, Kessler, DeCormis, and DeLaureal. As a result, I am sometimes asked where those family names fit into our past. This book is a preliminary answer. It includes the family histories of my eight great-grandparents: Cox, DeCormis, DeLaureal, Hornsby, Kessler, McManus, Rupp, and Shaw. I have added, as an appendix, four other family lines. That appendix answers the question, Who are our oldest known ancestors? Internet resources will, of course, reveal more distant ancestors.

The following notes are basically my genealogical notebook. Whenever I am researching new sources, I compare their information to what is written here. Being a notebook has several consequences. First, it means these pages are always a work in progress, both incomplete and subject to revision. Second, not all sources have equal reliability. Some may be questionable but contain useful clues or add color to the narrative. Third, the pages are heavily into dates and place names: these are the building blocks of family history research. Fourth, the style is terse. Fifth, there is some repetition of facts between chapters, so that chapters can be self-contained. And lastly, I have not researched each branch with equal care. The McManus, Hornsby, Kessler, DeCormis, and DeLaureal chapters have been meticulously researched over years or even decades; the remaining chapters are largely notes from a few books, articles, and census records.

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One note about dates. Some may appear strange to the reader, such as February 21, 1547/8 or 12 mo- 21- 1547/8. Before 1752, Protestant Europe and America used a calendar that considered March as the first month (1 mo-). So, February was the last month of the previous year. But some considered the new year to begin in January, so January and February dates were written in the form 1547/8, meaning 1547 if you consider the new year to begin in March and 1548 if you consider January instead. In addition, Quakers used notations like 7 mo- instead of September for religious reasons. Sometimes it is not clear whether 7 mo- means July or September, so I have copied the original notation where possible and preserved the ambiguity, rather than making a wrong guess.

One way to make the dates and places in the following biographies less daunting is to mentally compare marriage dates to the birth and death dates of each spouse. From these, you can calculate the couples’ ages at their marriages, how old each was when they died, and how long afterwards the surviving spouse lived. For instance, Sarah Whitelock survived Joseph DeCormis by more than a half century.

Several individuals mentioned in these pages were slave-owners. Where known, I have included that fact. The idea of owning other humans is abhorrent to us today. Each reader must decide how much slave-holding overrides an individual’s positive accomplishments and whether to judge that individual by the standards of their milieu. The same question applies to Washington, Jefferson, and other historical figures.

Chris McManus

Silver Spring, Maryland

February 2021

PART I

Principal Lines

COX Family

Connection: Cox → Shaw → Hornsby → McManus

James Cock emigrated from England to Long Island, New York by 1655. The family were early Quakers. The family name was variously spelled Cock, Cocks, Coke, and Cox.

Prenote: Most of my knowledge of Cox family history is based on a weather-beaten copy of a three-inch thick, olive-colored book, The Cox Family in America, published in 1912 by Rev. Henry Miller Cox. In addition, I have an album of visiting cards of various Cox and Shaw relatives that was passed down through my mother Nana (Hornsby) McManus. Nana carefully notated the pictures that she recognized. The earliest generations of the Cox family were Quakers and thus used the Quaker style of writing dates. See a fuller description of Quaker date styles in the introduction.

James Cock (1) m. Sarah Clarke

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Henry Cock (2) m. Mary Feke

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Benjamin Cock (3) m. Ann Brinton

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Moses Cock (4) m. Hannah Eavenson

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Caleb Cox (5) m. Louisa Catherine Heins

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Philip Augustus Shaw m. Amelia Louise Cox (6)

James Cock (1) was born about 1630 in England and died in Matinecock, Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York in 1699. His will was made July 23, 1699 and probated October 11, 1699. He married Sarah Clarke about 1654. His wife Sarah died 10 mo- 16- 1715.

James Cock apparently lived at Setauket, Long Island until 1661. In 1662, he purchased a house and land at Oyster Bay. The entire Oyster Bay area had been purchased less than ten years earlier from an Indian chief Mohenes for six Indian coats, six Kettles, six fathoms of wampum, six hoes, five hatchets, three pair stockings, thirty awl blades or muxes, twenty Knives, three shirts and as much Peague as will amount to four pounds Sterling.

The Cox Family in America (1912) surmises that the Cox family originated in Norfolkshire, England. The dual evidence is (a) mention in English records of 1479 and 1631 of Coke and Cock residents in Buckenham, a hamlet ten miles east of Norwich, and (b) mention in Long Island records of Buckeram to designate the lands occupied by descendants of James Cock. According to The Cox Family in America, a curious tradition concerns James’ arrival in America:

That the vessel on which James came over encountered a severe storm and was obliged to put into Bermuda for repairs; that during the storm when everything seemed disastrous, a severe shock was felt as of striking a rock, and the vessel leaked badly; but the united and persistent prayers of the passengers so prevailed that the ship was brought to land and on being hove out it was discovered that its side had been penetrated by the weapon of a great sword fish, which was broken by the shock and remained therein imbedded. (Shotwell, Colonial Ancestors)

Children of James Cock (1) and Sarah Clarke:

i. Mary Cock, born 11 mo- (January) 1- 1655, died at Flushing, Long Island, New York. Mary was the third wife of John Bowne. They were married on 4 mo- (June) 26- 1693. John Bowne was born 3 mo- 9- 1627 in Derbyshire England and died 10 mo- (December) 20- 1695 in Flushing. John Bowne’s first wife was Hannah Feake. Hannah was born about 1637 and died January 31, 1677/8 in London. This Hannah Feake was the aunt of Hannah and Mary Feke, two sisters who married Mary Cock’s brothers James and Henry.

John Bowne was arrested in New Amsterdam in 1662 for harboring Quakers and permitting them to hold meetings in his house. He was imprisoned for three months and sent to Holland to have his case heard. John was freed and returned to Long Island with sanction to practice his religion.

ii. Thomas Cock, born 8 mo- (October) 15- 1658 in Southold, Long Island and died before 1691 at Lusum, now Jericho, Long Island. Thomas married Esther Williams.

iii. Martha Cock, born 7 mo- (September) 1661 in Oyster Bay, Long Island and died 9 mo- (November) 1670 at Killingworth, Long Island.

iv. John Cock, born 11 mo- (January) 22- 1666 in Oyster Bay, Long Island and died in 1717. His second wife Dorothy Harcutt died in 1739.

v. Hannah Cock, born 6 mo- (August) 5- 1669 in Killingworth upon Matinecock, Long Island and died 4 mo- (June) 1755 at Germantown (now Philadelphia), Pennsylvania. Hannah married James Delaplaine on 6 mo- (August) 28- 1692. Her husband James died 4 mo- 1750. The couple moved from Long Island to Germantown.

vi. Sarah Cock, born 7 mo- (September) 20- 1672 in Killingworth upon Matinecock, Long Island and died at Flushing, Long Island. Sarah’s will was probated 2 mo- (April) 30- 1751. Sarah married Henry Franklin of Flushing. Henry was a bricklayer and landholder. His will was probated 8 mo- (October) 1711.

vii. James Cock, born 2 mo- (April) 4- 1674 in Killingworth upon Matinecock, Long Island and died 3 mo- (May) 26- 1728. James married Hannah Feke on 10 mo- (December) 1- 1698 in Buckram, Long Island. His wife Hannah was born 8 mo- (October) 8- 1675 and died 2 mo- (April) 28- 1750. Hannah was the sister of the Mary Feke who married James’ brother Henry.

*viii. HENRY COCK, born 2 mo- (April) 1- 1678 at Killingworth upon Matinecock and died there 3 mo- (May) 4- 1733. Henry married Mary Feke there on 6 mo- (August) 28- 1699. Henry’s wife Mary was born at Killingworth on 2 mo- (April) 30- 1678 and died there on 10 mo- (December) 30- 1715. Henry later married Martha Pearsall. Henry’s wife Martha was born 10 mo- (December) 10- 1681.

ix. Martha Cock, born 12 mo- (February) 13- 1680 at Killingworth on Matinecock and died 9 mo- (November) 25- 1750 at Germantown, Pennsylvania. Martha married Isaac Davis (or Deaves on Pennsylvania records) at Killingworth about 1700. Isaac died 7 mo- (September) 18- 1750 in Germantown.

Children of Henry Cock (2) and his first wife, Mary Feke:

i. Joseph Cock, born 2 mo- (April) 29- 1701 at Killingworth upon Matinecock and died unmarried and intestate about 1733 in Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania.

*ii. BENJAMIN COCK, born 10 mo- (December) 5- 1702 at Killingworth and died in Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, where his will was probated February 19, 1783. Benjamin married Ann Brinton at Birmingham Meeting on 8 mo- (October) 25- 1731. His wife Ann was born 7 mo- (September) 28- 1712 at Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania and died there. Ann was the daughter of Joseph Brinton (1692–1751) and Mary (Pierce) Brinton.

iii. John Cock, born 1 mo- (March) 22- 1705 at Killingworth and died at Buckram about 1778. John married Sarah Carpenter about 1729. John’s wife Sarah was born 6 mo- (August) 31- 1712. John was a house carpenter, farmer, and merchant. Like his Quaker relatives, John was sometimes fined for not participating in militia training. Once he was fined seven pounds of wool which I suppose to be worth ten shillings and six pence. Another time he was fined thirty-six pounds of bacon, worth eighteen shillings.

iv. James Cock, born 10 mo- (December) 24- 1707 and died between 1724 and 1733.

v. Amey Cock, born 12 mo- (February) 19- 1708/9 at Killingworth. Amey married Rees Jones on 1 mo- (March) 23- 1731/2 at Goshen (Pennsylvania) Meeting.

vi. Mary Cock, born 8 mo- (October) 8- 1711 at Killingworth. Mary married first Nathan Bane on December 27, 1735 at Christ Church in Philadelphia. He husband Nathan died in