My New England families have always intrigued me, and I’ve been fortunate that many of their lives during colonial and early American times have been the subjects of extensive research. I could even tie this into last week’s prompt, A Spot on the Map. There are lots of spots on maps of northwestern Europe, especially the British Isles, and what became the United States that are significant in my nomadic family. But I’m choosing one spot that is important to my New England family—Jericho, Vermont—and one family name: Samuel Day, father and son.
The elder Samuel Day was born in 1748 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut. He married Eunice Fay on June 16, 1772, and a month later, on July 15, Samuel Jr. was born. When war broke out in 1775, the elder Samuel joined the Patriot cause as a minuteman. Whether he served after that is a matter of conflicting records, but we know that by the end of the war he had become a Vermonter, living near the Massachusetts border in Whitingham, Vermont. Between 1800 and 1804, the family decided to move north to Jericho.
Being on the frontier, Jericho was a target of Indian raids, and one of the founding families, the Browns, suffered greatly, with family members being captured and ransomed. With peace, however, the farms were safe. By the time Samuel Day moved to Jericho, Vermont had become a state and settlements were expanding.
Meanwhile, Samuel Jr. was still in Connecticut, where he married his first cousin, Elizabeth Munger, in 1793 and remained there until after the 1800 federal census, when the family moved to Jericho. Samuel Jr. put down roots and got into the ashing business, making potash and lye from tree ashes, borrowing money to get started and expand his business.
Both Days then experienced hard times. Samuel Sr. became a widower when Eunice (Fay) Day died in 1808. In 1809, Samuel Jr.’s note came due, and when he could not make the payment, his property and goods were seized and sold. The young family may have stayed with Samuel Sr. for a while, but then Samuel Jr. was “warned out” of town.
As an aside, much of this information comes from the writings of Mary Richmond, who writes:
"Warning out of town" was a procedure used by local governments to rid their jurisdictions of undesirable people. What had Samuel done to warrant being labeled undesirable? The bad debt had been paid. There must have been more.
Did Samuel abuse Elizabeth? Was he often drunk? Did he owe debts to many people? Was he dishonest or a thief? Were his older boys a problem in the community? Did he have undesirable friends, maybe Indians, who aggravated his neighbors? Had he been practicing medicine and running afoul of local laws or other, more qualified doctors? There may be no way to ever know.
We do know more about the practice now. New Englanders in the early 1800s had inherited from their Puritan forebears the idea that communities had a responsibility to care for their members, but there were limits to their generosity when people became a financial risk. That appears to have been the situation with the Samuel Day Jr. family.
Samuel, Elizabeth, and their family ended up in Madison County, New York, where the Munger family had moved. Unfortunately, Elizabeth died in 1812 at the age of 38. As was common at the time, Samuel quickly remarried, this time to Hannah Robbins, who was ten years his junior. They had 11 children together and moved westward through New York State. Their daughter Hannah Robbins Day was born in Genesee County, New York, and the family eventually ended up in Huron County, Ohio, where Samuel Jr. became Dr. Samuel Day and practiced medicine.
Dr. Day died in 1839 at the age of 67. His second wife, Hannah, lived until 1845. Their daughter Hannah Robbins Day, of solid New England stock, married John Jay Fast, who was from solid German stock. They moved west and became the patriarch and matriarch of the Fast family of Barton County, Missouri.
And what about the family back in Jericho? Samuel Day lived to the ripe old age of 81, dying in 1829. Samuel Jr.’s brother Benjamin prospered in Jericho, and his son Hiram Benjamin married into the founding Brown family.
Two generations of Days, two very different experiences in Jericho, Vermont. For Samuel Sr., Jericho was his final home, and he lived out the rest of his life among friends and family. For Samuel Jr., however, Jericho was a place of misfortune. Yet he and his family were able to head west, reinvent themselves, and make their marks in New York and Ohio. Eventually, their descendants did the same in Missouri.
Picture:
Image generated by Google Gemini
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