One Rhode Island Family

Jesse and Sarah Andrews’ children in the census

Recently I decided to do a search in the 1830 Federal Census for the Andrews children that appear to be missing from Jesse and Sarah Andrew’s home and farm in Ashford, Connecticut.  Of course, I don’t know their names or anything, they are just a merry band of tick marks from early census records.

Jesse and Sarah are related to me in the following way:  their daughter Hannah Andrews (1819-1878), her daughter Emma Luella Lamphere (1857-1927), her son Russell Earl Darling (1883-1959), and his daughter, my grandmother, Edna May Darling (1905-1999).

Jesse and Sarah married in 1795. Here is what I know of their children from census records:

• 1800 –  1 male under 10, 2 females under 10 = 3
• 1810 –  3 males under 10, 1 male 10-15, 1 female under 10, 2 females 10-1 5 = 7
• 1820 –  3 males under 10, 2 males 10-16, 2 females under 10, 1 female 10-16, 1 female 16-26 = 9    (1 person engaged in agriculture, 5 persons engaged in manufactures)
• 1830 – only the two adults

To guess when each child was born, I spaced them out evenly between the periods when they first appeared in the census (in the Under 10 categories).  It would look something like this:

first group, could be in any order:

• girl b. 1796
• boy b. 1797
• girl b. 1799

second group, could be in any order:

• boy b. 1801
• girl b. 1803 – could be Diana [this is a theory, based on matching her possible grandmother’s name]
• boy b. 1806
• boy b. 1809 – could be Benjamin [almost certainly their child]

last group (and I know the last two):

• boy b. 1811
• girl b. 1813
• boy b. 1815
• boy b. 1816 – this was Alden
• girl b. 1819 – this was Hannah

Putting it together in this way shows that they had 12 children.  I don’t even see a lot of room for additional children who may not have survived.  Either the number is around 12, or there are other factors involved here that I don’t know about.  Since I happen to know that the youngest two claimed Jesse as their father, I doubt that other children are mixed in here.

So the mystery remains, where did the children go in 1830 – some barely teenagers – and my best theory is that some of them moved to Norwich, a thriving mill town at that time.  Perhaps the younger ones stayed with newly-married older siblings.  I base this on Hannah’s marriage in 1838 to a Norwich resident, and her husband’s appearance in the 1840 census in Norwich, as well as the five “engaged in manufactures” family members from the 1820 census – the offspring appeared to have some home industry, or perhaps they traveled to a workplace every day.  Other possibilities for finding industrial work would have been Killingly or Plainfield, Connecticut.

A search in Norwich

I searched the 1830 federal census records in Norwich, Connecticut for anyone named Andrews.  Of course, there could be married daughters, but I don’t know their names.

Running a search in Ancestry.com for last name “Andrews” in the 1830 census for Norwich brought up one result – Elisha Andrews.  Unfortunately, the quality of the page view was very poor.

There are several things I know about this census section:

• the handwriting was not so much bad as a little strange – note the “L” in “Ladd,” second entry from the bottom
• This image is suffering from improper lighting or exposure – the overly light areas can’t be due to completely faded-out ink
• The transcription is bad (and you can hardly blame them)
• If the images and transcription are bad, there COULD be a lot more Andrews in the Town of Norwich section.

I turned to Internet Archive (www.archive.org – a free site) to see if their images were better than this one.  They won’t have an index of the contents, just the images of the NARA microfilm rolls, county by county, so I searched for:  “1830 Census New London.”  It was the first item that came up –

Population schedules of the fifth census of the United States, 1830, Connecticut [microform] (1969).  Reel 0010 – 1830 Connecticut Federal Population Census Schedules – New London County

There were 566 pages.  I looked at the Ancestry.com page to find a page number.  Ancestry’s source notes gave the page as 127, but a page number 252 could ALSO clearly be seen.  Turns out, 252 was the page number I needed.  Here is the same section of the page, this time from page 252 in the Internet Archive copy:

The Internet Archive copy is completely readable (except for the weird handwriting).  With no index there, I had to read the records for Norwich myself, page by page.  Norwich City was on pages 192 – 228.  Town of Norwich was on 230 – 254.  It didn’t take long.  No more Andrews were found.

A search in the county

After finding so little in Norwich, I concluded I needed to look at a wider area.  To search more broadly for Andrews, and make a list of possible Andrews children, I chose the two most likely counties:  Windham, where Ashford and Plainfield were, and New London, where Norwich was.  I wanted to see who was in the 1830, 1840, and 1850 census.

I took long lists from the Ancestry index like this:

I pasted the text into Excel like this:

I added “Andrew” and “Andrews” entries (and a few other various spellings) from both counties in 1850 to this spreadsheet, resulting in about 130 entries.   I then eliminated (from the 1850 portion of the list) all women that were married to an Andrews.  From vital records, I added some men who had married Andrews women, and also used the vital records to eliminate some Andrews from further considerations as Jesse’s children.  I also added in the names from 1830 and 1840 census records in those counties.

Some steps that helped me eliminate some Andrews on the list from further consideration:

• limited the list to those born between 1795 and 1822
• Limited the birthplaces to Rhode Island or Massachusetts, or, if close to 1820, possibly Connecticut
• looked at military and pension records on Fold3
• looked for Connecticut death records.
• looked for marriage records to see if parents were named
• looked in newspaper notices at Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank

In the end, I had about 20 possible Andrews offspring.

• Abby Andrews m. Gurdon Bushnel
• Alden Andrews – definitely a son
  
• Amaret Andrews m. John Phelps
• Benjamin B Andrews – very likely to be a son; mother Sarah lived with him later on
  
• Cordelia F Andrews – seems possible because she married Bradford Lyon in Ashford, however, there was an Ephraim Andrews there who could have been her father.
  
• Diana Andrews – married Peleg Arnold.  Seems possible because of her grandmother being Dinah/Diana. 
  
• Erastus Andrews
• George R Andrews
• Gideon G Andrews
• Gilbert Andrew
• Hannah Andrews – definitely a daughter
• Harris Andrew
• Huldah Andrews m. George Smith
• Jane Andrews m. Hazard Rodman
• Mary W Andrews m. William Davis
• Nathaniel Andros
• Parish Andrews  (possibly Paris)
• Rebecca Andrews m. Jason Pray
• Susan S Andrews m. Griggs Weeks
• Sylvester Andrew
• Thomas Andrews
• Wheaton Andrew  (possibly Weeden)

Where things stand

Some factors that are holding me back:

• While I know Jesse had a brother named Christopher, his father’s home showed other children, and I have never identified Jesse’s other siblings.  His father was Phillip, and his mother’s name is unknown, and may possibly be Freelove.
• I have a Warwick, R.I. family I suspect may be Sarah Arnold’s. The father is almost definitely Joseph (that is from her marriage record), and the correct family may be Joseph Arnold and Dinah (sometimes Diana) Whitman.   Only five children are mentioned for them in The Arnold Memorial by Elisha Steve Arnold, and none were recorded in Warwick or East Greenwich, Rhode Island.   The five are Nicholas, Josiah, Joseph, Ann, and John.
• The descendants of the original John Andrews family grew and spread west from North Kingstown and East Greenwich into the large town of Coventry.  Some of those Coventry families spread into eastern Connecticut – meaning all these Andrews may be distant cousins, and those who were recorded in the census as born in Rhode Island may easily have been from the Coventry families.

Some factors that have come to light in this investigation:

• There was an older Benjamin Andrews in Plainfield in 1830 who had a household of 15, mostly young people.  I have long thought Benjamin was a common name among the Andrews, and I suspect he could be a relative, and possibly be housing the children – perhaps they worked at a local mill, or were being educated.
• I looked in vain for a Phillip Andrews or a Joseph Andrews, who would be the children named for the grandfathers.  Perhaps such children existed but died fairly young.
• Of the female Andrews I have found in Windham County marriage records, all seem to disappear from Windham before 1850.  One or two of the  husbands died, but clearly 1810-1840 was a time of exodus from these southern New England counties, as people headed north or west.  I suspect many are to be found in Vermont, New York State, Ohio, Michigan, etc.

So, without siblings for either parent, and only two children absolutely identified – Alden and Hannah – it is hard to make sense of this list.

Next steps

• Compile a research list and systematically go through each of the names on my list, noting results.  If there were any low-hanging fruit on these folks identifying parents, I would have found it already.
• Keep trying to identify the parents of Diana Andrews’ husband Peleg Arnold.
• Look again for probate records back in Warwick and East Greenwich which might mention any of these people.
• Investigate any records for the Joseph Arnold I am pursuing.  I did not find Warwick probate records for him in 1819, or deeds any time around 1819, but I need to keep looking.  Perhaps he died in East Greenwich.
• Be open minded about additional, more poorly documented (if such a thing is possible) Joseph Arnolds who could be Sarah’s father.
• Ultimately, use any of Jesse and Sarah’s children that I can confirm to help me determine more about his father Phillip’s family and also details of Sarah’s family.
• Look again at Jesse’s brother Christopher Andrews, to identify the names he used for his children which appear NOT to belong to his wife’s family.
• Ultimately, I find myself very curious about whether my great-great grandmother Hannah Andrews was a cotton mill worker as a girl.  I wonder if I will ever know?

One name study, anyone?

Of Jesse and Sarah’s 12 children, I have two children identified, two are serious possibilities, and that leaves 18 possibilities for the other 8 spots.  Of course, they may have left children behind in Warwick (Warwick/East Greenwich were loaded with Andrews), or the mysterious spot in Massachusetts they may have stopped in before moving to Ashford.  But I feel like a couple of these may be right.

This is starting to look and feel like a study of all descendants of John Andrews, the (supposedly) original Scottish settler who died in North Kingstown, Rhode Island in 1693.  The more I study these obscure people, the more I know there is a lot more work to be done.  When the Rhode Island Historical Society Library re-opens gradually over the next month or two, I am going to get in there and photograph the manuscript they have on this family.

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 — Illustration from The Art of Homemaking, 1898.