portraits: paintings and photographs

A Portrait of Lois Orne As a Girl

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There is a lovely portrait of Lois Orne, as a girl, by the painter, Joseph Badger. It currently hangs in the Worcester Art Museum. Lois would go on, at the age of seventeen, to marry William Paine.

 

lois-orne

Lois Orne, age 21 months, by Joseph Badger

 

Joseph Badger
Born Charlestown, Mass., March 14, 1707/8.
Died Boston, May 11, 1765.

Lois Orne (Mrs. William Paine), 17571
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 20 11/16 in. (65.1 x 52.5 cm)
Eliza S. Paine Fund in memory of William R. and Frances T. C. Paine, 1971.102

Provenance, References, and Exhibition History, here.

I am excerpting below the accompanying scholarly essay, provided by the museum. No author or attribution is mentioned, but if I find one, I will add it. It includes a truly helpful biography of Lois, and useful context regarding her husband’s life and career.

 

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A Few Prescott Anecdotes

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These are just some things I liked… Stories about Prescott.

Before we get to them, allow me a brief digression.

The dogged pursuit of names and dates and places of birth in genealogy really couldn’t interest me less. Taken on their own, they’re about as tantalizing as grocery receipts. Maybe a little more, but not much.

However, they do serve a purpose… And that purpose is not entirely dissimilar from the scaffolding material scientists and marine activists drop into the ocean to encourage the rebirth of coral reefs. Put the armatures in, and, the hope is, the life will find its way back.

It’s recollections like the ones below that are for me the living, breathing, color-filled reef of family history research…

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Photographs, here and below, are of the statue of Prescott at the Bunker Hill Monument.

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from the Prescott Memorial, pp. 58-9, footnotes,

 

Dr. Oliver Prescott, Jr., who was a nephew of Colonel William Prescott, and intimate in his family, and who was a young man at the time of the Revolution, had frequently heard his uncle, the colonel, relate a variety of anecdotes and incidents in his experience while in the army. He subsequently wrote sketches of the three brothers, (to wit) his father, Dr. Oliver, senior, and his uncles, Colonel William and Judge James, for his own use and amusement and that of his family, in which be has recorded many interesting anecdotes and incidents in their lives and experi­ence riot hitherto published, all of Which he saw or beard them relate. These sketches are now in the possession of his daughter, Miss Harriet Prescott of Cambridge, Mass., from which she has very kindly permitted the following extracts to be selected:

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Thomas Hickling and our Portugese Relatives

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Continuing our look at the colonial forebears of the Lawrence family, we come to Thomas Hickling, the U.S. Vice Consul in the Azores during  the late 18th and very early  19th century.

(Hickling was also William Hickling Prescott’s maternal grandfather, and – obviously – the source of the historian’s middle name. It’s worth  noting that when the young William H. Prescott was recuperating from his eye injury at Harvard, he went on an extended tour of the world, and stopped to see his grandfather, still living, in the Azores. There he would have met his Portuguese cousins.)

The following is from an Ivens family genealogy site, accessed in the mid-1990s, and which sadly is now a dead link. It appears, though, that either the same author, or a family member connected to that author, has continued the site at a new URL.

(The text below has been lightly edited for clarity.)

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There is a register of the Hickling family in the first English national census of the population in 1273, but unfortunately it was impossible for us to establish any direct relation (that is believed to exist) between the names in that register and the one of William Hickling (1704-1781 ) born at Sutton Bonington, Nottinghamshire, who emigrated to Boston in North America in 1730 where he worked as a shipwright.

In 1734, he married Sarah Sale (1714-1782), great-great-granddaughter of the Elder Thomas Leverett (1585-1650 ) who emigrated from Boston, Lincolnshire to Boston in North America in 1633, and who is known to have had traced his descent to a man who lived in the reign of King John of England.

William Hickling and Sarah Sale were the parents of the mentioned Thomas Hickling. He [Thomas Hickling–LSL] was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 21st 1745, and at the age of 19 he got married to Emily Green (1733-1774 ), by whom he had a son, William, who was married to Sarah Bradford (1769-1840), descendant of William The Conqueror, and a daughter, Catherine, who married Judge William Prescott and was the mother of the famous American historian William Hickling Prescott ( 1796-1859 ).

There were some radical ideological differences between William Hickling and his son Thomas. The first was, as was natural in an English gentleman, a stanch loyalist, whilst his son was an admirer of George Washington and a supporter of the revolutionary party. So, his father fearing that Thomas might put all the family in trouble, sent him abroad to Ponta Delgada where he arrived in 1769. He left his wife behind and never returned to America.

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Family Memories of Samuel and Susanna Lawrence

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The following is the complete text of A Minute Man, by Mary Fosdick. Fosdick, was the daughter of Sarah Lawrence (Woodbury) Fosdick, daughter of Mary (Lawrence) Woodbury, daughter of Samuel and Susanna (Parker) Lawrence. I have included this in its entirety because, in spite of its children’s-book-like tone, and obvious license where dialogue is concerned, it as close as we will ever get to an actual oral history of our family during the Revolutionary War and the earliest days of the new United States.

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A MINUTE-MAN[1]

By Mary Fosdick

CHAPTER I

Captain Amos Lawrence was an estimable farmer in New England, who was born in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and at a suitable age married Miss Abigail Abbott. She brought him as part of her dowry various handsome pewter articles, among them several large plates, or platters, on which her initials were stamped or cut, as was the fashion in her day, a handsome hall clock with mahogany case and brass face, and other articles of household furniture; though, as her father was also a farmer, it is not probable that she brought Captain Lawrence very much else beside the bedding which every bride [was] expected to provide. As to her personal attractions I have no means of knowing. Though born in Boston’s neighborhood, Captain Amos Lawrence made his way to Groton, a thriving village farther inland, and there our minute-man was born in the spring of 1754. He was a bright boy, and “did well,” as people said, both as a son and brother at home and as a scholar in school; and when he had exhausted the best educational advantages the place then afforded, he went to work on a small farm, which he took on a mortgage, hoping probably to make it profitable enough to enable him to support a wife. Whether he had in mind the lady whom he afterward married, I am unable to state, but in his twenty-first year he became engaged to a handsome girl, a year younger than himself, whose acquaintance he probably made while visiting his grandparents Lawrence, as her stepfather lived in a town (Concord) adjoining the one in which his mother, Miss Abbott, had been born (Lexington); so we may naturally suppose that he desired to make the farm as successful as possible. His parents had other children, and having given him the benefit of the best educational facilities in Groton, could not afford to do more, though they must have realized that such a boy as he would have been glad to go through college, as at least two of his contemporaries did, and would be an honor to any profession, for he was beloved and respected by his fellow townsmen as few young men of his age were, and was as fond of books as if he had been a rich Tory’s son.

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Frontispiece

LSL

Clan Orig bnw

The family photograph at above was provided courtesy of Edward P. Lawrence. Individuals shown are as follows, from left to right:

Back row: James Lawrence, Marian Lawrence Peabody, Dorothy Lawrence, Harold Peabody

Middle row: Marion Peabody Lawrence, Martha Whitney Peabody, [picture of Sam Peabody], John Endicott Peabody

Front row: John Endicott Lawrence, Gertrude Lawrence Peabody, James Lawrence

Dated: 1918, in front of the summer house in Brookline, MA

For a diagram of who they were, and how they all relate see below:

Peabodys and Lawrences ifo House at Brookline copy

Clarification to the diagram above: Years after posting this, a product of some now-much-outdated genealogy software, I just realized the lines leading from Marion Lee (Peabody) Lawrence to her children, and the line leading from Harold Peabody to his child, are blurred, or overlap. This could cause some confusion. Pending an update/ redrawing of the diagram, Marion (and husband, James Lawrence) had three children: James, John, and Dorothy. Harold (and wife, Marian Lawrence) had one child: Gertrude Lawrence (Peabody) McCue.