The Abduction of the Tarbell Children: Part 1

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The account below, of the abduction of our relatives, niece and nephews of one ancestor, and cousins of another, by the Caughnawaga Mohawks, is in a way the most readable because it was written for a popular magazine. I found it, as a reprint, in The Groton Historical Series, edited by Samuel Green, Vol. III, pp. 126-134, Groton, 1893.

For an absolutely excellent historical look at the French practice of encouraging Native Americans to kidnap English settlers, and the terrible cultural identity crises this would provoke among the captives themselves, see The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos. The book is history that reads like a novel, and describes an actual abduction that took place in Deerfield, at roughly the same time the Tarbells were taken. It details the assimilation process many of the captives went through, as they became members of tribes, and their agonized choices of whether or not to later return to white society— as well as their white relatives’ anguish to have them back.

A brief note on language: The following is an account from the 19th century that draws on and quotes primary material written in the 18th century. There are multiple instances here of language that ranges from racially insensitive to downright repugnant, when read from a 21st century perspective. These passages are included – have been allowed to remain –  because they are integral to the meaning and substance of the unique and irreplaceable historical documents being referenced, and not because I as an individual in any way agree with or endorse these characterizations.

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from  Samuel Green, The Groton Historical Series,  Vol. III, pp. 126-134, Groton, 1893.

THE following story of a Groton family appeared originally in the “Boston Daily Traveller,” March 8, 1890. It was written by Mr. Stephen Olin Sherman, a well‑known journalist of Boston, who has been connected with that newspaper for nearly twenty years. Mr. Sherman is a son of the Reverend Dr. David and Catherine Bardwell (Moody) Sherman, and was born at Blandford in this State, on April 29, 1849. He entered Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1868, but left college during his Sophomore year.

A FATED FAMILY

A True Story of Provincial Life in New England

The Indian troubles which are known in our early history as “Queen Anne’s War” broke out in I702, when England resumed hostilities with France and Spain, and continued up to the time of the Peace of Utrecht, which was signed in 17I3. For many years prior to that time the Indians all along the northern border of New England had been trading with the French settlers in Canada, and with the Dutch in northern New York, neither of whom were friendly to the little English colonies, and the savages in many instances acting under the direction of the French, and always with their active sympathy and co‑operation, made frequent incursions upon the frontier, where even the utmost vigilance did not always insure the lives and property of the inhabitants.

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British Origins of the Lawrences of Groton and Boston: Saying Goodbye to a Much Loved Myth

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Prior to the 1630’s, we really know next to nothing about the Lawrence family’s actual origins in Great Britain.

The above statement is the bedrock truth on which I’m going to build the family history that follows. It’s a confession of ignorance. It’s not dramatic in any way and, for those who might care about such things – I am not one – it offers nothing in the way of prestige or bragging rights. But…it is good scholarship, and, having written it, I will sleep quite soundly at night.

For the last 150 years or so, there has been a fictitious tale circulating that our family’s first discernible ancestor was a humble Englishman, Robert Lawrence, who, in 1191 AD, as a reward for his services at the siege of Acre, was knighted by Richard the Lionheart (aka Richard I, aka Richard of Anjou). According to this story, Sir Robert Lawrence, after receiving his knighthood, returned home from war, and went on to become the progenitor of the Lawrences of Ashton Hall, and subsequently, the Lawrences of Wisset and Rumburgh, and, by the mid-17th century, the Lawrences of Watertown and Groton, Massachusetts.

The genealogical detective work that exposed this story as being at best unreliable and at worst a complete fabrication was performed in the early 1930s by the distinguished researcher G. Andrews Moriarty. Moriarty summarized his findings in an article appearing in The American Genealogist, titled “Pre-American Ancestries: V. The Lawrence Family of Groton and Boston, Massachusetts” [TAG 10 (Oct 1933): pp. 78 – 83)].

Unfortunately, despite Moriarty’s compelling and definitive debunking of the myth, the tale of Sir Robert Lawrence and the lineage that supposedly derives from him has been difficult to dispel.

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Introduction

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I read my first actual book when I was eight. It was called Smiling Hill Farm, and it related, in the simple language fit for new readers, the journey of a family in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century from their former home in a tame, domesticated Virginia, through the great dark eastern forests, to the wilderness of Indiana. It described the cabin they built at the top of a hill, their first attempts at buckskin clothing and soap-making, visiting peddlers, the relationship of the bachelor uncle to the rest of the family, malaria, first marriages. The beauty of the book, and what fascinated me about it, was that it didn’t stop there. It followed them all…through the first brick house, the weddings of grandchildren, a contingent heading west yet again, the deaths of the original mother and father, and on and on.

At the end of the book, a very old man, well into his nineties, plays with his own great-grandchildren. He is, if I recall correctly, the son of two of those settlers. In a wonderful parallel, the tall trees surrounding the house are in fact the saplings which had been left standing by the original family members, as they cleared the brush so many years before. Together the man and the children, in the shade of these trees, watch a highway being put in at the foot of the hill.

This book, told almost from the point of view of the land, was my first glimmer of what I can only call the unbroken flow of life: that the old man was once really a boy; that people whose names have almost been forgotten, or have been forgotten, were as real as I am in all respects; that our lives, far from being the discrete poems we tend to imagine them to be, are just lines, or perhaps at best verses, in a very long song.

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As a teenager visiting Boston, Massachusetts, and South Bristol, Maine, during the summer, I would prod my Grandmother Burgin to recite the names and stories of her family. She could recall from memory much of a nine generation oral history, passed from mother to daughter, that stretched back to Plymouth. At the end of the day, while pouring out orange bottled dressing for the salads, I heard about Robinsons, Frenches, Farrars, Shaws, and Sanborns. The thought of writing it down occurred to me, but before I could—the summer I was sixteen—my grandmother had a stroke and much of that oral history, lore more than names or dates, was lost. Gone.

It was then that I realized what had to be done, and I started saving whatever I could find: old envelopes with names written on the back, newspaper clippings, the nothings on which histories of this sort depend. Anything that would help me to rebuild the framework, and possibly those stories.

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The map is not the territory, and this score, this list you hold in front of you, is not the song. But my hope is that if you read between these lines, you may be able to hear something, faintly, and be able to recall it the next time you’re preparing dinner with some young relative.

Acknowledgments

Anon

This is the latest stage of what has always been a group effort and I have received assistance from many. Particular thanks, though, go to those who have most recently helped to re-weave the tapestry: Elisha Flagg Lee Jr., and Helen Burgin on my mother’s side; John Endicott Lawrence Sr., and Frances Weeks Lawrence on my father’s. Lastly, we owe a debt to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century New Englanders who cared, as their families began to scatter, to write this all down the first time.

4 Quotes

Anon

 

From nowhere we come; into nowhere we go. What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, Blackfoot Tribe, last words

 

 

I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard.

Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov. V, 3.

 

 

Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.

 Joel 1: 3.

 

 

This music comforts my solitude.
It takes me to my father’s house
in Boston, to my ancestors….

Where are they?
Where are the songs of mothers
comforting their babies?
Where are the stories of the elders,
the whispers of love, the battle cries?
Where did they go?

 

Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

 

 

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Frontispiece

Anon

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.