Maria Vincent No Longer Among The Missing

   

     Looking through some posts about my Vincent family today I noticed a blog written before I had located all the children of John and Mary Clement Vincent, they being Matilda, Thomas, Maria, and Janet.  That blog noted one child,  Maria, had yet to be traced.  Happily, that is no longer the case.

     Maria Vincent was born in Saratoga County in 1806, probably at Halfmoon like her brother and sisters.  She married  Morgan Dunham, (Donham in some records), the son of William Dunham and Eleanor DuBois, in Saratoga County around 1830.  A deed from Saratoga County shows Morgan selling land there in 1831 which may be when the family migrated westward to Ontario County, New York.  They were certainly there by 1834 when their daughter Juliaette was born in Bristol, New York on June 22nd.  The 1840 NY census also places the Dunhams in the county, living in Richmond, New York, as was Maria's mother Mary Clement Vincent, now twice widowed and listed under her second late husband's surname of Howland.  Maria's sister Janet was there in her mother Mary's household though in 1840 she is only a tick mark in a column.  Maria's brother Thomas Vincent with his family also resided in Richmond in 1840.  All the Vincent siblings and their mother were together in Richmond except Matilda Vincent Irish who lived in Victory, New York in Cayuga County.

     Maria and Morgan would have four daughters and three sons in that order, all of whom would survive to adulthood.  Sometime in the early 1840's the Dunhams packed up their children and moved to Pittsford, New York where Morgan had a brother, about twenty miles from Richmond.  By that time the other family members had also sold their property in Richmond and joined Matilda Vincent Irish in Victory.  Pittsford would have been quite a change for Maria.  While Richmond was a rural farming community, her new home was booming.  The Erie Canal had come through town in 1825, while 1842 saw the arrival of the Rochester & Auburn Railroad.  Pittsford was a prosperous, expanding community at the time Maria and her family arrived though she wouldn't get to enjoy it for long.

     Maria died a  month before her 43rd birthday from dysentery on 18 July 1849 in Pittsford.  In the days before refrigeration intestinal diseases were common, especially in the warmer months giving them the name, "summer complaint".  With the exception of Janet Vincent Wetherel, who would attain the age of 78, none of the Vincent siblings had long lives; their mother had to endure the deaths of three of her four children.  Matilda Vincent Irish passed at 46, Thomas at 39, and of course Maria at age 42.  Her husband Morgan would marry twice more, first to a woman named Sarah whose surname is given on the Find A Grave site as Etts, then in 1870 to Hannah Sutherland who would outlive him.

     With all the Vincent children now accounted for, I'd really love to know what caused the death of my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas Vincent, only son of John and Mary, at the young age of 39.  The historian of Cayuga County where Victory lies, wrote me that several epidemics swept through the town in the 1840's, carried by travelers and pioneers.  We see this in the cases of Matilda Vincent Irish and her two year old granddaughter Mary Jane Wetherel who both perished during the 1847 epidemic.  So far a lack of records has confounded my search for Thomas' cause of death but it may turn up one of these days.

     
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