Private John Vincent's One Battle...Maybe

     In last week's blog I lamented the lack of a source to provide me a definitive answer as to which general my fourth-great-grandfather John Vincent served under during his all too short stint in the US Infantry during the War of 1812?  Was it Wilkinson or Hampton, they being the two major generals in the Plattsburgh area?  My guess was Hampton and I guessed right.  

     After a search on JSTOR* I found an article which included the journal kept by General George Izard during the fall and spring of 1813/1814.  Izard joined General Hampton's division in August of 1813, the same month John Vincent joined the army.  It doesn't get much better than an eyewitness account from grandpa's commanding general!  His journal literally spelled it out for me, General Izard noted in an entry on 16 October 1813, "...my brigade, the 2nd, composed of the 10th, 29th, 30th and 31st regiments of Infantry."  John's enlistment record and his widow's pension application both identified his regiment as the 29th Infantry, now I was making progress.

     From the articles and books I've found and now the journal, I have a fair idea of what John's war looked like.  He enlisted on 10 August 1813, by that time the US Army had moved it's headquarters from Plattsburgh, New York to Burlington, Vermont on the opposite shore of Lake Champlain.

      On October 21st, 1813 General Izard marched from Chateauguay Four Corners to Fort Hickory where he, "...found the infantry and moved into the woods".  It would appear infantryman John Vincent was at Fort Hickory in mid October, which was not really much of a fort.  

     It was instead a blockhouse, a stout building with small apertures through which soldiers inside could fire at attackers in relative safety from return fire.  With General Izard's arrival, the division would now march down the Chateauguay River and cross into Canada.  On the 26th of October the Americans came face to face with Canadian soldiers and their Native American allies on the north bank of the river.  The general's journal gives the positions the 29th took during the ensuing fight and other details.  Unless he was ill on that day, John Vincent fought in that battle.  It did not go well.  Mistakenly believing they were outnumbered the US forces retreated and by November 2nd were encamped back at Four Corners.

     Izard's journal entry on 7 November remarks that a number of sick men were sent to Plattsburgh and that of 15 November notes Izard had been ordered to Plattsburgh to settle his men into winter quarters, "We march with a snow storm at our back. Very cold".  Several entries in the journal refer to the brutal northern winter and rampant sickness in the ranks. The following day's entry recounts selecting the sick to be sent to Burlington which possessed a large hospital.  Could one of those men have been John Vincent?  His Army record states he was sick at Burlington when muster was taken there on December 31st.

     I have to wonder why any soldiers were sent to Burlington?  By the time the men to be sent there were chosen, the division was  halfway to Plattsburgh, why send them to Burlington across the lake, a much further distance?

     While I don't know what illness took John's life, dysentery, brought on by bad food, bad water, and bad hygiene, was one of the most common causes of death during the war.  Another fourth-great-grandfather of mine, Thomas Garner, also fought in the War of 1812 and although he survived his bout with the disease, it left him with permanently damaged bowels.  Doctors of the time had no idea how to treat infectious diseases nor did they understand the mechanism through which they were transmitted. 

     John's last days must have been miserable. Sick, cold and many miles from his loved ones, he died at Plattsburgh on February 27, 1814, only six months after enlisting.  Peter Dox, who was also from Saratoga County, testified on behalf of the Widow Vincent for her pension application and told the court he cared for John during his illness and helped to bury him there at Plattsburgh.  John is quite probably among the one hundred and thirty-six unknown solders who were discovered during excavations at the post over the years.  They are honored by a monument in the north corner of the cemetery, but it saddens me to think he died such a lonely death and now rests in obscurity.


*JSTOR is a worthwhile resource for scholarly articles that can be searched and read, (six articles per month), for simply registering. For a fee you get unlimited use and the ability to download text.

     

Of Patience, Family Bibles, And The Internet

     My fourth-great-grandfather John Vincent died during the War of 1812 fought between the newly established United States and England from whom the US had declared it's independence. His death was from disease but I can't help but hope he got to harass the English a bit beforehand.  I've always wondered what prompted John to leave his wife and four young children to enlist twelve days before his youngest child's first birthday in August of 1813?  The answer may well have been money.  That year the fledgling congress authorized increases in both the monthly pay and the cash bounty for soldiers. 

     Thanks to the pension application filed by John's widow I've learned quite a bit about him, but it hasn't been easy.  Another thing I've found is there is a dearth of information on that war.  It's not for nothing that the conflict is often referred to as the forgotten war.  From surviving documents I've learned where John enlisted and in what regiment, learned the names of his captains and other officers, but I've been mostly unsuccessful in finding anything like a history of his regiment.  Nor does there seem to be any source that would tell me which of two generals his known officers served under, Wilkinson or Hampton, but I'm leaning towards Hampton.

     Once one gets away from the New England states, information from that period is very difficult to come by and John's war was mostly fought in New York.  John's son Thomas is next in my line and while I know he died as a young adult, there are no sources to indicate the cause. One needs a lot of patience and perseverance to put together a picture of the ancestor's life during that era.  Luckily though, sometimes patience is rewarded.

     Thomas' sister Janet Vincent was the youngest child of John.  An infant when he left Saratoga County she would have no memories of her father.  Being a female she presented the extra challenge of tracing a woman whose surname changed at her marriage.  The break came with viewing an application to a lineage society which included the information that Janet's mother Mary Clement Vincent had married again after John's death in 1814.  Her new name was Mary Howland which opened the door to not only the aforementioned pension application, but eighty-two year old Mary Howland herself in the 1860 census of Butler, NY in the home of  "Jenett" Witherel.  Janet had been found!  She also appears in her mother Mary Howland's pension application as does her husband Darius Witherel.  Or Wetherel, or Wetheral, or ... it's one of those names whose spelling is a challenge.

     The census of 1850 also shows Mary in her daughter's household along with a young man named Ray Witherell who is not with the family in any other census.  Who was he?  It would have been easy to believe he was Janet and Darius' son but that couldn't be assumed.  The answer to that question came several months later in a family bible at the top of the right hand page.

     Ray was in fact the son of Darius' brother John.  The bible also shows "Jennett" Vincent wife of Darius, the birth of their son Hadley and barely visible above Hadley's name can be seen the faded words, infant daughter... 1840 died the sa...  A local history of Butler, NY mentioned Darius being a wealthy farmer and the fact he and Janet were parents to four children only one of whom reached adulthood, Narcissa who was born in 1851.

     So I keep searching the internet hoping for newly digitized records because patience is something I have plenty of when it comes to genealogy.

1812 Pension Files, Some Headway But Still Taking Ridiculously Long

    

     I continue waiting for those War of 1812 pension files.  The work seems to be progressing, as of today there are 2,211,532 digitized pages, 648 more than yesterday -- but who's counting?  We are up to the surname Rowe so hopefully by the end of the month or early November we may see the S surnames beginning to come online.  Unfortunately I'm waiting for the V surnames.  The S and T names may take awhile but I'm hopeful by early next year I will be able to look at the Vincent applications.

     A few years ago when digitizing had virtually stopped  I ordered my fourth great-grandfather John Vincent's file from NARA.  It confirmed his regiment was the 29th NY Infantry and his enlistment date of 10 August 1813.  It also answered many questions like the date of his death, 27 February 1814, and revealed he died at Plattsburgh, NY of disease.  I'm waiting to get a look at the other Vincents who appear in the pension index.  Specifically John I. Vincent who was probably the John Vincent from Halfmoon in Saratoga County, NY who enlisted a year after my John.  Many Ancestry family trees have John I. married to Mary Clement, but he wasn't.  Mary Clement married my John Vincent.  That was spelled out in the pension file I ordered which was in the widow Mary's name.  It contained the date of their marriage at Halfmoon and witnesses including Mary's brother John Clement.  

     Also, John I. was named in his father Jeremiah's will written in 1821, seven years after my John's death in an Army hospital during the frigid northern New York winter.  The few account I've found of conditions in the Army camp that winter of 1814 paint an abysmal picture, terrible weather with much illness among the soldiers.

     I may well be disappointed by the file when I finally lay eyes on it if it even exists.  I know John I. survived the war and pensions based on service rather than death or disability were not granted until 1871 when he would have been quite elderly or deceased, but I'm hoping there may be some clue in those files as to who my John was; like where he was born and who his parents were.  Both John Vincent's were living in Saratoga County, NY when they enlisted and were quite possibly related.  Or perhaps an unknown brother had a file?  As noted above, I will probably be disappointed but I have to check.  I've exhausted every other record I can think of to search...

What On Earth Is Banope? Or Irish Research Is Hard

                                                                                             Wikimedia Commons

     Eighteenth century, Kildare.  What baptismal records still exist from that time and place are in varying states of preservation, some easily readable, others barely decipherable.  Some records no longer survive at all, and there's the rub.  Even after finding a likely record it's impossible to tell if that record seems so likely because the better one is no longer available.  Nor is it always easy to tell if that better record even ever existed.  In other words, I don't know what I don't know.  With home baptisms common in pre-famine Ireland, it sometimes happened that the event didn't make it into the church register, or was entered incorrectly; as in the case of my great-great-grandmother Maria McGarr's sister in the early 19th century:

Children of Daniel McGarr and Anne Donahoe

     
     The third baptism down gives no first or last name for the child and no father's name.  Only the name of the mother along with the date and family address made it possible to deduce this was the baptism of Bridget McGarr who later came to America with her sister Maria.  I could easily have missed the fact Bridget McGarr ever existed.  She doesn't appear in any other records in Ireland and married soon after arriving in the US in 1851, changing her name to Kinsella.

     It's that much harder when seeking the parents of our great-great-grandparents. Using the naming pattern I guessed the first daughter, Catherine, in the baptism records above was probably named for her father Daniel McGarr's mother whom I believed to have been Catherine Murphy, and Maria was logically the name of her mother Anne Donahoe's mother.  I'm not sure why the infant Maria's name appears as Mary above, she is Maria in all US records, but in viewing the original entry, I found she was indeed recorded as Mary in the Baltinglass register.

     My search for the birth of Anne Donahoe and Daniel McGarr has been, in a word, frustrating.  Daniel can't be found at all and the closest I can find for Anne is a baptism that occurred in August of 1798 at Ballymore Eustace about 15 miles north of the couple's future home in Ballyraggan.  This baptism, written in Latin, gives the parent's names as James and Maria Donahoe and the godparents as Edward Cavana [Kavanaugh ?] and Maria Barnaval [Barnacle?].  There is no indication of what Maria's maiden name may have been.  If this is indeed Anne's baptism, the naming pattern would indicate Anne should have named a child James, but there is a five year gap between her daughters Mary and Anne's baptisms so it can't be ruled out there was a son named James. 

     The address contained in the baptism of Anne Donahoe is perplexing, it looks like "Banope" but there is no townland of that name.  The closest I can find is Banoge in County Wexford quite a distance away and definitely not in the right parish.  But that looks like a letter "p" to me, not a "g", an example of which can be seen in the top line of the entry, it's tail dangling down between the "e" in Donahoe and the B in "Banope".

Banope?

     A few pages on in the same register however, the below entry is found, now it looks like Banoge :

     
   There are two other baptisms of children of James and Maria Donahoe--an earlier one of Catherine in 1793 and one of William in 1802.  Their addresses were Tober and Toberkevin.  I can't find Toberkevin either, though there is a Tipperkevin near Ballymore Eustace.  There are two more Donahoe baptisms in Ballymore Eustace parish with the mother being Maria but this time the father is John. One was John Jr. in 1788 and the other was Bridget in 1804; both give their address as, "Toberkevin".  I almost wonder if this is in fact the same couple? Then the name John of Anne and Daniel's youngest son would fit the naming pattern, although I believe Daniel's father was also named John.

     Obviously, there is a lot more work to be done on Anne's parents.  I have no proof they were even from Ballymore Eustace parish, I'm examining it because it's the only parish with extant records that includes an Anne Donahoe whose mother was named Maria.  That made it seem like a good place to start, but it could be the answer was not recorded or has fallen victim to the ravages of time.  A sad truth of early Irish research.