18th Century Family Feud

Long Wharf, Boston

     When New York's stay at home order came down my first thought was, "now I have an excuse to sit home and work on my family tree guilt-free".  I was certain everyone in the same boat would also be whiling away the hours on Ancestry and filling up my Ancestry mailbox.  That didn't happen.  In fact this pandemic has been anything but a boon to research.  I can no longer visit my local Family History library and many digitization projects have come to a screeching halt.  So what's a person to do?

     In my case I returned to my neglected British ancestors.  Being enchanted with all the Celts in my tree, I've pretty much ignored that one little branch that holds the Wheat line.  There must be plenty online I hadn't seen already pertaining to them.  And after all, they were fighting the British in the American Revolution, so I gave them a go.

     Almost immediately I discovered the will of my seventh-great-grandfather John Wheat, born 1717 in Concord, Massachusetts.  Yes, Concord of, "shot heard round the world", fame.  John was a prosperous farmer who with his wife Grace Brown was blessed with eight known children, all of whom were mentioned in his will made in 1779, six years before his death.  That's when things got even more interesting.  In his will John provided well for his offspring however, his second daughter Betty was left a measly six shillings because, "she has left this state and gone as a friend to the enemies of this continent, to be paid only on condition that she return a friend to America".  Betty's youngest sister Mary received a similar bequest.  With the women's older brothers serving the Rebel cause, John Wheat's outrage at what he viewed as a betrayal of family and country is easily understood.

     I discovered the sisters had married two brothers born in Scotland who were well off merchants and loyalists in Boston at the time of the Revolution.  At age twenty five, Betty married John Semple on 30 November 1772 when her sister Mary, ten years her junior, would have been only fifteen.  I would love to know when Mary married Robert Semple.  Most women in colonial America married around age twenty to twenty five but we can assume Mary wed Robert at a younger age since the two of them left Boston in early 1776.  It's odd that there's no record of Mary's marriage in Boston.  Perhaps they were married in New York or even Canada.

    In order to discover what became of John Wheat's wayward daughters I made an effort to research the two Semple brothers.  Betty Wheat was born on 17 July 1747 per Concord, Massachusetts town records and married in Boston in 1772, so I would estimate John Semple was born somewhere in the neighborhood of 1743 since men married later than women in the Boston of that era.  Several trees at Ancestry have a published death notice for John Semple that gave his birthdate as 1711 making him thirty six years older than Betty.  Come on people!  That is obviously a death notice for a different John Semple.

     What I now know of John is that he signed a farewell address to the departing loyalist Governor Hutchinson in Boston in 1774 and also an address to the new Governor Gage the following year.  In March of 1776 John and Betty left Boston with the British evacuation fleet when the British army abandoned the city.

     As for Robert Semple, he was probably the younger of the two brothers and also extended his good wishes to the Tory governors.  He too left with the evacuation fleet in 1776.  Both brother's names can both found on a list of refugees traveling with the British army; no women's names were included.  After that things get a little hazy.  Most likely the group settled for a time in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the destination of the fleet.  An associate of the Semple brothers, Benjamin Davis, likewise evacuated to Halifax with the British that March but he eventually relocated to New York State which by the end of July of 1776 was partly in British hands where it would remain until war's end in 1783.  It's possible the Semples did the same.

     On July 28th in 1776 David Cobb, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress,  wrote the following in a letter to Robert Treat Paine, a member of the Continental Congress--

 "Two of the Continental Privateers have taken a ship [traveling] from Halifax to New York laden with English goods, provisions, and Tories and carried her this morning into Marblehead.  Among the Tories are Benjamin Davis & son and two Semple Scotchmen".  

Further research showed this was the Ship Peggy and some of the goods onboard were the property of John Semple.  His wife Betty was also on board and was arrested with her husband.

     At the end of his letter David Cobb added this post script, "Just now the Tories were landed at the Long Wharf from Marblehead and were attended thence to prison by two thousand people... I wish the devil had them".  Ironically, the Long Wharf was the spot the evacuation fleet had left from. The Semples being apprehended with Ben Davis makes me tend to think they too may have returned to America via New York.  Massachusetts passed a Banishment Act in 1778 forbidding the return of loyalists to that state under pain of death, the names of  Benjamin Davis and both Semple brothers appeared in that document.

     The records are frustratingly silent about the eventual fates of Betty and Mary or their husbands.  I've checked Canadian and American sources but I can't determine when or where they died, if they bore children, or if they ever reconciled with their family.  Quite a few loyalists did eventually return to America, even their old friend Benjamin Davis was allowed to return to his native Massachusetts shortly before his death in 1805.  There is more about the capture of the ship Peggy in George Washington's Papers, but Volume 5 where it is included, is not yet available online.  Supposedly it's being worked on.  I don't imagine it will shed any light on the Wheat sister's futures, but it  includes an inventory of goods seized from the ship Peggy and who knows what else?  Someday, digitization will resume!