Looking for Richard and Esther Bagley

Little is known about the parents of Edward Cyrenus Bagley. We believe their names were Richard and Esther. There are records that indicate Edward was born in either 1800 or 1810, possibly in Hartford Connecticut, or in one of the Hartford's in what is now the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Richard may have had a brother Samuel who may have had a son named John. The first actual written record of Edward I have is his marriage in 1833 which lists neither parent. The first record of his parents I have is from his patriarchal blessing in Utah, more than twenty years later.

Here are some interesting leads:

• The name Cyrenus is unusual.  It is a New Testament name from the Christmas story.₁ So anyone with the name could just have Bible reading parents. However, there is a Cyrenus Bagley living in Ontario,₂ who was born in New York. It is possible he could be a cousin. His son, also Cyrenus, moved the United States and settled in Iowa.₃ As far as I know this family has no living descendants, his second wife was childless. Cyrenus may have had a son by his first wife, who may have had children.₄ The last I record I've found for them is in Michigan. Most of the living family of the first Cyrenus are descended from his daughters and could still be living in Canada.
• DNA tests indicate the family is related to the family of Samuel Bagley an early settler in Massachusetts.₅ He had three sons - one stayed in Massachusetts, one settled in Providence, Rhode Island,₆ one settled in Fairfield, Connecticut.₇ The son who settled in Fairfield had three sons - all married. One of the son's moved to Long Island is probably the ancestor of Joshiah Bagley,  a New York patriot during the Revolution.₈ Fairfield had an Anglican/Loyalist contingent during the revolution. Fairfield was burned during a British raid.₉ It is possible that Richard could be from one of the Fairfield families, if any remained in Fairfield. If he is from Fairfield, he could have ties to the Loyalists which might have influenced a decision to migrate to New Brunswick. It is also possible one of the other son's descendants could have moved to Connecticut.
• There is a Richard Bagley in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania in the 1790 Census.₁₀ He is the head of a household consisting of one boy and a woman. He living next to Ezra Bagley. Luzerne county was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Connecticut prior to and during the Revolution.₁₁  In 1798 when a direct tax is raised, Richard is living on land owned by Elias Bagley.₁₂ There are other Bagleys in Providence at that time: James Bagley and Elias.  James is important - he is a veteran of the continental Army who served in Valley Forge.₁₃ His unit was raised from Connecticut.  If Richard, Ezra, and Elias are related to James, they would likely be from New England. By 1800, there is no Richard in the federal census.
• There is a mention of a loyalist named Richard Bagley. He apparently was the surgeon for General Howe.₁₄
• There is a Richard Bagley who entered New York in 1825.₁₅ He is a merchant. This may or may not be the Richard Bagley from Amesbury.

Any of these could potentially lead to a possible Richard Bagley who married or had a child with an Esther and is the father of our Edward Bagley. With this in mind the following next steps seem to be:

• Visit the library of the Fairfield Historical Society to look for Church records from the area. Hope to find Anglican and Congregational records with a possible Bagley name in the congregation, or to find grandsons or great-grandsons.
• Visit the Connecticut State Library to look at tax records - Congregational Churches were the established churches in Connecticut, if there are tax records they would let us know who was paying taxes to the Congregational churches and if they weren't which denomination the taxes were going to support.
• Visit the New Brunswick provincial archives to see if we can find a Richard Bagley in the Loyalist records. This is a long shot - there are extensive indexes on line.

Notes:

¹Luke 2:2
²Archives of Ontario. Registrations of Deaths, 1869-1938. MS 935, reels 1-615. Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
³"Iowa, Marriages, 1809-1992," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/XVSP-1Z1 : accessed 6 May 2015), Cyrenius C Bagley in entry for C A Bagley and Ada Russell, 25 Dec 1882; citing Winnesheik, Iowa, reference ; FHL microfilm 1,026,661.
⁴Family Trees on Ancestry list children for the marriage, but no supporting sources: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/441864/person/6115975137
⁵Bagley YDNA project on Family Tree DNA https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/bagley/
⁹British Burn Fairfield – Today in History: July 7, ConnecticutHistory.org, http://connecticuthistory.org/british-burn-fairfield/
¹⁰ Year: 1790; Census Place: Luzerne, Pennsylvania; Series: M637; Roll: 8; Page: 144; Image: 335; Family History Library Film: 0568148
¹¹ See The Susquehanna Settlers, Luzerne County: History of Luzerne County, Fort Wyoming Historical Marker
¹² United States Direct Tax of 1798: Tax Lists for the State of Pennsylvania. M372, microfilm, 24 rolls. Records of the Internal Revenue Service, 1791-2006, Record Group 58. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. available on Ancenstry

¹³ Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775-1783; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M246, 138 rolls); War Department Collection of Revolutionary War Records, Record Group 93; National Archives, Washington. D.C.

¹⁴p. 283, The North American Review, Volume 59, 1844 https://books.google.com/books

¹⁵ Records from Record Group 287, Publications of the U.S. Government; Record Group 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] and Record Group 36, Records of the United States Customs Service. The National Archives at Washington, D.C. (https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/8758/40910_29396-00654?pid=8106264&backurl=https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv%3D1%26dbid%3D8758%26h%3D8106264%26tid%3D%26pid%3D%26usePUB%3Dtrue%26_phsrc%3DXTv82%26_phstart%3DsuccessSource&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=XTv82&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true)

Entrelib 2014 - Collection Development

On Friday, 17 October, I attended the 2014 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. The sessions were thought provoking.

A New Collection Development Culture: Focusing on Individual Faculty by Sharon Holderman, Coordinator of Public Services at Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library at Tennessee Tech University stood out for me. When Ms. Holderman arrived at Tennessee Tech, the collection policy could be summarized as doing what we’ve always done base on what we did twenty years ago. This include a well entrenched but poorly documented allocation formula and a culture of last minute spending to avoid losing allocated funds. This was replaced with a book policy of “if you want it, we will buy it” (within reason). There were no more allocated budgets, but items were tracked for purposes of understanding expenditures. The policy empowered faculty to add to the collection based on actual needs. Librarians were empowered to fulfill faculty wants and desires and the library received goodwill from the faculty. The library changed processes making the entire program more transparent and removing obstacles to selecting books.

At the same time several high cost per use subscriptions were cancelled and the Library instituted unmediated Get It Now for faculty and graduate students. Faculty were empowered to purchased urgently needed articles, but often still opted to use ILL to acquire materials. Materials that had been underutilized were replaced with access to more journals from many publishers. The changes in the policies allowed Volpe Library to save money in the serials budget and shift allocations to the departments the desperately needed additional materials. I believe the changes were largely successful because librarians were able to effectively communicate the changes to the faculty in a way that created goodwill.

Hopefully, Ms. Holderman will follow up with a full paper in the Journal for Library Innovation. I look forward to thinking about patron driven approaches like this further.

Census Records

Census records are interesting documents - I find them fascinating because of what they can't describe. In 1900, my thrice great grandmother was living in Chicago. The census lists her relation to the head of household as "roomer". While not being inaccurate - the head of household was running a boarding house and she may have been paying rent - it is incomplete. You see, the head of household was previously married to her daughter, my thrice great aunt. This aunt died thirty years before. So, my thrice great grandmother could be described as either his mother-in-law or his former mother-in-law. The census worker probably called this too much information or recorded the information from talking with the neighbors. (It is not the only inaccuracy on the part of that census taker - his second wife - I found the marriage license, is listed as "wage hand". I suspect if I reported my wife as a wage hand I wouldn't be married for much longer. She was still with him when he died eight years later and inherited the property.)

Thirty years later, in the 1930 census, the same family once again stymies the census worker. The second wife owns the property. She is the head of household. All the other occupants of the house are initially listed as "roomer". The first two - both teenagers with the same last name, are crossed out and replaced with "relative". Again this is incomplete. The head of house hold is a widow. The two teenagers are her stepson's children. They are either her step grand children or her step son's children. Too much for the census.

Markov Chains Monte Carlo, Oh my!

Yesterday was the craziness we call Librarypalooza. We set up tables on the first floor explaining various library services from printing help to employment opportunities to research appointments. And then in exchange for visiting two or more of our tables we bribe the students with a cookout on the plaza in front of the Library. I was on the crowd control team guiding students and handing out passports to prove they had visited at least two tables. I didn't do much crowd control.

The research sent students to find me. Oh, your majoring in Science - we have a librarian who can help you with that. He's out in the lobby. I spent a good amount of time giving on the fly "How to use the library for Science research" and making research appointments for later in the week. And handing out my business cards.

One statistics student cornered me. He has an interesting problem. He is working on a work study project and needs to do some economic modeling. We briefly discussed various models he could use and MCMC came up. I had mentioned Monte Carlo methods, since I'm looking at them to model a demand driven acquisition (DDA) program. He couldn't remember what the other MC in MCMC stood for and commented it was an advance method. I thought nothing of it until I got in the shower this morning.

I was thinking about DDA and how my curve fit model was giving me good predictions - the experience in the last quarter seem to indicate the model overstates the number of books being purchased. I've been thinking about how to use Monte Carlo methods and it hit me - I have a Markov Chain. Using a physical analogy, think of each title as having a "state", there is a certain probability will flip to the next state. This sequence of states is the Markov Chain. It's a rather complex system - I think of it as a series of phase transitions - from available for rent to either owned or out of the catalog/no longer available.

So one of today's projects will be translating the model into a spreadsheet and see if predictions match reality. I am in over my head. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.

Day 700

Saturday was a big day for my younger son William. He had his final recital with his first violin teacher and he finished his 700th day of continuously playing violin. In spite of family vacations, summer breaks and other challenges.

Quote for the Day

I just finished How the mighty Fall by  Jim Collins.  I really like this quote on page 120:

The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not he absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. Great nations can decline and recover. Great companies can fall and recover. Great social institutions can fall and recover. And great individuals can fall and recover. As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, there remains hope. 

So, as long as you can keep moving there is no reason to lose hope. Carry on!

Wanted: George Robert Hewlings Emigration Records

George Robert Hewlings is my great great grandmother's second husband. Lucy Granger nee Woodward, married him in 1867 three years after her first husband, Henry Hinsdale Granger, died. I believe Lucy left her first husband sometime in the late 1850's. Land records from Hardwick, Massachusetts show Henry buying land and then abruptly, both he and Lucy are selling land. I haven't found a divorce record, though family oral history indicates there was a divorce. She may have simply moved out of town to get away from Henry. By 1860, he's living in Hardwick with one of the older boys, and Lucy with the two youngest children is living near their married daughter in Clinton County, Iowa._1,2

The last 20 years of George Robert Hewlings life are well documented. George Robert Hewlings was a congregational minister from England who died in 1877 when his family was living in Salt Lake City.  I first find him in the United States in 1859 performing baptisms at the Ephrata Dutch Reform Church, in Fulton County, New York.₃ He continued to return and perform baptisms at that Church through 1876. By 1862 he was seeking ordination in the Episcopal Protestant Church in Western New York.₄ He then moved to the midwest to head a Congregational Church and meets the divorced/widowed Lucy Granger. They marry in Porter County, Indiana in 1867.₅ He is a minister in various parts of the midwest until the family moves to Salt Lake City sometime between 1870 and 1877 where Rev. Hewlings died. We know Lucy's son, Louis, is mining in Utah by 1872.₆ Reverend Hewlings in listed as the head of the Congregational Church in the 1874 Salt Lake City Directory.₇ Lucy's grandson Leslie Scott Snyder is born in Utah in 1875.₈ So, I speculate the family had set up at least partial residence by the early 1870s, with somewhat regular trips to other parts of the country. By 1880, Lucy is living with her daughter's family in Kansas.₉ The Snyder's younger son, Corydon Granger, was born in Atchison County, Kansas in 1879.₁₀

Finding George Robert Hewlings prior to 1859 is a trick.  There is a George Robert Hewlings who appears in non conformist records as the husband of Martha Freeman and the father of three children:

• George Freeman Hewlings born in 1826 in England and who may have settled in New Zealand.₁₁
• Martha Freeman Hewlings born in 1831 in England. She married Peter Barr and died in 1882.₁₂
• Henry Freeman Hewlings born in 1833 in England.₁₃

I believe this is the person who emigrated to the United States. George is living with the family in the 1851 Census₁₄, but is absent in the 1861 census₁₅. There is a G. R. or G. K. Hewlings who entered the United States at Castle garden in September 1859, prior to the baptisms at Ephrata Reformed Dutch.₁₆ There is a mention in the June 1967 Daffodil Journal that G. R. Hewlings is the father of Martha Barr and died in Salt Lake City.₁₇ What I would really like to confirm this speculation is some record of Reverend Hewlings leaving the United Kingdom. I'm hoping some descendent in the UK or New Zealand sees this and has these records.

Notes:

¹"United States Census, 1860," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MZH2-CD2 : accessed 16 Aug 2014), , Hardwick, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States; citing "1860 U.S. Federal Census - Population," Fold3.com; p. 108, household ID 880, NARA microfilm publication M653; FHL microfilm 803533.

²"United States Census, 1860," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M825-4X1 : accessed 16 Aug 2014), , Lyons Township, Clinton, Iowa, United States; citing "1860 U.S. Federal Census - Population," Fold3.com; p. 140, household ID 1064, NARA microfilm publication M653; FHL microfilm 803316.

³"Ephratah Dutch Reformed Church, Baptisms." Ephratah Dutch Reformed Church, Baptisms. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May. 2014.

⁴Journal of the Proceedings of the Annual Convention, Diocese of Western New York - Protestant Episcopal Church. Diocese of Western New York, Held in St. Paul's Church, Buffalo, on Wednesday, August 20, and Thursday, August 21st, A. D. 1862. p. 28, 29, 31, 151

⁵"Indiana, Marriages, 1811-1959," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/KDH3-TSC : accessed 16 Aug 2014),<unknown>, 17 Oct 1867; citing Porter County; FHL microfilm 001686156.

⁶I speculate the family moved to the Utah Territory to be close to family - Lucy's four younger sisters were Mormon - her sister Emmaline was quite prominent in the Church. It is possible they were also moving to join her son Louis, since it is not clear from the records who arrived first - Louis from Louisiana or New York, or the Hewlings/Snyders from the midwest.

L. E. Granger is a name listed in newspaper articles about meetings taking place in the Ophir Mining District, starting with  December  7, 1871. see "Mining Intelligence." Salt Lake Daily Tribune and Utah Mining Gazette, Tuesday, December 12, 1871, p. 2 (http://newspaperarchive.com/us/utah/salt-lake-city/salt-lake-daily-tribune-and-utah-mining-gazette/1871/12-12/page-2 : accessed April 27, 2014) and "Miners Meeting." Tuesday, December 12, 1871, p. 2

⁷Sloan, Edward L., Gazetteer of Utah and Salt Lake City directory, p.228 Salt Lake Herald: Salt Lake City, 1874. Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1821-1989 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. (http://Ancestry.com : accessed August 20, 2014)

⁸"Scott Leslie Snyder." US Sons of the American Revolution Applications 1889-1970 (http://Ancestry.com : accessed April 20, 2014)

⁹"United States Census, 1880," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MFPN-F6W : accessed 16 Aug 2014), , Atchison City, Atchison, Kansas, United States; citing sheet 239D, NARA microfilm publication T9.

¹⁰"United States World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942", index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/V1K2-N9C : accessed 16 Aug 2014), <unknown>, 1942.

¹¹"England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/J38B-W5J : accessed 29 Aug 2014), George Robert Hewlings in entry for George Freeman Hewlings, ; citing St Mary Islington, Middlesex, England, reference ; FHL microfilm 838728.

¹²"England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/J38R-XB6 : accessed 29 Aug 2014), George Robert Hewlings in entry for Martha Freeman Hewlings, ; citing DR WILLIAMS LIBRARY, LONDON, LONDON, ENGLAND, reference ; FHL microfilm 815947.

¹³"England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975," index, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/JMLF-M9J : accessed 29 Aug 2014), George Robert Hewlings in entry for Henry Freeman Hewlings, ; citing DR WILLIAMS LIBRARY, LONDON, LONDON, ENGLAND, reference ; FHL microfilm 815947.

¹⁴"1851 England Census - Ancestry.com." 1851 England Census - Ancestry.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May. 2014.

¹⁵"1861 England Census - Ancestry.com." 1861 England Census - Ancestry.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May. 2014.

¹⁶"G. K. Hewlings - Castlegarden.org"(http://www.castlegarden.org/quick_search_detail.php?p_id=626900), retrieved 29 Aug 2014) Hewlings is a 54 year old gentleman who arrived on the Hamburg and South Hampton line on 1 September 1859.

¹⁷THE REV. JOHN J. BROADHURST, Callington, Cornwell, England; THE VICAR AND HIS DAFFODILS LOOM LARGE IN HISTORY; The Daffodil Journal, Volume 3 No. 4, June 1967, p. 159, http://dafflibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/1967_June_ADS_Journal.pdf, retrieved 18 May 2014