A Contemporary Conversation With the Formerly Enslaved Sophia Burthen

By Andrew Hunter

I Know Not How Far Nor How Long: The “Unfreedom” of Sophia

Burthen and

Eli

Brackenridge

Andrew Hunter

With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggarlike stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said: — “Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed…” — Elijah, the prophet, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)[1]

Children…operated between and around historical, conceptual, geographic and racialized boundaries of childhood and are therefore assumed to have disappeared from the historical record… African-Americans did have childhoods—and the existence of figurative and actual Black children challenges the ways that we conceptualize childhood, race and the archive. – Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood (2021)[2]

Dear Sophia,

“I’m writing to let you know that It Was Dark There All The Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada,[3] the book I wrote for you, has been published and is making its way out into the world. I know that you will be particularly interested to hear that it has resonated with good people in Dutchess County, colleagues working at the Dutchess County Historical Society (DCHS), and scholars at Bard College (at Hyde Park). I’m sure you’ll be surprised to know that there is a deep commitment at this time to exposing the heavy presence of slavery in Dutchess County, the Hudson Valley and New York State, and that much of this essential work is being led by Black scholars, students and community organizations. This fact echoes with the expanding ecosystem of generous scholarship happening in what my colleague and mentor Dr. Charmaine Nelson (of the Slavery North initiative at UMassAmherst, Massachusetts) terms “temperate zones,” meaning the northern regions of the Americas and Europe. Charmaine reminded me that “the history of slavery is ALL of our history, not only Black history,” and so those of us of whiteness have much work to do, and a profound weight to carry, in our supporting roles.

Another key figure in leading this work is Dr. Christy ClarkPujara of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (home to the Black Cultural Centre); her book Dark Work: The History of Slavery in Rhode Island[4] had a profound impact on my understanding of slavery as the economic foundation of the British Empire and the formation of the economy of the United States, and therefore your story. This is also true of Dr. Marenka Thompson-Odlum (of University of Glasgow and Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford) who revealed the networks of money linking Glasgow (with its “Sugar Barons” and “Tobacco Lords”) to the wider landscape of chattel slavery across the globe.

I began this text with a quote from Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster’s remarkable Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood, I say remarkable as it is a truly rare child-centered engagement with the lives of those held enslaved in the northeastern United States (New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) emphasizing the perspective and agency of children. I am pleased that you now have a place within this expansive scholarship and public history. Your interview was a true gift placed into our collective futures, and as I’ve said elsewhere, with your gift comes an obligation to work to honour your gesture. Perhaps someone will be able to surface your lost sister, discover your deeper ancestry and the fate of your parents, Diana and Oliver Burthen?

I have been asked by the Dutchess County Historical Society (DCHS) in Poughkeepsie to write what is, in essence, a “new chapter” or epilogue to It Was Dark There All The Time; a generous offer as it is helping me stay on this journey with you. I have also begun to map out a new book based on the life of Eli Brackenridge, the “5 year-old orphan Negro boy” whom I introduced briefly in your book. I’ve often wondered if you knew Eli? He was held in the same circle of wealth, privilege and whiteness as you were in Ancaster Township, Upper Canada, and his early life is directly linked to both Haudenosaunee/Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk leader Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant and Samuel Hatt (who you referred to as “the Englishman at Ancaster,” in your 1855 interview with Benjamin Drew), the men who kept you enslaved for three decades here in what is now Canada[5]. Eli is the embodiment of the Legacy of Slavery in Canada I refer to in the title of your book, and a significant witness to the sad truth that abolition and emancipation remain incomplete projects, as evidenced by the continuing presence of anti-Black racism here and the obvious biases against Black and Indigenous peoples defining our systems of so-called justice. venom (noun) – Feeling a need to see others suffer.[6]

While this text is rooted in Dutchess County, where you were born, its grounded in a wider geography that is far more expansive than the strictly delineated boundaries of that colonized landscape. Those who came from Europe to settle the lands east of the Hudson River (or North River as you called it), occupied the traditional territories of the Wampanoag, then extended their reach in the years bracketing the America Revolution; many moved north (as you were forced to) on a Loyalist tide. They remained tethered to a worlding shaped over generations in Dutchess County, and carried this with them into the territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee. We cannot write or think of your birthplace in isolation, we must engage it in an expanded field.

James Baldwin spoke of the journey taking one into the unknown (of what you will learn, and where you may get to), and I see my journey as one of unknowing and unlearning, of redaction (not erasing, but putting into public knowledge) of all those “Names down on papers,” so that “what’s signed” might be rewritten. Samuel Hatt’s signature snakes across the bottom of a thin paper document that is Eli Brackenridge’s indenture; it is time to extract the venom from his mark.

On January 25th, 1810, Samuel Hatt (Justice of the Peace for Ancaster Township, British Militia commander, businessman, and owner of at least one enslaved person) gave his “consent” on an indenture between Jean Baptiste Rousseau and John Jackson, Ancaster township wardens, binding “Eli Brackenridge, a 5 year old ‘orphan Negro,’ as an apprentice to Elijah Secord, until he comes of age at 21.”[7] In her essential book The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton,[8] historian and curator Adrienne Shadd succinctly addressed the significance of the difference between Eli’s indenture, and that of a white child (Ann Thayer) also consented to by Hatt (seven years earlier, in1803):

The child was required to, “faithfully serve in all such lawful business as the said Eli Brackenridge shall be put unto by the command of his master, . . . and honestly and obediently in all things shall behave himself towards his said master and honestly and orderly towards the rest of the family . . . ” For his part, Elijah Secord promised to “get and allow unto the said Apprentice meat, drink, washing, lodging and all other things needful . . . for the Apprentice during the term aforesaid . . .” When the term of apprenticeship expired, Secord was also bound to give the young man a complete new suit of clothing, including a “coat, waistsash (sic), overhauls, hat, shoes, stockings, with suitable linen . . .” [9]

Shadd goes on to note that while the indenture of the white orphan Ann Thayer shared the above wording, it also included the following obligations, not required of Brackenridge’s master:

In addition, the indenture required that Templeton instruct the child in, “the craft, mastery and occupation of cooking, sewing, spining (sic) and such other qualifications . . . the indenture also specified that Templeton “at some convenient time within the term aforesaid shall cause the said Ann Thayer to be taught to read and write.” These indentures always mandated that the apprentices be taught to read and write, . . . So why had Eli Breckenridge been denied this right? Was it because town officials felt that a Black child did not need to know how to read and write? . . . The fact that five-year-old Eli Brackenridge was denied his right to a basic education illustrates in stark terms the fundamental inequality of opportunity for Black children right from birth. This is echoed later in the century with the exclusion of Black children from schools that white children attended.[10]

Shadd refers to Samuel Hatt’s enslavement of Sophia, then states: “Obviously, the existence of slavery and the slave-owning class had a tremendous impact on the fate and circumstances of all Blacks, whether they were enslaved or not.” [11]

Dear Sophia,

What’s in a name? This is the title of the opening chapter of It Was Dark There All The Time, where I parse your names (Sophia, Burthen, and Pooley). I have taken the same approach as I begin to write of Eli. Like my surname, Hunter, Brackenridge is of Scottish origin. Both are prominent in Glasgow, Scotland (my paternal grandparents’ home) where variations of Brackenridge date back to the 1400s, and where there have been many Hunters. Eli is short for Elijah, meaning “My God is Yahweh” to Christians and Jews and “beautiful, smart, and loving” (as does your name) to Muslims. While my surname denotes an occupation, Brackenridge refers to place; it combines the old northern English words bracken and rigg (“ridge”) and has many spelling variants. The family crest features red and white roses (but oddly no bracken). Bracken is a fern, genus Pteridium (from pteron, meaning “feather wing”). It is thought to be carcinogenic and is considered a weed to be pulled up from areas of cultivation and piled up to define edges of fields. We are back to borders and margins formed of unwanted material. Eli, beautiful, smart, and loving, whose origin is the abandoned margin of a vast field that will continue to be fertilized and nurtured. The Scots brought their model of agriculture to the Americas.

Among the first United Empire Loyalists (or UELs, those who sided with the Crown during the American Revolution), was a Francis Brackenridge who settled in the Niagara area in Lincoln County in 1783. In 1824, however, he was “suspended” by an “order in council” from the official list of recognized UELs, according to the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada.[12] Where did the “orphan” Eli Brackenridge come from? Was he connected in some way to this family at Niagara, or members of their family who settled near Ancaster Township? Who was he orphaned from? Eli might have been born “free,” however, if he was the child of an enslaved woman in Upper Canada (born after 1793) he would be automatically placed into indenture until the age of at least 25. The age and duration stated on Eli’s indenture is consistent with this practice. Brackenridge is a thread to keep pulling on, as is another name written on Eli’s indenture: JeanBaptiste Rousseau.

Rousseau was born in Montréal in 1758 to a family engaged in the fur trade. He would become involved in many ventures upon settling in Ancaster Township, as a merchant, miller, administrator, and translator. Rousseau had very close ties to Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant, both business and personal. He acquired (with Richard Beasley, who came from Albany, New York, and James Wilson) significant Haudenosaunee acreage (around 4900 hectares), and married Thayendanegea/Joseph’s adopted daughter Margaret Clyne (or Klein). Margaret (a white woman) was born in 1759 in the Mohawk Valley near Canajoharie, New York, was captured, held captive, and brought to Upper Canada by Thayendanegea/Joseph, who then adopted her. She and Rousseau were married in Thayendanegea/Joseph’s home, and Sophia would have been present that day in Brant’s Town/Ford (or “Mohawk” as Sophia called the settlement) on the Grand River, Upper Canada. Having left New York following the American Revolution, Thayendanegea/Joseph and his followers settled on the Haldimand Tract in 1785 (land acquired by the British from the Anishinaabe/Mississauga in order to resettle the five nations of the decimated Longhouse, the traditional Haudenosaunee homelands that stretched across New York).

The five nations became the Six Nations when the Tuscarora came north from the Carolinas (having been driven from their homelands) and joined the Seneca. Instead of being married off to a wealthy friend as Margaret was, however, Sophia was sold into this same circle of local elites.

Rousseau had a son with Margaret whom he named Joseph Brant, born in 1799, and also an older daughter, Marie Reine, born in 1793. Marie Reine married Ancaster-born Elijah Matthew Secord, son of UEL John Secord of Westchester County, New York, and Susannah (née Wartman) of Niagara, who was born to German parents who came from Pennsylvania. Elijah Secord was also the second cousin of Laura Secord, famed British heroine during the War of 1812 (and known to most Canadians as the name on a brand of popular chocolates). In 1810, Elijah and Marie Reine acquired the labour of Eli Brackenridge, through documents signed by Marie Reine’s father, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, along with Samuel Hatt, in which no obligations were stipulated to educate or train him for sixteen years. Imagine looking upon a five-year-old child and seeing him only as labour! While Eli appeared, at first, to vanish from documentation once in the Secord household, I find traces of the couple just five minutes from my parents’ home.

In St. Peter’s Cemetery, Hamilton, a tall white headstone stands against the west-side fence, its surface eroded. The name Secord can only be revealed by photographing, then heightening the contrast. Outside the cemetery, Mohawk Road continues west to Ancaster. First it passes Meadowlands (a typical “big box” commercial development) and highway 403 (heading south to Brantford, and north to Burlington and Toronto), then passes an affluent neighbourhood with streets named for the other five of the Six Nations (Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora) and ones named Hiawatha and Tomahawk — a strange reconstitution of the Longhouse, anchored by Rousseau Public School. Just past Lime Kiln Road, Mohawk Road becomes Rousseaux Street (the added “x” is common). If you turn down Lime Kiln Road to Legacy Lane, you’ll pass the Cooley-Hatt burying ground, formerly hidden on private land. Richard Hatt

(brother of Samuel) and his wife Mary (called Polly, née Cooley) are buried here, on what was once their family’s land. Samuel Hatt likely lived on or near this property when he first came from England, he may have lived here with his wife Margaret, and possibly Sophia Burthen.

Dear Sophia,

How strange it was to find these names, Polly and Cooley, carried by the wife of Richard Hatt. Polly, your married name, as spelled in the 1851 census of Peel Township, Canada West, and then Cooley, the surname of ill-fated Chloe Cooley, the enslaved woman who formerly enslaved New Yorker Peter Martin witnessed being bound and ferried across the Niagara River to be sold back into the United States by New York born UEL Adam Vrooman. Vrooman had purchased Cooley from fellow Loyalist Benjamin Hardison, who likely acquired her in the region, possibly on the New York side of the border near Fort Niagara, where Daniel Outwater and Simon Knox (or Noxon), the men who stole you and your sister from their Dutchess County kin Joseph Harris, sold you to Thayendanegea/Joseph Brant. Chloe Cooley’s sale across an international border triggered the passing of The 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, an act that did little to change your status, or prevent you from being sold in Canada around 1806-07. Upper Canada’s Act was the type of “gradual emancipation” enacted in a number of norther states (Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1783, New York 1799/1817) that simply repositioned enslaved children into indenture, what Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster calls unfreedom:

“Through the process of emancipation in the North, which freed most African Americans after they were indentured and reached adulthood, Black children were subjected to new forms of unfreedom particular to their race, age and laboring status.”[13]

A child such as Eli would have shared a similar experience of unfreedom in Canada.

Preserved Cooley, father of Mary, is the only Cooley to appear on the list kept by the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada. Born in New York City in 1750, Preserved was the son of David Cooley of Orange County, New York, and grandson of Daniel Cooley of Fairfield, Connecticut. Daniel Cooley had married twelve-year-old Jemima Griffen in 1718; she bore him five children before she died at age 23. She was thirteen when Preserved’s brother (and Mary’s uncle) Isaac was born in 1720. Preserved settled in Ancaster Township, while Isaac moved to Dutchess County, where he died in 1780 at Fishkill, Sophia’s birthplace. She could have crossed paths with him. As I’ve said often, here and there are not separate, they remain contiguous, at times continuous, flowing together, bleeding into each other, weaving such a tangled web of people, places, homes.

If we look at the etymology of such well-known words for “house” as French maison, Italian casa, and Russian dom, we will see that they once referred to covering and hiding somebody or something… The oldest recorded form of house is hus, with long u (long u is the vowel we hear in Modern Engl. too), and it seems to be related to the verb hide. – Anatoly Lieberman (University of Minnesota, The Oxford Etymologist. [14]

Hidden away, deep in the woods of Quinte West, Ontario, there is a dark brown/black two-storey house. This building has travelled over 155 miles (250 klms) from the site of a former settlement near Albion Falls, at the east end of the Hamilton “mountain” (actually an escarpment, part of the Niagara) where Mud Street now crosses the top of the Red Hill Expressway, just a short walk from the falls. The house was originally built in 1817 by Elijah and Mary Secord, part of the newly established community of Albion Mills, developed by UEL settler William Davis. Davis had received substantial compensation in money and land when he lost his plantation (and dozens of enslaved people) in Orange County, North Carolina; his large plantation had been used by General Charles Lord Cornwallis as the base for British forces during their failed Race to the Dan (River) in the spring of 1781.[15] Davis also received ten-thousand pounds in compensation for hosting the army; the plantation was destroyed by Continental forces not long after he abandoned the property. Davis would meet John Graves Simcoe, future Governor of Upper Canada, on his flight north to Canada.

Harmony Hall (staffed by two enslaved men brought north with the Davis family) was the grand home of the Davis family at Albion Mills; the Secords were their neighbours. The final Cultural Heritage Resource Assessment Technical Report, completed prior to the construction of the Red Hill Expressway (City of Hamilton, 2003) offered this assessment of Davis’s settlement:

“Albion Mills, one of the earliest centres of settlement started as a mill site on the Big Creek on the escarpment edge. In the late 1820s, it comprised an extensive grist mill, a saw mill, a stone distillery, a distiller’s house, a blacksmith’s house and shop, an ashery, two houses for millers, three houses for tenants and labourers, one large house used as an inn, a merchant’s shop, a storehouse; a cooper’s shop, a waggon house, and a large two-storey dwelling house, with an extensive barn, stables, and a number of other outbuildings.”[16]

Despite all these essential amenities, this community failed to prosper, and nothing remains of the settlement today. In the 1980s, the Secord’s house, where indentured Eli would have lived until he “came of age” in 1826/27, was carefully dismantled in a lovingly ordered fashion, then precisely reconstructed, obscured in the woods near the Bay of Quinte.

The land around the Bay of Quinte is known as “Loyalist Country,” a region close to the Canada/U.S. border at the eastern end of Lake Ontario near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River where many UELs from Dutchess, Ulster and Westchester Counties, New York, relocated in the 1780s and 90s. The convenience of this area for UELs was made obvious in the decades between the American Revolution and the War of 1812; it allowed many to maintain their close ties with family and friends, as well as business and political contacts, south of the border, and it was not uncommon for UELs to play both sides to their advantage. Daniel Outwater, for example, received a land grant from the Crown in recognition of his loyalty; his widow Nelly (Neltje, née Harris) would later apply for a pension from the United States Army for her late husband’s services during the revolution in Dutchess County.

The Loyalist brand has long been highly valued by their descendants, similar to the descendants of Revolutionary and Civil war heroes in the United States. The UEL Association of Canada monitors and strictly controls its history, and the genealogies of its membership. They love the Union Jack, Britain and the Royal Family (even though many are descendants of

Dutch settlers), and embrace and defend their traditions, dressing in period clothing and making pilgrimages to honoured heritage sites. They continue to invest in their creation myth, regardless of its accuracy. They often describe themselves as persecuted victims, as exemplified by the following propaganda on two of the five bronze plaques affixed to the City of Hamilton’s UEL monument:

Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the calling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits, or divorce them from loyalty almost without parallel.

For

THE

UNITY OF EMPIRE:

The United Empire Loyalists believing that a monarchy was better than a republic and shrinking with abhorrence from a dismemberment of the Empire, were willing, rather than lose the one and endure the other, to bear with temporary injustice. Taking up arms for the King they passed through all the horrors of civil war and bore what was worse than death, the hatred of their fellow countrymen, and when the battle went against them, sought no compromise, but, forsaking every possession excepting their honour, set their faces toward the wildernesses of British North America to begin amid untold hardships, life anew under the flag they revered.[17]

There is no mention of the enslaved people they brought north as chattel (encouraged by the Crown, and tax free), or the significant compensation they were granted. This monument still confidently embodies the lie/amnesia at the heart of Hamilton’s settler history. During the early stages of researching It Was Dark There All The Time, I reached out to the official UEL archives in Adolphustown (near Greater Napanee, on the Adolphus Reach of the Bay of Quinte) to inquire about a particular UEL family who had relocated to the Bay of Quinte area. They were the extended Harris/Outwater families from Fishkill, Dutchess County, who had owned Sophia and her family. In my inquiries, I related the story of Sophia Burthen. I have never received a response.

The reality is, that much of the story UEL associations and their members promote, is fiction, a sad truth considering how deeply embedded their biased version is in the teaching of Canadian history. While their tales emphasize the great sacrifices they made; the numerous texts on Hamilton’s UEL monument fail to mention the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or any other Indigenous peoples who fought as allies of the British. There is a small plaque in a nearby garden, but it refers to the Haudenosaunee as the “Six Nation Indians” and also incorrectly states that they were fighting for the British (and not as allies fighting for their own independent community).

Dear Sophia,

The house at Quinte West is the physical embodiment of the Loyalist myth, a lovingly reconstructed domicile of white privilege, nestled in a crafted landscape, hidden from view on Indigenous land, only a short distance from Tyendinaga

Mohawk Territory, home to the descendants of Kanien’kehá:ka/ Mohawk peoples who chose to settle near Kingston (including Konwatsi’tsiaiénni/Molly Brant, Thayendanegea/Joseph’s older sister) instead of along the Grand River. In 2018, The Globe

Sidney March, United Empire Loyalist Monument , 1929, unveiled on Empire Day 1929, Hamilton, Ontario. bronze, approximately 2.5 m tall, photographed by the author.

& Mail newspaper described the Secord home as a “newly restored, centuries-old house (that) comes with a famous name attached.”[18] Eli Breckinridge’s absence from the restored narrative (little more than a heritage branding exercise), reminds me of the infamous enslaved child hidden in the shadows of the portrait of John Glassford and his family by Archibald McLauchlan, circa 1767, that I wrote about in It Was Dark There

All The Time:

“Run Away Slave” advertisements for Tom from the New-York Gazette, Or, the Weekly Post-Boy, March 30, 1755; June 23, 1755; and December 13, 1756, all on page 3, collection of the New York Public Library. Original newspapers photographed by the author in 2019.

“John Glassford was a wealthy Glaswegian tobacco merchant. At the time this portrait was painted he was living in the Shawfield Mansion just off the Trongate in what is now Glassford Street. His wealth is demonstrated by the opulence of the house … and magnificence of the oil painting itself. There was another indicator of Glassford’s great wealth and status in the painting, which depicted a black manservant standing on the left behind Glassford. The employment of black pages and servants was very fashionable among rich Glaswegians, brought over from the slave-worked plantations of the American colonies and the West Indies. However, the servant was subsequently painted out, perhaps due to anti-slavery sentiment in the 19th century.”[19]

Here, the phrase “employment of black pages and servants” conveniently obscures the enslaved status of the Black person, just as the absence of Eli in the Secord narrative obscures the truth of their privilege.

The home of the Dutchess County Historical Society is known as the Clinton House: “The stone house was built circa 1765 for Hugh Van Kleeck. It is now a state-owned historic building named in honor of George Clinton, the first governor of New York and former vice president of the United States.”[20] Within the story of Sophia Burthen, the Van Kleeck’s of Poughkeepsie are significant (variations of their name include Van Cleek and Van Kleek) as it was the series of fugitive slave advertisements (above) that provided the evidence I needed to confirm the identities of her (and her family’s) owners and kin:

“Between the early spring of 1755, and the winter of 1756–57, there were three advertisements placed in the New-York Gazette, Or, the Weekly Post-Boy for a man named Tom. Tom had ‘run away,’ and his owners — first ‘the Heirs of Barent Van Cleek, of Poughkeepsie,’ then ‘Joseph Harris, of Beekman’s Precinct, in Dutchess County’ — were anxious for his return. Tom was highly skilled, and he had left with much property. These very detailed ads tell us much about him and reveal much about the interconnected families who were searching for him. These related families were prominent in business (farming, trading, land speculation), the Dutch community, and the church, and they are directly linked to Sophia. Tom may, in fact, have been a relative of hers.”

The fugitive Tom, the “servant/page” of the Glassfords, the many unknown and unnamed enslaved persons brought as chattel into Canada, and the indentured Eli Breckenridge, haunt their respective houses; cast in shadow, hidden in back corners, shrouded in the collective ignorance and selective amnesia of whiteness. I know not for how long, Sophia said of being held, bound and blind folded, with her unnamed lost sister, in the hold of a vessel where it was dark there all the time. Those of us of whiteness need to look much harder into the darkness Sophia spoke of. We need to Begin Again:

“Begin Again is shorthand for something (James) Baldwin commended to the country in the latter part of his career: that we re-examine the fundamental values and commitments that shape our self-understanding, and that we look back to those beginnings not to reaffirm . . . or to double down on myths that secure our innocence, but to see where we went wrong and how we might reimagine or recreate ourselves in light of who we initially set out to be. This requires an unflinching encounter with the lie at the heart of our history.”

- Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020).[21]

[1] Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Modern Library, 1926 [1851], page 93.

[2] Webster, Crystal Lynn, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 1-2.

[3] Hunter, Andrew, It Was Dark There All The Time: Sophia Burthen and the Legacy of Slavery in Canada. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2022.

[4] Clark-Pujara, Christy, Dark Work: The History of Slavery in Rhode Island. New York: NYU Press, 2016.

[5] Clark-Pujara, Christy, Dark Work: The History of Slavery in Rhode Island. New York: NYU Press, 2016. Sophia Burthen’s interview appears on pages 192–95 of Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery.

The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company / Cleveland, OH: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington / New York: Sheldon, Lamport and Blakeman; London: Trübner, 1856). She appears as Sophia Pooley (her married name). I refer to her by her family name Burthen as her husband left her “for a white woman.” Her interview is the only known firstperson account of an individual held enslaved in Canada.

[6] Oxford English Dictionary, Canadian Edition

[7] From the “Scope and Content File Descriptions,” Archives of Ontario, F 493-1: Jean Baptiste Rousseau family personal and business correspondence.

[8] Shadd, Adrienne, The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010.

[9] Shadd, 50–51.

[10] Shadd, 52.

[11] Ibid

[12] “Loyalist Directory,” s.v. Francis Brackenridge, United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada website, http://www.uelac.org/Loyalist-Info/ detail.php?letter=b&line=512.

[13] Webster, 2

[14] Liberman, Anatoly, Our habitat: house, published in the series Word Origins and How We Know Them (January 21, 2015), OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, https://blog.oup. com/2015/01/house-word-origin-etymology/

[15] The Race to the Dan is seen by many historians as a critical turning point in the American Revolution, a strategic retreat by Continental General Nathanael Greene in 1781. Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown later that year.

[16] The former home of Elijah and Mary Secord (top: built 1817, photographed circa 1900 in its original location), relocated and reconstructed at Quinte West in the 1980s (bottom: photographed for The Globe & Mail, Home of the Week, August 2018).

[17] Hamilton’s UEL Monument is located in Prince’s Square, at the front of an Ontario Provincial Court House, 50 Main Street East.

[18] The Globe & Mail, Home of the Week, August 2018

[19] https://www.theglasgowstory.com/image/?inum=TGSE00539

[20] Ferro, John, Poughkeepsie boasts many examples of fine architecture. Poughkeepsie Journal, June 14, 2014.

[21] Glaude Jr., Eddie S., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. New York: Crown, 2020, 193–94.

“Who upon her oath saith”: Recovering Women’s Experiences and Voices from Dutchess County’s Early Court Records

By William P. Tatum III, Ph.D.

On May 13, 1783, while the American Revolutionary War was still officially raging, Justice of the Peace John Bailey wrote out a mittimus writ consigning a woman to the county jail in Poughkeepsie. Constable Richard Warner had arrested Sarah

Bakehorn, a spinster, for larceny. In his order, Bailey accused Bakehorn of “stealing a fowl commonly called a Duck,” an odd turn of phrase that might reflect some frustration with the entire affair. Bailey’s mittimus required the jailkeeper to confine Bakehorn until the next meeting of the General Sessions of the Peace, the county’s criminal court, at which time the judges would determine her fate. The back of the original document, which survives in the archives of the Dutchess County Clerk’s Office, provides a brief clue to her fate: on it is the abbreviated note “Disd by Procn,” which stands for “discharged by proclamation.” The note signifies that when Sarah Bakehorn’s case came before the court, no one stood up to prosecute her. At this juncture, she disappears from the known documentary record.[1]

Though leaving many questions unanswered, Sarah Bakehorn’s brief brush with the law offers one example of how court documents preserve the experiences of women from the county’s early years. Since the development of women’s history as a separate field began in the 1960s, locating source material on the female experience has been challenging. Sixty years of continuous effort by researchers has uncovered a wealth of journals, letters, articles, and other material generated by women in past eras. However, much of this material relates directly to elite women. The source base for much of women’s history, particularly for women of middling and lower social ranks, remains dependent upon documents generated by men. The mittimus writ for Sarah Bakehorn is a case in point: while it tells us she ran afoul of the law and proves her existence, the document does not provide historians with any insights into her worldview nor her motivation for the alleged theft. However, it is unlikely that we will ever uncover testimony in Bakehorn’s own hand, so without this record generated by and seen through a man’s perspective, we may never have known of Bakehorn’s existence at all.[2]

While historians have long appreciated the value of court records for developing a better understanding of women’s experiences in the past, these records remain under-utilized on the local level.[3] Historians of Dutchess County have a uniquely accessible source within the archival context of New York State courtesy of the Ancient Documents Collection. Consisting of the filings and associated material from the Dutchess County Courts of Common Pleas (civil court) and General Sessions (criminal court) between 1721-1889, this collection offers a rich assemblage of material including many cases touching on women’s lives in the past. Thousands of pages of digitized material from this collection are now available online through the Ancient Documents Search Portal on the Dutchess County government website. Accessible for free via the internet, the portal offers researchers practically unlimited access to this deep well of primary source material.[4]

While court records tend to preserve information on the richest and poorest members of society, including many like Sarah Bakehorn who are otherwise invisible in the documentary record, issues of historical bias must nevertheless be considered. The primary challenge for historians lies in the difference between recovering women’s experiences and women’s voices from the past. Women did not serve as judges or lawyers during the eighteenth nor through most of the nineteenth century in New York.[5] As a result, the evidence preserved in court records has been filtered through some level of male perspective, and often elite male perspective, at the point of creation. This article will explore the varying levels to which women’s voices penetrated this intermediate level of interpretation to reach us today. From declarations and narrations submitted by male lawyers representing their female clients in court to depositions prepared by clerks recording the direct testimony of female witnesses, the records within the Dutchess County Ancient Documents Collection preserve vital data ranging along the spectrum between women’s experiences and their direct words.

In general, women’s voices shine through the clearest in those matters where their testimony was most essential to the successful prosecution of the case. In most of these instances, that sworn testimony came from women of the middling sort and lower classes, offering an especially important record in light of the general absence of other writings from these sectors of society within the surviving manuscript material. High status women by and large appear in the court records as litigants represented by professional attorneys. Their ability to pay for a man to represent them within the male-dominated institution of the courts increased their chances of success in their suits while simultaneously distancing and obscuring their voices from the view of historians. Women of less elite status, in contrast, appear in the record as witnesses for legal actions initiated by men, most commonly as the result of prosecutions under the Poor Law. While lacking the agency and means to enter their own cases, the voices are preserved to varying levels of directness. The remainder of this article will present examples drawn from the Ancient Documents Collection, proceeding from the extreme of men representing women’s experiences to men recording women’s testimony. In each case, attention will focus on evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the material with respect to the information these sources offer on women’s lives.

Catheryna Brett

Few women achieved a status as elite as that of Catheryna Rombout Brett. Daughter of Francis Rombout, an early land patentee of Dutchess County, Catheryna married Royal Navy Lieutenant Roger Brett in 1703. When he drowned in 1718, Catheryna became sole proprietor of a massive estate centered on the modern city of Beacon. Until her death in 1764, Brett wielded tremendous influence in southern Dutchess County.

[6] She appears twice in the records of the Court of Common Pleas pursuing debts owed to her by tenant farmers occupying her lands. However, Madam Brett, as she is locally known to this day, did not enter these declarations herself: she retained the services of professional attorneys Henry Wileman and John Alsop to represent her and prosecute on her behalf. The documents that these men subsequently filed in the County Clerk’s Office are all written from Brett’s perspective, but the formulaic nature of these records raises serious questions over how directly they represent her actual voice.

In the first declaration, which Wileman presented during the October session of the Court of Common Pleas in 1734, Brett charged Jacob Musir with failing to deliver “Thirty two Scheples of good Merchantable Winter wheat” that he owed her as rent for his farm. As proof of her cause, Brett submitted the original agreement between her and Musir, written in Dutch and dated February 23, 1722.[7] The second case occurred four years later in 1738, when Brett once again entered a charge for non-payment of debt. She alleged, through her attorney John Alsop, that the defendant, Johannes Buys, owed her £24 of New York currency for failure to repay a £12 debt, though she did not specify the reason for the loan. As with Musir’s case, Brett produced the original bill from 1732 wherein Buys acknowledged the original debt and promised to pay the penal sum (£24) if he failed to repay the initial loan by December of that year.

While Brett probably relied upon her attorneys to prepare these documents, historians can nevertheless recover an echo of her sentiments in the ultimate disposition of these suits. Neither defendant entered a lawyer to proceed on his behalf, nor does it appear that Musir or Buys offered any form of defense against the charges. Brett requested that both declarations be filed de bene esse—temporarily and not to be acted upon by the courts until the defendants could secure someone to pledge bail for their future appearance.[8] From a distance of 280 years, it appears that Brett was providing both men with an opportunity to settle their debts outside of court. The absence of any further notations on either declaration suggests that Musir and Buys followed that course. Both cases offer vital examples of how an elite widow managed her estate business as an independent landowner.

Jane Hitchcock

Jane Hitchcock provides a second example of an elite woman employing the court system to settle a score. Like Bakehorn, the court record identified Hitchcock as a “spinster,” though in contrast to Bakehorn, Hitchcock was not on the wrong end of the law. While widows tend to be the best-known examples of women operating as independent entities in early New York law, spinsters of sufficient means could also initiate actions. Hitchcock clearly met that wealth criteria on some level, since she retained the services of attorney Theron Rudd to represent her at the January term of the Dutchess County Court of Common Pleas in 1806. In the declaration that Rudd entered on her behalf, Hitchcock related that on July 1, 1805, she had “agreed and undertaken and fruitfully promised” to marry one Robert Howe within the space of four months. Both were single residents of the county and the match seemed sufficiently sound to Hitchcock that she waited the promised four months, refusing “to contract matrimony with any other man,” which suggests that there may have been other offers coming her way. Despite reminding Howe of his promise numerous times, both parties remained single. Hitchcock claimed to the court that Howe’s failure to fulfill his marriage promise to her had cost Hitchcock $500, a significant sum for the period. The Court of Common Pleas minutes for January 1806 record Jane Hitchcock’s appearance in court, with the note that Robert Howe did not appear and that a summary judgment would be issued against him if he did not appear and offer a defense subsequently. The reverse side of the single-page declaration only records that the document was filed on March 4, 1806, while the remaining court minutes for 1806 do not record any appearance by Robert Howe. It is likely that the case was either settled out of court, that Howe accepted the judgment against him, or that he fled the county.[9]

Hitchcock’s suit is an apt example of how court records can frustrate research as much as they open windows into otherwise lost eras of the past. From this single surviving data point, we learn that Jane Hitchcock was a mature woman of some means. The title of spinster indicates that she had progressed beyond the age by which contemporaries expected women to marry, a figure that modern scholars estimate fell around 22 years of age during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America. [10] Her retention of Theron Rudd as her attorney indicates that she either had access to enough wealth or a sufficiently solid case to guarantee that his fees would be paid. In these circumstances, one would expect to see some other surviving documentation of her life and experience in Dutchess County: however, a thorough review of the standard reference literature and genealogical resources reveals nothing that can be reliably linked to her.[11] As with the example of Catheryna Brett, it is unlikely that Hitchcock prepared the narration herself, instead providing the relevant details to Rudd. While not preserving her voice in a direct manner, the declaration that Rudd entered on Hitchcock’s behalf nevertheless provides evidence of single, never-married women acting independently of male relations or guardians.

Zipporah Morgan

Zipporah Morgan provides the first example of a woman whose testimony was required for a case to proceed. On May 9, 1778, Morgan appeared before Justice of the Peace Ephraim Paine in Amenia Precinct to lodge an official complaint. According to the arrest warrant that Paine swore out that day, Francis Weeks had “violently assaulted beaten and wounded” Morgan three days earlier. Paine’s order directed any constable of the county to seize Weeks and physically bring him to a justice of the peace, at which point Weeks would sign a recognizance (a type of bond) to guarantee his appearance at the next meeting of the county court. We know from a scribble on the reverse side of the warrant that a Constable Gillit physically took Weeks into custody, although he failed to note the date on which he arrested the alleged assaulter. On May 18th, Gillit brought Weeks before Roswell Hopkins, another justice of the peace in Amenia, to complete the paperwork guaranteeing that Weeks would appear in county court. Weeks signed a recognizance swearing that he would forfeit £20 of New York currency if he failed to appear at the next General Sessions of Dutchess County to answer “unto all Such matter as Shall be then and there objected against him by Zipporah Morgan…Concerning an Assault lately made upon her…by the Said Francis Weeks” along with other unspecified misdemeanors. On the reverse of the recognizance, a clerk noted that the obligation was continued until October 1778. The minutes of the Court of General Sessions for October 1778 record that Weeks failed to appear in court, as he had promised to do when signing his recognizance. The court ordered the document to be estreated: that is, for the officers of the county to secure the surety or bail money that had been promised to guarantee Weeks’s attendance.[12]

Unfortunately, no further surviving information regarding this case has been found to date, nor has other material emerged regarding Francis Weeks. It is possible that Zipporah Morgan was the daughter of Jonathan and Zipporah Morgan of Kent, Connecticut, whose birth on May 12, 1750, appears in the surviving town vital statistics.[13] The only additional surviving detail regarding her alleged attacker is Roswell Hopkins’s description of Weeks as a “surgeon” in the recognizance. Nevertheless, the arrest warrant and recognizance provide a record of the existence of both parties, along with a documented instance of a woman seeking legal action against a physical abuser.

Rachel Snyder

Perjury cases preserve an alternative form of women’s voices: the falsehoods they told to harm or protect others. One of the best examples in the Ancient Documents Collection is a grand jury indictment of Rachel Snyder in 1762. Meeting in Poughkeepsie on May 18th, the jurors considered testimony from Justice of the Peace James Smith of Charlotte Precinct regarding evidence that Snyder had given the previous winter. On December 16, 1761, Snyder had appeared before Smith to record a deposition regarding her father’s attempted assassination of Captain James Isaiah Ross. At an unspecified point prior to December 16th, Snyder had been visiting her father at his house when Captain Ross rode by. According to Snyder’s statement, John Houghteling had promptly “load[ed] his Gun with two Bulletts and said that he intended to shoot Capt. James Isaiah Ross” when Ross rode back along the same path. Snyder stated that her father and Ross “had Some dispute in Law” and that Snyder, her mother, and her brother Jacob had all attempted to reason with Houghteling. He laid in wait for Ross for two hours before giving up his attempted murder, at which point Snyder’s mother remarked that “God would not Suffer him to go through with his Intention.” In response, Houghteling declared that “the Devil told Said Ross that he was Waiting for him” and promised to shoot Ross at the next opportunity. Snyder further deposed that, according to her mother, Houghteling had gone out to wait for Ross one more time, swearing that “he wod no be obliged to pay no money to the said Ross for he would Shoot him.” However, when called before the grand jury to repeat her testimony, Snyder claimed that “she did not know anything set forth in her oath aforesaid nor ever knew or had heard anything Concerning the same...” The grand jury issued a true bill to try her for perjury before the Court of General Sessions.[14]

Although this indictment likely records Justice of the Peace James Smith reading Snyder’s earlier testimony to the court, the document nevertheless captures a closer rendition of an actual eighteenth-century Dutchess County woman’s voice than any yet considered here. It is possible that in recording the initial deposition, Smith took some liberties of paraphrasing Snyder’s account of her father’s attempt at murder, but in order to be formally admissible as evidence, the deposition had to accurately reflect the gist of a witness’s statements. What led Snyder to inform on her father remains a mystery. The minutes for the Court of General Sessions for May 1762 record that she failed to appear to answer the charge and that her recognizance (which has not survived) was to be estreated. Her father, John Houghteling, appears in the same minutes with a continuance until the October 1762 session. At that meeting, Houghteling threw himself on the court’s mercy and received a fine of seventeen pounds, nine shillings, and six pence, which he paid in court. The incidental preservation of Snyder’s deposition, which is not known to have otherwise survived in its original form, opens a rare window into family dynamics in the mid-eighteenth century. From the entire family’s attempts to dissuade Houghteling from shooting Ross to Houghteling’s wife’s blunt statement on the planned attack going awry due to divine intervention to Houghteling’s absolute refusal to give up his designs and his clear hatred of Ross, this indictment preserves elements of lived experience that would otherwise be lost to time. This document should certainly make any historian pause to consider the human dramas that might have laid behind the thousands of pages of debt litigation preserved in this collection.[15]

Helena Bogardus

Those court records that most clearly capture the voices of early American women in Dutchess County were invariably involving the enforcement of Poor Law. Descended from a series of statutes passed between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, this law required local communities to care for certain classes of impoverished residents. Local elected officials titled “Overseers of the Poor” administered government-funded relief while simultaneously policing their communities to ensure that no unnecessary expenses fell upon public funds. Whenever possible, the overseers of the poor would transfer costs for relief onto private individuals, requiring those residents to swear out bonds to indemnify the local government if they failed to properly provide for the specified impoverished person. One of the favorite targets for the overseers of the poor were the fathers of bastard children, whom the overseers would pursue in court to secure legally-mandated payments to support the bastard child and occasionally the mother.[16]

Helena Bogardus, a resident of Rombout Precinct in what is today the Fishkill area of Dutchess County, offers one example. In the spring of 1758, she began a physical relationship with Jacobus (otherwise called James) Philipse, also a resident of Rombout. Jacobus promised to marry Helena and even offered her a gold ring as a physical token of his love. By the summer, Helena was pregnant with Jacobus’s child, at which juncture their relationship took a sudden turn. By implication, Jacobus broke off relations some time before December, when Helena’s pregnancy became obvious. The overseers of the poor immediately went into action, bringing the case to the attention of the local justices of the peace and arranging for Jacobus Philipse to be bound over to appear in the Dutchess County Court of General Sessions at the next meeting, in May of 1759.[17]

While bastardy cases are significant for the study of local history in a number of ways, for the purposes of this article these cases are especially valuable because they preserve the most direct testimony of women found within the Ancient Documents Collection. Successful bastardy suits required depositions by a variety of witnesses, including the mother and anyone in her household who could corroborate her story. Due to the life patterns in Dutchess County during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of the witness were other women. While the overseers of the poor and the justices of the peace who carried out these examinations did not record the wordfor-word testimony of the witnesses, the careful paraphrasing comes closest to preserving the actual voices of eighteenth and nineteenth century woman living in the county. Helena Bogardus’s case has preserved the testimony of four women:

Helena herself, her mother Catharina, her sister Catherine Wilson (who was married to John Wilson of Rombout Precinct), and Rachel Isabrantz, who resided in Catharina Bogardus’s house along with Helena.

Helena began the chain of testimony on December 16, 1758, in front of Mathew DuBois, one of the local justices of the peace. DuBois recorded Helena’s testimony in a remarkably poorly-spelled deposition, beginning with the statement that “ Jacobus Phillips had the Carnall knowledge of her body on her mothers bed some time in the and [sic, end] the last of guin [sic, June],” promising her marriage. Since that encounter, Helena had repeated the experience several times. At some juncture, she stated, “the said Jacobus Phillips begat her weth [sic, with] the bastard child of which she is now pregnant.” Helena further swore that Jacobus was the true father of the child and that she had not had relations with any other man during that time. On May 12, 1759, Helena recorded a second deposition in the presence of Mathew DuBois and John Bailey, both of the local justices of the peace for Rombout. Confirming her previous testimony, Helena added that Jacobus had begun visiting her “under Pretence of Courtship and that in the said Easter week the said Jacobus Philipse after reciprocal Promises of Marriage between him and the Examinant he desired liberty of the Examinant to ask her Mothers Consent to the Marriage.” Helena had asked him to delay the request, fearing it would appear indecent “to Marry so soon after her Father’s Death.” That concern did not, however, forestall her from agreeing to “let him have Carnal knowledge of her Body that in the latter Part of the Month of June on her Mother’s Bed.” Helena added that

Jacobus Philipse told her that his sister Catharina had a Gold Ring of his and told the Examinant to get it from her to keep it as a pledge of Marriage which the Examinant afterwards got from the said Catharina and wore it for several months till her pregnancy was Publickly discovered.[18]

The detail of the promise ring effectively ensured that the overseers of the poor would have a successful prosecution of

Philipse. For local historians, Helena’s testimony offers an insight into courtship practices, including the use of promise tokens, in colonial Dutchess County.

The testimony of the other three female witnesses supported Helena’s statements while adding significant details. Her mother Catharina, deposed on May 12, 1759, stated that Jacobus visited her daughter “very frequently at this Examinants House That the Examinant thought he Came to Court her Said Daughter for his

Wife and never Suspected the Integrity of his Intentions.” When Helena’s pregnancy became obvious, Catharina said, she only ever identified Philipse as the father. Catharina never Saw any other Man to visit her as a Sweet heart That her said Daughter wore a Gold Ring Some Considerable time during her pregnancy and before her pregnancy was Discovered And Afterwards the Jacobus Philipse pretended the Said Ring was his and Insisted to have it That her said Daughter Insisted he had Given the Ring to her as a pledge of Marriage but as said Philipse refused Marrying her said Daughter and there was a Considerable Alliance between the Examinants family and that of the said Jacobus’s father by two of the Examinants sons being married to two of the said Jacobus’s sisters the Examinant to prevent any further family Uneasiness Advised her Said Daughter to send the Ring back.[19]

Catherine Wilson testified that Philipse courted her sister and that “Sometime last fall her said Sister workt about a fortnight at the Examinants House and the Said Jacobus Philipse Came there to Visit her said sister very frequently and Almost always Carried her home And that no body to her knowledge came to See her the said Sister at her house or Elsewhere.” Rachel Isabrantz confirmed the previous testimony of Philipse’s courting behavior, including having seen Helena wearing a gold ring, though Rachel did not know the ring’s origin. Rachel added a character testimony for Helena, swearing that “she always Saw the Said Helena Bogardus behave Decent and well and that she is generally respected by all her Acquaintance & Neighbours.”[20] Through this testimony, doors are opened on female work patterns (Helena and Rachel’s stays in other households to labor), complicated inter-family relationships (multiple marriages between Bogardus and Philipse family members), and the overriding need to maintain a good reputation. The women’s testimony, along with other evidence, carried the day during the court term of May 1759, when Philipse’s lawyer attempted to quash the order in bastardy that established child support payments. The court found in favor of the overseers of the poor, requiring Jacobus Philipse to pay for his bastard son’s expenses.[21]

Though frequently dry and filled with seemingly endless repetitions of the same stilted legal phrases, court records preserve an essential record of daily life, often affording the only views we have of individuals who otherwise did not leave behind an enduring documentary record. Women of all stations were chief among these otherwise invisible residents of eighteenth and nineteenth century. From high status to low status, the records preserved in the Dutchess County Ancient Documents Collection afford us rare glimpses into special episodes of their lives, sometimes providing additional information that is applicable across a broader spectrum of experience. Unfortunately, none of these documents preserve actual word-for-word records of women’s voices. Those filings that come closest to fulfilling that goal were usually linked to cases where the evidence provided by women was essential to the successful execution of a lawsuit. While such cases occupied a relatively narrow bandwidth within the business of the county courts as a whole, almost exclusively relating to enforcement of the Poor Law, the documents surviving from them offer the broadest insights into women’s experiences in early Dutchess County. This article has reviewed a small sample of the types of court records and the variety of information they preserve. Researchers will find even greater detail online in the Ancient Documents Search Portal, the contents of which will continue to expand as the Dutchess County Clerk’s Office processes additional surviving records of the Dutchess County Courts of Common Pleas and General Sessions.

[1] Ancient Document 10354, Dutchess County Ancient Documents Collection, Dutchess County Clerk’s Office, Poughkeepsie, NY.

[2] For an overview of the field of Women’s History, see Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein, “The Big Tent of U.S. Women’s and Gender History: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 99, No. 3 (December 2012), pp 793-817.

[3] Classic studies that are still state-of-the field today for the study of women from the courts include Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994; and Deborah A. Rosen, Courts and Commerce: Gender, Law and the Market Economy in Colonial New York, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1997.

[4]The digitized portion of the Dutchess County Ancient Documents Collections may be accessed online at www.dutchessny.gov/ancientdocuments. Documents from that collection referred to in this article are available online and may be found by searching with the document number only in the online portal. The Ancient Documents Project is a continuing initiative of Dutchess County Clerk Bradford H. Kendall, funded with generous financial support from the New York State Archives Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund.

[5]Kate Stoneman became the first woman admitted to the New York Bar on May 20, 1886. “Kate Stoneman,” The Kate Stoneman Project, http:// katestonemanproject.org/katestonemen.shtml, accessed May 13, 2020.

[6]For an authoritative biography of Catheryna Rombout Brett, see Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook 1992.

[7] Ancient Document 143 (hereafter Anc Doc). Schepel is the Dutch word for bushel. Ancient Document 142C, which is written in Dutch, is probably the contract between Brett and Musir, entered into evidence with Brett’s initial filing.

[8] “DE BENE ESSE Definition & Legal Meaning,” The Law Dictionary, http:// thelawdictionary.org/de-bene-esse, accessed February 15, 2022.

[9] Declaration of Jane Hitchcock, January Term 1806, Anc Doc 44901; Dutchess County Court of Common Pleas Minutes for January Term 1806, Film 130, Dutchess County Clerk’s Office.

[10] Haines, M. R. 1996. “Long-Term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present.” The History of the Family 1(1):15-39. Catherine Fitch and Steven Ruggles impugned Haines’s methodology in their later work, pointing towards a general scarcity of reliable sources from this early period, calling his conclusions on marriage age into question. Catherine Finch and Steven Ruggles, “Historical Trends in Marriage Formation: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation,” in Ties that Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation, Linda Waite, Christine Bachrach, Michelle Hindin, Elizabeth Thomson, and Arland Thorton (eds.), Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruter, 2000, pgs 59-88.

[11] No records from Hitchcock or Howe appear in Poucher’s Gravestones or in Helen Wilkinson Reynolds Marriages and Deaths. Searches of FamilySearch. org and Ancestry.com return hits from western New York: a tombstone for a Jane Hitchcock who died on October 18, 1862 in Tompkins County at 83 and probate records for a Jane Hitchcock who died in 1864 and whose will was probated at the Cayuga County Court. In neither case does the surviving data tie these individuals to one another nor to Dutchess County.

[12] Anc Doc 9976 Arrest Warrant for Francis Weeks, Amenia, May 9, 1778; Anc Doc 9793 Recognizance for Francis Weeks, Amenia, May 18, 1778; Dutchess County Court of General Sessions Minutes for the Term of October 1778, Film 127, Dutchess County Clerk’s Office; “ESTREAT Definition and Legal Meaning,” The Law Dictionary, https://thelawdictionary.org/estreat/, accessed February 15, 2023.

[13] Index to the Kent Vital Records, Barbour Collection, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, CT, copied by Francelia Johnson and accessed via Rootsweb, http://sites.rootsweb.com/~ctlitch2/towns/kent/kent-vr-p5.htm, accessed June 5, 2021.

[14] Anc Doc 6482 Indictment of Rachel Snyder for Perjury, May 18, 1762.

[15] Minutes of the Court of General Sessions for May 1762 and October 1762, Film 126, Dutchess County Clerk’s Office.

[16] For a broader background treatment of poor relief in early America, see Gabriel J. Loiacono, How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021; Walter I. Trattner, from Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, Sixth Edition, New York, NY: The Free Press, 1999.

[17] Recognizance for Jacobus Philipse, December 22, 1758; Anc Doc 3994.

[18] Deposition of Helena Bogardus, December 16, 1758, Anc Doc 3995; Deposition of Helena Bogardus, May 12, 1758, Anc Doc 3996.

[19] Deposition of Catharina Bogardus, May 12, 1759, Anc Doc 3993.

[20] Deposition of Catharine Wilson, May 12, 1759, Anc Doc 3992; Deposition of Rachel Isabrantz, May 12, 1759, Anc Doc 3985

[21] Minutes of the Dutchess County Court of General Sessions, May Term 1759, Film 126, Dutchess County Clerk’s Office