Ancestry/Genealogy

I remember reading about Deerfield and the captives, but never ever thought anyone's story would ever be told. It was one of those things that when you put down the book you think they are/will be lost to history forever. That is one cool story.

I'm familiar with the Ipswich/Northampton/Chicopee/Springfield Allens because of a mistake I made years ago. I thought the the Hampden Co. Allens were the most likely ones on the other side of a two generation gap I had between my own records and the published genealogies of Massachusetts. I paid less attention to the Duxbury/Plymouth Allens and I shouldn't have.

This went on for years. Finally, in about 1998, I found an obituary that led me to a long-lost married sister, and more importantly, to the long-lost sister's application to the DAR. It was gold. But they weren't connected to the Allen family I thought they were.

That trail goes back to Samuel Allen of Bridgwater, Somerset, England, b.1596. He arrived in about 1630, became a freeman in 1635 and lived in Braintree. In 1660 he and his oldest son were among the founders of Bridgewater, MA.

Not that long ago the details of his life seemed well-established. The internet has not been kind to him though, and everyday brings more family trees with customized accounts of his life. I don't even look at them anymore. To know much more about him, or anything farther back, I'll have to rely on work published in journals.

The accounts of his descendants were written in the 19th century and have been left unbothered. Almost all of them stayed near Bridgewater during the colonial period. I don't see any crossover with the ones in Hampden Co, but there is some migration to R.I. and Connecticut. There were several Sarah Allens, but they are all well-buried there. In the last part of the 18th century, the ones who bolted from Bridgewater leapfrogged the settlements elsewhere in Massachusetts and went straight into Vermont.

If it hadn't been for the end of the New Hampshire Claims border war with New York I don't think they would have gone. Another influence might have been Ethan (General not furniture) Allen, who was likely a second cousin or so of the ones who left. Word would have traveled through the grapevine about opportunities there.

On the off chance, I just checked for any event in Ipswich in my database, and I have a pair:
John Clark(b. 1639, Ipswich, Massachusetts, d. 1718, Norwich, Connecticut) m. 1672, Ipswich, to Mary Burnham(b. 1652, Ipswich, Massachusetts, d. 1723, Ipswich, Massachusetts)

I don't know much about them(someday maybe), but three and four generations later part of the family ended up in the same VT to upstate NY migration.