Tag: Dwinells

Part III: What I Tried to Find Out

In my last post, I talked about the things I didn’t know about Mary Dunlap Dwinells (my fourth great-grandmother). The information I needed about her was where and exactly when she was born and who her parents were. I went through many different channels to try and figure out the answers to my questions.

Massachusetts has some pretty good records, and by this I mean the Massachusetts Town and Vital Records. There is some information missing from this huge database, but for the most part it is fantastic, especially because many of my ancestors lived in Massachusetts. It was a pretty easy search to see if Mary showed up in any Massachusetts birth records, she didn’t.

My next step was to check New Hampshire. It seemed pretty divided from my other information as to whether she was born in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. New Hampshire has some good birth records as well but they aren’t as easy to look through as Massachusetts. I still didn’t find any record of her.

With birth records a bust, I next turned to census records. The only records that I could find of her were after her marriage. This makes sense because before 1850 only the heads of families were listed on the census with all other family members just counted.

My last ditch effort to find something about Mary was to combine both the birth records and census data. I looked through the 1800 census in New Hampshire and found all the men with the last name Dunlap who had a female child between 0-10 years old. There were four possible fathers and through marriage records I was able to narrow those fathers to one.

Perfect! I found her parents right? Not yet, I had to make sure. The father I had found was Samuel Dunlap, of Dunlap furniture fame. I was excited but I had to make sure this was a sure thing. He had a daughter named Mary that was born in 1791. Looking through other family trees on ancestry I found this Mary a few times but some trees had her married to someone else. I couldn’t find any record to match this. I searched and searched but couldn’t find any records at all. Finally I found a book that listed the Samuel Dunlap’s genealogy and I found a record of that marriage, eliminating Samuel Dunlap as Mary Dunlap Dwinells’s father.

Unfortunately, that’s the end of the story for now. I’ve exhausted my research skills. I’ve come up with a few theories as to why I can’t find any record of Mary’s birth. Maybe those records were lost. Maybe Mary was adopted and her records are somewhere else. She also could have been lying about her name, that’s probably less possible.

First published on November 30, 2015.

Part 2: What I Don’t Know

This is the second part on my series about researching Mary Dunlap Dwinells, my fourth great-grandmother. In my last post, I outlined what it know about Mary, which is really only after she got married. So lets start from the beginning.

I don’t really know where Mary was born. Her birthplace is listed as either Massachusetts or New Hampshire. I also don’t know when she was born either. On the census records and her death record her birth year (based on her age) ranges from 1793 to 1797. Speaking of her birth, I also have no idea who Mary’s parents are. They are no listed on her marriage record or her death record.

If Mary was from New Hampshire, I don’t know why she moved to Massachusetts. If she wasn’t then why did was there some discrepancy between her birthplace?

These are the main questions that I tried to answer when I began to research Mary Dunlap Dwinells. In the next part, I’ll share my researching process and the different avenues I pursued.

First published on November 18, 2015.

Part 1: What I Know

I’ve been recently caught up researching Mary Dunlap Dwinells, my fourth great-grandmother. I’ve done a lot of work about her and in these next few posts, I’m going to talk about my process and the problems that I ran into. First things first, what I know about Mary Dunlap Dwinells.

Mary’s name shows up in 6 initial documents, and I found all of them through ancestry.com. The first of these is her marriage record from the Massachusetts Town and Vital Statistics:

Her record is highlighted in grey. She was married to William Dwinells on December 31, 1817 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It probably was a nice New Year’s Eve wedding.

Mary shows up next in the birth records of all her children, which is also found in the Massachusetts Town and Vital Statistics:

All of her children are in highlighted in grey, and she had quite a few. Let me put them in chronological order for you.

• Joseph James, November 11, 1818
• Almira Ann, October 24, 1820
• Charles Henry, August 24, 1822
• Moses, October 11, 1824
• Hannah Woodman, October 29, 1826
• Daniel Bradbury, October 16, 1828
• Leonard, September 29, 1830
• Philip, January 15, 1833
• William Jr., December 15, 1834
• John Francis, May 28, 1837
• George, July 12, 1840

That’s a lot of children! And for a span of 12 years, she was having children every two years around the same time. I’m not sure why some of her children have strange middle names like Bradbury or Woodman. It is amazing that Mary has so many children over a span of 22 years especially when childbearing was so dangerous during that time period.

Mary next shows up in census records. The ones I have found are from the 1850 United States Census, the 1865 Massachusetts State Census and the 1870 United States Census. Before 1850, the United States Census only had the names of heads of households and enumerated the number of other household members. So Mary’s name wouldn’t have shown up until the 1850 census. here are her records in chronological order:

In the 1850 US Census, Mary’s age is listed as 55 and she is also listed as being born in Massachusetts. If Mary was 55 in 1850 then her birth year would be 1795. In this census record, it appears that she is still living with her husband and some of their children. Her youngest child, George was 11. Mary is listed as 68 in the 1865 census making her birth year 1797. She is no longer living with her husband who is deceased, and is living with her son, Philip. Here she is listed has being born in New Hampshire. In the last census record in 1870, Mary’s age is 75 again making her birth year 1795. She is also again listed as being born in Massachusetts.

This discrepancy is strange and perhaps points to the possibility that these census records don’t match. However, I do think that they are the same person and perhaps point to a problem with the person relaying the information to the census taker.

The last record that I have of Mary is her death record. This again comes from the Massachusetts Town and Vital Records:

Her record is kind of hard to read, but Mary L. Dunlap Dwinells passed away on January 14, 1875 at the age of 82. That would make her birth year 1793. She died from dropsey, which is an old word for edema or swelling. She died in Haverhill, but her place of birth is listed as Concord, N.H. There are no parents listed for Mary but one is listed as also from Concord.

I said that this would be a short post and honestly this is only part of Mary’s story and part of my story trying to find more information about her. In the next part, I’m going to dive deeper and try to figure out all I can about Mary’s origin story.