The Malcoms Coming Back to Boston

In the published Boston town records are some lists of people arriving in Boston by ship in the 1760s.

Each set of entries starts by identifying the ship: for example, “Danl. Malcom Sloop Rose from Halifax” on 31 Oct 1765. Then come names and sometimes brief descriptions of the passengers.

These records show a couple of John Malcom’s trips back to Boston.

• 15 Dec 1767: On a schooner from Quebec, “Capt. John Malcom”
• 1 Feb 1768: On a sloop from Halifax, “Capt. John Malcom,” mariner

They also show that in this period Malcom was legally not considered a resident of Boston, or else he wouldn’t have gone on these lists.

Another interesting entry appears on 4 Nov 1765, a sloop from Quebec: “Mickl. Malcom to the care of Capn. Malom [sic].” That captain is probably Daniel, still based on Boston. Michael Malcom might have been his aging father or his six-year-old nephew, John’s son.

Sarah Malcom, the matriarch of the family, died in Boston on 23 Sept 1767 and was buried on Copp’s Hill. Her gravestone is quite weathered, but a nineteenth-century publication makes clear she was the wife of Michael Malcom, who died in 1775.

I puzzled over one mystery among these passenger lists. A entry for 4 Aug 1769 says a schooner from Quebec brought “Mary Malcom Wife to Jno. Malcom & 3 Children.”

John Malcom married Sarah Balch in 1750, and they had children together through the following decade. In the 1790s a Boston woman identifying herself as Sarah Malcom, John Malcom’s widow, sent petitions to the British government.

The Boston directory for 1789 listed Sarah Malcom as running a “boarding-house, [on] Ship-street.” And the 15 Sept 1800 Boston newspapers reported that Sarah Malcom, aged seventy-three, had died just a few hours after her forty-year-old daughter, also named Sarah Malcom. Those facts line up pretty well with the records of John Malcom’s wife and daughter from the 1750s.

So where does “Mary Malcom Wife to Jno. Malcom” come in? I wondered if John Malcom’s first wife Sarah might have died in Québec, he remarried to a woman named Mary, she died, and he remarried to a second Sarah. I couldn’t find any records of death and remarriage, but those events might have happened outside of Massachusetts. Given how many women of the time were named Mary and Sarah, that scenario’s not as outlandish as it might seem.

But the simplest explanation is that whoever was making those lists of incoming passengers just wrote down Sarah Malcom’s name wrong. After a few years in Québec, Capt. John Malcom’s family was moving back to Boston.

TOMORROW: More change in 1769.