Boston 1775

There’s a lot still to learn about the Akley family from Boston. From genealogy websites I’ve picked up that descendants have some lore abou...

When I started to focus on Joseph Akley , I also introduced his brothers: Francis, one year older, and Thomas, John, Samuel, and William, f...

Being sued for tarring and feathering a Customs officer wasn’t the only big event in Joseph Akley ’s life in the spring of 1771. On 16 Ma...

In the late nineteenth century, the Boston historian Francis S. Drake collected lore about the Boston Tea Party from lots of families. Dr...

My last posting about Joseph Akley argued that despite being indentured away from his impoverished family at the age of ten and seeing his...

When Timothy Winship died at the end of 1767, the apprentice he’d taken in for Boston’s Overseers of the Poor, Joseph Akley , was fifteen y...

Yesterday I described how in October 1762 the Boston Overseers of the Poor indentured ten-year-old Joseph Akley to a man named Timothy Win...

Back in April , I started to look into the men Owen Richards sued for tarring and feathering him on 18 May 1770. The first and easiest to...

When we left Owen Richards in May 1770, the magistrates of Boston were completely stymied in their inquiry into who had tarred and feather...