All Roads Lead to Windham County

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 about other relatives besides the brothers I’ve been writing about.

One claim is that the father, Francis Akley, Sr., died at the Battle of Bunker Hill. His name doesn’t appear on any of the American casualty lists, however. He would have been about fifty years old at the time, and as of September 1772 he had been admitted to the Boston almshouse and designated “Lame.” So I’m skeptical.

Similar family tradition says that the youngest brother, William, born in 1769, was killed at the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in 1814. I haven’t found a casualty list to address that.

Rather, the big mystery about the Akley family that I’d love to be revealed, but doubt ever will be, was how they stayed in touch.

The Akleys fell on hard times in the 1760s. The Boston Overseers of the Poor largely split up the family, sending children to far-flung towns in the province. Then came the disruption of the war.

Eventually four of the brothers applied for Revolutionary War pensions from the federal government. None of those documents described their birth family, upbringing, or other relatives not directly germane to proving their military service or need. Only one brother even mentioned being born in Boston.

Nevertheless, those pension applications offer evidence of a bond still holding the family together. Namely, all four of those brothers ended up in the same southeastern corner of Vermont.

The first was Francis Akley, Jr. He was indentured to Edward Houghton of Lancaster from 1763 until he came of age in 1772. There were two Edward Houghtons in that town in the mid-eighteenth century, and I’m guessing Francis’s master was the Edward Houghton born in 1730 and married to Lucretia Richardson in 1760. He evidently moved to Holden around the time he took in Francis since the Boston Overseers of the Poor got a character reference from Lancaster but listed Houghton as coming from Holden.

In 1773 that Houghton family moved to Guilford, Vermont. This new community had had its first town meeting just the year before. It had charters from Gov. Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire in 1754 and 1764, but there was also a competing land grant from New York in 1771, and that conflict took decades to sort out. The initial slate of officials elected in 1772 included constable David Goodnough and clerk and assessor John Shepardson.

Edward Houghton died in Guilford in 1782, having achieved the militia rank of lieutenant. His widow Lucretia ran a tavern that was focus of fighting between ”Vermonters” and “Yorkers” two years later, and their sons, including another man named Edward, became prominent property-owners in the following decades.

According to Francis Akley’s pension application, he was living in Guilford, Vermont, when the war began. He had evidently followed the Houghtons north, either to continue working for them or to seek his own farmland.

In early 1776 Francis’s younger brother Thomas Akley also came to Guilford. He had grown up in Dedham and spent most of the preceding year serving in a Dedham-based company of the Continental Army. For a while that company was stationed in Roxbury. Had Thomas met Joseph Akley and his young family there when they were refugees from Boston or when Joseph was doing militia duty on the siege lines?

In any event, the only reason Thomas Akley would have traveled out to Guilford after his army service was to rendezvous with big brother Francis. In June 1776, Thomas Akley decided to go back into military service, enlisting under Guilford official John Shepardson.

Six months later, in January 1777, Francis Akley also signed up for the army. He recalled being recruited by David Goodnough, who in May 1775 had been elected as first lieutenant of Guilford’s militia company.

Thomas was in his New Hampshire regiment for a year. Francis did a longer stint as a ranger. He was at the surrender of Gen. John Burgoyne after Saratoga—and so was their younger brother John, by then drum major for a Massachusetts regiment. Did Francis and John Akley seek each other out around the surrender ceremony?

After the war all three of those brothers returned to southeastern corner of Vermont. I can’t find primary records about Francis’s family, but he was living in the town of Halifax, next to Guilford, when he applied for a pension in 1819.

Thomas settled in Brattleboro, also next to Guilford. He married Abigail Wilder in 1783, and they had several lots of children who remained in the region, spelling their surname Akeley. The photo above shows Thomas and Abigail Akley’s house when it was on the market last year.

Francis and Thomas’s younger brother John returned to the Springfield, Massachusetts, area after the war and married in Connecticut. At some point, however, he and his wife Miriam Ward joined his brothers in southeastern Vermont. According to a Ward family genealogy, they lived with their children in Brattleboro for a while before moving to Connecticut in the early 1800s.

Finally, brother Samuel Akley grew up, married, and had children in Topsham, Maine. Nonetheless, he was living in Halifax, Vermont, in 1827 when he first applied for a Revolutionary War pension. Quite possibly his older brothers’ success at getting such pay inspired him to try. Later Samuel moved back to Maine.

That pattern means these Akley brothers somehow kept in touch even though they grew up from fairly early ages in different corners of Massachusetts. Had they been able to make periodic visits back to Boston to see their parents and siblings remaining there? Were they writing back and forth the whole time? We’ll probably need to find private correspondence to know.

Francis Akley, Continental Ranger

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

Samuel and William were so much younger, in fact, that Joseph never lived in the same household with them, being indentured out before he was born. (Joseph and William both grew up in Boston, so they might have known each other at least.)

The Boston Overseers of the Poor sent the other five brothers to new masters all over the province, as far west as Springfield and as far north as Topsham, Maine.

Those Akleys were young men and teenagers during the Revolutionary War. In 1775 only Joseph had married and started a family. Francis, Thomas, and John came of age before or during the war, meaning their apprenticeships ran out. They had no doubt built some personal ties in the communities where they grew up, but they didn’t have any relatives or property.

In sum, those Akley brothers were just the sort of young men the Continental Army was looking for. Just the sort of young men that towns were happy to grant a little bonus money and send off to fill draft quotas.

Indeed, all four of those Akley brothers joined the army, and, remarkably, all four survived long enough to apply for pensions in the early 1800s. By that time they had scattered across the northeastern U.S. of A. None of their applications described their family background or life in Boston before enlisting, but they stated their ages and the towns from which they enlisted, confirming that these are the right guys.

Francis Akley, Jr., baptized on 19 May 1751, was indentured to a cooper in Lancaster. After turning twenty-one in 1772 he moved to Guilford in what would be Vermont. In January 1777 he enlisted under Lt. David Goodnough in “an independant corpse of rangers mostly from New Hamps. at Tyconderoga commanded by Major [Benjamin] Whitcomb—and Capt. [George] Aldrich Company.”

Aldrich’s company fought in the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777. The only event Akley specifically recalled, however, was being “at the taking of Burgoyne” after Saratoga. He said he was discharged at Haverhill, New Hampshire, “I think in 1783.” Whitcomb’s Rangers actually disbanded at the start of 1781.

Francis Akley applied for a pension while living in Halifax, Vermont, in 1819. The following year he testified that he was seventy years old and his property consisted of “two Pigs—1 Jacknife & 1 old Pocketbook.” At that time, the law required veterans to show need before receiving any support.

The federal government granted Akley a pension. In 1829 he moved to Connecticut, and then in 1838 back to Vermont. Akley appeared on the U.S. government’s pension list in 1840, the year he turned eighty-nine.

The Vermont Mercury for 26 Mar 1841, published in Woodstock, carried a notice from the men commissioned to settle “Francis Akley’s Estate,” he being “represented insolvent.” They invited creditors to meet “at the dwelling-house of Lyman Akley in Plymouth,” most likely a descendant the veteran had been living with at the end of his long life.

TOMORROW: More Akley brothers’ service.

(The drawing above comes from the website of the reenacted Whitcomb’s Rangers and shows a soldier like Francis Akley.)

Joseph Akley as an Adult

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 May, still aged only nineteen, Joseph wed Margaret Durant, according to Boston’s list of intentions to marry.

I can’t find a record of what church the couple married in or anything more about Margaret Durant. But there’s no record of a child coming quickly.

Instead, the couple’s first recorded children were baptized at King’s Chapel:

• Joseph on 5 May 1773.
• Margaret, 12 Mar 1775. [Transcribed “Skeley” in some publications.]

Later there was Sarah, baptized 25 Oct 1778 at Trinity Church, when that was the only functioning Anglican church in town.

Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War lists only one “Joseph Akeley.” He did twenty-one days active service in Capt. Hopestill Hall’s company of Col. Lemuel Robinson’s Massachusetts militia regiment. That was in February 1776, when Gen. George Washington was desperate for any men to shore up the siege lines.

That “Akeley” was recorded as enlisting in Roxbury. But that would be consistent with the Akely family having left Boston after the war started. It’s also understandable that Joseph Akley, father of young children, didn’t go into the Continental Army full-time.

By the 1790s we see Joseph Akley listed as a hairdresser in the Boston directories. He owned real estate, having overcome the poverty of his early years.

Indeed, the Akley family seems to have gained a little stature. When Joseph’s mother, Tabitha Akley, died in 1790 at the age of seventy, her death was noted in newspapers across the state. Only twenty years earlier she had been in the Boston almshouse.

On 13 Nov 1794 the American Apollo reported this death:

At Point-a-Petre, Guadaloupet Mr. Joseph Akely, jun. of this town—a worthy young man, whose death is much lamented by his most cursory acquaintance, Æt. 22.

Presumably the Akleys’ oldest child was on some sort of mercantile voyage when he died.

On 1 Nov 1808, the New-England Palladium reported that the barber Joseph Akley had died the previous day at the age of fifty-six. His widow Margaret was appointed executrix.

The 1810 U.S. Census lists Margaret Akely living alone on Hanover Street in Boston. That could be the widow or her eldest daughter, unmarried.

TOMORROW: The Akely brothers at war.

“Informed against for his participation in the destruction of the tea”

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

Drake published those stories, along with many documents, in the book Tea Leaves (1884). One entry read:

——— ECKLEY,

A barber, was informed against for his participation in the destruction of the tea, and committed to prison. The Sons of Liberty supported him while in confinement, and also provided for his family. He was finally liberated, and the person who informed against him was tarred and feathered, and paraded through the town with labels on his breast and back bearing his name, and the word “informer” in large letters.

Some books on the Tea Party repeated this information without adding to it. No one has brought forward more evidence to corroborate this oral tradition, even from places we should expect to find it.

People don’t get “committed to prison” for long enough to need outside support without getting put on records. We know royal authorities in both Boston and London were very eager to find out who organized the destruction of the tea. Gen. Thomas Gage and Adm. John Montagu even secretly transported Samuel Dyer across the Atlantic because they thought he had useful information. But no source at the time mentioned this barber or the dismissal of his case.

To tar and feather someone and parade him through town was also a highly public act. When a Boston mob abused John Malcolm that way in January 1774, it was widely discussed in both New England and Britain. That same period offers no record of a tarring and feathering connected to the Tea Party like this.

Here’s my theory: This is a distorted memory of Joseph Akley’s dispute with Owen Richards in 1770-71, attached to the Tea Party because by the mid-1800s that was Boston’s most famous and respectable Revolutionary protest, the one families wanted to have an ancestor participating in.

This lore reversed the order of events, and probably exaggerated Joseph Akley’s tribulations, but we can recognize those events from the story of the mobbing of Owen Richards.

First, we know Richards was tarred, feathered, and paraded around town. People called him an ”informer.“ He recalled, “they also fix’d a paper on my breast, with Capital Letters thereon, but [I] cannot Recollect what it contained.”

The tradition referred to “ECKLEY…A barber.” Joseph Akley, whose name was spelled many different ways, was a barber later in life, after the peruke wigs he was first trained to make went out of style.

There’s no evidence Akley was accused of helping to destroy the tea or locked up, but Owen Richards did accuse him of a crime and haul him into court in 1771. Boston’s Whig leaders, including John Adams, John Hancock, and newspaper writers, did get involved in fighting against Richards’s accusations.

I suspect that some stories about that documented dispute, overshadowed by bigger Revolutionary events, got passed down in the Akley family or circle. Over time they faded until people in the late 1800s didn’t even remember the barber’s name precisely. But they remembered something about tarring and feathering, and legal jeopardy, and help from the Sons of Liberty. They hung those baubles of memory off the larger story of the Tea Party, and Francis S. Drake conglomerated the “Eckley” story with the rest.

TOMORROW: Joseph Akley in the war.

When Owen Richards Sued Joseph Akley for Assault

My last posting about Joseph Akley argued that despite being indentured away from his impoverished family at the age of ten and seeing his master die five years later, Akley turned out okay.

But, Boston 1775 readers might ask, we started looking into young Joseph only because Owen Richards sued him for being part of a tar-and-feathers attack in May 1770. Might that suggest the teenager ran wild and got into trouble?

That’s still a possibility, but today I’ll argue that Akley’s relationship to his master’s family played into both how he got sued and how he got out of that jam.

To start with, let’s go back to the attack on Owen Richards. He was a tide waiter for the Customs service, involved in that department’s disputes with John Hancock in 1768. On 18 May 1770, Richards confiscated a Connecticut ship for smuggling, and that evening a mob came to his house.

It makes sense to assume that most of the people in that mob were sailors, waterfront workers, and others with a grudge against the Customs service. The most prominent person Richards sued for assaulting him was Joseph Doble, a sea captain and son of a sea captain.

A teen-aged wigmaker like Joseph Akley could have joined that crowd, but he wouldn’t have led it. Why, then, did Owen Richards single out Joseph as another of only three people he sued for assault?

My answer starts in 1758 when peruke-maker Timothy Winship’s daughter Margaret, aged twenty-three, married John Gregory at King’s Chapel. Nine months later the couple returned to that church for the baptism of their first child, John.

There were three sponsors at that baptism. One was the mother’s older sister, Sarah. Back here I guessed that she was helping to manage the Winship household and her younger siblings after her mother’s death.

Another sponsor was Owen Richards.

Thus, Richards was close to members of the Winship family. He may well have met the indentured boy who arrived in the peruke-maker’s house in 1762, seen him grow up at church, and even attended the master’s funeral.

I theorize that Richards sued Joseph Akley not because that teenager was a leader of the tar-and-feathers mob but because he recognized the kid’s face.

We don’t have many records of that lawsuit, but we know who represented Akley and his fellow defendants in court: John Adams. He collected fees of 12s. and 48s. for defending the teen, more than twice what he charged Joseph Doble.

Beside the second payment Adams wrote: “at Elizabeth Winship’s Instance.” That was Timothy Winship’s widow, who had raised Joseph Akley since 1762 and was evidently still looking after him.

TOMORROW: A barber at the Tea Party?

What Would Become of Young Joseph Akley?

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 years old.

Though Joseph had been living with and working for the peruke maker for five years, he was still five years short of his majority.

He didn’t have the legal standing, and he probably didn’t have all the skills, to set up his own shop.

Joseph did have parents nearby in Boston. However, that family had its own troubles. In the spring of 1768, three younger Akley children were admitted into the alsmhouse, to be bound out to masters outside Boston by the fall.

So what happened to Joseph? I haven’t found many clues from the next few years, and that’s a good thing. Because Joseph did not reappear on the Overseers of the Poor records, unlike his parents and his brother Thomas.

It seems likely that Joseph was a bright lad. Winship chose him as an apprentice ahead of his older brother, and for a profession that required social graces.

Furthermore, the Winship shop was still a going concern when the peruke-maker died in 1767. Timothy Winship still had his shop and his tools. His estate owed wages to George Bellamy, presumably a journeyman.

As executrix, the widow Elizabeth Winship collected on debts; paid off creditors like Bellamy, landlord Hugh Hall, Dr. Nathaniel Perkins, and Dr. Joseph Warren; and came out ahead. She still had her husband’s goods and a pew at King’s Chapel. She continued to sponsor friends’ baptisms there.

I suspect that Elizabeth Winship or other wigmakers in her husband’s circle saw potential in Joseph, already partly trained, as well as an obligation. Someone kept him on as an apprentice, but because that was a private arrangement we don’t know who.

The biggest clues about how Joseph Akley weathered the death of his master is how he appeared in Boston records after the Revolutionary War. As of 1796, he was established as a hairdresser on “Hanover street, corner Wing’s Lane.” He owned a little real estate.

Furthermore, in adult life Akley was an Anglican/Episcopalian. His parents were Congregationalists, like most Bostonians, but he joined the denomination of the Winship family. That suggests how much influence his apprenticeship had on him.

No doubt Joseph Akley faced some challenges after Winship’s death. Being sued for tarring and feathering a royal official was one. Joseph may have had to grow up quickly. He married in May 1771, a few weeks short of his nineteenth birthday, and was a father before he turned twenty-one. But he was able to support that family with the skills he learned.

COMING UP: What about that lawsuit?

Timothy Winship, Peruke Maker of Boston

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

The Akley family was falling on hard times. In the following years Joseph’s parents would end up (separately) in the Boston almshouse, and most of his siblings would be bound out to other households across the province, from Springfield to Maine.

Joseph’s placement was unusual in several ways. He was the first Akley child to be apprenticed even though he wasn’t the oldest. He remained in Boston instead of being sent to a smaller town. And he was to learn a trade that catered to the genteel class rather than housework or making wheels and barrels.

Timothy Winship was a “peruke maker,” meaning he made wigs and shaved gentlemen so they looked good wearing them. In an eighteenth-century British seaport, that meant steady work.

There are two genealogical sources of information about Timothy Winship. One consists of the records of Boston and its Anglican churches. The other is the Barbour Collection’s index of vital records from Middletown, Connecticut, even though there’s no sign Timothy Winship ever lived in that town. I’m guessing that descendants settled there and inserted their family’s backstory into the local record.

According to the Barbour Collection, Timothy Winship was born on 3 May 1712 in Westminster, England. That’s close but not an exact match to the Boston report that he was fifty-seven years old in 1767. Not being from an old, Puritan New England family explains why he was an Anglican.

Boston records state that Winship married Margaret Mirick of Charlestown on 5 Aug 1731, with the Rev. Hull Abbott of that town presiding. The bride appears in the Connecticut data as Margaret Merrick. Their children listed in the Middletown records were:

• Samuel, born 3 May 1732
• Sarah, 20 Jan 1734
• Margaret, Nov 1735
• Timothy, 3 Dec 1737
• Joseph, 2 Oct 1739
• John, 30 Mar 1742
• Jacob, 6 Jan 1744
• Anna, 26 Apr 1746

Of those, King’s Chapel recorded baptisms of Timothy, Jr., on 30 Dec 1737; Joseph on 12 Oct 1739; and Jacob on 9 Feb 1744.

Timothy Winship never advertised in Boston’s newspapers, but there are signs that he became an established tradesman. He owned an enslaved man named Caesar, who on 23 Sept 1742 married a free black woman named Margaret Codner at Old South. That same year, Winship took in a couple as tenants from Cambridge, which we know because Boston cited him for not informing the selectmen. In 1748, the Boston town meeting elected Winship as one of the Scavengers responsible for keeping the streets clean.

The peruke maker also suffered losses. Margaret Winship died “about one hour after birth of Anna,” the couple’s youngest, according to the Barbour Collection. King’s Chapel records state that Timothy Winship’s wife was buried on 29 Apr 1746.

A little less than a year later, on 9 Apr 1747, Timothy Winship married Sarah Rogers at King’s Chapel. That was none too soon because the couple had a son, William, baptized less than eight months later on 28 November. A second son, Benjamin, was baptized on 1 Jan 1750.

Sadly, that new Winship family did not thrive. William died before age seven and was buried from the new King’s Chapel building on 1 June 1754. Timothy’s wife Sarah died on 23 Jan 1755 at age thirty-eight. Their surviving son Benjamin died on 10 Jan 1758 at age eight. (The Connecticut records say nothing about this family.)

This time, Timothy Winship found a new wife even more quickly. On 25 Aug 1755, seven months after becoming a widower again, he married Elizabeth Vila of Watertown at Christ Church in the North End. I see no sign of Timothy and Elizabeth having more children of their own.

Thus, when Timothy Winship took in Joseph Akley in 1762, the peruke maker was about fifty years old and thrice married. His youngest surviving child, Anna, was in her mid-teens. His oldest, Samuel, had married Sarah Miller of Glastonbury, Connecticut, in October 1758 and had twin girls with several more kids on the way.

We can see in the King’s Chapel records that Timothy Winship and his wives were in a network of other Boston Anglicans, sponsoring the baptism of each other’s babies. Notably, on 6 Sept 1765 Timothy, Elizabeth, and Timothy’s daughter Sarah all sponsored the baptism of a baby born to James and Mary Vila, probably from Elizabeth’s family.

That eventful year of 1765 brought big changes to the family. The brothers Timothy, John, and Jacob Winship all died in their twenties. On 28 October, Sarah Winship married Nicholas Butler, a twenty-seven-year-old barber, at King’s Chapel. As the eldest daughter, she had most likely shouldered the household and childrearing responsibilities after her mother had died. Now, at age thirty-one, she was leaving to start a family of her own.

On 3 Mar 1767, Timothy Winship wrote out his will. He declared that he was in good health but wanted to tend to his business and his soul. Owning no real estate, he left all his personal property “unto my Beloved Wife Elizabeth Winship,” to be shared after her death among his children Samuel, Joseph, and Anna Winship. For Sarah Butler, about to give birth to her first child, Winship left only five shillings, to be paid out after her stepmother’s death.

On 12 Nov 1767, Timothy Winship, “Peruke Maker,” was buried out of King’s Chapel.

TOMORROW: A wigmaker’s estate.

The Poor Akley Family

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 track was Joseph Doble, both because he came from a fairly prominent maritime family and because he spelled his name only two ways.

The next name on my list, Joseph Akley, has been more difficult. I’ve found his family name spelled Akly, Akeley, Aikley, Aykley, and even Heakley. In later life he used Ackley, but his mother and his widow chose other forms. One influential source appears to have remembered him as Eckley. I’m going to stick with Akley just because I’ve already created a label for him under that spelling.

Joseph Akley’s story starts on 8 June 1750 when the Rev. Dr. Joseph Sewall married Francis Aikley (or Akley) and Tabitha Bull (or Buell) at Old South. I can’t find any period mention of Francis Akley’s profession. [ADDENDUM: It looks like he was a wheelwright.]

Francis and Tabitha started to have children on a regular basis. According to the New South Meeting-House records, its minister baptized:

• Francis, Jr., on 19 May 1751
• Joseph, 5 July 1752
• Tabitha, 9 Dec 1753
• Thomas, 25 May 1755
• John, 4 Sept 1757
• Sarah, 25 Mar 1759
• Mary, 18 Jan 1761
• Samuel, 13 May 1764

In addition, there was a William born in 1769.

The Akleys had trouble caring for all those children, which provides a second set of records about them—from Boston’s Overseers of the Poor.

The first sign of the family intersecting with those town officials was on 14 Oct 1762 when Joseph, aged ten, was bound out to Timothy Winship of Boston until 10 June 1773, which would be when he turned twenty-one.

The following May, older brother Francis was indentured to Edward Houghton of Lancaster until 16 Mar 1772. He was to be trained as a cooper. That indenture appears above, courtesy of Digital Commonwealth.

The next year, the family needed more support. On 5 Jan 1764, Overseer Benjamin Dolbeare authorized the almshouse to take in “Tabitha Akley And 4 Children.”

In October the Overseers indentured the other two Akley boys. Thomas was sent to the Rev. Jason Haven of Dedham, probably as a household servant, to serve until 3 Oct 1777. This relationship was legally renewed on 6 Feb 1771 and then again in duplicate on 6 Nov 1771. Perhaps the Akleys or Haven grew dissatisfied and ended the arrangement but then went back to it. 

On 11 Oct 1764 the Boston Overseers bound seven-year-old John Akely out to Samuel and Lucy Williams of Springfield to work until 1 Apr 1779. Williams was identified as a gentleman, and he didn’t promise to teach John any trade, just “to Read Write & Cypher,” which suggests the boy was to be a household servant. Williams also promised to give John £13.6s.8d. when he came of age. The Akley children were being dispersed far across the province.

For the next four years the diminished family appears to have eked by, but on 1 Apr 1768 Overseer John Bradford sent “3. Children of Francis Akley” to the almshouse. Those three children were sent out of town in the following months:

• In May, nine-year-old Sarah Akley was bound out to Joshua Clap of Scituate to learn housewifery until 1 Mar 1777.
• In June, four-year-old Samuel was sent to John Merrill of Topsham, Maine, to be trained as a wheelwright until 17 June 1785.
• In September, seven-year-old Mary was indentured to Edward Russel of North Yarmouth, Maine, to learn housewifery until 20 Dec 1780.

On 11 Aug 1769, “Tabitha Akley & Child” came into the house “from Workhouse.” On 20 August, Overseer Samuel Partridge sent “Willm. Akley a Child” there.

About a year later, on 17 Sept 1770, Overseer Royall Tyler authorized “Tabitha Akley & Child” to be admitted into the almshouse, and on 26 October Joseph Waldo did so again. On 7 Feb 1771, Edward Richardson “Discharg’d Tabitha Akley to Workhouse.” (This might have been the daughter Tabitha, who turned eighteen that year.)

On 16 Sept 1772, Overseer John Leverett admitted the father Francis Akley into the workhouse, designating him as “Lame.” On 23 Oct 1773 Tabitha Akley was moved from the workhouse to the almshouse by order of Overseer Samuel Whitwell.

The last mention of the family in the surviving Overseers of the Poor records came when those officials bound out William Akley from 6 Oct 1774 to 15 Feb 1790 to learn navigation from Capt. Shubael Downes. Back-calculating from his date of majority, William was then five years old; he had first entered the almshouse as an infant.

TOMORROW: Joseph Akley’s new master.

Owen Richards’s Lawsuits for Assault

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

Richards, a Customs officer who had also been part of the disputes that led up to the Liberty riot of 1768, probably suspected those local officials weren’t really trying.

Eventually Richards took legal action himself. In On 24 Dec 1770 the Boston Gazette reported that he had

commenced an Action of Damage for Three Hundred Pounds lawful Money, against a young Gentleman of this Town, whose family Connections are among the better sort of folks, the friends of Government.

This Lad was taken by a single Writ and held to Bail—Upon his application to several of his near relations who are persons of fortune, to become sureties for him, we are told, they absolutely refus’d. But others had compassion upon him; for two Gentlemen were bound for his Appearance at Court.

The following 7 January an attorney—probably Samuel Fitch—wrote out a writ on Richards’s behalf, apparently aimed at another attacker:

Attach &c. Joseph Doble of Boston &c. Mariner, to answer unto Owen Richards of said Boston Yeoman, in a Plea of Trespass, for that the said Joseph, on the Eighteenth day of May last, 1770, Boston aforesaid, with Force and Arms an Assault on the Body of him the said Owen made and him did then and there violently beat, wound, bruise, and evil entreat, so that his Life was thereby put in great Danger, and He the said Joseph did then and there take and imprison him the said Owen, and him in Prison for a long Time, vizt. for the space of six hours, detained against Law, and the Custom of our Realm, and he the said Joseph then and there, did also grievously abuse the said Owen; forcibly took and placed him in a Cart, and stripped him naked to his Skin, and with Force as aforesaid, did tear off, from his Body, and take from him, his Hatt, Wigg, Coat, Waistcoat, and Shirt, and also a gold Sleeve Button, two Handkerchiefs, his Pocket Book, with sundrie Papers therein of the Value of [blank] vizt. an original Note of Hand, for seven Pounds, Ten Shillings, and Sundrie, original Receipts for Moneys paid, and other Papers of Value, also one Piece of Gold Money, called a Johannes, and two Spanish milled Dollars in Silver, being all of the Value of Thirty Pounds lawfull Money, none of which Things so taken from him the said Owen, have ever been returned to him again and He the said Joseph did then and there also cover and besmear the said Owen, Head, Face, and naked Body, with Tar and cover him over with Feathers, upon said Tar, and cruelly and inhumanly set fire to said Feathers; and then and there dragged said Owen in said Cart, through diverse Streets of said Town of Boston, and from one End of said Town to the other, for the Space of Six Hours, as aforesaid, and fixed a Label to his the said Owens Breast, with Writing thereon importing that he the said Owen was a common Informer, and in that Condition exposed him the said Owen to the Contempt and Resentment of our liege Subjects, and as a public Spectacle, thro said Town, and other Outrages and Enormities, on him the said Owen, He the said Joseph then and there committed, against our Peace, To the Damage &c. £1000.

Fitch filed that writ in April 1771, almost a year after the attack and 250 years ago this month. Richards sued two more men named Benjamin Jones and Joseph Akley (Aikley, Heakley) for assault. (That makes three or four suits, depending on whether either Doble, Jones, or Akley was the “young Gentleman” sued in December.)

Meanwhile, in February 1771 the Crown brought criminal charges for the same riot against a man named George Hamblin.

If that seems confusing, all I can say is that I’m not really clear on the whole situation myself. The colonial legal system is hard enough to understand already, few cases like these have left complete records, and I’m relying on mentions in the Legal Papers of John Adams.

TOMORROW: Tracking down the defendants?