I recently found that I'd been given a gift subsciption to DK, but I didn't not see a message telling who made the gift. If my generous benefactor is among us, thank you! I'm grateful and touched.
To those less familiar with Massachusetts, and even to people who live here, Barnstable County is better known as Cape Cod. Its county seat, also called Barnstable, is a town founded in 1639 by Rev. John Lothrop and a number of my direct ancestors. The Town of Barnstable is large and includes Hyannis of Kennedy fame. Both town and county were named for Barnstaple, a Puritan-friendly town in Devon, England. This is a brief story of some early Barnstable dwellers. In true “real housewives” style, it involves sex (or as close as I can get with mid-1600s Puritans) and plenty of cattiness and contention.
Danger: Pilgrim soap opera ahead!
One of my direct ancestors who settled in Barnstable was named Robert Shelley, eleven generations before me. He was born in England in about 1612 and arrived in Boston aboard the Lion on September 12, 1632 with his sister Anne. Robert became close to Judith Garnet (Gardner), a young English-born woman who also sailed on the Lion. Upon their arrival Judith worked in Boston as a servant to John Coggeshall, yet another Lion passenger. Coggeshall soon was compelled to leave for Rhode Island due to his support of dissident Anne Hutchinson. He squabbled with leaders in his new town of Portsmouth, R.I., as well, and ultimately joined with others in 1639 to found Newport.
While Coggeshall butted heads with the rulers of Boston, Robert and Judith married and settled in Scituate. There they befriended Rev. John Lothrop, the new pastor of the First Church in Scituate. Robert joined the Scituate church in 1637, but he and Judith were among those who left Scituate with Lothrop in 1639 to found Barnstable, following a dispute over the proper form of baptism (full immersion in the Massachusetts winter vs. a little sprinkle, which the normally conservative Lothrop favored -- more on that another day).
Robert "Goodman" Shelley appears on Rev. Lothrop's list of those who joined the Scituate church in 1637
Lothrop was known as highly intelligent and highly stern. In 1641 he excommunicated William Casely, who was a longtime associate and friend, one of the original settlers of the town, for “carnall carriages.” It appears from the trial record William’s crime was homosexuality. In 1642 Lothrop orchestrated the punishment of William Casely’s brother John and his future wife Alice for fornication a short time before their marriage. John Casely was whipped publicly, Alice placed in the stocks for the whole of a hot summer day.
Rev. Lothrop's house in Barnstable, much expanded, is today the public Sturgis Library, which has a great genealogy collection. It also contains his Bible. Several pages were burned by candles during late-night readings; Lothrop rewrote the missing verses from memory.
Robert Shelley was different. Although a hard worker and a good Christian, he was about as Falstaffian a character as one could expect to find in Barnstable. He was fond of good food and drink, and as Otis’s Barnstable Families reports, was an “easy, good-natured man and cared little how the world moved.” Judith Shelley, on the other hand, was described by Rev. Lothrop’s records as “proud” and “tenacious of her own opinions.” He continued, “Her tongue runneth like a whipsaw, cutting everything in its path.”
In the end Barnstable, or at least the Barnstable church, wasn’t big enough for the Judith and Rev. Lothrop. Judith Shelley, who had joined the Barnstable church in 1644 upon her dismissal from the Boston church (like a library card at an old residence you never cancelled), was excommunicated from the Barnstable church by Lothrop on June 4, 1649. Judith defied his authority to the point of refusing to appear at her own hearing. As Lothrop wrote, she was “absent for she would not come, setting att naught the messenger of the church sent to her.” Judith’s offense was:
principally for slaundering of two systers, syster Wells and Syster Dimmick, saying Syster Dimmick was proud and went about telling lies, but could not prove anything by any testimony, and also affirming that myself and brother Cobb to my Syster Wells att her house did talk of her upon a day I sent to see Syster Huckins, being sick then, we denying the truth of it, no speech of her declaimed as she continued to affirm it as confidently as if she had a spirit of revelation, saying also that I had confessed it, and afterward denied it, and that all the church knew it was so, but durst not or would not speak, and that I deserved rather to be cast out than she, for she was innocent, and I was guilty. She never would be convinced of any of her conceived jealousies, was wondrous peremptory in all her carriages, many times condemning the brethren, that they dealt not with her in a way of God. We had long patience with her and used all courteous entreaties and persuasion, but the longer we waited, the worse she was, because upon some occasion, she was not called to a Christian meeting, which some of the sisters had appointed among themselves. Many untruths she hath uttered from the beginning unto the end of this business.
For anyone who didn’t follow that, the other ladies had Christian meetings and didn’t invite her. She took it badly and accused the “cool kids,” including Rev. Lothrop, of talking trash about her. She proudly and stubbornly stuck to her guns, bashing them all over town, and claiming Rev. Lothrop had confessed to badmouthing her. She accused all the church members of knowing she was right but being too chicken to say so, and said that the pastor should be cast out instead of her. Pretty bold.
Judith’s battles with Lothrop were not over. In 1653, four years after her excommunication, her fifteen-year-old daughter Hannah was whipped for allowing a man ten years older to court her without her father’s position. Robert Shelley, the father in question, urged mercy to no avail, and Judith was furious with Lothrop for taking his anger at her out on her oldest daughter. In her view nothing untoward had happened, and in fact the two married that same year.
Check the last line: "a gentle, kindly man and beloved by all who knew him." I'm guessing Judith and Hannah Shelley, and William and John Casely were not contacted for this story.
You might say Judith Gardner Shelley and Rev. John Lothrop fought to the death. Lothrop died in 1653, shortly after performing Hannah Shelley’s marriage, and Judith in 1658. Judith’s daughter Hannah never forgave either. She and her husband left Cape Cod in 1660, and she never joined the church.
Perhaps Judith’s old enemy, “Syster Dimmock,” had the last laugh. “Syster Dimmock,” who Judith alleged was “proud and went about telling lies,” was Ann Dimmock. Ann’s husband Thomas Dimmock was a big deal in town. The Dimmocks had come to Massachusetts Bay in 1635, settled in Scituate in 1638, and come to Barnstable with Lothrop and the Shelleys in 1639. Thomas Dimmock was the first to build a house in the new town and was a highly trusted man, being among the very few (yes, few) allowed to bear arms. In 1650 he was named an elder of the Barnstable church and in 1653 he took the inventory of Lothrop’s estate. The Dimmocks were insiders.
Not long after Judith died her husband Robert married the Dimmocks’ daughter Susanna, who was half his age (25 to his 48) and barely older than his own daughter Hannah. Robert and Susanna Dimmock were married thirty-two years before his death in 1692, longer than his marriage to Judith. The happy new couple had a daughter right away, followed by four sons. Their daughter, also named Susanna, is my ancestor and the next character in this tale.
Barnstable was not a place of leisure in those days, but I'm sure it was as beautiful as today
At about twenty, this daughter Susanna Shelley married Samuel Gardner, who ironically was the nephew of the unfortunate Judith Gardner Shelley, her father’s first wife. Samuel’s branch of the Gardners did not live near Barnstable; he came from the southern part of Hingham, where many members of the family lived. There is a Gardner Street to this day. Samuel died just seven years after the marriage, leaving Susanna alone with four young children. Susanna married the widower Joshua Ransom, with whom she had four more children.
It is ironic that Susanna was Robert Shelley’s daughter with the Barnstable insider Susanna Dimmock, rather than the militant outcast Judith Gardner. The younger Susanna, like her father’s first wife, was in constant trouble with church authorities. Much of this trouble was caused by her sharp tongue, apparently not aided by a serious drinking problem. When Susanna married Joshua Ransom, someone insisted custody of her children with Samuel Gardner be signed over to a James Clarke. She signed them over. Susanna and Joshua Ransom lived in Rhode Island for several years before returning to Lakenham, near Plymouth, where most of the Ransoms lived. It is not known how much contact she had with her Gardner children after that.
I am descended from Susanna through her son Samuel Gardner, Jr. This grandson of Robert Shelley, who left Scituate with Lothrop over their liberal baptism views, married Lydia Oldham. Interestingly, Lydia was a granddaughter of Rev. William Witherell, the first pastor of the Second Parish of Scituate, which was founded by those baptism “liberals” who didn’t leave Scituate for Barnstable. When Lydia Oldham died in 1723, he married her niece, who was Witherell’s great-granddaughter. Through these marriages the Scituate baptism “liberals” who stayed in town ultimately united in blood with those who didn’t.
Judith Garnet (Gardner) Shelley and her nephew, who married her husband's daughter with his next wife, appear on the same page in this New England genealogy book
As it turns out, Susanna’s second husband Joshua Ransom’s father Robert also is my direct ancestor, through his daughter Hannah on another line. Robert Ransom didn’t live in Barnstable County long, but he raised enough hell while there that it is fitting to close this diary with his story.
Robert Ransom was born in England in about 1637. In 1654, at the young age of 17, he emigrated alone to Plymouth. When he arrived he was apprenticed to Thomas Dexter, Jr., an early settler of Sandwich on Cape Cod. Sandwich is the town where Thomas Burgess (my common ancestor with Rev. Ebenezer Burgess) lived, and it’s among the prettiest in Massachusetts. Thomas Dexter opened a grist mill, which still survives, in the very year Robert Ransom arrived, 1654. But apparently Dexter was a cruel and violent master, to the point that Robert Ransom sued him in his first months as an apprentice. This backfired at first, resulting in one night’s imprisonment of Ransom but only a warning for Dexter. It did, however, lead Thomas Clarke of Plymouth to buy out Ransom’s remaining time. His residence on Cape Cod was over.
His troubles, though, were not. Robert Ransom had no relatives in Plymouth, and in the beginning no friends either. He was lonely, wayward, and stubborn. Robert had a knack for offending people, and not even marriage and children dulled his sharp edges. He was sued in 1662 for failing to deliver security promised for land he purchased. In 1663 he was fined ten shillings for his “turbulent and clamorous carriage in the court.” In 1665 Robert, who had fenced in a common field in Lakenham for his own use, got into a fistfight with two Plymouth men. That same year he was admonished for calling William Hawkins a “rogue,” and more fistfights followed between 1665 and 1673.
Dexter's Grist Mill of 1654, where Robert Ransom was so badly treated, still stands in Sandwich, Massachusetts
In 1669 Robert and his wife appeared in court to answer for their “contentions and unworthy carryages” to each other. Also in 1669, he appeared to answer charges of speaking “wicked and reproachful words” against the governor and magistrates. The jury cleared him for lack of proof, although they were persuaded that the language was very much “like…the said Ransom’s language.”
Robert Ransom mellowed a bit as he aged, holding positions of trust such as highway surveyor and juror. But he didn’t mellow too much. In 1681 John Doter, the “late constable of Plymouth,” successfully sued him for five pounds (a large amount then) for “much unnecessary trouble, expense of time and losses in the execution of his late office of constable.” Robert lived his last thirty-five years in Lakenham west of Plymouth, feeling much happier far away from the colony’s establishment.
Some of Robert Ransom's many appearances in the Plymouth Colony records for trouble with the law
There you have it. Barnstable County. Seventeenth century. Full of infighting, adultery, difficult marriages, litigation, and brawling. In other words, human beings.