II.

ON COLONEL JOSEPH LEMUEL CHESTER'S ALLEGED ENGLISH PARSONS ANCESTRY.

By ALBERT ROSS PARSONS.

"Col. Chester, a laborious antiquarian of the United States." (Dean Stanley: "Historical Memoirs of Westminster Abbey," p. viii.)

Colonel Chester, of New York City, collected a fee of $4,000 for making a search in England for the ancestry of the Parsons family of Springfield, Mass. The result we condense from the valuable and interesting "Hall Ancestry" (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1897), with comments of our own setting forth the facts of the case.

"Thomas Parsons was a country gentleman of Great Milton, Oxfordshire, England, of an heraldic family, and the progenitor of Deacon Benjamin Parsons' branch of the Springfield, Mass., Parsons family. The descent back to said Thomas is clear enough." (Hall, p. 63.) "Hugh, son of Thomas Parsons of Great Milton, had Hugh and Benjamin, who emigrated and settled at Springfield, where Hugh appears on the records in 1645. Benjamin came over with Hugh, or soon after." (Hall, p. 128.)

The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (vol. xii. p. 175), preserves the following letter of the Rev. Jonathan Parsons:

"Newbury Port, Oct. 20, 1769.-You write yt one Samuel Parsons from Martinico desires to know from wt part of England our Ancestors came. I will tell you as near as my memory enables me, (as I have no records of the matter but what I heard from my parent). I suppose my Great Grandfather Parsons came from Great Torrington about 20 or 30 miles from Tiverton and not far from Exeter. He came over

and brought my Grandfather Benjamin Parsons and other children about 130 years ago, perhaps 140

Samuel H. Parsons, Esq., Lynn, Conn.

J. Parsons.

Conformably to this, Savage says (Gen. Dict., art. Parsons):

"Richard Parsons was at Windsor before 1640. He went to Hartford and probably returned to England."

At Hartford, Cornet Joseph Parsons was married. Thomas Parsons, married 1641, resided at Windsor, and gave to seven of his nine children identically the same baptismal names which Cornet Joseph and his brother Benjamin gave to their respective families. Samuel Parsons, born 1630 (probably the youngest brother), removed from the Connecticut River colony to Easthampton, L. I. He gave to four of his seven children the same names which were used by Cornet Joseph, Deacon Benjamin and Thomas Parsons, respectively. The name of Hugh Parsons, which first appears in the Springfield Records in 1645, or nine years after Cornet Joseph witnessed the Indian deed of lands at Springfield, is not found once in any of these families, nor among their descendants. The foregoing facts all combine to disprove Colonel Chester's "clear descent" from the Oxfordshire Hugh Parsons.

"Tradition has it that Benjamin was a brother of Cornet Joseph Parsons of Springfield. The English investigations of Colonel Chester, however, make it clear that the two were not brothers, as supposed, nor even related." (Hall, pp. 191-2.)

The original account-books of Pynchon, still extant in Springfield, in which books Pynchon charges against Cornet Joseph Parsons' account goods delivered to his "brother Benjamin”; and Benjamin's testimony in court, in which he refers at least twice to Joseph's wife as his (Benjamin's) "sister" (i.e., sister-in-law), are not traditions, but facts of record, which no hypothetical pedigree framed at this late day by a baffled genealogist in England can obliterate.

"Colonel Chester says that in 1653, Benjamin proved his brother Robert's will in London, and the Springfield records

show that he was married November 6, 1653, so he must have gone back to England, and after settling his brother's estate, returned to Springfield bringing with him perhaps the means which enabled him to marry in November." (Hall, pp. 191-2.)

Marriages in early Springfield do not appear from the records to have been noticeably dependent upon the possession of any considerable amount of means.

It may be safely affirmed that no other young inhabitant of Springfield ever made the long journey back to England either to prove a brother's will or to obtain the means to enable him to marry. If young Benjamin Parsons' resources were so limited as to hinder his marriage, why should the wealthy Oxfordshire Parsons family have required his presence in England simply to prove an English will? Further, where did Benjamin get the funds to enable him to go to England and obtain the means to return to Springfield and marry. Most genealogists would have concluded at once in the presence of these two 1653s, which Colonel Chester himself noted, that Deacon Benjamin Parsons of Northampton and the Benjamin Parsons of London were distinct.

"Colonel Chester infers from his investigations, that Hugh and Benjamin Parsons, in their intellectual and social status, were, in Springfield superior to those by whom they were surrounded." (Hall, p. 128.)

Plainly this inference was drawn in England, and not from the Springfield records still extant. As far as Hugh of Springfield is concerned, such superiority could hardly have been true of him save perhaps when surrounded by aborigines! Mr. Henry M. Burt states, after a thorough and minute study of the Springfield records, that no relationship can be traced between Hugh and the two brothers Joseph and Benjamin. Parsons of Springfield. In a historic despatch to Boston for advice as to permitting the unhappy Mrs. Lewis to marry Hugh, the worshipful Pynchon describes her as having "falen into a leauge of amity with a bricke-maker;"* and in the

Green's Official History of Springfield, p. 82.

witchcraft trials evidence was introduced concerning Hugh's alleged conduct in the capacity of bricklayer. As to Benjamin and Cornet Joseph Parsons, Burt writes: "Benjamin Parsons, who followed farming exclusively, had at his death an average estate, but that amounted to only £222 9s. The inventory of Cornet Joseph Parsons' property, on the other hand," (which, with his holdings at Springfield, Northampton, and vicinity, included a residence and a warehouse with a wharf at Boston) "amounted to £2,088 9s-the largest estate probated in Hampshire County for many years." The reader may be left to draw his own inferences as to the social status in early Springfield of the several settlers bearing the name of Par

sons.

The true history of Colonel Chester's Parsons search remains to be written. As far as it has become known to the writer from the examination of Dr. Holton's MSS., and from extensive correspondence and enquiry, it is here set forth.

When that "laborious antiquarian" was commissioned by Dr. Holton to discover the English ancestry of the Parsons family at the instance of Judge Levi Parsons, who made a bequest of $60,000 to found a Parsons scholarship in Union College, documentary evidence was put in Chester's hands showing that Cornet Joseph and Benjamin Parsons were brothers and that Benjamin came from Devonshire, England, whence also came Jeffrey Parsons (born 1631 at Alphington, near Exeter), the ancestor of Judge Theophilus Parsons, termed by Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary, “the most learned jurist that has ever appeared on our side of the ocean." Not finding, however, in Devonshire what he wanted as soon as he wanted it, Chester turned elsewhere. Had he met with the record of the marriage to the daughter of Sir W. Parsons of Black Torrington, Devonshire, of Colonel Abednego Matthew, born in 1629, whose father's cousin Alice, daughter of the mayor of Exeter (1552) and granddaughter of Geoffrey Matthew, Esq., had previously married W. Parsons (see "Devonshire Pedigrees "), perhaps he would have prosecuted his search longer in Devon. Under date of February 1, 1897, George W. Marshall, Rouge Croix, Herald's College, London, where Colonel Chester's papers are in custody,

wrote to Professor Charles L. Parsons, of New Hampshire College:

"Colonel Chester did not examine registers at Black Torrington." And again (May 27, 1897), "I wonder that he did not look at them to make his search exhaustive."

Quitting Devonshire thus after but an incomplete examination of its records, Chester shortly after discovered a way to his handsome fee. Finding, namely, in a collateral branch of the family of Sir Thomas Parsons, of Oxfordshire, the names of Hugh and Benjamin, Chester, in defiance of positive and indisputable evidence, such as the letter of the Rev. J. Parsons before cited, Pynchon's autograph evidence and Benjamin's testimony under oath, declared, in effect, that neither Cornet Joseph, Benjamin, nor Pynchon knew what they were talking about when all three alike spoke of the first two as brothers. On the contrary, he boldly affirmed that instead of the wealthy Cornet and Deacon Benjamin Parsons having been brothers, it was the bricklayer and the Deacon instead; that they were born and baptized in Oxfordshire, and that there was no room for a Joseph in their family. The natural misgivings of his patrons, Dr. Holton and Judge Levi Parsons, both of whom were positive from documentary evidence that Joseph and Benjamin were brothers, Chester seems to have allayed by an artful appeal to enlightened self-interest and to convenience. Thus, Dr. Holton, the life-long collector of material for a Parsons genealogy, and Judge Levi Parsons, who found himself indebted to Chester to the amount of $4,000 for his work so far as it had progressed to that time, were descendants of Benjamin Parsons. To them Chester therefore reported that "Joseph Parsons' pedigree could be traced, but that if his descendants wished to have it, Judge Parsons should let them pay for it, since Joseph's descendants were as rich as Benjamin's." So obviously fair was this proposition, that it seems to have met with little or no resistance. The acquaintance with Chester's methods gradually formed by the writer of the present contribution to the history of