My Mayflower Ancestry - Part 2

Seven Graves and a Lot of Connections

A great deal of genealogy research is about shaking the tree to see what falls out. Experience helps, but sometimes you just work on a hunch until you can prove it or disprove it. Any genealogy web site with a search engine that stands as much as on the periphery of the topic domain is ripe for exploration. And web sites that are close to what you’re exploring are obvious targets. The Saratoga NY GenWeb site was one of those web sites in my search. All of the people in the branch of the family that I was researching lived in Saratoga County. And as I explored all of these resources, one piece of reference documentation kept popping up. It was a compilation of epitaphs from the tombstones of small cemeteries, both public rural cemeteries and small family cemeteries located on private property. This compilation was published in 1878, so the author, Cornelius Emerson Durkee, was able to extract the epitaphs while the tombstones were still in readable condition. This compilation is called “Some of Ye Epitaphs In Saratoga Co. N.Y.” or simply  “Durkee’s Epitaphs”. References to this work can be found on genealogy web sites as well as in family trees on ancestry.com and on findagrave.com.

Finding a single grave that you’re searching for in an old reference document such as this is by itself a big win. But when you find an entire cemetery with nothing but your relatives, it’s nearly amazing. This is what I found by searching “Durkee’s Epitaphs”. And it became the most important point in this research of connecting Mary Wilcox Wyatt to William Wilcox and Mary Stevens Wilcox. It seemed that every time a point was raised that cast doubt on the veracity of a claim, simply referencing the cemetery and the people buried there made the doubt of the claim seem very unlikely. The three most important people buried there are Mary Stevens Wilcox, Mary Wilcox Wyatt and John Wyatt. This cemetery is known as The Wyatt Cemetery because it was located behind the farmhouse and on the property that the Wyatt family lived with Mary Stevens Wilcox until her death in 1847. With the knowledge of Mary Stevens living with her daughter and son-in-law in her elder years, it is not surprising that we find these three people buried together in the private family cemetery on the property. But there are seven people buried there. They are

Mary Stevens Wilcox
Mary Wilcox Wyatt
John Wyatt
Elisabeth Wyatt
John B. Wyatt
George Miller
Alice A. St. John.

At first blush, we see that there are other Wyatt family members buried there. Since I had already done a great deal of research on the family, I knew who these people were straight away. But research using just the U.S. Census and the New York State Census reveals most of these people and further research with online resources discovers the rest. Instead of writing out who these folks are in longhand, I will let the picture say a thousand words.

There are seven people highlighted in this extended family chart. They are the seven people buried in the Wyatt cemetery. They are people from 5 generations of the family starting with the matriarch, Mary Stevens Wilcox. The biggest reinforcement of the assertion that this is a family cemetery of closely related people, at least for me, is the burial of Alice A. St. John there. Her grandmother was Angelica Wyatt Petitt, my 3-times great-grandmother and the granddaughter of Mary Stevens Wilcox.

In my documentation to The Society, I concluded my discussion of the Wyatt cemetery with the following statement.

This small cemetery is the tie that binds this family together through 5 generations. To discount the importance of this cemetery is to state that these people had no relationship and through shear fate they found their final resting place in a 7 plot cemetery behind a farmhouse in rural Schuylerville, N.Y. It is not random. It is not coincidence. They were a family in life and they are buried together in death.

I cannot overstate the importance of this cemetery, not just in this quest to establish Mayflower heritage, but as a memorial to the ancestors that were responsible for an enormous family tree, of which, I am just one member.

Other Contributing Facts

There are other facts associated with the proof that Mary Wilcox Wyatt was the daughter of Mary Stevens Wilcox. One of these facts simply verifies that her maiden name was indeed Mary Wilcox. This was verified by the discovery of the death certificate of George Wyatt from the State of Michigan. Therein it states that the name of his father was John Wyatt and the maiden name of his mother was Mary Wilcox. This is one of the cases where a physical document comes through in a big way. To find certificates of birth, death or marriage that contain the maiden names of mothers pushes the genealogical search along with greater ease.

Other breadcrumbs that help establish the picture include the 1850 census showing George Miller living with John Wyatt, the 1840 census showing 1 “Free White Persons – Females – 80 thru 89” living in the John Wyatt household (Mary Stevens Wilcox would have been 83 at the time), and even the postmark on the envelope sent by William Wilcox Jr. showing the post office as Pike, NY, which is 9 miles from his residence in Eagle, NY, that fact confirmed by the census showing him living there.

Further bolstering the assertion of relation between William Wilcox and Mary Wilcox Wyatt is the discovery of an old family document held by a descendant of William Wilcox Jr. which names the descendants and establishes an important relationship. In describing Mary Wilcox Wyatt, the author of the document refers to her as “great aunt Mary Wilcox a sister of greatgrandfather”. Though not a legal document, it is old and contains information similar to that of a family bible. The part of the page referring to the Wilcox genealogy is included here. The remainder of the page contains information on another branch of the document owner’s family.

And when the entire picture is sown together, it results in the family tree descending from Francis Cooke and Richard Warren down to myself. It’s been a long project, but worth the results of finding my family roots.