Evidence for the Ancestry of David Dickinson of Leicester NY, Pomfret NY, Steuben Co NY and Clermont Co OH

David Dickinson of Ashburnham and Shelburne MA

Note: December 2017, autosomal DNA evidence links this writer, 4th great-granddaughter of David Dickinson Jr, to a number of descendants of Concord, Massachusetts, relatives of David Sr. For example, there are matches to several descendants of Sarah Meriam of Concord. She was a first cousin of David’s, a granddaughter of Timothy and Abigail (Munroe) Wheeler, and her other grandparents were also both related to the families from which this David descends.

These are the reasons I believe our David Dickinson is the David Dickinson, Jr, of Ashburnham, Massachusetts.

1. Age = Birth record. David Dickinson Sr married Persis Wheeler, 16 Jul 1767, Bolton MA, “both of Ashburnham.” Two children are listed in History of Ashburnham, Massachusetts, from the Grant of Dorchester-Canada to the Present Time, 1734-1886, with a Genealogical Register of Ashburnham Families, by Ezra R Stearns, 1887, p 681: David born 1769 and Sally born 1771. The book errs when it says Persis was the daughter[1] of Seth Wheeler of New Ipswich [NH], when she was his sister, the oldest child of Jonas Wheeler Sr and his wife Persis Brooks. Wheeler records do not usually show Persis’s marriage or her death. Stearns says that in Ashburnham records the family used Dickinson and Dickerson about equally.
2. Studies of all Dickinson families in New England show no place for David Dickinson, born 1765-1774, in the following:

• Descendants of Nathaniel Dickinson and his many sons, who lived in the Connecticut River valley, especially in Hatfield, Hadley, Deerfield and Amherst MA. Neither published genealogies of this family nor Dickinson Family Organization researchers place him in this group of Dickinsons. Since one Chautauqua Co NY source[2]stated David was from Berkshire Co MA, I made a point to identify all nine families from the 1790 census; he is not a son of any of them, and none of these families had any later connection to western NY. In this branch of Dickinsons there are virtually no unknown families or gaps in families and certainly no unclaimed Davids.[3]
• The Oyster Bay, Long Island, family, descended from John and Elizabeth (Howland) Dickinson.
• The Southold, Long Island, family of Philemon Dickerson.
• The Rhode Island family of Charles and Philip (Greene) Dickinson.

All of these families had branches in the Hudson River valley about the time of the Revolutionary War, but I did not find a David of the right age, who might have gone to western NY at the time ours did. I have published my Dickinson gedcom at Rootsweb.com under the name “New England Dickinsons.”

David belongs to a smaller New England Dickinson group, the Rowley MA family of Thomas and Jennet (–?–) Dickinson, found in George Brainard Blodgette and Amos Everett Jewett, Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts, 1981, pages 94, 95, 98. One man listed in this book, David Dickinson, bp 18 Oct 1741, is known from the sources mentioned above to have had a son, David Dickinson, born in 1769, named as one of eight children in his father’s 1809 will; he had a stepmother and left home before age 21.

Like the family of George Dickinson in Ashburnham MA, our David, especially in Steuben Co NY records, used the names Dickinson and Dickerson interchangeably and about equally.

Persis’s death was recorded at Carlisle MA on 1782.

This David Dickinson Sr was a son of George Dickinson Jr and his wife Sarah Spofford, who had:

• Jeremiah, b 16 Dec 1736
• Daniel, b 14 Jun 1739
• David, b 7 Oct 1741
• Amos, b 14 Mar 1743
• Francis, b 20 Sep 1746

No further records are known for Daniel and Jeremiah; Amos, David and Francis are all in later censuses. Note the existence of men named Francis in this family.

3. In Chautauqua County and Its People there is mention of David Dickenson arriving in that county from Berkshire Co MA in 1804.  He had a dwelling on Dewberry St. and he erected a sawmill.

Proximity to Berkshire County = Family in Shelburne MA. History of Ashburnham states that David Sr moved to Shelburne MA in 1779; he was there as early as 1777, but no Dickinsons by any spelling were found in that town in 1790. David Jr could have gone to Berkshire County after his mother’s death, or Shelburne might be considered as in the Berkshire mountains. Shelburne is about half a county away from the Berkshire County line.

4. Father’s war record. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the War of the Revolution,p 740: “Dickerson, David. Receipt dated Shelburne, Sept. 22, 1777, for mileage, etc., from Shelburne to Stillwater, paid said Dickerson and others by the Selectmen of Shelburne; Capt. John Wells certifies that the men whose names appear upon the receipt went out of town with him.” David’s brother Amos is listed on pages 734, “Amos Dickason,” 735, “Amos Dickenson,” and 743, “Amos Dickinson,” all three times as a Lieutenant for Ashburnham or Worcester Co MA or with the same captain. Any references in this source for Daniel or Francis appear to be different men, from Hatfield or Hampshire County, not David and Amos’s brothers.

5. Lack of known connections to other Dickinsons = his father’s apparent remarriage in Ashburnham. Lydia Hapgood married Abraham Munroe, 4 Apr 1775, in Harvard, Worcester Co MA. A daughter Lydia was born in 1776. According to The Hapgood Family: Descendants of Shadrach 1656-1898, by Warren Hapgood, and Genealogy of John Wetherbee of Stow and Marlboro, MA, by Ethel Wetherbee Mazza, Lydia later married David Dickinson, on 25 Feb 1784, in Ashburnham, where their two sons, Abraham and William, were born. This is the same David previously married to Persis Wheeler, since Stearns and the Hapgood-Wetherbee writers all give him the same birthdate. Stearns gives David Jr’s birth and that of his sister Sally; the other writers name Lydia’s sons.

6. His father’s will. For comparison, with the children named in his will, see David, Sr’s census record.

•1790 census, Harvard, Worcester Co MA: 142. This household is near Lydia’s father, Shadrach Hapgood.

•1800 census, Harvard, Worcester Co MA: “David Dickinson”; the father lived until 1809, although only the wife and children are listed, 02000/00010.

•1810 Keene, Cheshire Co NH: Abraham Dickinson, 00100/10100; Wm Dickinson, 00200/20101. Note that Lydia is with son William here. There is a Joel Dickinson in the same town: 00101/02110; he is Joel Dickinson, who married Eunice Holton, from the Nathaniel Dickinson family—no relation.

•1820 Keene, Cheshire Co NH: Lydia Dickinson: 000000/00001; Abraham Dickinson: 200010/21010; William Dickinson: 200010/12010. These names are listed together.

7. Lack of known connections to other Dickinsons = the lack of other closely related Dickinsons.  There were numerous Dickinsons in Rowley MA, since most of the family stayed in eastern Massachusetts. George Dickinson Sr and his wife, Martha Nelson, had one son, George Jr, and three daughters. This George Jr and his wife, Sarah Spofford, went to Worcester County where only three sons appear to have lived to adulthood. Amos had one son, who died in infancy. David Dickinson Sr, as has been seen, had David Jr, Calvin, and the two half-brothers. Francis was in later Ashburnham censuses with Paul and Samuel Dickinson and may be the father of John, named in Stearns.

My conclusion here is that David Jr of Ashburnham had very few close relatives named Dickinson. Any close Dickinson relatives stayed in New England: his half-brothers moved with their mother to NH and two or three cousins stayed in Ashburnham.

Where was this David in 1790 and earlier? He was not with his father in 1790. By 1800, our David has been found in western NY.

8. Location: Two members of his mother’s family, uncles Jonas Jr and Silas Wheeler, died in Steuben Co NY, and another, Isaac Wheeler, died in nearby Tioga Co PA.

Steuben Co NY and other western Wheelers. Persis (Wheeler) Dickinson was a child in the following family, according to The Genealogical and Encyclopedic History of the Wheeler Family in America, Albert Gallatin Wheeler Jr, Boston MA, 1914: Jonas Wheeler, son of Timothy and Abigail (Munroe) Wheeler was born at Concord MA, 18 May 1720, and died at New Ipswich, New Hampshire, 1815. He was married at Concord, 13 Oct 1743, to Persis Brooks, who died in 1816, at 87 years of age. She was the daughter of Benjamin Brooks and Sarah (Heywood) Brooks. Jonas lived in the east part of New Ipswich, New Hampshire, near Hoar Pond, in 1758. Jonas’s children, all born at Concord MA:

• Persis Wheeler 23 Aug 1744, m David Dickinson, d 15 Jan 1782, Carlisle MA. (above)
• Jonas Wheeler 25 Jan 1746, d in Wheeler, Steuben Co NY.
• Dorothy Wheeler 16 Mar 1748. She married Benjamin Prescott, 1790 Cheshire NH.
• Seth Wheeler 25 May 1750, d 1822, New Ipswich NH.
• Silas Wheeler March 7, 1752, d 25 Nov 1827 in Wheeler, Steuben Co NY.
• Isaac Wheeler, baptized 14 Apr 1754, d 26 Feb 1833 Charleston, Tioga Co PA (just across state line from Steuben Co NY).
• Amos Wheeler 28 Jul 1756, d 1839 Brookfield, Madison Co NY.
• Abigail Wheeler 23 Jul 1760, m Isaac Stratton, poss 1790 Rutland VT.
• Noah Wheeler, baptized 26 Jul 1763, d Hancock NH.

9. Geographical situation of this family. The Dickinson family studied here moved west in a clear trajectory ending in western NY. The Dickinsons first lived in Rowley, Essex Co MA, then one son, George Jr, moved west to Harvard and later Ashburnham MA, then one of George’s sons, David Sr, continued the western move to Shelburne MA. David Jr went from there to western NY, where he was found in Ontario County in 1795 and 1800, Leicester NY (present-day Livingston County) in 1803, and Pomfret, Chautauqua Co NY in 1804.

David Sr moved east again, to Harvard MA, Shirley MA, and eventually to Keene NH.

10. The use of the name Wheeler.  About a year after I determined the David Dickinson of Ashburnham MA was the most likely father of my David, I found a biography from Ancestry.com: Nebraska, The Land and the People, Vol. 3, which confirmed my belief that David Jr’s son, David W Dickinson may have been David Wheeler Dickinson.

My comments on this article: the statement that the family was from England is loosely true, but I think they were in America long before Charles T Dickinson even knew. This Nebraska article was written ca 1925, when Charles was almost 80. The actual author of the article was either his son, a grandchild, or a local who took notes. That person seems to have done a great job with facts within Charles’s memory, but probably confused generations. David W Dickinson was Charles’s father not his great-grandfather.

David W Dickinson, born either 1800 or 1805, had a brother Charles and a brother William F. The name Francis Dickinson occurs several times among the children of David Dickinson (1769-ca 1830s), but I don’t find a Daniel at all.

I can add that in my researches, I found no family with sons named David W, Charles and Daniel, ca mid-to-late 1700s. Charles Thaddeus Dickinson’s father, David W. Dickinson was about 50 when Charles was born, his own father David [Jr] had probably been dead about 30 years, and he had never known the grandfather, David Sr of Ashburnham. The Clermont Co OH family is distinctive in its lack of connection to other branches of the Dickinson family. It is reasonable that David W Dickinson named his son Charles for his own presumed brother, and that Charles Thaddeus named his son for his own father.

11. The use of the name Francis Dickinson. David Dickinson of Clermont County, Ohio, had a son named William Francis, and several descendants in the next two generations continued the use of this name. David W[heeler?] had a son named Francis; Harriet (Dickinson) Light named a son Charles Dickinson, presumably for her brother, and two of her sons named children Francis Dickinson Light.

I therefore conclude that my David Dickinson was David Jr; his son David W Dickinson was the third generation with this name. The W probably stands for Wheeler, as his grandson’s name confirms. My conclusion that my ancestor David Dickinson was the son of David and Persis (Wheeler) Dickinson received validation when I discovered that the name Wheeler was used among David’s descendants.

12. To this may now be added DNA evidence, although of course after this many generations, more work is needed. More matching descendants and triangulation would be helpful.

© Kathy Alvis Patterson 2008, updated 2017

[1] Seth Wheeler had a daughter Persis who married her first cousin Daniel Dickinson.

[2] History of Chautauqua County, New York, by Obed Edson, 1894, page 168.

[3] David of Westminster VT (married Rhoda Adams), Major David of Deerfield (married Mary Warner), and David of Conway, Massachusetts, who died at the age of seven.

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