Rooting for Ancestors: April 2019

The Ayars/Ayers/Ayer/Eyre/le Heyr ancestors show up in Wiltshire in 1220. The earliest for whom I've seen records was a man who miraculously fought on crusade with King Richard Lionheart in the 1190s, and then was born in 1220. Neat trick, right? Unless some hobby genealogist can't do math but wants a royal connection. Yes, that's probably it.

Salisbury, Wiltshire, England
The Eyres survived the horrible famine of 1317-1320, the great bubonic plague outbreak in 1347-1349, and many plagues thereafter.

After living for 300 years in the parish of Wedhampton and Urchfont and baptizing and burying at the church of St. Michael's and All Angels, a branch of the Eyres moved a few miles to the city Salisbury to do business, probably something to do with leatherwork, wool production and textiles. Their wealth and trade in the East India Company elevated father and son into Parliament, aldermen of Salisbury, and they were elected mayors of Salisbury.

St. Michael and All Angels church,
Urchfont, Wiltshire, where Ayers/Eyre
ancestors were surely buried.
Photo by Christy K Robinson

In a time (from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I) when it was perilous in turns to be Catholic or Protestant, the Eyres of Salisbury were Protestant, and then purifying separatists called Puritan. This can be seen in the inscription on their memorial sculptures in St. Thomas Becket church in the shadow of the great Salisbury Cathedral. They "lived virtuously and charitably gave to ye cittie of London and also this cittie for the erecting of an almshouse in this cittie and maintenance thereof for ever & for a weekly lecture in this parish for ever & being of ye age of 47 years: departed this life in ye feare of God hating idolatry." Hating idolatry is dog-whistling for hating the rituals and veneration of saints that Catholics and Anglicans practiced.

Thomas Eyre (1549-1628) and Elizabeth Rogers
memorial in south aisle chapel of St. Thomas Becket
church in Salisbury.

In 1608, thousands of people in England, on the European continent, and Russia died in the Great Frost and its famine, which were caused by a Peruvian volcano's ash ejected into the atmosphere.

John Ayer (descendant of Juliana Cockerel Eyre and son and grandson of Salisbury merchants and mayors) and his wife Hannah Evered Webb and their first six children left England in June 1635 because their Puritan religious beliefs and practices were under attack by King Charles I. Hannah was seven to eight months pregnant when they planned to arrive in Massachusetts Bay Colony. After a perilous journey of eight to ten weeks, very near to their destination, the ship James sailed into the worst hurricane ever to strike New England, and their ship was nearly destroyed off Maine and New Hampshire. All passengers and crew providentially survived. Their son John Ayer Jr., born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, was my ancestor. The baby Hannah was pregnant with, Obadiah Ayer, born safely on October 1, 1635, was also my ancestor, on another line. Imagine being tossed in a wooden ship in a severe hurricane when you're seven months pregnant. Perhaps the other passengers surrounded and cushioned her against the shifting crates, barrels, and belongings needed during the voyage. They were hardy stock!

The ship James lost its masts, anchors, and sails in the August 1635 Great Colonial Hurricane off Maine, New Hampshire, and Boston Harbor. They miraculously survived and limped into Massachusetts Bay. Among the families on board were the Ayers and the Evered-Webbs, as well as Increase Mather, an important official in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Salem/Ipswich/Haverhill, Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Ayers and Evered-Webbs settled on several properties in the area of Salem, which was even more zealous and fanatically Puritan than Boston or other communities, having had a succession of hellfire and brimstone ministers and been governed by the hotheaded John Endecott, who was the sometime governor of the colony and whose personal seal was a death head. The first minister of the first church in Salem, Rev. Samuel Skelton (1592-1634), was so extremely conservative that he refused to allow Communion to the members of the ultra-Puritan Winthrop Fleet when they arrived in Salem in 1630. Skelton was my ancestor.

Rev. Roger Williams was their minister for a short time, but he was ousted and fled for his life in 1636. Another minister, Rev. Hugh Peter, was among the inquisitors at Anne Hutchinson's trials, and in the later 1630s and 1640s was involved in child trafficking and adultery. He was executed for treason in 1660. In the 1650s and 1660s, Salem, still under Endecott's local influence and rule as colonial governor, persecuted Baptists and Quakers with great zeal, including nearly-fatal whippings, crippling fines and confiscations, and attempting to sell teenagers into slavery.

Of the Ayers' large family of children, their eldest daughter was Mary Ayer, who would later marry Nathan Parker. After Nathan died in 1685, Mary Ayer Parker, who was in her late 60s by this time, would have lived a comfortable life with farms, domestic animals, and numerous adult children to keep her financially secure. But in late summer of 1692, Mary Ayer Parker and a daughter were indicted in the Salem witch scandal. Mary was hanged despite her protests that she was only one of several Mary Parkers in the area and they had falsely accused her. (Of course, all the Salem "witches" were Christians, without a hint of enchantment, curses, or satanic congress.) Her daughter, though imprisoned, was reprieved as the hysteria of the trials faded and the remaining women were released.

Wm Barker has affirmed to ye grand inquest that Mary Parker did in company with him sd Barker afflict Martha Sprage by witchcraft ye night before sd Barker confessed, which was ye 1 of Sept 1692.

Hannah Evered Ayers' brother, John Evered-Webb, was in charge of Mary Dyer's execution on Boston Neck. He was a supporter of Gov. John Endecott, who ordered Mary Dyer hanged.

Swansea, Massachusetts Bay Colony
The John Ayer who had survived the hurricane as a boy lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts, until his death in 1657. His eldest son, Capt. John Ayers (my 11th great-uncle), was scalped and killed on 2 August 1675 in Brookfield, Massachusetts, in one of the early battles of King Philip's War.

My branch of the Ayers family, who had at some point (perhaps in the 1650s or 1660s) become Baptists and either witnessed or experienced severe persecution by the Salem Puritans, moved south to Swansea, Mass., a Welsh Baptist enclave, in time to survive the first massacre of King Philip's War there. If they had stayed in Salem, surely more of their nonconformist family would have been accused and hanged as witches in 1692, but living in Swansea didn't prove to be very salubrious to their health, either. In June 1675, nine Englishmen died, were scalped, and their heads and hands were placed on poles nearby. After their cattle were slaughtered, their food stolen, and farms and a stockade were burned out by Wampanoag Indians, Swansea was abandoned, and many southern Massachusetts people fled to Newport, Rhode Island, which was a haven because Rhode Island was a pacifist society and refused to join the armies of Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies.

During their time in southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Ayers came into close association with a Seventh-day Baptist woman named Tacy Burdick Maxson, who later became a Quaker. In an era before middle names were common, they actually named their Baptist child Tacy Burdick Ayars, so the original Tacy, who had died 20 years before Tacy Ayars was born, must have been quite an interesting person. As I learned recently, Tacy Burdick Maxson is my 9th great-aunt on my maternal side. Small world, in colonial times!

There was a Seventh-day Baptist meetinghouse in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Ayer/Ayars family may have attended services with the congregation there. I visited the Newport Historical Society, which is housed in that church. The current building was erected in 1730, after the time the Ayers were there.

Cumberland County, New Jersey
In 1687, the Ayers moved on to Cumberland County, New Jersey, and their descendants were Baptist or Seventh-day Baptist from then until now. The Cohansey Baptist Church was organized in 1690 in a log house. After merging with the Bowentown congregation in 1710, a frame meeting house was built between Sheppard's Mill and the Cohansey River.

Obadiah Holmes Sr. was whipped nearly to death by
Salem Puritans in 1651. The Ayers would have known
this could be their fate.

The New Jersey Ayers family definitely knew Rev. Obadiah Holmes Jr. (Baptist minister), whose father was well-known to the Dyers in Newport. The senior Holmes had been beaten in Salem for visiting and giving Communion to an elderly, blind Baptist there. Holmes Jr. was a Baptist minister in New Jersey.

The Ayers intermarried with the Bowens, Jenkins, Davis, Swinney, and other Baptist and Seventh-day Baptist families, and many were buried in the Cohansey Church cemetery. To read a bit more on their associations, see my article, Nathaniel Jenkins, Another Brick in the Wall.

March 2023: the 286th anniversary
of the
Shiloh Seventh-day Baptist church
founded by my ancestors.
Photo: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=596848339149438&set=a.461186479382292.

In my lines, the Ayers married into the Swinneys, who were farmers and remained Seventh-day Baptists until the 20th century at least. I recently discovered a DNA relative whose Carter ancestors are Seventh-day Adventist. A Swinney married a Carter, which produced my paternal grandmother, Opal Carter Robinson. I remember that Grandma Opal felt some slight disdain for one of those seventh-day cousins' families, but I don't know which. She attended a country fellowship in the 1930s, and in the 1970s she was a Methodist. When she was in her late 90s she lived with her daughter, whose husband was an Evangelical Lutheran minister. Grandma didn't make waves.

Learning and retelling the stories are why genealogy and history are fascinating to me. It personalizes history, and whether white-hat or black-hat ancestors in our 21st-century eyes, nobody gets to be a flat cartoon--they take on dimensions and we carry them on in memory.

When I was writing the Dyer and Hutchinson books, I didn't want to make a caricature villain of Gov. John Winthrop, I wanted to understand and respect him. I intended to do the same for Gov. John Endecott, but honestly could not find one nice shred about him, even in the writings of his descendant, so I decided not to try to get into his head, and just see him through the eyes of Edward Hutchinson and William Dyer.

But all my research from hundreds of books and papers and colonial records give me an insight into what kind of people lived and died and eventually resulted in thousands of descendants, including me. From a life that's not related to me, I can find details of what ancestor lives were like and who knew who 400 years ago. It's fascinating to wonder which strands of their DNA influenced who and what I'd become.

So there you have it: 800 years of survival in one family line, from medieval times to the present. They survived through severe famines, the Black Death, the English Reformation and its burnings, the Great Frost, immigration in a small wooden ship that was all but destroyed in a hurricane, religious persecution, the outbreak of King Philip's War right in their village, a journey to New Jersey where there were fatal measles and influenza outbreaks, and eventually a move to Indiana, where they lived as farmers in such poverty that they didn't have as many plates or chairs at the table as they had mouths to feed. They served in the War of Independence, the Civil War, and two world wars. By Providence, they made it through those trials and tragedies. Whether the Ayers/Eyres were your ancestors or not, your forebears must have survived the same events or you wouldn't be here, safely reading this article from the comfort of your computer chair.

It's easy to think that I could never have made it through such adversity. But they sent their DNA down to me: I could survive and thrive with that strength and courage. It makes me straighten my spine and throw my shoulders back, ready to stride into the unknown.

Let's go, cousins. We can do this.