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Combining a vacation with a trip to our son's college in Massachusetts, Janice and I had the opportunity to visit several ancestral homes we had read about in working on the family history and genealogy. It all proved to be real exciting for a descendent of the Hammond-Hale-Jameson families.
At Dunbarton township, north of Nashua, N.H., and northwest of Manchester, we found the 1753 homestead of Hugh Jameson, Scoth-Irish immigrant great-grandfather of Mary Eliza Jameson of Hanover, Illinois, who married Orson Ward Hammond and was my maternal grandmother. A portion of the large rambling farm house built in 1753 is still nicely kept and serves the present owner. The farm is currently a fruit farm, with peach, apple and other fruit trees, and strawberries in season. What a thrill to be on the homestead granted Hugh Jameson, and habited by his descendents continuously until 1893! Our lineage is through his son Hugh, who reared his family near Oneida, N.Y., and Hugh's son Samuel Jameson (1789-1868) who then moved on to claim a wilderness home in western Illinois near Hanover. Mary Eliza (1858-1918) was reared there and married O. W. Hammond there in 1883.
We found that our immigrant Hammond ancestor is memorialized in the memorial bell tower of the Olde Ship Church at the port town of Hingham, southeast of Boston. His name is listed along with others who joined the Hingham pioneers in 1636. He was Thomas Hammond, b. Melford, England, who arrived in Hingham before 1636 with his family.
Our line is through his son Thomas Hammond, and grandson Isaac Hammond, who was reared by his mother after the early death of the second Thomas, with the help and guardianship of his Uncle Nathaniel. This immigrant Thomas lived several years in Hingham, then moved to Cambridge Village, later known as the village of Chesnut Hill in the town of Newton. In Newton a Parkway, a large pond, and a street are named after the Hammond family. Later our line of Hammonds moved to Bolton township in Connecticut, east of Hartford, where some of them made the acquaintance of the Jonathan Hale family. Some Hales and Hammonds jointly planned to migrate to Ohio after business failures in Connecticut about 1810.
At Glastonbury, Conn., now a suburb southeast of Hartford, on the Connecticut River, we found a rich treasure of Hale family history. Our immigrant ancestor was Samuel Hale, Sr. (1610-1693), who was in Hartford Connecticut in 1640, and later lived at Wethersfield, Norwalk, and Glastonbury. His son Samuel Hale, Jr., married as his second wife Mary Welles, a grandaughter of one of the first governors of the Colony of Connecticut, in 1695. His son Jonathan by this marriage is our ancestor and thus we are descendants of the Welles family of Connecticut also.
This Jonathan Hale built a large weatherboarded farm home in 1720 which still stands among many lovely old homes in Glastonbury. His tomb is prominently marked in the Community Greens Cemetery. His son Theodore of our line, built a large brick home later on the same farm homestead, now at 1715 Main Street in Glastonbury, in 1754. In this home another Jonathan Hale was born in 1777. Jonathan's wife, Mercy S. Piper, gave birth to Sophronia Hale in this same brick home on July 7, 1804, six years before the family migrated to Bath, Ohio, which was then a wilderness known as Connecticut's ``Western Reserve''.
Jonathan Hale evidently secured 1,000 acres in this new land upon which to start a new life in 1810. Sophronia Hale grew up in Ohio, and married Ward Kingsbury Hammond there the 31st of May 1827. Orson Ward Hammond was their tenth and last child, born June 6, 1846, in Knox County, Illinois, near Galesburg. Thus the Hale and Hammond ancestry was united as both families moved westward.
As we left the beautiful town of Glastonbury, we, too, turned westward and a few days later visited the Jonathan Hale Farm and Village which is now a museum village operated by the Western Reserve Historical Society near the town of Bath, between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. There we found the graves of Jonathan and Mercy Hale and other Hale and Hammond relatives in the small cemetery of the farm village.
The house in which Ward K. Hammond and Sophronia Hale were married has been carefully restored and preserved, donated by an affluent great niece of Sophronia's to the Western Reserve Society for the preservation of the history of the pioneer families in that part of the country. The brick house, as well as the one built in Glastonbury by his father Theodore Hale, was built of materials from the farm itself, including the bricks which were made from clay on the farm.
These signs of the care with which these lovely old homes and lands have been preserved gives us hope for the future of our country and our lands. Remembering gives us a sense of appreciation of them and their struggles for freedom, creature comfort, and personal satisfactions as they migrated from place to place. It makes me appreciate even more our ``Yankee ancestors'', some of whom were really ``Connecticut Yankees''.
Upon later visits to Bolton, Conn., we have found a Bolton Township History with great documentary of two generations of Hammonds there and several ancestral graves in the local cemetery. The Nathaniel Hammond homestead in Bolton is well known and his home is still standing though enlarged and modified across the years. This visit was made more interesting because of the helpful small township library which offered assistance to visitors. It is a rural setting and very picturesque. We have a copy of the Bolton history book which is quite explicit in identifying the Hammond family as early leaders in the community.