Today's
ancestor, Jemima Booth, was my 4th gt-grandmother. She was married to
Benjamin Townsend (who I wrote about on 10 Dec 2017) and was the
mother of Edith (Townsend) Marsh (who I wrote about on 8 Dec 2017.)
If
you tried to read about Jemima on my genealogy website, you would
find very little information there about her. See
http://www.joanneskelton.com/p15.htm#i369
The
main source of information about Jemima that I have found is the
Quaker record of her marriage to Benjamin Townsend, as his second
wife, at the Concord Monthly Meeting in Chester County (now Delaware
County) Pennsylvania in 1784. I will try to do a transcription of
that record sometime soon.
There
are a number of public member trees on Ancestry.com (at least 40)
which include her. However, as often happens they don't all agree.
About 2/3 of them list her parents as Robert Booth and Elizabeth
Cloud, while the rest show unknown. Since the Quaker record names
her father as Robert Booth, at least that appears to be correct.
There was a Robert Booth in that Quaker community who married an
Elizabeth Cloud in 1741, so if they were the same Robert, her mother
would probably be Elizabeth Cloud.
Most
of the public trees show her birthdate as 1759 in Pennsylvania or
Delaware. The Delaware may mean Delaware County, Pennsylvania, but
Elizabeth Cloud was from Delaware. Looking at Jemima's death date I
found that most with a date listed 1803 and a few gave 1805 and all
but one gave her death place as Pennsylvania. The one which showed
her death place as Ohio was most likely the correct one. I base this
on an item I had found in the History
of Belmont and Jefferson Counties Ohio, by
J. A. Caldwell, published 1880, pg 554. It was in the section about
Smithfield Friends Church and said that original members of the
church in 1802 were Benjamin Townsend and Jemima his wife. It also
said that the first grown person to be buried at that church's
cemetery was “Jemima Townsend wife of Benjamin Townsend.”
This Quaker record from the
Westland Monthly Meeting in Washington County Pennsylvania showed
that the Townsend family, including Jemima, were planning to go to
the Concord Monthly Meeting in Ohio in June of 1803.
I
checked in the Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy,
edited by William Wade Hinshaw,
Volume IV for Ohio, page 161, Concord Monthly Meeting, and found in
the Townsend listings, Benjamin and w. Jemima, as well as 5 of their
children were received on certificate there 1803, 9, 17. Smithfield,
or Plymouth, and Concord were in the same basic area. So it appears
that if Jemima died in 1803 it was after the 17th
of September. I am fairly confident that she had died before 1807
since Benjamin married a third wife then.
Although public member trees can
give clues about an ancestor, often a part or even all of the
information can be incorrect. We need to do our own research, even
though sometimes we can find very little.
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