New Jersey Tapscotts, Revisited

An earlier blog (8 Sep 2014) briefly discussed the Tapscotts of New Jersey. Because of a possible, but only possible, relationship to William Tapscott the Rebel (blog of 22 Mar 2016), we need to take a closer look at this New Jersey group.

A major concern about the history of the New Jersey Tapscotts is the enormous number of on-line trees that include this line (122 public trees in Ancestry.com to date) and the miniscule number of sources provided for those trees. In fact, in some sort of Möbius-strip-like, circular logic, nearly all citations are to other trees. What follows, however, is from original, contemporary, or well-documented secondary sources, not, unless stated otherwise, from on-line trees. (Contact me for sources.)

Upper Freehold Baptist Church (Old Yellow Meeting House). Wikipedia.

The Tapscotts of New Jersey first appear in rural Monmouth County (which may or may not have been named for the Duke of Monmouth), a county peopled by English, Dutch, Scotch, and Quaker immigrants. In that county is the Upper Freehold Baptist Church, constructed in 1737 following the burning of an earlier 1720 church. No longer regularly used for religious services, the Old Yellow Meeting House, as the structure is now called, is the oldest Baptist church in New Jersey.

In the adjoining cemetery stands a marker for one James Tapscott, though, for some reason (probably because it is badly eroded), the marker appears in almost no cemetery surveys. Even Find a Grave doesn’t list it as being in the cemetery. James, who died 13 Mar 1750, aged “about 60” (corresponding to a birth year of 1690), is the earliest known Tapscott of New Jersey. His 6 Mar 1750 will names a wife, “Margaret,” and two sons, William and James.

William was highly active in the Upper Freehold Baptist Church. In 1766 he was one of forty-one parishioners who requested separation from the Middletown Baptist Church, of which Upper Freehold was a branch. Permission was granted. On 13 May 1766, William was one of those subscribing to the covenant for the new church, and two years later, on 7 Apr 1768 he was ordained a ruling elder. According a church book, over the years, William was involved in a “misunderstanding” with one Elizabeth Mason (“amicably Settled,” but the details were never revealed, though Elizabeth was quite sharp-tongued), shingling of the church roof, a reprimand of Brother Caleb Carman who was “unsound in ye Doctrines of Grace” (William’s investigation revealed that the charge was unjust), and a £30 bond for the church.

Marker for William Tapscott. Find A Grave.

When he passed away 8 Mar 1786, William was laid to rest in a plot immediately behind his father’s stone in the Old Yellow Meeting House cemetery. His marker is inscribed “In Memory of WILLIAM TAPSCOTT Esq who Departed this Life 8th March 1786 Aged 68 Years and 16 Days,” an age yielding the birth date 21 Feb 1718. To the right of William’s cemetery marker is a badly-scaled stone (also missing from Find a Grave) for an Anne Tapscott, who died 17 Oct 1760, aged 38 years 1 month 25 days, corresponding to a birth date of 22 Aug 1722. (Neither of these birthdate calculations take into account the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.) Anne may be Anne Bretton, who is claimed to have been William’s wife in 122 online trees, not a single one with a reliable source for the assertion.

William’s will, written after Anne’s death, names four children: William Jr., born 8 Sep 1747, operated a paper mill near Allentown, New Jersey, and died about Apr 1819, leaving at least two children, Catherine and Elizabeth. James Sr., born 1750, married Sarah Baird, had eight children, moved to Ohio, and appears in our next posting. Lucy, born in 1743 or 1744, married John Longstreet (license 28 Jan 1769), and died 21 Oct 1836, leaving five children (according to secondary sources). Lydia, born about 1855, married James Gaston 20 Apr 1773 (a marriage yielding one child), then married David Baird (yielding six children), and died 15 Feb 1791.

James Tapscott Jr., the second son of of James and Margaret, is a most interesting individual. Apparently never having left England, he was a physician in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England, dying in that county around Jan 1799, apparently without descendants. We know he was William’s brother because his will specifically names as legatees “Nephews and Niece namely William Tapscott James Tapscott and Lucy Longstreet who are all natives of and reside in America,” noting that William resided “at Monmouth in North America.” Lydia, his other niece, was dead by 1799 and, thus, not mentioned in James’s will.

And what were the origins of the first James, husband of Margaret? “Danny” (Joseph Daniel) Tapscott, a descendant of Capt. Henry Tapscott of Virginia and a Tapscott genealogy pioneer, a giant on whose shoulders Tapscott researchers stand, claimed that William the Rebel founded the New Jersey (and, therefore, the Ohio) Tapscotts. But Danny died an early death and his research records stored in the Northumberland County Historical Society contain no indication of how he came to this conclusion. If James were the son of William the Rebel, how did he come to be in New Jersey? Did the Rebel go to New Jersey from Jamaica? If so, how did one of his sons end up in England? A number of people have published trees claiming that the father of the first James Tapscott of Monmouth County, New Jersey, was John William Tapscott born 22 Nov 1667, and living in Culmstock, Devon, England. The name is certainly suggestive, the location is correct, and the birth date is acceptable for John William to be William the Rebel. He would have been seventeen at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion, old enough to be a rebel, particularly in those days, though a little young to be designated a “sergeweaver.” A major problem, however, is that only on-line trees have been cited as sources for John William Tapscott, another case of trees citing trees. Has no one learned of evidence? sources? facts? documentation?

The New Jersey Tapscotts were fascinating. Many family members were involved in the Revolutionary War, which was particularly vicious in Monmouth County. And with some dedicated research, a true, or at least reliable, family history is probably attainable. But I am not a descendant of the New Jersey Tapscotts and have other fish to fry, or, at least, other dramas to divulge. In the next posting, we will move into Ohio with James Sr., son of William and (presumably) Anne.

William the Rebel

All Saints' Church, Culmstock, Devon (2002), where a
William Tapscott married Mary Bronsford, 10 Aug 1654.

Following the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 Jul 1685, the jails of Somerset and Dorset were filled with thousands of captives, many of whom had been chased to the ground by Colonel Percy Kirke and his regiment of “Kirke’s Lambs.” One of the captured Monmouth rebels was William Tapscott, a “sergeweaver” from Culmstock in Devon, possibly the William Tapscott who had married Mary Bronsford three decades earlier on 10 Aug 1654 at Culmstock’s All Saints’ Church. Starting 25 Aug 1685, southwest England saw a series of prosecutions, the “Bloody Assizes,” conducted by the ruthless Chief Justice George Jeffries, a succession of trials that reached the town of Taunton in Somerset, on 18 and 19 Sep 1685. There in the Great Hall of Taunton Castle, William the Rebel was hauled before the Court of Oyer and Terminer and charged with waging war against the King. He was sentenced to be transported to the Americas, and was lucky for that judgement. At Taunton Sir Jeffreys condemned five hundred Monmouth rebels to death. Vicious, cruel, and abusive, not only to prisoners, but to witnesses, attorneys, and jurymen, Jeffreys took delight in dealing out punishment and was particularly happy when watching a woman being flogged or a man swinging at the end of a rope. Even Charles II had despised him stating "That man has no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers." Jeffries was appointed Lord Chancellor by King James as an award for his cruel work.

Judge Jeffries presiding over the "Bloody Assizes."
(John Tutchin, James Blackwood & Co., 1873.)

Mary Bronsford, were she the wife of William the Rebel, would not have been spared. By putting pressure on local landowners, not only were the men who joined Monmouth vigorously suppressed, their wives and children were hounded for months, being turned out of their homes, compelled to hand over their meager possessions, and forced to make payments to the King out of any earnings.

Shipped out to Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands to be sold to plantation owners, most transported rebels never saw their homes again. They were kept below decks for the whole of their journeys and were only given the scantiest of coarse biscuits and fetid water. One fifth died on the voyage and so emaciated were the remainder that a slave merchant who handled their sales decided he would have to fatten them up first. One of a hundred prisoners sold for the benefit of Sir Christopher Musgrave, a member of Parliament, William Tapscott was conveyed with thirty-four fellow rebels from Weymouth on the ship Jamaica Merchant, arriving in Jamaica by 12 Mar 1686 (Gregorian Calendar).

[As a side note: Some claim that William’s ship, Jamaica Merchant, had belonged to the pirate Henry Morgan. But Morgan’s ship of that name sank a decade earlier, on 25 Feb 1676. William Tapscott traveled on another vessel of the same name.]

Bill of lading for 35 convicted rebels, including William Tapscott, 30 Nov 1685.

William Tapscott, who cost “Twenty two peeces of Eight” for passage, and other transported prisoners were sentenced to ten years’ service. During that time they could be bought and sold like African slaves, and were forbidden to marry. Heavily dependent on forced labor for its sugar plantations, Jamaica welcomed the captives.

When evicted from Jamaica by the British in 1655, the Spanish had freed the then African slaves, who fled to the mountains. For decades the liberated “Maroons” harassed the British colonists, who, nevertheless, continued importing slaves until, by the time William arrived, Blacks outnumbered whites. It is just possible that William and a slave (or "Maroon") woman founded a Jamaican mixed-race line. In 2013 a 67-marker yDNA test showed a striking two-step genetic match between a descendant of John Ford, a man of color born in Jamaica around 1753, and your author, sixth great grandson of Henry Tapscott, the Immigrant. (Another Tapscott, living in England, shows a yDNA genetic distance from the Ford descendant of only 1 for 67 markers.) Was John Ford a descendant of William Tapscott, the Rebel? If so, William and Henry had a common male predecessor; they were possibly even father and son. But only “possibly.” One must be very careful when drawing conclusions from y-DNA results where there is a surname difference, but the matches are decidedly close.

In 1689, following the Glorious Revolution, which drove James II from Britain, Mary, his daughter, and her husband, William of Orange, ascended to the throne. In 1689 the vicious Judge Jeffreys died of kidney disease in the Tower of London. In 1691 Colonel Kirke passed away in Brussels, redeemed by his military support of William's revolution. In 1701 James II perished in exile in France.

And what became of William Tapscott, the Rebel? In Feb 1690 William and other transported prisoners were pardoned by the new King and released, though in some cases with delay. West Indies Governors and plantation owners were not pleased to lose free labor. Most pardoned rebels lacked the money needed or possibly the inclination to leave Jamaica, where jobs were abundant and wages were good. But opportunities were greatly reduced with the destruction of Port Royal by the 1692 earthquake, after which many of the rebels are believed to have left the colony, often heading to the North American mainland. William Tapscott may have been one of those. And that is the subject of our next posting.

The Monmouth Rebellion

I have on occasion mentioned William Tapscott, the Rebel, whom I am once more studying as part of an effort to prove or disprove the blood relationship of all Tapscotts (save a few that were adopted or chose the name).

The story of William the Rebel begins with the 1685 death of the English king Charles II and the ascension to the throne of his Catholic brother James II. Within months following James's crowning, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, one of many Illegitimate sons of Charles II, launched an uprising of disgruntled inhabitants of southwestern England, particularly those around Taunton in Somerset. On 11 Jun 1685 the Duke landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset with only 82 supporters and marched north, acquiring on the way a large force of cloth workers (who suffered from a depressed market), farmers, peasants, and Protestant zealots.

At Taunton in Somerset, Monmouth was proclaimed “King,” but his unskilled and poorly armed army was insufficient to defeat the military might of King James, who in 1685 still had the support of the landed aristocracy. On 5 Jul, at the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset, the rebels were crushed, giving credence to the assertion that “Somerset County, England has always been the rallying point for forlorn hopes, and the champion of lost causes.” Around three hundred rebels were killed in the actual battle, with many more slayed in the following pursuit. James II lost less than fifty men. (Less than two months later, somewhere nearby, Henry Tapscott, the Immigrant, was born. But our story is not about Henry, but about William.)

Taunton Castle, Somerset, where Judge
Jeffries terrorized Monmouth’s followers.

Following Monmouth’s beheading, King James sought further vengeance. He sent Colonel Kirke with the Queen’s Royal Regiment (“Kirke’s Lambs,” whose badge was a lamb with the flag) into Somerset, where traitors and suspected traitors were hung without trial. Later Judge Jeffreys in the “Bloody Assizes,” which the King dubbed his “campaign in the west,” tried hundreds more, hanging many. Most rebels came from central Somerset, but the Exmoor region did not escape. Insurgents, or suspected insurgents, were hung at Dulverton, Dunster, Minehead, and Porlock. One of those hung in Porlock, in 1685, was Henry Edney, who bore the family name of Henry the Immigrant’s wife to be, Ann.

A poignant church record at the Somerset hamlet of Weston Zoyland shows the condition of five hundred Sedgemoor prisoners briefly housed there: “paid for frankincense and saltpeter and resin and other things to burn in church after ye prisoners had gone out.” Three years later William III’s “Glorious Revolution” to save England “from Popery and slavery” would accomplish what Monmouth’s rebellion had not—the expulsion of James II, William III’s father-in-law.

If you want more details about the Monmouth Rebellion, Thomas Babington Macaulay's five volumes on The History of England from the Accession of James II cannot be beat. And the volumes are available at little or no cost on Kindle. Macaulay's history and that of the Virginia Tapscotts starts in the same year, 1685, when James II was crowned and Henry Tapscott, the Immigrant, was born.

And what has all this to do with William Tapscott, the Rebel? William was one of the Monmouth rebels, one who escaped hanging, but not punishment. His tale is the subject of our next post.

DNA, Jamaica, and Bollings

Since posting (21 Oct 2014) the observation of a close DNA match between me and a Jamaican Ford descendant (genetic distance of 2 for a 67-marker yDNA STR test), I have observed an even closer match (genetic distance of 1 for 67 markers) between that Ford descendant and a Tapscott who has never left England. In both cases the DNA difference lies in marker CDYb. The Jamaican Ford descendant shows 37-37 for CDY; the Tapscott living in England shows 37-38 for CDY; I show 37-39 for CDY. Since CDY is a fast-mutating marker, the fact that we differ only in this one marker strengthens the probability that the Fords of St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, and the Tapscotts of England and the U.S., have a common ancestor, quite possibly linked to William Tapscott, the Rebel, who was transported from England to Jamaica around 1686.

What is interesting is that the Jamaican Ford descendant also shows close matches (distances of 1 for 67 markers) with three people descended from ancestors bearing the name Bolding or Bowling (members of Group 5 Bollings, http://www.bolling.net/). Two of these matches are known to show a difference only in the CDY marker (37-38 for both a Bolding descendant and a Bowling descendant compared with 37-37 for the Ford descendant). As you all know, we have found Bolling matches for Tapscotts in the Tapscott surname study. And, more recently, autosomal DNA results also indicate a match between Group 5 Bolling/Bowling/Bollin/Bolding descendants and Tapscott descendants.

It is becoming increasingly likely that the Bolling Group 5 family of Virginia, USA, the Tapscotts of Virginia and England, and the Fords of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, have a common ancestor through an all-male line, but I would like to confirm this with a paper study. At this point, I am leaning toward a Tapscott progenitor in England with William Tapscott the Rebel starting the Jamaican Fords and someone in early Virginia or possibly England starting the Bollings.

I have proposed a proof of the connection of the Tapscotts and the Jamaican Fords as a problem for the televised Genealogy Roadshow (http://genealogyroadshow.org/casting-page/); however, I suspect that this will not be chosen since (1) it involves records outside the U.S. (which may increase the amount of time that the Roadshow wishes to spend on a project) and (2) I am not a confirmed member of the Ford family of Jamaica and thus cannot give the question the personal feeling that the Roadshow likes. Others (a Jamaican Ford?) may want to propose this or another Tapscott genealogy question to the Roadshow. I would be glad to help.

New Jersey Tapscotts

As you all know, there are two major Tapscott lines in the U.S.--the Virginia Tapscotts, my interest area, and the New Jersey Tapscotts, for which I have done very little research. Henry the Immigrant, the progenitor of the Virginia Tapscotts, arrived in America in 1700. The New Jersey Tapscotts probably arrived around the same time and settled in Monmouth county in New Jersey. Eventually, a number of them migrated to the state of Ohio. It is thought that the New Jersey Tapscotts may have originated from William Tapscott, the Rebel, who was released from bondage in Jamaica and may have traveled to New Jersey after King William ascended the throne of England.

For some time we have wondered whether the New Jersey Tapscotts were related to the Virginia Tapscotts. Now we have some evidence that they are.The earliest Tapscott in New Jersey for which we have good evidence (contact me for sources) was James Tapscott (not the rebel), born abt 1690, died 13 Mar 1750. He had a son William (b 21 Feb 1717/1718, d  8 Mar 1786, said to have married Ann Bretton), had three known children (William, James, Lucia), and appears to have two more (Isaac and Lydia).  Lydia is known to have married James Gaston and Lucy is known to have married a Longstreet, probably John Longstreet. Today, I went through my matches from autosomal DNA testing and found a number of matches with people descended from Monmouth County Gastons and Longstreets, including some that are known to be related to Lydia's spouse James Gaston. Is this proof that the two Tapscott lines are related? No. But it is moderately strong evidence. We need additional data, but we have a start.

If the lines are related, it occurred prior to entry of the earliest members into America, presumably in England.