Can a seemingly random note change known history?

Jnana Hodson

April 3

Somewhere in the past I heard about a kind of public journal that wasn't overtly personal but carefully recorded by devoted individuals. News items, witty thoughts, chance encounters, weather observations might fill them.

Recently, I came across one of those, the Record Book Kept by Daniel C. Osborne (1794-1871), Quaker and Banker. The copy was online at the Friends of Allen County's website – the highly regarded genealogical center at the public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

What especially interests me is that he was a member of Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire. His entries provide fresh insights on the life of the congregation and the broader community, both the subjects of my book, Quaking Dover.

A record book, as this one demonstrates, is a collection of random accounts the individual found fascinating or significant. Daniel's, for instance, has entries on the manufacture of watches in U.S., John Jacob Astor's will and estate, the popular vote for president 1848, the wife of president Franklin Peirce president-elect, population of the states 1855, English Bible translations list, executions for murders, steam boat accidents and Atlantic Ocean steamers lost, even the royal family of England – most of those notations are on distant events – but they accompany family genealogies and other things closer to home.

Daniel, a son of Marble and Mercy (Nock/Knox) Osborne, operated an iron foundry and was later president of the Strafford Bank, now part of TD Bank. He lived in a Georgian Colonial style home his father had built adjacent to the Quaker meetinghouse, where Daniel continued as an active member while the congregation aged and declined.

These entries note visitors from other locations to Dover Friends Meeting, perhaps all of them in traveling ministry.

Although his penmanship was impeccable, I'm not confident in my ability to decipher it clearly. Even so, I find his records filling in details I'm not sure I'd uncover otherwise. The family genealogies, for instance, have details otherwise lost from the Quaker records when an individual "married out of Meeting," was "disowned" for other reasons, or moved from the area.

The accounts of deaths, mostly around Dover but sometimes including U.S. presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, or soldiers at Lexington, Massachusetts, also name neighbors who weren't Quaker. Perhaps they were even involved in business dealings with him. Notations in the margins point to a surprising number of suicides and, especially, drownings. One 53-year-old man was killed by his own father. Mention of the passing of Quaker evangelist Joseph John Gurney reflects the branch of Friends that Dover followed while that of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher indicates an openness to religious liberalism.

Notations of family marriages point to a much broader interaction of Dover Friends with fellow Quaker families in Rhode Island than I had suspected, including the Wilbur family, prominent in a schism in the yearly meeting, through no blame of their own. I'm guessing it's because so many attended what's now the Moses Brown School in Providence.

Of special interest to me is this notation, "10^th mo 22, 1864. Israel Estes of this City, died this day, aged 64 years. He was a lineal descendant of Joseph Estes, who died in Dover Neck in 1626, coming over with Edward Hilton, in the first vessel, and had lands assigned to him as early as 1631." If true, it would add another person – and, obviously, eventually a wife – to the settlement before the Puritan invasion that multiplied the frontier settlement now known as Dover. As the history stands now, Thomas Roberts was the only other person who arrived with Edward, and they were followed a few years later by brother William Hilton.

It would also place the origin of the surname in America at Dover rather than Massachusetts.

Well, that's what I get in a first sweep through the record book. I suspect there's much more to glean.