Gravestone of Sarah M. Ladd
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John Shaw Ladd
John Shaw Ladd, for over 100 years has been listed as having a birthdate of Feb 1, 1801 from Warren Ladd in his book "The Ladd Family; A GENEALOGICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR Of THE DESCENDANTS OF DANIEL LADD OF HAVERHILL MASS" which has created a bit of confusion when trying to trace my direct line through the Ladds to Moses Clough in order to join the "Sons of the American Revolution" (which I was ultimately able to do through my grandmother's Bullock line anyway... I digress). This date simply doesn't match up with the known and proven census records of John Shaw and his wife Sarah in Waterbury, Vt. According to the census records for 1850, 1860 and 1870 John Shaw Ladd (known often in written records as John S. Ladd) was born between July and November of 1817. Why the confusion?
I believe that the John Ladd who was born in 1801 died as a child and that his death simply went unrecorded. In the early years of Tunbridge, births and deaths seemed to be recorded whenever the family thought of it and usually after a number of births had already happened. Maybe they just didn't think about this sort of thing or maybe it was too difficult to get to town often. Whatever the reason, it seems as though, while many births were recorded, very few infant deaths were. I'm trying to figure out if the family lacked that sort of sentimentality as they seemed to re-use the name 'John' an awful lot or if this was common practice. Maybe John Ladd Sr. just really, really wanted a namesake and when his died he named another? To clear it all up, in Tunbridge I found the records for two John Ladds born to John and Sally Ladd, one in 1794 and the second in 1801, the source of the confusion. I found birth records for both clearly listing the parents John and Sally Ladd but death records for neither. On the John Ladd born in 1801 to John and Sally Ladd, there was NO mention of a middle name Shaw. So where did Warren Ladd get it? Well, John S. Ladd actually did exist and really was a son to John and Sally Ladd for reasons I'll show in the next paragraph. I believe that Warren Ladd was given the information by an informant but lacked a birth date. To this day a birth record doesn't exist for the John Shaw Ladd who was born in 1817 (I'll explain why that is later as well). Either Warren or the informant checked the records in Tunbridge and found the John Ladd born in 1801 to John and Sally Ladd and determined that he must be the same one and so it went into the book. For a while I thought that John Shaw Ladd might not actually be the son of John and Sally Ladd as they seemed to be too old to have a child in 1817 until I found a very interesting land record in Thetford, Vt.
The record is from 1827 and is a transaction between John Ladd, husband of Sally to their two oldest sons, Elijah Shaw Ladd and Tyler Ladd (in order from oldest to youngest). In the deed he leaves his sons the land in Thetford under the stipulation that they take care of he and his wife and that they give to their 3 brothers "Isaac, Enoch and JOHN" $100 when they REACH THEIR 18th birthdays. The John Ladd born in 1801 would be 26 YEARS OLD by this date and therefore wouldn't be included in this list. By the same token THAT John would have been one year older than Elijah Ladd and would most likely have been one of the recipients of this deed had he lived (which I believe he did not). Isaac was born in 1809, Enoch was born in 1811 and if my calculations are correct, John Shaw was born in 1817 and would not have been 18 yet in 1827. The boys were listed oldest to youngest meaning that John and Sally HAD to have had another John Ladd sometime after 1811, Enoch's birth year. Again there is no birth record for a John Ladd born in 1817 to John and Sally Ladd of Tunbridge or Thetford (they owned land in both places) but this land record definitively proves that the Ladds had a son named John who was less than 18 by time 1827 came along AND that he was younger than his brothers Isaac and Enoch. I believe that John Shaw Ladd was born in 1817 to John and Sally Ladd and that information was passed onto Warren Ladd, minus the date of birth, and because of a lack of a birth certificate he was associated with the earlier, deceased John Ladd Jr. Maybe this was strange even back then and Warren wasn't expecting a family to name 3 sons John after each one died although he does acknowledge the difficulty of having to sort out so many John Ladds and even alludes to the fact that the book came out late due to a "mix up" and difficulty keeping them straight.
The Nov 4th, 1850 census of Bolton (where I found record of John S. Ladd's first land purchase WHICH lists him being from Thetford WHERE I found his marriage record to Sarah Moody Bragg) lists him as being 33 years old. The July 20, 1860 Waterbury census (the Land John S. Ladd owned in Bolton was annexed to Waterbury around 1852, he first bought it in 1839) he's 42 which points to a birth of 1817. So why no birth record?
In a deed that I found in Thetford dated 1818, John Ladd Sr. of Tunbridge bought his first plot of land in Thetford. I haven't had time to go and copy every deed found in Tunbridge and Thetford under John's name but I'm pretty sure that the family sold all their Tunbridge land and moved at this point to Thetford. If John was born in late 1817 and the family then moved to Thetford in the next year, and families didn't seem to make a habit of rushing right down to town to record births until there were a number of them, I'm pretty sure that the family simply moved before the record was made. And since he wasn't born in Thetford the folks there certainly didn't make John Sr. record the birth. Of course this is just conjecture but I'd be willing to bet on it. Also by this time John and Sally were in their 50s... that calls up all kinds of other stuff.
I believe this to be correct, it has been painstakingly researched and is an ongoing process. One thing is clear and that is the John Shaw Ladd who is listed in the Warren Ladd book as being born in 1801 definitely is not the same John Shaw Ladd who married Sarah M. Bragg and eventually moved to Waterbury but I do believe that they were brothers who never met.
Now, establishing a pedigree where there is no birth record was the hard part, finding out a little bit about John S. Ladd's life has been easier, and not what genealogists usually hope to find when researching long dead ancestors.
The first written record I find of John S. Ladd is a land record from Bolton in 1839 where he bought a parcel of land up near the "Waterbury River" along the Cotton Brook. The next record is from the summer of 1840 and is his marriage to Lydia M. Chamberlain, both listed being from Thetford. Lydia dies although I haven't found a record of this or burial place, I think I'll have to look over Bolton a little more closely. In 1843 John marries Sarah Moody Bragg, also in Thetford. Why and how he traveled from Bolton to Thetford all these times, I don't know, I wish I did. Sarah is listed as being from Strafford so I'll have to check out town records there.
As mentioned before, the land that John S. Ladd bought in Bolton was later annexed to Waterbury and became what's now known as the Little River Settlement, an area that is now abandoned, empty cellar holes, overgrown with trees and documented very well by Patrick Yaeger in the book "The Beautiful Vale Above the Falls". It was a hard life in this mountain settlement, the soil wasn't great, the winters hard and the living meager. In a large map dated 1857 at the Middlesex Vital Records building you can actually see the site of the farm house built by John S. Ladd, his name is right next to it! It's a map of Washington County and I'm hoping to go and get a decent photo of it soon. In a Beers Atlas dated 1869 (maybe it's 1873) that same house is listed as being owned by Sarah M. Ladd, John's wife. Did John die? No, his date of death is listed as February 18th, 1875 (1873 in some sources though this is a mistake). So what happened?
While researching in Waterbury I came upon a record from 1863, a Bill of Divorce, Sarah M. Ladd from John S. Ladd. There is also a Libel for Divorce and a article of Alimony. Each of which I have transcribed into a .doc file. I was stunned! More stunning was the reason for divorce... "the detestable crime of adultery". Here things get foggy.
It seems that either right after this or during this mess in 1863 John ran into some legal trouble with a fellow named A. H. Farr. In fact an offshoot of this case made it into Vermont Supreme Court record published in 1866 (for 1863). I'm not sure the circumstances but it appears that John ended up in State Prison. Not long after he was transferred to the "Brattleboro Asylum for the Insane" (now the Brattleboro Retreat)! Was the effect of a divorce and subsequent or concurrent legal trouble to cause of some mental breakdown? It's not farfetched, reading some of the old reports of the Brattleboro Insane Asylum there were some people there because of "female trouble" (women going through menopause), masturbation, alcohol and all sorts of things on top of your more run of the mill mentally ill.
So how did I find this? I was doing an internet search one night for John S. Ladd and up came a list of persons who died at the Brattleboro Asylum for the Insane. I didn't realize that their John Ladd was my John Ladd until I looked at his information. He was from Waterbury and he died on Feb. 18th, 1875! Warren Ladd had gotten that part right and I couldn't believe that in his mention of John Shaw he neglected to include WHERE he died! It seems when he got the info, his informant politely left this information out of the picture. Why? Hadn't he wronged Sarah? Committed numerous amoral acts that led to his incarceration and later his committal to an asylum? Something else must have been going on, maybe he made up to Sarah, maybe he convinced them he was innocent or maybe he really was. While he's buried in an unmarked grave in Brattleboro, Sarah's grave in Waterbury Center reads "Sarah M. Ladd, wife of John S. Ladd". Would she have put this on even after a divorce? Even after divorcing an adulterer? My hope is to someday find letters from the family that may help to shed light on this event. Even stranger, my great-great grandfather Walter named one of his sons John Shaw Ladd. Do you name one of your children after a person who ended up dying in an institution such as an insane asylum? Not usually.
Genealogically speaking, John Shaw Ladd lead an interesting life. Almost no account of his birth exists, he came from a fairly large family, first wife died within two years of marriage, started another family (bringing two daughters into it from his previous marriage), moves to a section of the state now abandoned and littered with cellar holes, commits adultery, ends up in prison, later transferred to an Insane Asylum and dies there 12 years later with his family seeming to pine for him after his death. If ONLY I had a time machine...
I'll never actually know John S. Ladd, heck I may not want to. But it's little mysteries like this that keep genealogy fun and keep everyone from just being another name on a page with a date next to them. I can't wait to see what I find out next!
Any information offered will be returned in kind if I have it.
I am always willing to supply pictures and information to anybody researching their family roots.
Just drop me an e-mail at celt_rock (at) yahoo (dot) com |
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