The Origins of Caswell Polk Sanford: I’ve been trying for some time to figure out the relationship of all American Sanfords. Most of those in New England and the Midwest are descended from Thomas Sanford (who came from England in the early 1630s) or from one of his brothers.  But there are also lots of Southern Sanfords, and I’ve been trying to find out who they are descended from -- did one of the New Englanders migrate south, or was there another Sanford who came straight from England to North or South Carolina?  The earliest one I can find was Caswell Polk Sanford, born in North Carolina in 1776, who moved to Alabama (like many other North Carolinians in the late 1700s and early 1800s) and established there a large branch of the family. 

    So where did Caswell Polk Sanford come from?  One story said that his father was in the Revolutionary War and, admiring two generals he served under -- Caswell and Polk -- he gave his son this name.  Okay.  So who was this father?  A number of on-line sources (mostly copying from one another) said his father was Samuel Sanford, origins unknown.  Several sources gave Samuel’s birthdate as either 1756 or 1708; several listed his mother as Sarah Meeker, with a birthdate of 1715.  And my New England database includes this Samuel and this Sarah.

    But there are problems there.  Yes, Samuel, born 1708, was indeed married to Sarah, born 1715 -- but if they were Caswell Polk’s parents, Caswell’s mother must have been 61 when he was born.  (Several sources compound the absurdity by listing Caswell’s parents as Samuel, born 1756, and Sarah, born 1715, making Sarah a 61-year-old mother, married to a man forty yearsher junior.)

    One source listed Caswell’s father as Peter. And my database shows that Samuel and Sarah had, as their eleventh child, Peter, born 1756, who is said to have been a soldier in the Revolution, though his name does not appear in lists of soldiers or veterans.

    So the numbers are all feasible. Here’s a scenario:   Peter goes to North Carolina, either in the Revolutionary Army (did soldiers serve much outside of their own states??) or perhaps before the war as an agent for some Connecticut firm, buying or selling in North Carolina.  He has an affair with a local girl; Caswell Polk Sanford is born.  Then Peter apparently returns to Connecticut, where his name appears in a 1780 legal document and where in 1786 he marries Abigail Keeler and has five children.  Nice story: but not a shred of evidence (yet) to support any of it except for the confirmed facts shown in boldface.

Another puzzle: 

    Who was the first Benoni? The given name “Benoni” keeps cropping up in the family tree from about 1700.  Where did it come from?  The earliest reference I can find is to a Benoni Stebbins, born in 1689, who married a Kirby, and one of the Kirbys married a Sanford.  So where did Benoni come from? Some sources say he was born in (New) Milford, Connecticut, but it appears more likely he was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the home of many generations of Stebbinses, including -- surprise! -- another Benoni Stebbins, born in 1655.  Clearly, then our Benoni (1689) is the son of Benoni (1655) -- isn't he?  Problem is, we have a list of Benoni (1655)’s children -- and there is no younger Benoni among them.  And I have gone through the offspring of several generations of Stebbinses, and there is no Benoni anywhere close to 1689. Just one source -- The New England Ancestry of Albert Wilcox Savage, Jr: Savage-Wilcox lines, by Albert Wilcox Savage, p. 425 -- states that his father was the Benoni born in 1655, but offers no evidence to support this.

    Interestingly, Benoni (1655) had a younger brother Samuel, who seems to have been something of a black sheep. Married, with several children, he suddenly left Northampton, seems to have drifted through several Massachusetts towns before ending up in Boston.  Then he went to Rhode Island -- and remarried (possibly not bothering to mention the inconvenient fact that he was already married). The record states -- somewhat disparagingly, though I could be reading too much into it -- that he and his patootie (my wording -- am I showing a bias here?) were married by an "Anglican clergyman," which sounds to me as though no repectable clergyman would marry them.  Identifying the clergyman as Anglican may have been simply a matter of stating a fact, or it may have reflected a bias in a Puritan community.

     In 1695 his first wife sued for divorce.  One of her children, born in 1689, was Samuel Jr., who does not seem to show up anywhere else in later records   Hmm -- curious coincidence of dates.  Speculation:  Once the divorce was granted (and even before), the abandoned wife wanted nothing to remind her of her two-timing husband.  So is it possible that she had Samuel Jr.’s name changed to that of his admired uncle Benoni?  Again, not a shred of eveidence (yet) to support this ingenious theory.  (Help!)

    By the numbers:  By the way, I’ve looked through a large number of on-line family trees (in the Mormon collection and elsewhere) and found large numbers of errors. Some arise from compiling trees without dates (especially birthdates) or with dates that are not looked at critically.  How many trees have I looked at where the father was born in, say, 1707 and his first child in 1711?  Sure, people sometimes married young back then, but come on now! 

    My genealogy software creates an index, and just so I don’t get lost in the index's multiplicity of, say, David Sanfords, I make a point of assigning a birthdate to each one (estimating “about 1750,” or "before 1680," if I’m not sure, so we'll always know that this is a guess rather than a fact) -- then at least I’m looking in the right half-century.  The advantage of doing this is that absurdities leap out at me. 

    I was working up a family tree for a friend and came upon what looked like a woman, her daughter, and her granddaughter -- with the woman and her presumed granddaughter born about thirty years apart. Hmm....  Well, it could have been so, if each one had had a child at about age 15.  But not likely.  So I dug deeper -- in another source -- and eventually found that the presumed daughter and granddaughter were in fact sisters -- the "granddaughter" was a daughter, not a granddaughter. 

    Of course, when you look at your data critically, you come up with more problems than if you just accept everything at face value.  But if your real goal is to find out what actually happened, this approach will at least raise the questions -- even if the answers sometimes can’t be found.

    There were also Sanfords in Virginia.  Two unrelated Robert Sanfords settled in Virginia in the early 1600s, thereby confusing genealogists trying to figure who descended from which Robert Sanford.

    And there was a William Sanford (my father's name) who settled in 1666 in northern New Jersey. That settlement -- mostly in Bergen County, and centered on Hackensack (where my mother was born) -- was called New Barbados, because the early settlers had first settled on the island of Barbados but were forced out when black slaves were brought in by the wealthiest landowners.  So they settled in this English territory that had been Dutch.

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   I’m sure anyone who, with an inquiring mind, digs into his family history will come up with at least a few riddles.  Most of these are of course based on factual errors or gaps, and once you get the facts right, the riddle disappears.  But some are less simple, involving a number of seemingly reliable facts -- but something just doesn’t add up.  Certain key facts just aren’t there, so all we can do is speculate until someone finds a key fact that will resolve the matter.  Here are a couple that I have stumbled onto (and for which I'm still waiting to find that key fact):

   A dead end comes to life: And then, once in a while, a mystery gets solved -- perhaps even before you realize that there was a mystery there.

  Take Linus Sanford, born in Connecticut in 1774. That's all I had on him -- no further information about marriage and death. I didn't even know it he had survived childhood. I just knew that his mother had died when he was ten, and his father had remarried just six months later.

   But then I heard from a couple named Stanford, living (curiously) about 20 miles from me.  They wanted more information about their earliest ancestor -- one Linas Sanford. Could it be the same one? I decided it was.

   It seems I had no information on him because he didn't get along with his new stepmother, so at a young age he ran away from home, hiding on a sailing vessel. When the captain caught him, he was forced to work for two years to pay his passage, and he was eventually dropped off in Charleston, South Carolina.

   From there he made his way to the North Carolina mountains, where he married and raised a family. Linus's son Mack, between first and second marriages, had an affair which produced a son, Tip. Tip grew up using his mother's maiden name, Rathbone, then at 18 took the Sanford name, then a few years later changed it to Stanford, which his descendatns continue to use.

   Think of it: You are a clergyman, and an unknown couple shows up and want to be married.  What reasons can they offer for not choosing to be married in their hometown by a local minister?  Surely red flags go up in your mind.  We can wonder how many ministers this couple approached -- perhaps perfecting their story along the way -- until they found an Anglican clergyman in Rhode Island who would fall for their story.

Genealogical puzzles