Author: Janice H.

Timothy Stanley Jr., Revolutionary Martyr

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The 150-foot column known as the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn, New York was built in memory of the 11,500 men, women and children who died aboard British prison ships during the American Revolutionary War. My five times great-grandfather, Timothy Stanley Jr., was one of them.

Timothy Stanley Jr. was born in 1730 in Hartford, Connecticut, a member of the fourth generation of the extended Stanley family in America. The original immigrants were three brothers, John, Thomas and Timothy Stanley, who came from Tenterden, Kent, England in 1634. The Timothy who is the subject of this article descended from the youngest of the immigrants, also named Timothy.  Timothy’s parents, Timothy Stanley and Mary Mygatt, moved from Hartford to Harwinton, CT, where the future soldier married Mary Hopkins in 1754. The young couple then settled in nearby Litchfield. An ad that appeared in the Connecticut Courant in 1776 suggested he had his own small business. It read, “Clothier and oil-mill screws cut in the neatest manner, by a machine by the subscribers at Litchfield, Abel Darling, Timothy Stanley.” 

Timothy and Mary had nine children. I’m descended from their fourth child, Pamela, who was born in 1760. Timothy’s wife, Mary, died around 1770.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, Timothy signed up with Captain Bezaleel Beebe’s Company in Litchfield.  In November 1776, thirty-six men from Beebe’s company were sent to Fort Washington, at the north end of Manhattan Island, to help defend the fort. The British captured it and took the soldiers prisoner. Timothy was put aboard a prison ship anchored in the East River, near Brooklyn. He died on board on Dec. 26, 1776.

The story of the prison ships is not well known. During the revolution, the British took many prisoners, including foreign sailors, soldiers captured in battle and private citizens accused of supporting the revolution. By the end of 1776, they had imprisoned some 5000 individuals. They did not have enough jails to cope with all these prisoners, so they converted several former transport vessels into prison ships.

The conditions on board were terrible: the vessels were overcrowded, there wasn’t enough food, the water was contaminated and many of the prisoners had infectious diseases. More than twice as many people died aboard these prison ships than in battle. The bodies of the dead were buried in shallow graves along the marshy shoreline. After the revolution, the British commander who had been in charge of the prison ships was hanged.

In 1808, some of the prisoners’ remains were buried in a tomb near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Seventy years later, they were moved to a large brick vault in Washington Park, later renamed Fort Greene Park. President Taft inaugurated the classic column built as a memorial to the prison ship victims in 1908, but over the following century, the monument suffered from neglect and vandalism. It was restored in a $5-million project that was unveiled in 2008.

Research Remarks.  I first read of Timothy Stanley’s fate in Israel P. Warren’s classic 1887 publication The Stanley Families of America as Descended from John, Timothy and Thomas Stanley of Hartford, CT 1636 (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23666712M/The_Stanley_families_of_America). I found corroboration on the genealogical database of the Daughters of the American Revolution website. (http://services.dar.org/public/dar_research/search/?Tab_ID=0). I am not a member of the DAR, but several other descendants are, or were, so I was able to access a summary of Timothy’s service record on the DAR’s database for a $10 fee. I don’t know how accurately the British identified the prisoners and recorded their deaths, but that date, December 26, 1776, sounds pretty final to me.

Also in the course of researching this piece, I came across an article that described how an unscrupulous paid researcher invented information about the births of the immigrant Stanley brothers in England.  (Mahler, Leslie. “Re-Examining the English Origin of the Stanley Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut. A Case of Invented Records.” The American Genealogist 80 (2005): 218. http://www.americanancestors.org/PageDetail.aspx?recordId=235863582 [accessed July 29, 2013]). The original flawed publication appeared in 1926 and the error was not noticed until The American Genealogist article appeared in 2005. Considering the size of the Stanley family tree today, I suspect a great many family histories still have to be corrected.

Isabella Hamilton and the North-West Rebellion

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When Isabella Hamilton died in 1912, her obituary in the Winnipeg Tribune was headlined, “Sheltered the Wounded: Woman Who Befriended Soldiers During the Riel Rebellion Passes Peacefully Away.” So how did my great-grandmother become a witness to one of the most riveting events in Canadian history?

Isabella’s father, John Glendinning, came from Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and her mother, Margaret Whiteside, was from Belfast. They met and married in Upper Canada. Isabella Watson Glendinning, born in Scarborough in 1834, was the eldest of their six children. When Isabella was 26, she married a young man from a nearby farm, James Hamilton. Between 1860 and 1875, they had five sons and one daughter, all of whom were baptized at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, Scarborough.

St Andrews Presbyterian Church, Scarborough, ON

In 1881, a group of Toronto men set up the Temperance Colonization Society and applied to the Dominion Government for a tract of land in the North-West Territories. James Hamilton was one of them. They wanted to establish a community in which they could prohibit the sale “of intoxicating liquors.” 

James and his eldest son set out in June 1882 with the society’s advance party. The following year, Isabella and the rest of the family made the long trek west by train to Moose Jaw, then by horse-drawn cart to the settlement that became known as Saskatoon.

The settlers faced hardships from drought to extreme cold, and they never achieved their temperance goals because the society was not granted the expected single block of land. Moreover, there was political unrest in the region. Louis Riel, leader of the Métis people, who were of mixed First Nations and European descent, formed a provisional government in Batoche, north of Saskatoon. Canadian government troops defeated Riel’s supporters at the Battle of Batoche in May 1885.

Many of the wounded soldiers were brought to Saskatoon for treatment. The Winnipeg Tribune obituary reported that Isabella “was a most hospitable woman and never missed an opportunity in giving solace and comfort to the needy and distressed.” Isabella’s impressions of these events were not recorded, but in a letter to relatives in Ontario, her daughter, Maggie, described baking bread and buns for the visitors. “I sometimes baked about eighty weight a day in a little no. 8 stove,” she wrote. The settlers threw a party for the soldiers before they left and, according to Maggie, the dancing lasted until morning.

When the troops returned east, James Hamilton travelled with them. He never returned: he died of a heart attack in Ontario. The following year, Maggie died of typhoid.

Isabella remained in Saskatoon for several more years, but farming was difficult and she wanted her sons to continue their education. In 1890, the Hamiltons moved to Winnipeg. There, her sons worked to support themselves through medical school and law school. Twenty years later, a frail Isabella moved in with her son Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife, Lilian (my future grandparents). They cared for her until her death.

Research notes: A Scottish genealogist has put together an extensive family tree of the descendants of James Glendinning and Agnes Little, married in 1701 in Westerkirk, Dumfriesshire (www.glendinning.name). Isabella Watson Glendinning is in the sixth generation of the Glendinning family on this tree. If you had ancestors in early Scarborough, you might find their names on that tree, or in St. Andrews Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Thomson Memorial Park, Scarborough, Ontario.

For the history of the Temperance Colonization Society, see Narratives of Saskatoon, 1882-1912, http://rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sksaskat/NarrativesOfSaskatoon/. This page brings together several first-person accounts of Saskatoon’s founding years.

Another excellent source for the history of Western Canada is Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/. You might come across a reference to your Prairie ancestor in the digitized pages of old books, documents, newspapers, postcards and directories on this site.