Category: Bagg

Polly Bagg Bush: a Surprise Sister

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Until I started doing genealogy research a few years ago, I knew that my three-times great-grandfather Stanley Bagg had a brother Abner. Both were well known Montreal merchants in the first half of the 19thcentury. But I had no idea that Stanley and Abner had two sisters, Polly and Sophia, and a half-sister, Lucie. 

I discovered Sophia Bagg when I ran across the record of her 1811 marriage to Gabriel Roy, a landowner and politician in the Montreal-area parish of St. Laurent. When Roy died in 1848, aged 77, Sophia became a rich woman. 

Sophia made out two wills.  She wrote the first in 1818, a document to ensure that her sister Polly Bagg, wife of William Bush, and Polly’s daughter, Sophia, would have some financial security. 

Sophia’s sister Polly? Who was she?

I discovered that Polly lived in West Haven. At first, I thought it was in Connecticut, but eventually it became clear that that she and her husband were farmers in West Haven, Vermont, a rural area not far from the southern tip of Lake Champlain. 

In 1856, Sophia made a second and more detailed will in which she split the bulk of her estate between the Catholic church, her brother Abner’s widow and children, and Polly’s children: Phineas Bagg Bush, William Bush and Ann Bush. 

This second will did not mention Polly or Sophia Bush, so I assumed that both Polly and her oldest daughter had died. I have since discovered that Sophia and Gabriel Roy, who had no children of their own, adopted the girl and brought her to St. Laurent. The sad story of Mary Sophia Roy Bush, her marriage to the seigneur of Milles-Îles (around Saint-Eustache, north of Montreal), and of her daughter, Marguerite Virginie Lambert Dumont, is for another time. 

Dame Sophia Bagg veuve (widow) Gabriel Roy died in 1860. Present at the inventory of her estate the following year were Phineas Bagg Bush, farmer, of Patoka, Illinois, representing himself and his sister Pamilla Ann Bush, wife of John W. York, of Cornwallis, Oregon, Methodist preacher. Also present was William Stanley Bush, of Johnsburgh New York, Baptist minister. (Johnsburgh appears to be on the western side of Lake Champlain.)

More than a year ago, I did a quick search for Phineas Bagg Bush. He was named after his grandfather, Phineas Bagg, a farmer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts who had brought his children  Polly, Stanley, Sophia and Abner Bagg to Canada around 1795. I found an 1850 U.S. census record for Phineas Bush, farmer, 28, living with Mary Bush, 52 (Polly is a nickname for Mary) and William Bush, 53, farmer, in Clinton County, Illinois. It is not surprising they had moved to Illinois; this was a time when the midwest was welcoming many new settlers, including New Englanders.

Recently I went back to that record on Ancestry and found something new: a link to findagrave.com. I clicked on it, and up came a photo of the gravestone of Phineas B. Bush, 1820-1867. Two more clicks away, there was Polly Bush’s grave. According to date of birth calculated from age, Polly Bagg Bush was born April 22, 1785 and died Jan 9, 1856. She is buried near her son in a rural graveyard in southern Illinois.

Research notes: I still have research to do on all these people. For example, there should be notarized adoption documents for Sophia Roy Bush, and I have yet to find church or census records for the family in Vermont. Without Sophia’s will, I would not have a clue about their existence.

In Quebec, most wills were made by notaries and can be found in the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. The three documents I used here are in the files of L.H. Latour, 15 aout 1818, #1456; J.A. Labadie, 18 mai, 1856, #14278; and Leo Labadie, 28 January, 1861, #6248. According to findagrave.com, Phineas B. Bush was born Dec. 20, 1820 and died Jan. 4, 1867. He is buried in Harrison Cemetery, Marion County, Illinois. I followed up on his wife Louise in city directories and discovered that she was still alive in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1910.

For the story of how the Bagg family came to Canada from Massachusetts, see https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2013/10/an-economic-emigrant.html

When Sophia Bagg married Gabriel Roy on Nov. 25, 1811, the parish priest made a mistake in the record: he gave her mother’s name as Emily. Actually, the mother of Sophia, Polly, Stanley and Abner Bagg was Pamela Stanley, originally of Litchfield, Connecticut.

Death by Lightning

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Threatening clouds (JH photo)

A friend recently discovered that her seven-times great-grandfather died when he was shot by someone who mistook him for a bear near Montreal in 1686. Needless to say, she was thrilled with that discovery. I can’t top that, but I did run across the bizarre deaths of brothers James Bagg and Jonathan Bagg in Suffield, Connecticut in 1766, and an even more unusual account of that event. 

I found a reference online to “A short Account of Three Men that were killed by Lightning, at Suffield, Viz. Samuel Remington, James Bagg, Jonathan Bagg.” I expected it to be a newspaper article, but it is actually a long poem, published in 1767, that only briefly recounts the actual event. Most of the 41 four-line verses are a warning to the living to be ready for death. I suppose this is not surprising. Death often came unexpectedly to the colonists of New England, whether from an accident or disease.  

The poem set up the scene:

‘Twas on the Twentieth Day of May;
These Men were in their Prime;
And by permission cruel Death
Did Snatch them out of time.
Two of the Men that Day rode forth
And left their Friends at Home,
And not thinking but to return
When they their Work had done,
But God’s Almighty Sovereign Hand
Did not intend it so;
He did intend their mortal Souls
Before his Bar should go.

It described the brothers: 

Two of those Men had great
Prospects,Of Tables richly spread;
They may be round their Father’s Board,
Eating his heavenly bread.
These are two Men were scarcely found
In a vain Company,
From foolish Talking fun and light,
They did themselves deny,
They were not free from satan’s snares
while they were here below,
Eor he unguardedly steps in,
his snares are spread so low.

There was a comforting message:

One word to you that mourners are,
Cheer up and do not weep,
Hoping at the great judgement day
They’re found among Christ’s sheep.

The poem concluded with a stern reminder:

You that are not prepared now,
may read these lines with dread,
Who thinks the Lord will on us wait,
but likewise strike us dead.
And you that are prepar’d to go,
Will sing with great surprize,
While Sinners weep and rowl and roar
With weeping hearts and eyes.
Death always flies with wings unseen
to those that sleep secure,
And hungry death, with cruel graves,
both old and young devour.

There is a fuller account of the lightning strike that killed these men in an interview with a woman who searches for gravestone inscriptions that describe accidental deaths. Judi Trainor explained that brothers James and Jonathan Bagg, both in their late teens, were working in a field when they saw a storm approach. They ran to a nearby house and were sitting by the fireplace when they were struck. Today it is unusual for lightning to kill people indoors, but at that time, people did not understand the nature of lightning and the need to ground buildings.

James and Jonathan were born in West Springfield, Massachusetts, about 10 miles north of Suffield, Connecticut. According to West Springfield Births, they were the sons of James Bagg and his wife Bathsheba Dewey, who had been married in Springfield in 1744. James was baptized on March 15, 1746-7, Jonathan two years later. 

James, Jonathan and their sister Bathsheba would have been distant cousins to my four-times great-grandfather Phineas Bagg, who was born in nearby Westfield, MA, around 1750. Their great-grandparents John Bagg and Hannah Burt, who married in Springfield in 1657, were their common ancestors. 

The headstone inscriptions of James and Jonathan are online, however, there is a discrepancy: the inscriptions say the young men were the sons of Jonathan Bagg, rather than James. Both inscriptions read, “son of Jonathan, late of Springfield, & of Bathsheba, now wife of Captain Asaph Leavitt; died May 20, 1766.” 

The mistake about the boys’ father probably appeared when the stone was engraved because James Bagg had died many years before, in 1749, aged 48, in West Springfield. His death would also explain why the couple had only three children. Mrs. Bathsheba Bagg married Capt. Leavitt in 1762.

Research notes: The account of the death of Claude Jodouin in 1686 can be found in the Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, Vol 41, p. 39, (otherwise known as the BRH), available at the library of La Société Généalogique canadienne-française  (http://www.sgcf.com) in Montreal. You can read the full story at http://genealogyensemble.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/life-in-new-france-was-fraught-with-danger/

A short Account of Three Men that were killed by Lightning, at Suffield, Viz. Samuel Remington, James Bagg, Jonathan Bagg was printed and sold by Timothy Green, New London, 1767. It is not indicated whether Timothy Green also wrote it. A Google search brings up many references to this document, but some don’t actually link to an online copy. I found it on microfiche at the McGill University library, but an online copy described as A Loud Call to the Living is available through the Library of Congress website Memory of America, An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and other printed Ephemera.

“A Sudden and Awful Manner”, an interview with Judi Trainor, written by Ben Shattuck, appeared in the online magazine The Morning News, Sept 11, 2013. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/a-sudden-and-awful-manner

Births, marriages and deaths in early Massachusetts are generally well documented. West Springfield records can be found in the database Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 on Ancestry.com, and in the members-only section of online databases of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), www.AmericanAncestors.org.

The headstone inscriptions of Suffield, Connecticut, 1660-1937 can be found at:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kathycamp/Index/Page172.htm.