top of page
rewood13

A Very Revolutionary Find

Updated: Sep 23


The Battle of Monmouth


I was quite surprised to see that Ancestry.com has some new (to me) family tree information about our Watts line. As you might recall, Samuel Watts I is purportedly the immigrant patriarch of our Watts family; most of our knowledge of him comes mostly from oral history that was eventually written down. He was supposedly from Scotland, and he died as a Patriot in the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, a battle where, serendipitously, members of various family lines were also present. We think that Samuel was a private in the Pennsylvania militia. Military records show a Samuel Watts in the fifth Regiment, which was comprised of men from Chester County, Pennsylvania. He supposedly left two sons, one also named Samuel. Samuel II had thirteen children who lived to adulthood, including the grandfather of Walter Watts Sr., David Watts.


The History of Juniata and Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania, published in 1886, relates information about the first Samuel Watts in a brief biographical sketch of his son, Samuel Watts II, as follows:


Samuel Watts was a native of Bucks County. His father, Samuel Watts, emigrated from Scotland and was in the Revolution and was killed at the battle of Monmouth. Samuel came to Northumberland County in 1809 and settled at New Berlin (now Union County). In 1811 he moved to Greenwood township (now Monroe), where he purchased a farm of --- Gottshall, near where his son Thomas now lives. He had several sons-- Samuel Watts (ex-associate judge of the county) lives at McAlisterville, John at Richfield and David and Joseph at Mifflintown.


In addition, the following was written by Charles E. Winey, son of Lucien G. Winey, who was the grandson of Issac and Mary Ann Watts Winey. Mary Ann was an older sister of our ancestor, David Watts:

Mary Ann Watts Winey (1814-1891)


Isaac Winey married Mary Ann Watts [daughter of Samuel Watts, sister of David Watts] of Juniata Co., Pennsylvania in 1832. Mary Ann was a descendant of the Watts and Cramer families.


During the early part of the 18th century a man, wife and two sons by the name of Watts lived in the state of Vermont. The father enlisted in the Revolutionary War and never returned. Later the mother died, leaving two young orphan sons. One of the young sons, just a boy named Samuel Watts, came to the home of a family by the name of Cramer, living in Bucks Co., Pennsylvania.


He lived with the Cramer family until he grew to manhood and married Cramer's daughter, Susan. After the marriage the young couple moved to Juniata County, Pennsylvania and located on a farm a few miles from a town now known as Richfield. To this couple was born a large family -- Mary Ann Watts, the wife of Isaac Winey, being one of them.


And I found a Samuel Watts in Vermont who fought in the Revolution, but he has a totally different family line than ours. I also looked up "Samuel Watts" in other New England states, and found nothing of interest.


The thing is, in perusing more military records of Private Samuel Watts from Chester County in the American Revolution, it seems he was apparently still alive after the Battle of Monmouth, which took place on June 28, 1778. I have him still being alive as late as 1781; Whether this means he's not our ancestor at all, I have no idea.


The bottom line is that we do know for certain that Samuel II lost both parents at a very early age; he was taken in raised by the Cramer family, possibly along with a brother. But as you can see, it's hard to be definitive about his family heritage. Aunt Ruth (my namesake, brother of Walter Moore Watts, Sr.) believed that Samuel I fought in the Revolution, but her DAR membership was not based on his service. Instead she based it on Rev. James Johnston, her second great-grandfather on her mother's side of the family tree, where there was a more definitive connection.


There were actually two more surprises I found at Ancestry.com, but they only matter if Samuel I is indeed our ancestor. In one case, the name of his supposed wife is given, and her line can be traced back to Maine and Ireland for multiple generations. In addition, it appears that we may now be able to connect Samuel I back to his Scottish homeland with baptismal records, and show who his parents and grandparents were.


I learned many years ago that you can't just accept the information that's given at Ancestry.com. Many times I have found people making the wrong connections, and then others copy that information without any critical thinking, and before long almost every family tree you find online has these false connections.


I will deal first with the purported wife of Samuel Watts I. And by the way, the name is often spelled without the "S," but I'll use the "Watts" version for simplicity's sake. Two descendants of David Watts's brother, Joseph, applied to the DAR/SAR in the early 1900s. (It was actually male descendants applying to be members of the SAR (Sons of the American Revolution).


They filled out questionnaires listing each generation back to their purported Revolutionary War soldier. The soldier they were trying to base their membership on was not Samuel Watts I, but his supposed father-in-law, Moses Robinson, who was an officer in the Maine militia. They said their however-many great-grandfather was Samuel Watts I, married to Mary Robinson, who was the daughter of Moses Robinson, who was indeed an active soldier in the War. The DAR/SAR apparently allowed them to become members, but, again, based on Moses Robinson's service, not Samuel Watts's. Moses Robinson's lineage goes back to Ireland and information about it is quite robust, so it was exciting to think this might be true.


However, after spending many hours doing a deep dive on all the corroboration that was given, I found that this simply cannot be true. I found another Samuel Watts who lived in Maine, who was indeed married to Mary Robinson, daughter of Moses. In fact, he and Mary are buried together in the same cemetery in Maine, and their gravestones are still there, although they are quite broken and eroded. This Samuel was born in 1745 and died in 1816, and he also fought in the war, but in the Massachusetts militia, and lived to old age. He and Mary had many children together, none of them our ancestors.


On the other hand, the linking of Samuel Watts I to a family in Scotland seems like it might be the real deal. This information wasn't available to me fifteen years ago, when I started my genealogy research. We have such little certification of Samuel's American existence that it would be hard to prove anything definitively, but it just feels right, after looking at the sources. It's definitely a possibility, if not a probability. At least I don't have to bend myself into a pretzel to believe it. I suppose one day it might be possible to figure this out for sure using DNA.

Samuel Watts I's father is given as Samuell Watt, born in Scotland in 1725. Samuel's mother was Margaret Dalrymple, also born in 1725 in Scotland. He was the youngest of five children: William (1748), Janet (1750), Elizabeth (1752), Jean (1754), and Samuel (spelled Samull, 1756). (Previously I had Samuel I's birth date guesstimated as 1750.) They lived in Musselburgh, Midlothian, Scotland, which is just five miles east of Edinburgh. I will talk more about Musselburgh in the next blog post.


Samuel I was so young, that it makes sense that he would have come over with his entire family, and lived here long enough to feel an allegiance to the Patriot side in the looming American Revolution. And if his birth date is true, and if he did indeed die at the Battle of Monmouth, he would have been only 21 years old.


There are tax records from 1769 and 1781, that shows a man named Samuel Watts living in the town of East Nantmeal in Chester County, Pennsylvania. A 1770 census record has him counted as a "freeman" in East Nantmeal. That could very well be the father of Samuel Watts I. Sadly, there is a record of a Samuel Watts -- possibly the same one -- from Chester County who spent his last few years in the Chester County Poor House, from 1812 to 1814, when he died.


Another possibly corroborating detail is that there were two Watts men in the Fifth Regiment of the Pennsylvania Militia: William and Samuel. William was the name of Samuel's only brother. Among other things, both were at Valley Forge in that horrible winter of 1777.



0 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page