Dukes County includes Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaquiddick, Nomans Island, and the Elizabeth Islands off the southern coast on Massachusetts. Chappaquiddick is connected to Martha’s Vineyard only by an unstable beach that is periodically breached during heavy storms. Nomans Island is uninhabited, and the town of Gosnold (encompassing the Elizabeth Islands) has about 75 inhabitants. Martha’s Vineyard is by far the largest and most significant of these islands; it encompasses 96 square miles, making it the third largest island on the east coast of the United States. It has a year-round population of about 16,000, although in the summer the population swells to more than 100,000.
There are a lot of theories about why Martha’s Vineyard has this name – including theories about a young daughter (named Martha) of Bartholomew Gosnold, an English explorer who first encountered the island in 1602. However, it does not appear that Gosnold actually had a daughter named Martha. Some early records refer to it as “Martin’s Vineyard,” and no one seems to know the source of that name either. Other proposed explanations for the name are also undone by pesky facts, so the mystery is unresolved.
The first years of Dukes County, Massachusetts, were characterized by conflict between two competing land grants from the English monarchy. Thomas Mayhew purchased one of these land grants from Massachusetts Bay Colony and established his own colony there in 1643. However, in 1665, Mayhew’s lands were included in a grant to the Duke of York, who established a colony under the jurisdiction of the Province of New York. Dukes County, New York, was formally established on November 1, 1683, and included all of Mayhew’s lands – Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands. The county was given back to Massachusetts on October 7, 1691; on that date, Nantucket County was formed. Dukes County was incorporated in 1695.
Martha’s Vineyard originally achieved economic significance for its role in the whaling industry in the 19th century. In the 20th century, it served as a summer get-away for residents all along the east coast of the United States. Tourism and related industries are the current basis for the island’s economy.
Evolution of County Boundaries
County boundaries evolve over time, as the following maps illustrate. For Dukes County, this is less important than it is for most other counties. The island pretty much IS the county (and vice versa). (All of these maps are taken from http://www.mapofus.org.)
A (Very) Little History
I owe much of what I know about the early history of Martha’s Vineyard to the ground-breaking genealogical work of Charles Edward Banks, who wrote an exhaustive (and exhausting!) three-volume History of Martha’s Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts in 1911 (publication date of the first two volumes) and 1925 (publication date of Volume Three). Volume One provides an overview of Martha’s Vineyard in the context of the early settlement of Massachusetts and New York; Volume Two provides detailed annals of the town on Martha’s Vineyard; and Volume Three includes hundreds of family genealogies. Banks undertook this research at a time when the only way to do the job was to spend enormous amounts of time in the locations he was researching, poring through scores of documents to extract threads of information. He spent 20 years at this task, and he recognized that there was more to do.
Over the hundred years since Banks wrote these volumes, more has been discovered about the early history of Martha’s Vineyard, but Banks’ research has held up pretty well. Much of what follows builds on his work, which I will refer to simply as “Banks.” Where more current research contradicts Banks’s findings, I’ll try to note that.
As I began to dig into the history of this location, one thing became immediately obvious: the family of Thomas Mayhew (not my ancestor) was enormously important to Martha’s Vineyard in the 17th century. Mayhew was the founder of the original English settlement on the island in 1643, and he led the community as an almost autocratic leader through much of the century. Together with his sons and other members of his extended family, he ran the show – to a degree unknown in most of the other British colonies in America. Maryland and Virginia had their gentry – large landowners who were important politically and economically – but Martha’s Vineyard had the Mayhews.
At a time when the rest of Massachusetts was gradually moving away from the strict theocracies established in the 1620s and 1630s, Martha’s Vineyard remained tightly controlled by Mayhew. Mayhew negotiated the relationship between Martha’s Vineyard and the New York colony between 1670 and 1693, and Mayhew’s son Matthew negotiated the island’s return to Massachusetts in 1695. Matthew was regularly referred to as “Lord of the Manor” in Tisbury (another town on the island). And as late as 1730, Micajah Mayhew, Matthew’s grandson, asserted himself “Lord of the Manor” of the island.
Another thing I have begun to understand more deeply is the degree to which Martha’s Vineyard was a pawn in the power relationship between the Dutch settlers of New York, their English successors after 1660, and the English Puritans and Pilgrims who founded the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. Martha’s Vineyard (in the red circle below) didn’t have a lot to offer except its strategic position; as this map shows, residents of the island controlled access to the port of New York as well as the ports of New Haven and Providence.
In the ongoing 18th century struggle between England and France, this strategic location proved valuable as a supply station and strategic outpost. The enemies of Britain – in particular, the French – coveted this outpost. Control over the island flipped between England and Holland (another player in the power struggle in the North Atlantic) several times between Mayhew’s earliest settlement there and the county’s ultimate establishment as a part of Massachusetts in 1695, and continued to be threatened by the French throughout the 18th century.
Thomas Mayhew’s oldest son, also named Thomas, served as a missionary who famously “Christianized” the natives on Martha’s Vineyard. He spent a great amount of time with them and took pains to learn their language. By 1650, he claimed that almost 200 natives had converted to Christianity, and there were two services for the native converts every Sunday. In 1657, Thomas Mayhew Jr. decided to go to England to report on the status of his efforts and to procure materials to further his work among the natives; his ship left harbor, to much fanfare.
Neither Thomas nor his ship were ever seen again.
Martha’s Vineyard was only minimally impacted by the 1676 conflict called King Philip’s War. Its island status protected it from the violence that characterized this conflict on the nearby mainland, but the relationship between the natives on the island and the earliest settlers was nonetheless the source of some anxiety. The natives on Martha’s Vineyard were nominally the subjects of Metacom (King Philip), but they were under the control of Japheth Hannit, an island native whose parents had been Christianized by Mayhew. Japheth was a Christian convert and an ally of the island’s leaders, and there was no fighting on Martha’s Vineyard during this period of warfare in the rest of the New England colonies.
In the 18th century, Martha’s Vineyard provided soldiers and sailors to the various wars fought between the English and French in their efforts to control the North American continent.
My direct family members were no longer living in Martha’s Vineyard by the end of the 18th century. They had moved on – to Maine and to other parts of Massachusetts – before their descendants moved on even further, to New York and the Ohio River valley.
My Ancestors in Martha’s Vineyard
The Pease Family
The Pease family, from Great Baddow, Essex County, England, is my “anchor” family in Martha’s Vineyard. The immigrant in this family line was my 9th great-grandfather John Pease (1608-1677), who came to Massachusetts on the ship Francis in 1634 with his brother Robert Pease (1604-1644) and Robert’s 3-year-old son, also named Robert. By 1637 both brothers appear in the land records of Salem, Massachusetts (north of Boston), where John was granted 10 acres of land and Robert was granted 20 acres. In 1639, their mother, Margaret King Pease (1574-1644), joined them in Salem; her husband and their father, also named Robert Pease, had died in England in 1623. Margaret died in 1644, shortly after her son Robert.
As a side note – one problem I have with this family is that they had lots of children, and every family apparently was required to have at least one John and one Robert. The records of these Peases have become very confused over the years.
John Pease is identified one of the first five settlers who received a land grant from Thomas Mayhew in 1643. He and his brother Robert settled in what would become the town of Edgartown.
I have a soft spot in my heart for the Pease family. When I first began to work seriously on my family history, the Peases were the first family of early Massachusetts settlers that I identified. They opened my eyes to how long my family has been in America. None of these names and stories had been passed down through my family, so this was all a huge surprise.
The Marchant Family (Pedigree Charts #2 and #3)
Martha Marchant provides me with the link to this part of my family tree. Her grandfather John Marchant IV originally settled in Yarmouth, in Barnstable County with his parents in the 1630s. It is not clear when he and his wife Sarah Price (1625-1707) came to Martha’s Vineyard, but he had a land grant on the island by 1682. He is frequently referred to as “Lieutenant John Marchant IV,” a title he earned for his involvement in King Philip’s War in 1676 while the family was still living in Yarmouth.
One of the problems in researching this family is that spelling is inconsistent in this era. The word “merchant” was often spelled “marchant,” so an individual identified as John Marchant may simply have been someone else named John, who was a merchant.
Anyway.
Several of their children, including my 7th great-grandparent Abishai Marchant and my 8th great-grandparent Sarah Marchant (yes, I’m descended from both of them), were already living on the island at this time. At first, I had a hard time understanding this family’s movement between Yarmouth and Martha’s Vineyard; however, this modern map helps me make sense of this. Yarmouth is on the “upper arm” of Cape Cod, and to a population accustomed to travelling over water, this would not have presented an insurmountable problem.
Abishai married Mary Taylor (1650-1717) in Yarmouth in 1673. They had one child in Yarmouth before moving to Martha’s Vineyard, where they had 11 more children and spent the rest of their lives.
Sarah married Richard Arey (1644-1688) in Martha’s Vineyard in 1672. Richard’s father, also named Richard Arey (1606-1669), had come to Massachusetts in 1646 and seems to have lived in several towns, including Salisbury, MA, Gloucester, MA, and New London, CT, before receiving his first land grant in Edgartown in 1652. Banks suggests that he was a mariner. He had married Elizabeth Crouch (1620-after 1669) in England. They had two children, including my 7th great-grandfather Richard 1644, before coming to Massachusetts. They had three more children after they arrived in Massachusetts. Banks points out the sad circumstances of the death of Richard 1606; in 1669, he drowned while on a boat trip to either Nantucket or the mainland. All but one of his children were grown at this point; only his son Thomas, who was 13 years old at the time of his father’s death, was still a minor in 1669.
The Ripley Family
To follow this discussion, refer to Pedigree Chart #2 in this essay.
I mentioned earlier that my 6th great-grandfather John Pease 1707 married Hepsibah Ripley (1712-1765) in Edgartown in 1726. Hepsibah’s grandfather, Abraham Ripley (1624-1683) first came to Hingham in Plymouth Colony in 1638. Abraham married Mary Farnsworth (1637-1705) in Hingham in 1656. They had 14 children in Hingham, including my 7th great-grandfather Joseph Ripley (1667-1737), who was their sixth child. Joseph was the first of the Ripley family to own land in Martha’s Vineyard. His father had died in 1683, when Joseph was 16 years old, and he was placed under the care of a guardian when his mother remarried the following year. By 1686 he was working as a cooper and general carpenter in Dartmouth, MA, and he came to Martha’s Vineyard in 1702. Joseph married Sarah Jenkins (1675- ) in Edgartown in 1705, and they had seven children, including Hepsibah. I don’t know anything about Sarah’s family.
The Doggett Family
To follow this discussion, refer to Pedigree Chart #3 in this essay.
The Doggett (or Daggett) family was also among the earliest residents of Martha’s Vineyard. (For the sake of consistency, I’m going to use the “Doggett” spelling.) John Doggett (1602-1673) arrived in Massachusetts as part of the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and lived in Salem, Charlestown, Watertown, and Rehoboth. It was in Watertown that he first met Thomas Mayhew and became interested in Martha’s Vineyard. He was one of the first five men to receive a land grant from Thomas Mayhew in 1643, although he apparently did not move to the island immediately. John came to own a great deal of land on Martha’s Vineyard; one of his farms encompassed 500 acres, and he owned as many as ten other properties. Once he came to the island (probably about 1650), however, he began to clash with Mayhew, whose expanding power I described earlier. The clashes increased in severity and by 1665 John had left the island and moved to Plymouth.
The Doggett family is the subject of one of the more interesting stories I have encountered while doing family research. Joseph Doggett 1647 married an Indian woman, the daughter of a minor official of the local Wampanoag tribe. It is not clear what her name was. It appears that they had two children before she died, and that Joseph 1647 married a second time (to yet another unnamed woman) and had several more children, including a son Joseph 1688. This is all very murky. A romantic legend about the “Pocahontas of Martha’s Vineyard” grew around the first marriage, and genealogists have argued for decades about the identity of these women. I am not going to be able to solve this dilemma this week. Joseph’s marriage to a native woman caused a rift in the family, and the descendants of John Doggett divided into the “Bow and Arrow” Doggets and the English Doggetts. If the records are right, I am a descendant of both lines.
The Eddy Family
To follow this discussion, refer to Pedigree Chart #3 in this essay.
Members of the Eddy family spent even less time in Dukes County than the previous families, but I want to make note of them. Martha Marchant’s great-grandfather (and my 8th great-grandfather) John Eddy (1637-1691) was born in Plymouth but married Hepzibah Doggett (1642-1726) in Martha’s Vineyard in 1659. He and Hepzibah had 12 children, including my 7th great-grandmother Amy Eddy, who married her first cousin Joseph Daggett, as mentioned above.
After the American Revolution, my family on Martha’s Vineyard moved to Maine. I have tried to figure out the reasons for the move. The most obvious explanation is the need for more land than could be provided on a relatively small island. But Banks supplies an alternative that is both poignant and compelling; he suggests that many of the women, in particular, apparently hated the sea. It took their fathers and husbands and sons, and its storms isolated them from the growing society on the mainland. He says it this way:
“In time this tribute of human life to the perils of the deep became a constant spectre haunting their visions by day and their dreams by night . . . . The romance and mystery of the vast waters held no more charm for them and their one desire was to go to some remote inland country far from its sound and sight . . . .” (History of Martha’s Vineyard, Volume 3, page viii).
The stories of Richard Arey, who drowned on a trip either to Nantucket or to the mainland, and Thomas Mayhew, Jr., the missionary whose ship never made it to England, helps make this point. I don’t know how important this factor was, but it gave me something to think about.
Nice. I've been to Nantucket and just love Edgartown. If I had pots of money, I'd definitely have a place there. Just beautiful. Knowing your relatives through your posts and learning more about my ancestors makes me realize how interesting and logical it is that depending upon where our ancestors came from, they landed in places that are logically populated by more of those geographically same people. You: English, Virginia; me: German, Midwest. Over time, we tend to spread out, but initially, geography makes sense.