I think it’s a good idea to begin with exactly when Franklin Pierce was president and what was going on at the time. He served one term in office, from 1853-1857. Here were the key events of his presidency:
January 6, 1853 – Franklin Pierce’s only surviving son, Benjamin (11 years old), is killed in a train wreck.
March 4, 1853 – Pierce inaugurated
December 30, 1853 – Gadsden Purchase concluded
Mary 30, 1854 – Kansas-Nebraska Act, setting the stage for “Bleeding Kansas” and the ramping up of hostilities between pro- and anti-slavery elements in the country
July 6, 1854 –Founding of the Republican Party. Pierce was a Democrat
Throughout 1855, hostilities increase in Kansas
May 22, 1856 – Caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate. The fight was provoked by Sumner’s fiery anti-slavery speech on the floor of the Senate two days earlier.
June 2, 1856 – the Democrats dump Pierce, and nominate James Buchanan for President.
November 4, 1856 – Buchanan is elected President.
This line connects through my Cody family in New England and New York. I wrote about this family in the second week of this project, when I was researching my connection to President John Adams. My connection that week was through Daniel Cody (#6 on this chart) and his brother Elijah. This week, the connection is through the family of Daniel’s mother, Mary Parmenter (#7). I’ve done a fair amount of research on this line and I’ve grown fond of Mary. I’m happy to have the chance to tell you about her.
First, let me repeat what I wrote about the Adams family and tell you about the Cody family. You may recognize this as the name of one of the iconic figures of the American West, William F. Cody (aka “Buffalo Bill” – I call him Buff). The members of the Cody family in America are descended from Philippe and Martha LeBrocq L’Escaude, Huguenots who came to Massachusetts from the Channel Islands in 1698. By the next generation, the surname had been Anglicized to Cody. Philippe and Martha had six children, but only two of them are important to the link between Buffalo Bill and me: their sons Isaac and Joseph. I am descended from Joseph and Buff is descended from Isaac, my third great-grandmother Melinda Cody was Buff’s 4th cousin.
Here’s what I know about Mary Parmenter. She married Joseph Cody in Massachusetts in 1757. They had eight children before Joseph responded to the Lexington Alarm in April 1775, and three more children before 1784. After the war, they ran a farm and a successful store. However, perhaps as the result of some business setbacks, Joseph died in 1787, and Mary was left to her own devices. Her children ranged from age 3 to 27, and she may have felt she was in a fine pickle. As the story is told, Mary moved with some of her children to Marcellus, NY, in 1794. It is likely that Mary received land there as compensation for Joseph’s military service.
After a trip of almost 300 miles on horseback in the spring of 1794, Mary and a couple of her older children scouted out land in the newly formed town before claiming 640 acres. She then went back to Upton, retrieved the rest of her children, and returned to settle on her land in Marcellus.
Not too long after her arrival in Marcellus, Mary married Jared Smith, who was also a new arrival in the town and whose land abutted Mary’s property. Jared entered into the tavern and inn-keeping business in Marcellus, working directly with Mary’s sons Joseph and Elijah Cody. Mary and Jared and several of Mary’s children worked in these enterprises and were important figures in the everyday lives of the residents of Marcellus.
As I trace this connection, at first I encounter a familiar name – Mary’s mother, Thankful Cheney (#8). Love these Puritan names. But then I had to do some tree-building to test this connection. Thankful did have a sister named Mary (#9), and Mary was married to a man named Thomas Dill (#10). I didn’t have him on my tree, but it didn’t take long for me to determine that this was accurate.
It wasn’t hard to discover that he had married twice – Mary Cheney was his second wife, but he had been married previously to a woman named Mary Pierce (#11). So far so good. The next connection gave me a little bit of trouble – the WikiTree connection had her mother identified as Elizabeth Pierce (#12), but I wasn’t sure if that was her maiden name or married name. A little digging revealed that this was probably her maiden name – that her husband, Nathaniel, was also a distant cousin.
Once that problem was out of the way, it wasn’t hard to trace the descendants of Elizabeth and Nathaniel down to their 2nd great-grandson, President Franklin Pierce. It helps that several of the people in that line were well-known in their own right, serving as colonial officials and elected officials through the years of the early Republic
.Geni takes me along a different path, this one through my father’s family through his Wilcox ancestors in Rhode Island. A quick glance at this chart provides me with names I recognize back to Theophilus Richardson (on the right end of the second line in this chart). Theophilus’s father, Ezekiel, was a passenger in the 1630 Winthrop Fleet and was one of the founders of Woburn, Massachusetts. Theophilus was one of nine children – one named Melchizedek – but for the purposes of this lineage, he had another brother Josiah.
From Josiah, it’s not hard to build through his daughter and granddaughter to the Pierce line, and from there to Franklin Pierce.
One thing I found interesting about both of these lines – Franklin Pierce’s father and grandfather were both named Benjamin Franklin Pierce. I just finished teaching an Osher class about Benjamin Franklin, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the first Benjamin Franklin Pierce was born and given his name in 1757, at the peak of Benjamin Franklin’s worldwide fame as a scientist.
I remember Mary. She must have been quite a woman. After Heather's article on President Johnson a few days ago, I wondered if you might be related to him, too. I'm sure you're not. Bleeding Kansas was one thing, but Johnson's actions set up quite a string of unforeseen outcomes for our country down the road.