The Merrill Newsletter - Volume 5, Number 4 - July, 1999 -Page 8

Merrilldom in Maine

by Abby Lumsden

As a small child I assumed that every family had double cousins, aunts that were cousins, uncles that were also great uncles, and that every town had a Merrill Road. When I was a bit older my Merrill grandmother presented me with a family fan chart as a reward for being her aide in searching out old gravestones, and I wondered a bit at how there came to be so many Nathaniels, Jameses, Abels and Adames all with the surname of Merrill. Eventually it occurred to me that if these people had the same birth dates, parents, etc, there were probably fewer of them than the names on the chart.

Many years later I fell heir to a box of family papers that included a reasonably tidy notebook labeled “Merrill,” and realized there had been a few marriages between Merrill cousins over the years. The full extent of intermingling began to become apparent to me when I began using the Family Tree Maker program and it began to seem as if every time I typed in the surname Merrill a question screen appeared asking ”is this person the same as ......?.” It became overwhelmingly apparent when I ran a nine-page 13-generation descendant outline from Nathaniel to me and a kinship chart that lists twelve blood cousin relationships between my grandmother and me.

The tangle starts early, when John, c.1599, had Hannah who married Stephen Swett, and they had descendants who came back into my lines again through my grandfather, and Nathaniel, 1601 with his son Abel, 1643, who had Nathan 1676, Priscilla 1686, and James 1688/9.

I think of James, 1688/9, as being at the center of the knot. My grandmother’s notes say that he had “11 children, 78 grandchildren and 147 great grandchildren who continued the name.” At that rate his offspring could populate a good part of southern Maine and did a pretty good job of it.

James had been born in Newbury and lived there until about 1725 when he moved to Stratham, New Hampshire, where he stayed until 1738. It was then that he moved to what is now Falmouth, Maine where he bought a large tract of land from Brigadier General Waldo. His farm lay between the east side of the Presumpscot River and the main road leading to the falls bridge. He is said to have lived in a garrison house built about 1714 about three quarters of mile east of Presumpscot Falls. That house was torn down by Harlon Page Merrill, 1841-1905, although the land stayed in the Merrill family until the
1950s. I remember visiting Merrills with my grandmother at a rather dilapidated colonial home sitting close to the road on a bad turn on the Old Falmouth Road. It has since been moved back and extensively modernized complete with a swimming pool in the back yard.

I also have a memory of a trip through a tiny railroad underpass to an abandoned pasture near the mouth of the river where we found the family burying ground. It was my first exposure to the “Remember me as you pass by” verse which haunted my childhood dreams for quite a time. The stones were overgrown and in bad repair then. I do not wish to remember how many years ago that was; it suffices to say that when the interstate highway was later built over them and they have disappeared without a trace. According to the old notes both the stones of James and his son, the second Adams, were
there.

James' daughter Mary, 1735, married her aunt Priscilla’s son Samuel Noyes and his son Adams, 1728, married Elizabeth Titcomb who was Nathan’s granddaughter through his daughter Sarah. James, 1730, also had a son James who had a
daughter Abigail, 1769. Abigail married her first cousin Beniah, 1767 , the son of Adams and Elizabeth Titcomb Merrill.

James also had a son Adams, 1755, who had Hannah Greeley Merrill, 1799, whose daughter Elizabeth Aurelia Foster, 1827, married Samuel Noyes Merrill , who was the grandson of Abigail and Beniah through their son Edward Joseph, 1791, who had married Lucy Noyes, 1794, the granddaughter of Mary Merrill and Samuel Noyes and daughter of Silas Noyes, 1763.

It goes on another generation or two with a son and a granddaughter of Samuel and Elizabeth marrying Randall siblings and a grandson who married back into the original John’s line. It gives me a host of relatives with a Merrill somewhere in their name, something I have in common with a large percentage of native Mainers.

The moral of this story is that one does not have to “practice to deceive” to weave a tangled web. One just marries a cousin.

The Merrill generations in my direct line, the tip of the Merrill intermarriage iceberg, listed this way because I cannot figure a way to make a readable chart.

1. Nathaniel, 1571
2. John, c1599 and Nathaniel, 1601
3. Hannah and Abel, 1643
4. Priscilla Merrill,1686, and Nathaniel Noyes, James, 1689, and Nathan, 1676
5. Samuel, 1725, and Mary Merrill, 1735, Noyes, James, 1730, Adams, 1728, +
Elizabeth Titcomb, and Sarah Merrill and Edmund Titcomb(Elizabeth’s parents)
6. Silas Noyes,1763, Adams Merrill, 1755 and Abigail Merrill and Beniah, 1767
7. Lucy Noyes, 1794 and Edward J Merrill, 1791, Hannah G Merrill, 1799 +
Alfred Foster, 1793
8. Elizabeth A Foster, 1827, and Samuel Noyes Merrill, 1823
9. Samuel Clinton Merrill, 1852
10. Rena F Merrill, 1889 (Grandmother)

And there I leave the Merrill name, although I have to confess that my first child’s given name is Amanda Merrill, who, by the way, works at the Merrill Library in Yarmouth.