ARTICLE IV.-JOHN DWIGHT OF DEDHAM, AND HIS DESCENDANTS.

IT is a most fortunate thing for the world at large, that a few men have such natural or acquired tastes for certain kinds of literary work, that they will do it, regardless of trouble or expense. The man who can write such a sensational novel, that, in all circulating libraries it will stand pledged ahead to six young lady readers, for the space of six months, may expect to make a little money out of the operation. But the man who writes a good history of his native town, or the genealogy of his family, must commonly expect to give months and years of his time, and help pay for the book out of his own pocket, when it is done. But he has his revenge, if he lives long enough to enjoy it. By and by, when the aforesaid novel has faded into the shadowy past and been forgotten, many an individual, and many a library will buy that Town History, or that Book of Genealogy, at almost any price, rather than be without it. But even this is not ordinarily a money revenge to the writer. Men who do this kind of work ought to be credited with a large share of "love to being in general."

Few people ever take the trouble even to think what an enormous work it is, to collect and arrange the facts down to the present time, showing the descendants of an average married pair, starting in life, we will say, in the year 1630. Let us suppose a case, which may be beyond the average, but not equal to many actual cases, as they are found in the early New England generations. A young man is united to a young woman in marriage in the above named year, 1630. They have five children, sons and daughters, who live to grow up, and to become heads of families. When those five children have taken to themselves husbands and wives, there are twelve persons to be counted as belonging to this little tribe. We will give again five children to each of these couples, who in their turn shall live to mature age, and become heads of families. That adds fifty more persons to the stock, and our little tribe

has now grown to be sixty-two. Now we will give to our twenty-five couples, five children each, who shall live to the estate of manhood and womanhood, and take to themselves partners, and become in like manner heads of households. Here is an addition to our reckoning, of one hundred and twenty-five children, and when they are married, of one hundred and twenty-five persons more, who, though not of the blood, must of course come into the genealogical enumeration, and our tribe has now swollen to three hundred and twelve. But we have as yet reached only to the end of the fourth generation, and have traveled over a period of something more than a century. Yet we have already so broadened out our work that it begins to look appalling. And now we have at least five generations more, on this enlarged and rapidly enlarging scale, to enumerate, before we reach these passing years in which we are living. The young children and youths of this day, springing from the old New England families planted here from 1630 to 1640, will generally be found in the ninth or tenth generation from the first founders. Generations will of course move along somewhat more rapidly, when reckoned in the line of the older children of households than of the younger; yea, these generations will often overlap each other. This was much more common in the former days than now, when marriages took place earlier in life. Esther Edwards, oldest child of Jonathan Edwards, had three uncles and one aunt (children of Richard Edwards), who were younger than she, and this was no very uncommon circumstance in the ancient days of early marriages.

With these general facts and considerations before us, we cannot but have a sense of overwhelming labor, when we look upon two bulky volumes, numbering together 1144 pages, in which Dr. Benjamin W. Dwight has enrolled the "Descendants of John Dwight of Dedham." From the author's "General Summary," we learn, that about eight thousand persons appear in these volumes, as belonging to the family of the said John Dwight. But the author's mother was a Strong, and the Strongs were far more numerous than the Dwights. These two volumes are only a kind of companion work of two larger volumes, embodying the Strong lineage, and the author tells us: "In the

two family histories investigated in union with each other by the writer, the lineage of some forty thousand persons has been presented more or less fully to view, with brief outlines besides of the history of two hundred or more collateral families, with other thousands of names."

It makes one weary even to copy that sentence. There is so much labor involved in it that the mind tires at the very portals of the gateway.

The author tells us how he was led into this labor. We cannot copy the whole passage, but the story is instructive, as illustrating the little turning points, on which the course of our lives so often hinges. "It was in the most casual way possible that the idea of the great endeavor, whose results are here brought to view, came in the first place to possess the author's thoughts. Twelve years ago in the fall of 1861, Augustus W. Dwight, Esq., a lawyer at Syracuse, then wholly unknown to the writer-who became afterwards Colonel of the 122d New York Regiment, and fell at the head of his troops in the attack on Fort Stedman-wrote to the author that he had learned that he was about to prepare a history of the Dwight Family; and that, if it were so, he could render some valuable aid in the premises.' Answer was returned at once, that no such thought had been entertained for a moment, or was likely to be in the future.' This ended all farther correspondence between the two parties." We will not copy more, but that was the way the original seed was planted, which various influences fostered and caused to germinate and grow. And many a man will find in his experience, that he has been turned aside from plans which he had marked out and fondly contemplated, and been led into other fields of activity, by causes, seemingly as slight as this.

*

John Dwight came to this country in 1634, or early part of 1635, and soon established himself at Dedham, Massachusetts. There came with him a John Rogers,-son of a Puritan Lecturer, who had exercised his gifts in Dedham, England, but had been silenced by the government. This John Rogers, the immigrant

* There was also a Timothy Dwight among the freemen of Dedham, and afterwards of Medfield, who is believed to have been a brother of John, coming over with him, or following soon after. Of him we shall speak hereafter.

companion of John Dwight, may or may not, have been a grandson of one of those nine children of the Martyr, whose faces we used devoutly to study in the New England Primer. The name of the town itself was doubtless given by the General Court, out of regard to these people, who had come from Dedham, England, and from under the instructions of John Rogers, the Lecturer.

John Dwight (or Dwite) was of the twelve men, who took part in the first town meeting in Dedham, in 1635. He brought with him from England a wife and three children,-two sons, Timothy and John, and one daughter, Hannah. Two daughters were born on these shores, Mary and Sarah. Mary Dwight was the "first child born in Dedham," as appears by the old records. But the boy John, when six years of age, three years after the family reached these shores, was lost in the woods, and perished. The forests which our fathers first encountered in New England, were awful in their reach, and in the many dangers and terrors that lurked about them. For a little child to go astray in those pathless solitudes, and never return, would make a subject, over which the thoughts of parents and of brothers and sisters would brood for months and years in painful agony.

The death of this boy leaves us alone with Timothy the other son, for the perpetuation of the male line. But as he is to live to the great age of eighty-eight; is to be six times married; is to have fourteen children, eleven of whom are to be sons-we can reasonably look to him to give the family name. a good firm start in the new world. But of these eleven sons, four die in early life; two are married, but leave no issue; one had sons that died young; and so the Dwight name is still left dependent upon four boys-Nathaniel, Josiah, Michael, and Henry.

The six wives of Timothy Dwight were Sarah Sibley, Sarah Powell, Anna Flint, Mrs. Mary Edwind, Esther Fisher, and Bethiah Moss. By the three last he had no children. Anna Flint, his third wife, was the daughter of Rev. Henry Flint of Braintree. Ten of the fourteen children of this Timothy were hers, and she was the mother of the four boys above mentioned, who helped to spread the Dwight name. Nine of her ten

children were boys. Her father, Rev. Henry Flint, was a choice spirit, as we may gather from some items of his will, made in 1652. He died in 1668. In this will he says: "Until my wife or any of the children marry, I leave all my estate in the power, and to the wisdom and discretion, of my wife, for her comfort and bringing up of the children. . . For the present, I know not what portion of my estate to assign to my wife, in case God call her to marriage, otherwise than as the law of the country does provide in that case,-accounting all that I have too little for her, if I had something else to bestow upon my children." There is not much of the sour and surly Puritan in the composition of such a man. This Anna Flint, his daughter, in becoming the third wife of Timothy Dwight, became also, as it proved, the ancestress, in her generation, of all who bear the name of Dwight in this country.

But let us now turn for a moment into another field. To show that we did not, in our imaginary case, overstate the labor which the early generations of a family often furnish for its genealogist, take the following sentence from the preface to Mr. Dwight's work on the Strongs. "In his history of the former family (the Dwights) there were even in the third generation but three founders of families; but with the Strongs how different! Elder John Strong began the family history with eighteen children, fifteen of whom had families, and eightyeight of their children are on record in this book as heads of families. There were doubtless a dozen more. From the third generation downwards, the author's task was nearly thirty times greater, therefore, in tracing his maternal ancestry and kindred, than his paternal." This is, of course, a very unusual and remarkable disparity. But whoever looks into the early New England history, as pertaining to the growth of families, will find many strange variations from the general rule. The Dwights were as much below the ordinary rule, in respect to rapidity of increase, as the Strongs were above.

Elder John Strong, the patriarch of his race, came over with Rev. John Warham's church in 1630. This company, with all its goods and cattle, was rudely set on shore down at rocky Nantasket, by the captain of the vessel that brought them (Captain Squeb-his name is against him) because, contrary to