Table of the Pages in
My Quaker Ancestors		 Whichever page you are on is in bold in a top table cell in this mini-website.
Compilation of Maps, Sources, and Monthly Meeting Information page.
Introduction &
Ralph Allen and Henry Howland		 The Field family - Long Island to Indiana The Willets & Powells of Long Island Quakers to Pennsylvania:
Comly, Gilbert, Strickland, Routledge

Maps, Sources, and Quaker Monthly Meetings

There are many maps and sources on this mini-website. On this page I've collected many of them into a single page as well as additional information on the Monthly Meetings north of Philadelphia which were important in my family history.

Click to Jump to Sources | Click to Jump to Monthly Meetings

Maps

Base Emigrant movement from England to Catawissa, Pennsylvania over a century and a half or so.

Used in the Introduction page.
Location of Sandwich and Duxbury - Allens and Howlands -

My earliest Quaker ancestors rebelled against the strict Puritans. Sandwich is the location of the oldest Quaker Meeting in America

Used in the Introduction page.
Locations in Queens -

Robert Field the emigrant settled in Newport, Long Island where his grandson, Benjamin Field, was born. Benjamin went to Burlington County in New Jersey after his marriage to Experience Allen in 1692.

Used in the Field Family page.
Long Island Locations

Both the Field family and the Willets family were located on Long Island in the early 1700s. While the Field line would remove to New Jersey, the Willets would leave later to Pennsylvania. Thomas Willets married, about 1720, Rachel Powell, the daughter of a major figure in Long Island Quaker history, Thomas Powell.

Used in the Willets-Powell page.
Flushing to New Jersey

Benjamin, the son of Robert Field2, was born in Newport, Long Island. He married Experience Allen and went to Chesterfield township, New Jersey about 1692.

Used in the Field family page.
Fieldboro, New Jersey

The Fields were members of the Chesterfield (now Crosswicks) Monthly Meeting and established a home in Fieldsboro.

Used in the Field family page.
Location of Bucks County in Pennsylvania

Robert Field, the great-grandson of Robert the emigrant, married into the Comly family of Bucks County by marrying Phebe, the daughter of Henry Comly IV and Rachel Strickland.

Used in the To Pennsylvania page.
Samuel Jennings home in New Jersey

Samuel Jennings came to America about 1680 and in 1681 built Green Hill, a home about three miles out of Burlington, New Jersey.

Used in the Field Family page.
Abington to Catawissa

Rachel Field, born 1780 in Abington, was the daughter of Robert Field who died in 1819 in Catawissa.
(Robert5, Benjamin junior4 Benjamin3, Robert2, Robert Field (Emigrant))


Rachel7 married Levi Willets whose grandfather Thomas had moved from Long Island to west of Philadelphia (Maiden Creek). Levi's father Isaac then moved to Catawissa about 1770.

Used in the Willets-Powell page.
Catawissa Local area

While Levi Willet's father Isaac had been disowned by the Quakers at the onset of the French and Indian War, Isaac bought 400 acres in 1771 along the Susquehanna River at Catawissa.

Robert Field came to Catawissa with his family about the mid-1790s and attended Quaker Meetings at Catawissa or Roaring Creek. It was there his daughter Rachel married Isaac Willet's son Levi in 1797.

See below for more information on the Catawissa Monthly Meeting.

Used in the Willets-Powell page.
After selling their land in Pennsylvania in 1807, Rachel and Levi Willets took their young family west to Centerville in Wayne County, Indiana. Their fifth child, Vashti Willets, is my 2nd great-grandmother:

Vashti Willets m. John Dunham

Lydia Dunham m. Irvin Thurston

Anabel Thurston m. Henry Spicer

William J. Spicer m. Ruth Mott (my parents)


Used in the Willets-Powell page.
Catawissa to Indiana

Below is an overview of the Quaker Monthly Meetings north of Philadelphia which were important in my family history. The table below the map has links to a Google map of their specific location.

Gwynedd Monthly Meeting (1698)
Location: 1101 DeKalb Pike, Gwynedd, PA 19454 		Abington Monthly Meeting (1683 / 1697)
Location: 520 Meetinghouse Road, Jenkintown, PA, 19046-2954		 Byberry Monthly Meeting (1694)
Location: 3001 Byberry/ Southampton Road, Philadelphia, PA 19154		 Middletown Monthly Meeting (1683)
Location: 453 W. Maple Ave., Langhorne, Pa. 19047		 Falls River Monthly Meeting (1683)
Location: 9300 New Falls Road, Fallsington, PA 19054 (William Penn Center)		 Chesterfield (NJ) Monthly Meeting (now Crosswicks) (1684)
Location: 15 Front St., Crosswicks, NJ
Location links above will open a Google map in a new window or tab - these are the current and often historic locations of the Meetings.
All these Meetings have a history page developed to one degree or another. The links below are to those pages in a new window or tab.
Gwynedd Monthly Meeting (1698)
 Abington Monthly Meeting (1683 / 1697)
 Byberry Monthly Meeting (1694)
 Middletown Monthly Meeting (1683)
 Falls River Monthly Meeting (1683)
 Chesterfield (NJ) Monthly Meeting (now Crosswicks) (1684)
Of special interest is the Catawissa, PA Monthly Meeting and the Roaring Creek MM
There is a very interesting history written in 1940 on the founding of the Meeting and building of the house in 1789. The Fields are mentioned. Use the link to the right or contact me for the full PDF.
The Roaring Creek MM's history is very interesting. See the Wikipedia article link on the right. 		The house is on the National Register of Historic Places Catawissa Meeting House Link: 1940 history of the Meeting.
Link: Catawissa MM at Wikipedia
Link: Roaring Creek MM at Wikipedia.
Other Meetings of interest
The History of the Flushing, Long Island Meeting The History of the Burlington, New Jersey Meeting House

Sources

Many specific sources are in the footnotes of individual pages, as are sources for those pages. The following is a compilation of those sources. Those that follow are secondary sources. Primary sources would be in the footnotes on the individual pages.

Two sources were used extensively: Ancestry.com which I have a full subscription to. The images of Quaker records there are indispensable as well as the images of Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy in six volumes. Also used were the images of records at FamilySearch.org which in some case duplicate Ancestry’s. Another source used marginally is Find-a-Grave where a few researchers have added lineage leads as well as some documents that led to further research.

One other resource is invaluable: "The Quaker Calendar" webpage at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College: https://www.swarthmore.edu/friends-historical-library/quaker-calendar

Wills: a number of wills sourced in the footnotes were gleaned from the secondary sources or primary images of those wills. Wills are a very important source in establishing genealogical lines for a number of different reasons.

County and regional Histories: many written generally in the latter part of the 19th century have partial information on genealogical lines, but have great information for background.

Compilaton of sources from the four pages:

  1. Anderson, Robert C., and Sanborn, George and Melinde, The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Vol. 1: A-B, page 27 begins article on George Allen, pages 33-34 for section on the two Ralph Allens. (See Appendix One for pages 33-34)
  2. Anderson, Robert Charles, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volume 2, pages 1016-1019 for Henry Howland, pages 1020-1024 for his brother John Howland.
  3. Bartlett, Ted Lawrence, The Willits family (Chicago, 1982). Not examined but at a number of genealogy libraries. Not online. Albert Willett calls this book a definitive work on the Willits family, fully documented and includes collateral lines. WorldCat listing for a copy near you see http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/9226248
  4. Bunker, Mary Powell, Long Island Genealogies (Albany, N.Y., 1895) online at https://archive.org/details/longislandgenea00bunkgoog/page/n9/mode/2up Powell and Willets families covered extensively.
  5. Comly, George Norwood, Comly family in America, descendants of Henry and Joan Comly, who came to America in 1682 from Bedminster, Somersetshire, England. (Philadelphia, 1939). Online at HathiTrust.org: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005730402; or the entire book as a PDF is at http://www.seekingmyroots.com/members/files/G001349.pdf (Accessed 6/15/2021 - 63 MB)
  6. Gardner, Charles Carroll, "Ralph Allen of Sandwich" in "The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey," (Vol. 16, No. 3 (July, 1941), Pages 49ff. As part of his "A Genealogical Dictionary of New Jersey." Some errors pointed out by Wakefield, but otherwise an important resource.
  7. Howland resources: much has been written about Henry Howland’s brother John, a Mayflower passenger: see his Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howland or the Mayflower History page at http://mayflowerhistory.com/howland
  8. Jennings, William Henry, A genealogical history of the Jennings families in England and America (Columbus, Ohio: Mann & Adair, 1890); page 348-9 for Sarah Stevenson & Benjamin Field: https://archive.org/details/genealogicalhist21jenn/page/742/mode/2up
  9. Martindale, Joseph C. A History of the Townships of Byberry and Moreland in Philadelphia, Pa.: From Their Earliest Settlement by the Whites to the Present Time (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell, 1867.) Online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011607171 - and https://archive.org/details/historyoftownshi00mart/page/n7/mode/2up ---- Comly Family pages 250-284 citing the genealogy provided by Watson Comly of Byberry; Gilbert Family pages 289-299. Very interesting for history of the Society of Friends in the two townships.
  10. McCracken, George E., Ph.D., F.A.S.G., "The Fields of Flushing, Long Island," New England Historic and Genealogical Register, Vol. 113 (July 1959): 197-216; 267-289. ($ Available from me if needed.)
  11. “A Memorial of John, Henry, and Richard Townsend and their descendants” (New York, W.A. Townsend publisher, 1865). Online at https://archive.org/details/memorialofjohnhe00newy/page/n7/mode/2up (Accessed June, 2021) Chapter XV (page 211) discusses Richard Townsend but then only several of his sons.
  12. Pierce, Frederick Clifton, Field genealogy; being the record of all the Field family in America… 2 Volumes (Chicago, IL: W.B. Conkey, 1901) https://archive.org/details/fieldgenealogybe01inpier/page/n5/mode/2up (Many errors and incompletions, but still a valuable source.)
  13. Riker, James, The Annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York..., (D. Fanshaw, 1852, New York) online at https://archive.org/details/annalsofnewtowni00rike/page/148/mode/2up (Field genealogy which has likely been superseded by McCracken's 1959 article.)
  14. Seaman, Mary Thomas, Links in Genealogy, Memorial of Samuel Hicks Seaman and his wife Hannah Richardson Husband (New York, 1927) online at FamilySearch.org: http://www.familysearch.org/library/books/idurl/1/760967 and also Ancestry.com. Covers first generations of many families including Cole, Powell, Townsend, Washburn, and Willets.
  15. Stevenson, John R., Thomas Stevenson of London, England and is descendants (Fleminton, N.J.: H.E.Deats, 1902), page 31; Online at http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005763752
  16. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, editors, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, in New England (12 volumes, Boston MA: William White, 1855-1861) available at FamilySearch.org: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/344454
  17. "The Townsend Society of America" of Oyster Bay, NY - holds resources that includes genealogical material donated over the years, and a small archive for members: https://townsendsociety.org/index.php
  18. Wakefield, Robert S., F.A.S.G., and Robert M. Sherman, F.A.S.G., "Henry Howland of Duxbury, Massachusetts, 1633, His Children and His Grandchildren," (National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol. 75, Nos. 2, 3, and 4 (June, September, December 1987), beginning page 105, 216, and 278 respectively.) Perhaps the most recent definitive article on Henry Howland.
  19. Willett, Albert James, The Willett families of North America (Southern Historical Press, Easley, S.C. 1985) - available to borrow at https://archive.org/details/willettfamilieso01will/page/248/mode/2up
  20. Willets: Online at a website (accessed June, 2021) called "Life Along the Mississippi River in the 1800's" has much Willets history: see the page at https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mygermanfamilies/history/Willits.html

Quakers and Slavery

In researching these pages on my Quaker family history I couldn't help but get interested in the question of slave holding or trading by my ancestors. It is, however a study now on the "back-burner." There are a few resources gathered with which to begin the study besides careful reading of the various Monthly Meeting minutes.

Page created June, 2021

© Text copyright: Steve Spicer

Feel free contact me about this page.