M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Christmas with Ain’t Nick
By Sherlene Hall Bartholomew
click on photos to enlarge

Editor’s Note: In Sherlene’s last column, she talked of learning about her ancestor, Nicholas Pinion, whose wife accused him of killing children. Her column set off an explosion of letters both defending and deriding Nicholas. It wasn’t “children” but chickens, Nick’s side claimed.

Eighth great-grandfather Nicholas Pinion is not one to take lying down the kind of slander he got in my Thanksgiving column (see “The Ancestor I Didn’t Want to Find,” in Meridian’s Turning Hearts Column Archives). Fact is, “Ain’t Nick” already descended my chimney and emerged, well-sooted, griming my days and grating my nights.

Nick’s hauntings provoked e-letters of condolence, commiseration, and condemnation from relatives, friends, Saints, and Strangers who read (or wished they had not) about Nicholas—all of this ending in an Internet fracas over his chickens.

What I did not admit in my first column about Nick was that I had argued with the editors of Springfield 1636-1986 that whoever indexed those colonial court records had misread the early script. Editors Konig and Kaufman wrote that Nicholas’ wife Elizabeth, in a heated court argument, accused him of “killing five children, and his wife says, one of them being a year old.”

I could not find the Vol. 6 that reported details about this hearing, but did find an index of Nicholas’ supposed killings of children. This, I was certain, was the source used to make the case against my ancestor in this book dividing into two classes, “Distinguished” and “Obscure” Massachusetts settlers. I argued that tangled colonial hen-scratchings should have been transcribed to say that Nick killed five of his neighbor’s chickens!

After all, I reasoned, had Nick killed children, his Puritan masters would have harvested his head. He would not have been around two years later, June of 1649, to be hauled into court by neighbor Quinten Pray, who accused Nicholas of swearing about his harvest of squashes when he planted pumpkins. So far as I was concerned, that comforting feeling I got as I read Nicholas’ records was further assurance that of all Nick’s sins, one was not infanticide.

Since neither the Springfield Library and Museums Association that published the book in 1987, nor editors Konig and Kaufman answered my letter making this case, I attributed their silence to guilty assent and rested my defense. After all, Nicholas could not have murdered children and still fathered such kind and good descendants as 6th great grandson Aaron Ward Tracy, former president of what was then Ogden, Utah’s Weber College, and my own father, H. Tracy Hall, first to create a reproducible commercially viable process for synthesizing diamonds, and named as BYU’s first “Distinguished [sic] Professor” (Hugh Nibley was the next to be so honored).

However, as mentioned in my earlier column about this ancestor, I did an Internet search that turned up a review of Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Knopf, 1996). This report detailed how author Mary Beth Norton named Nicholas Pinion’s as the “most dysfunctional family” on record in seventeenth-century New England. It made sense to contact this scholar, who devoted nearly an entire chapter to Nicholas, before promoting my theory about his chickens.

My notion gave Cornell’s Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History a good laugh. She said Elizabeth’s accusation about the five children was the first of “twenty-six prosecutions over two decades in four colonies” involving the Pinion family. Therefore the infanticides could have happened in England which was anxious enough to ship Nicholas off to suffer and probably die in the New World. Further, Dr. Norton explained how Puritan law required that there be two witnesses to a felony before a person could be hanged. Obviously such infant deaths could have been hidden from witnesses of any sort. The fact that Nick retained his head did not verify my opinion that his case involved chickens, not children. She did, however, acknowledge that on first reading Elisabeth’s accusation, she wondered if Nick’s wife was overly exercised or even deranged. Dr. Norton was willing enough to allow that option as salve to concern for my ancestor’s soul.

I barely had time to sigh my relief before she asked: “By the way, did you know that Nicholas’ daughter Ruth was hanged after being tried in Hartford, Connecticut?”

“Uh, no. Dare I ask why?”

Norton then disclosed that court records, still not open to the public, witness that our Ruth Pinion Moore Briggs was hanged by New Haven magistrates in 1668, after court testimony that included witnesses enough to her adultery and decision to destroy the evidence. According to pp. 36-37 of Norton’s book, Ruth at first denied having given birth on February 15, 1667/8, but under pressure from the magistrates “finally admitted that she had been pregnant, had taken savin (an abortifacient) prepared by her sister, Hannah, and had given birth in secret. Claiming that the child had been born dead ‘thro her neglect for want of helpe,’ she revealed that she had subsequently buried it ‘below her sisters [Mary Pinion’s] garden by the swampe.’” (Mary Pinion, by the way, is my ancestress, who had the misfortune to marry Thomas, Nicholas’ son.) Prof. Norton was too kind to suggest such, but it seemed apparent that Ruth might have been acting, in her perfidity, on family tradition. Facing death for what the court judged as infanticide, Ruth confessed, writes Norton, “’that she could not have peace untill she had made some further discovery of her wickedness.’ She accordingly confessed to a series of sexual offenses committed in New Haven over the previous three years.” [Note: It was not clear, in my reading of Norton’s account, whether the Court of Assistants at Hartford discounted Ruth’s testimony about having aborted her baby or whether they judged the act of abortion itself equivalent to infanticide—were it the latter, then Ruth was hanged for behavior and an act that millions of Americans today treat as commonplace.]

In a subsequent e-letter Dr. Norton, while writing about Nicholas’ son, my ancestor Thomas Pinion, let slip one of those golden nuggets we genealogists pan for year after year—the maiden name of Thomas’ wife: "I remembered where I had seen a reference to Thomas Pinion, and the footnote led me to a bawdy verse written by a friend of his about Thos's relationship w/ his wife to be, Mary Edwards. This was in 1664, in Concord, Mass., but Thos was then living in Sudbury (next town). See Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex (Univ. of Mass Press, 1986), 180-82. So Thos must have moved first from Lynn to Sudbury, and then went on to join the rest of the family in New Haven by 1666, when he ends up in court there. MBN”

My report to the family about my communications with Dr. Norton got an exercised response from my attorney brother-in-law, Barry D. Wood, of Arlington, Virginia, who had innocently invited friends to look for my column before knowing I would spill family secrets. We Halls have to love the way Barry defends our Nick, when some in-laws would rush to pinion my quill. What we love even more is his genealogical brilliance as applied to his wife’s lines.

Intrigued with my challenge that someone in the family track Nick’s sleigh to its home over the ocean, Barry issued a report one day after my Thanksgiving column was published:

“Nicholas, as you will recall, was first known to history at the Saugus Iron Works in Lynn, Essex County, Mass. (same county where Joseph Smith’s ancestors and the generality of mine were leading much more sober lives at the time), and later at Ancient
New Haven in what is now Connecticut (where Harold B. Lee and I share additional very sober ancestors).

“While I claim NO RELATIONSHIP with this scoundrel Pinion, I do claim the prize Sherlene offered (there WAS going to be a prize, wasn’t there?) for finding his homeplace in England.

“vide:

“Nicholas Pinion married 1 Oct 1639 at Burwash, Sussex, England one Elizabeth Starre. Obviously, she had starres in her eyes at the time, but might have done better with another, as her life unfolded. Or perhaps in a darkened shadow of the Burwash parish church there was a shotgun (or musket) pushing Nicholas to the altar with Elizabeth, as less than eight months later there appeared ‘Ruth, christened 24 May 1640 at Burwash, daughter of Nicholas Pinnion alias Spray.’ (Barry then goes on to identify christenings for four of their children and to name both Nicholas’ and his wife Elizabeth’s fathers, as well as to identify the probable family place of origin in the village of Worth!)

Perhaps Ain’t Nick’s early descent down my chimney was meant to help coordinate Barry’s discovery of the Pinion homeplace in Sussex with Church news about groundbreaking, this magical month of December, at Wivelsfield Green, Sussex, for the first LDS chapel in that county!

When we asked in amazement how Barry learned so much, so fast, he replied that it took him all of one hour, using the new on-line IGI now available on familysearch.org. (How to do that for your ancestors, too, and important qualifications about how much we can trust the IGI will be featured in another column.)

In a subsequent e-letter, Barry shared this with our extensive family:

"Our ward choir director is from Sussex, so after rehearsal this afternoon I asked her about Nicholas' hometown of Burwash. To me it sounded like a cross between ‘Pittburgh’ and ‘carwash,’ so I wasn't expecting much--some blackened industrial ruin, perhaps. Quite to the contrary, Liz says that it is right on the Channel. The ‘wash’ part of its name stems from the way the sea washes right up in the streets at high tide. There are signs warning visitors not to park on the lower streets at certain times because of the way the borough is washed when the tide comes in.

"Burwash is a very picturesque locale. Real estate there is so much sought-after that even a tiny cottage there costs at least a million pounds ($1.5 million). Any number of expensive yachts throng the harbor.

"Liz asked what Nicholas' occupation was. I admitted that I didn't know what it was in England, but that in America he worked at the Saugus Iron Works. Liz said it was her impression that the major occupations around Burwash were fishing and smuggling, though I doubt that we'll find smuggler as an occupation listed in the parish register.

[Tap this link to Burwash, home of Rudyard Kipling, smugglers, iron orkers, and the author’s illustrious Pinion family:
http://www.villagenet.co.uk/esussex-iron/villages/burwash.php ]

"That supports my idea that Nicholas was a Royalist. Another clue: that the Pinion family did not give their sons Puritan names. While among the Pinions one finds James, Robert, Martin, Nicholas and the like, my Woods are naming their sons Obadiah, Josiah and Jeremiah.

"If Nicholas cast his lot with the Royalists, might he not have been imprisoned by the Cromwell forces at some point during the Civil War? If so, how to sentence him for the crime of fighting against Parliament?

"Assuming that he was not a leading plotter against Cromwell, amputation of the head might have been too strong a punishment. However, he probably had no lands to confiscate, and the jails were full, so he was transported to the colonies to work for a term of years.

"As I may have mentioned earlier, this is what happened to my ancestor George Darling. He was a Scott from Mid-Lothian who was taken prisoner at the Battle of Dunbar in 1649, marched to London and sentenced to labor in the colonies. Quite a number of these unfortunates ended up at the Saugus Iron Works performing work that was not deemed desirable by the local Puritans (and probably for good reason--stoking the forges was a back-breaking chore). Thus George ended up working at Saugus in almost the same timeframe as Nicholas, the only difference being that George stayed in Essex County when his term was up, while Nicholas relocated to the New Haven colony, where he farmed his remaining days.

"Against the backdrop of Nicholas' status as an involuntary migrant to New England, his occasional use of less than lofty language, preserved for us by the Puritan scribes, is not surprising. Probably his speech was no worse than that of Henry VIII, but times and fashions change. Now, four and a half centuries after Nicholas, public respect for the second commandment is much the worse, as one can see any night on Jay Leno (which I haven't watched for months).”

Barry’s summation: “Here I finish my report, but not before noting that, allowing for Thomas’ birth about 1642, the sequence of children for Nicholas and Elizabeth scarcely leaves room for any to have been done away with by their father. All those christened in the English records in 1640, 1644, 1646 and (I think) 1647 show up quite alive and well in New England.

“Thus, and for various other reasons detailed to Sherlene in a private e-mail, I am holding to the view that Elizabeth’s accusation that Nicholas had killed some children is either (a) a misreading for chickens (Prof. Norton notwithstanding—I have read enough 17th century handwriting to know that what one person thinks is clearly X, another can easily read as Y) or (b) the effect of a frenzied mind wherein Nicholas was accused of something he did not do, just as a great deal of what is testified to on Judge Judy and the like is actually not true at all.”

I made the mistake of asking Prof. Norton how she might respond to Barry’s defense, to which she quietly suggested: “Elizabeth never said the five children were their own.”

I am left to surmise that either Nicholas was innocent of infanticide, or our Lord’s grace is even more extensive than I knew—especially to those who by birth are condemned to lawless tradition. I am grateful that judgment is the Lord’s and that my charge is to forgive and to, myself, shun false tradition. I again affirm the witness of God’s love for Nicholas Pinion and his family that came over me as I searched those court records. Even agnostics reading this report of Nick’s dealings, since I brought him up in my Thanksgiving column, must admit his continuing involvement with the living!

As regards our involvement with Nicholas and his family, I told Barry that the obvious reward for his efforts on behalf of my Pinions was that he and wife Virginia stand as proxies for them, as we accomplish any new temple ordinances on their behalf. I included this offer in a round-robin letter, inviting members of our family to join in sacred ceremony, as part our Hall Christmas celebration already planned for this year. In response, my brother Tracy sent Barry an e-letter asking if, since Barry found this new information about Nicholas in the IGI, we might assume that all known Pinion family members’ temple service was already accomplished. Barry’s answer: a resounding “NO” (more on this, too, later).

Well, you’d better watch out for those who dare pout about ancestors we wish were never found. Chances are we’ll look up one hallowed eve to find ancestral Ain’t Nicks, at last released from Spirit prison, placing coal in our deserving socks. Let us hope they’ll have the grace to give us unwilling, but repentant descendants a knowing wink and gentle nod.

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