Ebenezer Berry (1707 - 1761)

My fifth great-grandfather.

Born: (probably) 1 October 1703 (but possibly 23 September 1707) in Wenham, Essex, MA
Died:  1761 in Middleton, Essex County, Massachusetts

Father:  John Berry
Mother:  Rachel (or possibly Rebecca) ?

Siblings:
   Joseph Berry, (date unknown, but he's the oldest)
   Sarah Berry, 1695
   Hannah Berry, 1696
   Samuel Berry, 1699
   Ben Berry, 1709
 
Married: Phebe Curtis 3 September 1730 in Middleton, Essex County, Massachusetts

Children:  Phebe Berry, 1732  (The mother must have died in childbirth or shortly after.)

Married: Susanna Perkins 19 September 1734 in Middleton

Children:
   William Berry, 1735
   Elizabeth Berry, 1741
   Susannah Berry, 1742
   William Berry, 1745
   Ebenezer Berry, 1746
   William Berry, 1749
   Samuel Berry, 1751

When I see a name used multiple times like this, I assume that the first child with the name died young. The parents either liked the name a lot or wanted to honor the dead child, so they used it again. This is the only time I've seen one used three times (so far.) There is also the possibility that there was only one William, but that his birth date is not clear.

The son Ebenezer told someone, who later shared the information, that his father was a "gentleman" with much estate. He had been the proprietor of the Danvers Hotel. He said his father had been born "in North Andover, in the last house on the line near Middleton, on the old road."


Susanna Perkins 

I can't find anything about Susanna except their marriage was recorded in Middleton and her mother was named Elizabeth Perkins. She is not on the Middleton list of births, so she must have come from somewhere else.


Most of the records I have found list Phebe Berry as the mother of our ancestor Susannah. That is the information that I got from my mother, but I discovered that it is wrong. Too bad, because I had a lot of Phebe's ancestors listed in our family tree. Now I have had to eliminate many people going all the way back to the early 1400s.

This is a good time to explain how I'm doing this so you will understand what has gone wrong when errors are discovered.  I started with information that my mother gathered, mostly from records on file with the Mormon church. But those records are only as good as the knowledge of the person who filed them with the church.

Once I started to really get into all this, I discovered Geni.com. Through that website, I was able to match some of the oldest ancestors that we had recorded and, from there, I have been relying on what I find on the website. I went through and recorded tons of information. I have over 1000 pages of family trees (pedigree charts) going back over a 1000 years - and there is much more! However, this website is also only as accurate as the information that people like me enter into it. I have found mistakes and tried to avoid repeating them.

The next step for me comes when I write the blog posts. I start with the family trees I have compiled. Those control the organization of my posts. But I am doing a whole other search for information on each person as they come up. I might be able to find more, but I would have to pay to join one of the online sources, and there is no way to know if their information is any better than what I can find for free. Since many people are interested in genealogy right now and are posting the information on websites that are trying to put together a huge family tree that shows how the whole world is related, I am able to use their postings as a place to start. It is like we are all working together on this one massive project. 

But, of course, I have no way to be certain that their information is correct. Most people doing this are very careful, but, unfortunately, not all of them. Anyone who did a Google search on Phebe Curtis could have found the information that I found. There were two different sources. But it also took patience on my part to read through the stuff and find what I needed. As interesting as it was to discover and record all these names and dates on the pedigree charts, finding out about the bits and pieces of their lives is so much more interesting. Thank you, Google!