Category: Thomas

After spending all of that time and typing explaining why I couldn’t just assume that Nathan was Josiah’s son… I came across a couple new pieces of evidence that make it almost impossible for me to refute this possibility anymore.

First of all, and this was like striking gold – a photo of a gravestone for a Nathan Thomas appeared on findagrave.com!  Better yet, this stone has a birthdate of June 13, 1809 – our Nathan’s estimated time of arrival on Earth – and is located in a huge cemetery in the middle of Allentown.  This city is not far from Bucks and Montgomery County, and the fact that this cemetery is not affiliated with a church plays into the speculation that Nathan’s involvement with the church was limited, either voluntarily or due to his birth out of wedlock (his presumed parents were married Nov, 21, 1809, four months after this Nathan was born). The page on findagrave has the following note: “Although Nathan’s tombstone gives a death date of 2/22/1898, the Allentown, Quakertown, and Doylestown papers all say he died 2/19/1899 (his obituary appears in the Feb 1899 editions of all three papers).”  I am working on tracking down the obituary, which will solidify once and for all whether this Nathan is our Nathan or not.

The second piece I found was an 1810 census record of Josiah.  Back then, names of others in the household were not listed.  Instead, the number of people within a certain age range was recorded.  This 1810 record of Josiah’s house reads (with my anecdotes):

The rest of Josiah & Elizabeth’s children’s names are known, and none of them were born in 1810 or earlier.  Therefore, the probability of this nameless child referenced on the census being our Nathan is pretty high.

Findagrave also came up with a photo of Hannah (Renner) Thomas’s gravestone in the cemetery of St. John’s Ridge Valley.  I had searched there before and never found it – guess I just never looked far enough.

Hilltown Baptist Church

My brother, Philip, reading the gravestones of Elder William and wife Ann Thomas

When I learned that Nathan might have been descended from the Welsh minister William Thomas who founded Hilltown Baptist Church, that was the first place I went to see if any evidence would surface there.

In July of 2011 I traveled there with my mom, brother, and grandfather Russell Thomas.  My grandfather very much enjoyed the trip and learning about the church that his potential forefather created.  We met with a friendly church member, Carolyn, who happily gave us a tour of the current church, a few miles away from where the original stood.  The congregation at Hilltown is obviously still grateful to their founding minister and has done much to preserve and teach their history.  I was also given a small book entitled “A Walk Down Memory Lane,” written by a parishioner, which details the church’s history and contains many records.

Huge ancient tree and stone marker where original church stood

After a tour of the church building, which has many glass cabinets of old church memorabilia, we traveled a few miles away to where the original building once stood.  At the edge of the road stood an immense tree – I’ve no doubt that it was there when “Elder Thomas” built the original church in 1737.  In the green lawn behind the tree is a stone monument to the original church.  And behind that lawn is a surprisingly large and old cemetery.

Josiah Thomas’s gravestone

My brother and I raced about with a camera taking photos of any gravestones that might be Thomas relatives.  Most stones were heavily weathered and difficult to read.  The gravestones of Elder Thomas and his wife Anna Thomas are large, lay flat, and are still very legible. Reading these stones, and particularly how immensely long some of the Thomas’s lived (into their 80s and 90s… in the 18th and 19th centuries!) I could not help but think that perhaps our long-lived line is descended from these individuals.  Though the stone wall bordering the cemetery had recently seen some damage, it was evident that the current congregation miles up the road continues to tend and care for this land and grave site.

Though Josiah, Nathan’s possible father, is buried here at Hilltown, Nathan is not.

Tohickon Union Church / St. Peter’s UCC

We know one thing: Josiah, Nathan, and Nathan’s son Jeremiah were all married here

The hunt for Nathan’s parents then took us to Perkasie.  Both Nathan and his theorized father, Josiah Thomas, were married at Tohickon Union Church (now known as St. Peter’s UCC), which is on Old Bethlehem Road in Perkasie.  What’s even more significant is that Jeremiah Thomas, Nathan’s son was also married here.  Three generations of Thomas men married in the same church?  That is probably the strongest evidence I have.  This information comes from a volume of “The Pennsylvania-German Society” in which records of the Tohickon Church are listed.  This is also where the theory of Nathan being born out of wedlock comes from.  Josiah and his wife Elizabeth Hoffman were married on Nov. 21st, 1809.  Based on census records, Nathan’s year of birth was 1808.  This would mean Nathan was born prior to his parents’ marriage.

In the spring of 2012 I met with a member of this church in a small old school-house looking building across the street from the main church.  I was hoping to find some record of perhaps Nathan’s baptism, or luckier yet his death or burial.  The church member had the same volume from which I had learned of the marriage location, but no other information that might place Nathan in the congregation or its cemetery.  Another dead end, but my chase of Nathan and his parents was taking me on the path that this man potentially traveled over the course of his mysterious life.

St. John’s Ridge Valley

Thomas corner in the Ridge Valley “old” cemetery

As my mom, brother, and I were departing Tohickon/St. Peter’s, we took a “back-road” back to her father’s house.  We chatted about the legends of “Thomas woods” in Tylersport, and the path that the Thomas family gradually made from township to township until they ended up in Pennsburg.  We speculated that, if Nathan were indeed descended from Elder William, it would make geographic sense for the family to have slowly migrated from the Baptist church in Hilltown, to Tohickon in Perkasie, to where we knew they were at St. John’s Ridge Valley in Sellersville, to St. Mark’s in Pennsburg where family members still attend. It was around that time that we realized we were, on our back-road route, going to drive right past Ridge Valley on our way back to Pennsburg.  We were unwittingly making the same trek that they did over many years.

I have known about and visited St. John’s Ridge Valley Lutheran Church in Sellersville for several years.  It was here that I learned many new names in the Thomas line, adding three generations to the meager knowledge I had at the time.  Though there is no record of Nathan being buried at Ridge Valley, where his wife and children are buried, there is evidence at this church that further forges a possible link to Josiah and, thus, Elder William.  It is known that Josiah had a son named Ephriam.  So, if Nathan was also Josiah’s son, then Ephriam and Nathan were brothers. Why is this significant?  Because Ephriam, his wife, and most of his children were active at St. John’s Ridge Valley AND ARE buried there.  That makes two churches – Tohickon and Ridge Valley – at which both Nathan’s and Josiah’s immediate families were active.  Ridge Valley may hold more secrets about Nathan and his forefathers that I have yet to uncover.

To see the “road traveled” between these four churches, click on this link:

View Larger Map

In my first post about the old codger Nathan (a nice gentleman, I’m sure) I discussed the frustrating lack of information regarding his birth, death, or indeed much of his life.  Speculations as to why the bugger seemed to drop off the face of the Earth were also included.

When tracing a family line backwards through time, one is always searching for the next link: an individual’s parents.  I know that Nathan lived and had a wife and a family – and that might be all we will ever know of him.  So my next task must be to find the next link: Nathan’s parents.  The problem here is that it is typically through records of a child’s birth that we find information about his or her parents.  And since Nathan was not kind enough to leave any evidence that he was ever born, his parents also remain a mystery.

So, who were Nathan’s parents?  Below are some possibilities that I have researched.  Two have become dead-ends, whereas the third remains an open possibility.

Theory #1: Nathan’s parents may have been Quaker immigrants to Philadelphia
Likelihood: Not very likely

For many years, my grandfather, Russell Thomas, sold books.  Many of them were antiques or generally valuable.  As a result, we have ended up with a few.  One is a thick volume entitled “The Merion Tract,” which details the migrations of Quakers to Pennsylvania.  Since many Quakers came from the British Isles, and the Thomas’s supposedly came from Wales, and I had this book in my possession, I carefully went through its pages.  Several times.  Any of the very few Thomas’s mentioned either had no children or only had daughters – so the surname of Thomas would not have continued.  And, none of them were named Nathan.

Theory #2: Nathan’s parents may have been British Royalists living in PA during Colonial times
Likelihood: Possible, but difficult to prove

I learned of this British Thomas family from chapter 19 of the book “History of Bucks County” (available via Google Books).  Page 592 of this book briefly discusses Lewis and Evan Thomas who owned large portions of land “in the northwestern part of the township near Rieff’s corner, and eastward from the village of Telford.”  These men, perhaps brothers, were “wealthy and aristocratic” and owned slaves prior to the Revolutionary War.  Though a family cemetery is located “on the Bethlehem turnpike a half-mile above its divergence from the county line,” in which many slaves were also said to be buried, any evidence of the existence of a grave site has been destroyed.  The book goes on to say that one Richard Thomas was the head of the family before the war, and that his sons William and Evan were in the British army.  I have researched all of these names within the time frame of the Revolutionary War, but have not found any sons of the aforementioned men that might have led to a Nathan Thomas.  Regardless, the desecration of their cemetery is appalling, and for simply posterity’s sake and out of respect for the deceased I would like to locate the approximate location of their family cemetery some day.

Theory #3: Nathan’s parents were Welsh immigrants who founded a Baptist Church
Likelihood: Possible, probable, and plausible, but difficult to prove.

Ancestry.com has a neat feature in which you can link individuals in your own tree to identical individuals in another researcher’s tree (we’re all related somehow, I’m starting to think!).  In doing so, you can gather information from the other researcher’s tree that perhaps you did not know.  This is how I came across the possibility that Nathan may be descended from Welsh immigrants.  I have Nathan plugged into my ancestry.com tree.  A little over a year ago, the website alerted me that another researcher potentially had the same Nathan on their tree as well.  I took a look to see if these two Nathan’s shared any similar information.  Indeed, the other researcher’s Nathan had all the same information that my Nathan has… and ALSO listed a father.

At first I jumped for joy and all but poured myself a celebratory glass of bubbly.  A few more clicks of the mouse pad and I learned that the Josiah Thomas (1784-1856) that was listed as Nathan’s (possible) father was the great-grandson of one William Thomas, who immigrated from Monmouthshire, Wales.  A bit more digging on the internet is how I found the book “History of Bucks County” in the first place, and it gave me much more information on the man who could be our link back to the “old country.”  Pages 590 and 591 of the book (linked below) detail his family’s initial misfortune when immigrating to Pennsylvania from Wales, their eventual prosperity in the new world, and William’s founding of the Hilltown Baptist Church.

As fantastic as it would be to finally call the mystery of Nathan solved and closed with the discovery of this Welsh family with possible connection to our Thomas line, there is not yet enough evidence to know for sure whether Josiah was Nathan’s father.  I’ll write more on the evidence I have, and the evidence I still need to find, in another post.  This one is getting long enough.

• No record of his birth, death, or burial has been found to date. 
• Record of his marriage to Hannah Renner on June 28, 1829 at Tohickon Union Church exists in the records of this church. 
• His name appears in the 1850 Census but in no census thereafter. 
• According to this census, Nathan was 42 years old in 1850, making his estimated year of birth 1808. 
• He is also listed as residing in the Milford Township of Bucks County along with his wife and three children: Hannah, Lucinda, and Nathan.  Little is known about these three children. 
• Nathan’s eldest known child, Jeremiah, from whom we are also directly descended, was born in 1831 and, at the age of 19, was likely already living and/or working outside of his parents’ home – hence is absence from the 1850 census.

• Nathan may have been born out of wedlock.  The couple who I have found to possibly be Nathan’s parents were married after Nathan’s estimated birthdate.  Depending on the stringency of the church at the time, a person born prior to his parents’ marriage may not have been permitted to be baptized and thus may not have been permitted to have a proper funeral or be interred in holy ground.  Or, if a “secret” baptism or funeral did take place, it may have gone unrecorded.  I have asked some Lutheran pastors about the possibility of this.  Though they were not sure and said that it would have been awfully strict of a church to deny a child baptism and, later on, burial rights, they did indicate that it could be possible.

• There is a legend of an escaped prisoner in the family.  It is unclear if this gentleman was a prisoner of war or jailed for some other reason.  The story goes that the convicted Thomas gentleman would, each day, challenge a prison guard to a race around a distance tree and back.  Thinking this a harmless activity, the guard obliged.  Harmless and innocent the pastime remained until Mr. Thomas pulled the wool over his guard’s eyes; after weeks of building up his strength and stamina with simple races around a tree, one day Thomas kept on running and was never caught.  The legend continues that his family hid the convict in “Thomas Woods.”  Could “Thomas Woods” be in Tylersport, where Nathan’s sons and grandsons lived and ran an inn?  If Nathan were the escaped convict, it would explain his sudden disappearance from his family unit and the lack of record of his death or burial.  Furthermore, it is unlikely that Nathan would have been a prisoner of war, as his disappearance prior to the 1860 census puts him off the map years before the Civil War.