There’s nothing more exciting for a genealogist than to discover one’s family line extends back to the Mayflower landing of 1620. Sadly, ours doesn’t.
But I recently found it almost goes back that far–namely, to 1634.
My mother came from an Anthony family and there is a 1904 book by Charles Anthony, The Genealogy of the Anthony Family from 1495 to 1904, that traces Anthony family lines to the original Anthony colonist, and even farther back in England.
The challenge was to definitively link my mom’s line to a person found in the book. That was done through family records, the 1855 New York census, and an 1842 probate filing which linked her great-great grandfather Job to Paul and Elizabeth (nee Chase) Anthony from the book.
The title of this post arose from finding that one of the English ancestors was Francis Anthony, a noted London doctor of physick, who was the son of an eminent goldsmith, and who made a considerable fortune producing and selling a “medicine” drawn from gold called Aurum Potabile, which landed him in prison for a while. His son carried on in his father’s questionable footsteps. Together they are the Quacks of our story.
John Anthony, the colonist who landed at Rhode Island in 1634, had a couple of sons who married into a Quaker family, and this began a number of generations of Anthony’s who practiced their faith in Massachusetts and New York. The marriage of Paul and Elizabeth (see above) is recorded in the Swansea Monthly Meeting of Friends of 1778, in which Paul pledged “until Death it please the Lord by Death to Separate them or words to that Effect.” These generations are the Quakers of our story.
Paul and Elizabeth Anthony resettled in up-state New York, and there we find the first occurrence of what I call the Mad Anthony Syndrome. According to several witnesses at the verification of Paul’s estate in 1842, Paul was an eccentric man given to having divine revelations, a talent for creating mechanical devices that didn’t work (including a cultivator that hopelessly bogged down in the soil and a “perpetual motion” machine), and an unjustified belief in the value of his land, which he thought was worth a million dollars an acre “because of a mineral substance that was found in some particular Earth on that land which by going through with the process of leeching would make beer – and make all his relitives emensely rich.”
In fact the opposite happened. According to his son-in-law, Paul Anthony “has a son in the County Poor House in a state of derangement where he has been since the death of his mother. There was another one who put an end of his own life by hanging himself about two or three years ago last June & left his children three or four thousand dollars of property. There is another one who has had three turns of derangement and I have been told he now has a fourth; his circumstances are poor; he has only a little personal property and has five children.” This son-in-law concluded that “things gave me to understand that he [Paul Anthony] was a man particuly deranged.”
Apparently Paul passed his Mad Anthony genes on to his son Job. On a small stream Job built a saw mill which the History of Jefferson County relates “was, however, one of the kind known as “dry mills,” and was of short continuance. For some unknown cause this neighborhood has received the name of “Bedlam,” and is so most generally designated.” Oh, really? Job, by the way, ended up in the county poor house in his later years.
In turn, Job’s son Barney (my mom’s great-grandfather) made claims on his application for a Civil War pension that despite only spending 3-1/2 months in the Union Army–and never deploying–his “exposure to inclement weather and sleeping on the damp ground for many nights in succession, resulted in disease of the lungs, vertigo, and deafness from which I have not recovered.” So Barney nobly carried on the Crackers tradition of our story. He ended up in an old Soldiers’ Home.
Let’s hope those Mad Anthony genes are now recessive. Just to be sure, though, let me go ask my wife if that seems to be the case.