Sunday, July 13, 2008

Desire ye Truth Akors

Elizabeth Akors was born in Boston on May 18, 1664. Her parents were John and

Desire ye Truth Akors.

The couple named a subsequent daughter (b. March 9, 1666) after her mother.

If the inhabitants of Boston gave their children such impressive names, I can only imagine what must have been going on in Rhode Island.

2 comments:

Robert J. said...

For amusement I looked up these ladies in Savage's Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England (1860-62), where in the fine print and innumerable abbreviations one can often find gems.

It appears the mother was daughter of William Thorne, who is irregularly identified in the town record of Roxbury. Savage complains of this irregularity, and says that "The keeper of that record enhances his wrong, by mutilating the name of the child baptized 23 March 1645, Desiretruth, from which he withdraws the last syllable but I am happy to assure the admirers of a good name, that the evidence of the Roxbury church volume vindicates the whole truth."

(Men work together, I told him from the heart, whether they work together or apart.)

Caitlin GD Hopkins said...

I wonder whether Desire ye Truth was baptized soon after her birth. I've found that in the early decades, babies tend to be baptized soon after birth, but later on, it's common to find parents bringing in 4 or 5 kids to be baptized all at the same time (usually when one of the parents joined the church).

If she was an infant at baptism, that means that she was only 17 or 18 at the time of her marriage, which would make her among the younger brides of her generation. (The LDS record says she was born in 1644, but they may not have done the Julian calendar conversion.) The birth of Desire ye Truth's first daughter in 1664 makes me wonder whether we're looking at what is politely termed an "early" birth.

Also of interest in Savage's Genealogical Dictionary is the note about Desire ye Truth's church membership. She joined the Roxbury church on July 8, 1666 and had her two young daughters baptized the next Sunday.

A friend of mine recently wrote a paper about the Cambridge church in which she examined patterns of membership and baptism. She found that most of the young adults who joined the church in the 1660s-1690s did so in conjunction with the baptism of multiple children, suggesting that they may have joined primarily in order to satisfy the requirements of the Halfway Covenant and get their kids baptized.