CLC 1994

OF THE

CARLEY -- Barnes -- Slack

Phone 525-8821

Family tradition says the Carley family originated in Scotland; came to the North of Ireland; later settled in Wales and England, before coming to America.

Originally MacThearlaich, MacKerlich, or MacKerlie, meaning "Son of Charles." Of the sept Clan Tarlich under the Clan MacKenzie.

Their tartan was chiefly a green and blue plaid, cross-hatched with black, with a narrow white line running through the green both with black, with a narrow white line running through the green both ways, a narrow red line through every other square of blue. A..Kerle was one of Sir William Wallace's "speciall men" about 1297.branch of the Sir William Wallace family later settled with others in Ulster, in the North of Ireland. Perhaps some of our Carley ancestors were among them, as this seems to bear out the old family tradition.There are many Carleys and McCarleys in Ireland today. I found many in England of Irish descent. My father always said that in Scotland and England the ey ending indicated someone who lived on an island.

When I was in England in 1965, doing research for this family history and genealogy, I contacted a Mr.Kenneth Carley-MacCauley, whose grandfather came from Oban, on the West Coast of Scotland. Unfortunately, his grandfather had died young, and was unable to pass on to his son or grandson anything he might have known about his family, only that he came from Oban, where his father was said to have been a civil engineer.

Mr. Carley-MacCauley himself works for the British Atomic Energy Commission, and has had one or two patents granted him in connection with his work. He told me that he had visited Oban the summer before, searching for further information of his family, and had been told that the clan came originally from one of the islands off the West Coast of Scotland there, probably Lewis Island.This could be equally true of our Carleys, as the ey ending indicates.

In English the name Carley is said to be locational in origin, meaning "a dweller at, or near a fort or flat stone." Some interesting clues if I should ever be lucky enough some day for a further trip to Scotland for additional research. It was while on this same trip in 1965 that I found our delightful Miss Marjorie M. Carley of West Ewell and Epsom, Surrey, England. She lives in West Ewell and works in the Borough Offices in Epsom, where she is a secretary. And where her father was a Commissioner when he was alive. Her father was a Wm. Carley, a civil engineer, worked for the Otis Elevator Co. My father was a Wm. Carley, an inventor and mechanical genius. We like to think we can trace family characteristics between the two. Althou she can't trace back any farther than her grandfather, who in his time was the civil engineer responsible for the upkeep of London's famed Tower Bridge. There has been a rare affinity between us from the very first time we met. And so we call her our English cousin, and she calls us her American relations.

The first substantiated trace I fine of them is in 1552 - from Nightingale's Church Plate Returns for that year. A. Wm. Keyrlye is listed as a church warden in Ashmore, County Dorset, England, as one of four in whose keeping the church plate was entrusted.

1562 - 5 Elizabeth 105/219 - a Will Kirley, Ashmore, on Subsidy Rolls.  1595 - a Martine Kyrley is listed as a free tenant at Ashmore.           1621 - a Wm. Kerley, witness to Livery of seisin at Ashmore.             1635 - Wm Kerley, Sr., witness to Livery of seisin at Ashmore.

Wm Kerley, Jr., witness to Livery of seisin at Ashmore 1636 - Wm. Kerley, a Puritan before the Puritans came to power, cited before arch-deacon's court for "neglecting his parish church." His reply, "Did not do this out of contempt, but in respect that he has land at Lower Donhead (a nearby village) and had something to do there." Dismissed with a warning. Others not so lucky. A fellow townsman, proven to have attended St. Peter's, at nearby Shaftesbury, where a fiery Puritan pastor held away, was forced to pay a fine, wear a white sheet and stand in the church porch to do penance. No wonder they rebelled and came to the then little-known New England!

Ashmore I found to be a pleasant hilltop farming village, still centered about its central pond, focal point of its being today just it must have been in 1636, or even in the time of the Romans, when it was a favored stopping place for Roman teamsters hauling lead from the Mendip mines down to the sea, as a never-failing source of water.

There are no streams in Ashmore, high on its hilly plateau. Only wells and the afore-mentioned pond forlater supply.I was shown traces of that old Roman road through the woods, still used today by animals or farm vehicles. Large farms still surround Ashmore, and the manor still bulks large as the main source of employment.

That could be another reason why our ancestors left England. They could only lease the land, never own it, under the lord of the manor system. While in New England, countless rich acres of land awaited them, free for the taking. And so begins our family's known history.

1. WILLIAM KERLEY, Sr., of Ashmore, County Dorset, England, near Shaftesbury, on the Wiltshire border. In 1637, July 17, he is listed as a planter and proprietor (land owner) in Hingham, Mass. In May, 1640, he signed a Sudbury tax protest. Sudbury, Mass., was just in the process of being formed. A group of men, many of them Wm.'s old friends and neighbors, had petitioned the General Court for a grant of land to found the town. Wm. was a signee and one of the first proprietors and land owners. In the meantime Wm. was one of the first planters at Hull, Mass., held land on Pedock's Island, now Nantasket. Listed as of there May 20, 1642. About 1642 or 1643 he moved to Sudbury and settled there, one of its first settlers. He and his son, Wm Jr., both held land and many important offices; but as the younger men grew up and were not granted land, as his younger son Henry, our ancestor, for instance, he looked elsewhere. In 1652 he was one of the first four signers of the Lancaster covenant, and named one of its first prudential managers. All three moved there and held land, and also owned lands at Marlboro from their Sudbury rights, and helped in settlement there.

Wm. was a true pioneer in the broadest sense, having helped to found these 3 New England towns, one right after the other, all founded on the premise that all men were qualified to hold land, take part in its government, (as in the New England town meeting, which survives to this day) and a separation of church and state. The minister was there merely to preach. Not as it was in Boston, where if you didn't belong to the right church, you didn't vote. And where dissenters were usually warned out of town.

Once in Sudbury, when appealed to by his fellow townsmen to erect a bridge over the Sudbury River that wouldn't wash away each year in the annual spring floods, his specifications as noted in the town clerk's annals are so clear and precise that an artist had been able to reconstruct that landmark bridge from his notes alone.

As a famous first settler he was noted as a man "who would speak his mind." A man of character and force and sturdy independence. We can look back and sense in him those first faint stirrings toward complete freedom for which his descendants later fought so vigorously in the Revolutionary War. It was ingrained in them by this invigorating ancestor.

Wm. died, in Lancaster, July 14, 1670.
His 1st wife, Ann, mother of his children, died Mar. 12, 1658.He married (2) Mar. or May 31, 1659, Bridget Rowlandson, widow of Thomas, and mother of the minister, Rev. Joseph Rowlandson. She died, June 14, 1662.

He married (3) Mar. or May 16, 1664, Rebecca Joslin, widow of Thomas Joslin. She apparently outlived him, as there is no record of her death.

Children of William and Ann Kerley:

4. Henry Kerley.

2. HENRY KERLEY, son of Wm. Sr., born about 1632, in Ashmore, Eng., came to America with his father. In Sudbury, Nov. 2, 1654, he remarried Elizabeth White, daughter of John White, who had been a minister in England, turned out of his church for Puritanism, came to Salem, 1638, later Sudbury, then Lancaster, noted as the  
3. wealthiest man there. Altho the Kerleys, between them,

owned more land. His wife Joan died May 18, 1654. John White died in May 1673. Elizabeth was sister to Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who was captured by the Indians in King Philip's War, and later ransomed. She wrote an account of this, TRUE HISTORY, she called it, and so got her name in the history books. They lived in Lancaster, where Elizabeth was killed by the Indians, along with 2 of her sons, Feb. 10, 1676, in the Rowlandson garrison massacre, and their remaining children taken captive.

There is an amusing sidelight on Henry's courtship of Elizabeth. In Sudbury, in the town square outside the tavern and near the bridge his father had built stood a large wooden post which was used as a town bulletin board. Here were posted the banns or notice of their coming marriage which had to be cried from the pulpit for 3 successive Sundays to make it legal.Whoever said the course of true love never runs smooth, never said a truer word.

One night, after a terrific quarrel with his betrothed, Henry sought solace in the tavern. Later, upon coming out, much the worse for wear, he spied the bulletin post with its offending notice of his coming nuptuals, and staggering over, with much exertion wrenched the post from the ground and threw it in the river. Yet the following Sunday he sat meekly in church during the final reading of their banns, and they were married shortly after.

Henry and Elizabeth had 9 children:

3. Bartholomew, b. about 1660.

6. Artemus Ward, b. Nov. 27, 1727, d. Oct. 27, 1800, m. July 31, 1750, Sarah Trowbridge, who was in direct maternal descent from Increase Mather and John Cotton.
7. Artemus was the first Rev. War General, Commander-in-Chief, before Washington came North to take command. Had command at encirclement of Boston and the Battle of Bunker HIll. Later 2nd in command after Washington. Was left in charge of Mass.

2. Hezekiah How                                                             3. Daniel How
4. Jonathan How                                                            5. Elizabeth How                                                           6. David How

9. Martha Kerley, b. June 10, 1672. One wonders if she survived her captivity by the Indians in the harsh New England winter. She was hardly 4 at the time. Captain Henry was away in Boston when the massacre occurred, along with the minister, Joseph Rowlandson, his brother-in-law, pleading with the Council for protection for their settlement from the Indians. They only returned in time to bury their dead. After fighting nearly all day, the Indians finally managed to set fire to the garrison house, to drive its inhabitant out. Capt. Henry's wife, Elizabeth, was shot along with 2 of her sons as she came out the doorway, and fell there, so that she was burned beyond recognition. Capt. Henry didn't even know he had buried his wife until her sister, Mary Rowlandson, was ransomed from the Indians and returned to tell her tale.

After the massacre Henry moved to Marlboro and, on Apr. 18, 1677, at Charlestown, where she was staying, he married (2) Elizabeth (Ward) Howe, widow of John Howe, Jr., killed in the Sudbury Fight, Apr. 21, 1676. Elizabeth was daughter to Wm. Ward (1) and sister to Hannah (Ward) How, whose son Daniel How, married Henry's daughter Elizabeth.

Perhaps it might be interesting to note here that it was John Howe, Sr., who founded the famous Wayside Inn near Sudbury, made famous by Longfellow's poem of the same name. "As ancient is this hostelry / As any in the land may be." The original building burned to a shell one snowy night in 1955, but has since been lovingly reconstructed and is maintained today by the Ford Foundation as authentic Americana.

Its "buttermilk pink' clapboards and white trim and small paned windows with its door almost flush with the ground, as the earth has built up around it over the years,are just as attractive today as they were during the more than 150 years it was maintained by the Howes.Its water-powered grist mill is still operated today by a national baking company.

And its Mary-Martha Chapel maintained on the estate is still a favored setting for wedding parties, with a horse-drawn carriage still preferred as a means to deliver the newlyweds back to the inn for a rousing reception.

Of this second marriage, Capt. Henry had 2 daughters:

They had 8 children:

          1. Hannah Eager, b. Mar. 14, 1699, d. before 1745

Moses, George, Dorothy, Mary

4. Jacob Eager, b. Oct. 2, 1704, d. Dec. 18, 1723.                         5. Demaris Eager, b. Sept. 11, --, m. Johaniah Howe.
6. Moses Eager, twins, b. Aug. 30, 1712, Moses d. before 1745
7. Miriam Eager, m. Feb. 26, 1730, Isaac Harrington.

2. Mercy (Marcy) Kerley, b. May 2 or 12, 1681, d. Oct. 16, 1727, m. Nov. 10, 1708, in Marlboro, Joseph Rice, b. June 5, 1671, died Dec. 3, 1745, son of Joseph and Mary
3. (Beers) Rice. He m. (2) Elizabeth Robinson, m. (3) Jane Corey.

Mercy had 6 children:

1. Jesse Rice
2. Eleazar Rice
3. Mercy Rice twins
4. Elizabeth Rice
5. Mary Rice

Capt. Henry was a Representative to the General Court in 1689, in 1693, and in 1703. He died Dec. 18, 1713. His will was written May 17, 1708, and probated Jan. 27, 1714. His 2nd wife Elizabeth d. Apr. 26, 1710.

I think that a John Barnes and a David Church were also married to daughters of Captain Henry, but do not know which ones. At least they, in 1713, together with Daniel How, who was married to Elizabeth, tried to claim lands in Capt. Henry's right, on a new purchase Marlboro made from the Indians. Their suit was refused.

Of her previous marriage, Elizabeth Ward, b. Apr. 14, 1643, in Sudbury, d. Apr. 26, 1710, in Marlboro, dau of Wm. Ward (1) and his wife Elizabeth, m. (1) Jan. 22, 1662, John Howe, Jr., said to be a widower with children, b. Aug. 24, 1640, d. Apr. 21, 1676, killed by Indians.

They had 4 children: