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And the next day (Wednesday), Grandpa William Munroe recruited the Russell brothers from the Cambridge farm adjoining “Scotland” to help him look for the one sow that was still missing.
His choice of corroborating witnesses is particularly interesting to our family. Thirty-year-old Cambridge farmer Benjamin Russell,* son of William and Martha, is my 9th great-grandfather. A century later, his great-great-grandson Oliver (II) Wheeler would marry William and Mary Munroe’s great-granddaughter Hepzibah Munroe and wear a sword at Concord Bridge.

Like the Munroes, both Russells signed their affidavits by mark. Middlesex farming doesn’t seem to have required literacy. I wonder whether William had to learn to read and write before he could serve as a selectman.

*About eight years later, Grandpa Benjamin would build a house in Concord (now Carlisle) that would remain a landmark into the 20th Century. The grave of his son, our eighth great-grandfather William Russell, occupies Plot #1 in Concord’s historic Hill Cemetery.
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