Thomas Bird and Mary Belden
Husband Thomas Bird
Born: Abt 1595 - prob Essex County, England Christened: Died: Bef 10 Aug 1662 - Hartford, Connecticut Buried:Marriage: 1660
Other Spouse: Mary ( - ) - Abt 1615
Wife Mary Belden
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
Children
General Notes (Husband)
Death from Genealogical Dictionary of Settlers of New England, James Savage, p 182.
He died shortly before 10 Aug 1662, the date of his estate's inventory, in Hartford, CT - which is how we know where he died. He apparently never lived in Farmington.
Steven has made explorations into possible relationships to other Bird families of New England.
The "Birds of Farmington, Connecticut" were Thomas's sons, James and Thomas. They lived in Farmington.
There was Goodman Birde, a basketmaker in Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex, who may or may not be a relative. He was named John Birde. He had children who went to New England, but no indication that these are the same family as that in Farmington.
Steven Bird estimates his date of birth as 1595. Trask, in article on Thomas Bird in NEHGR, 1871, estimates his date of birth as 1613.
Thompson discusses Goodman Birde in Mobility and Migratio, East Anglian Founders of New England, which extensively cites an earlier work, Migration from East Anglia to New England before 1660, by N.C.P.Tyack. Thompson cites Tyack's identification of Goodman Birde, but then concludes that Goodman Birde was John Birde, supposedly a basketmaker from Hatfield Broad Oalk. However the souces that he cites do not support this identification.
Tyack also cites an entry from 1636, saying it says "Goodman Bird's children". Steven finds the word corresponding to "children" in the document to be illegible, but Tyack could be better at reading it. It does appear from the account book pages that Birde's family left a year before he did, since he is present (at Hatfield Broad Oak) up to late April 1637. He identifies the Birds of Farmington, CT (James and Joseph) as clthomakers, based on Christopher Bickford's book, Farmington in Connecticut. He took the identification from Farmington land records, which identify Joseph Bird and two of his sons as cloth makers. (Steven thinks that does not mean weavers.)
It is apparent from Barrington's account book that Goodman Birde must have left directly for New England sometime shortly after Apr 26, 1637. The real value of the record is that the narrow window of opportunity for the immigration date may lead to the identification of just one or two possible candidates for "Good man Birde".
John Bird of L.I. cannot be the same person. A John Bird arrived in MA in 1645, but this date si much too late to be the immigrant of 1637.
Neither Nyack nor the original Barrington Account books ever identify Goodman Birde by his first name.
John Budd of the Hector (1648) died in 1670, so is not John Bird who Trubull found in 1677 in Milford, CT.
A different Thomas Bird lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was born in England about 1613, joined the church in Dorchester in 1642 after it was reorganized under Rev. Richard Mather, was a bailiff, and a tanner, died on June 8, 1667, aged 54, and was married to Ann. He is often confused with Thomas Bird of Hartford, Connecticut.
The Bird who came to New England in 1635, who has also been confused with Thomas of Hartford, was Simon Bird. According to Steven Bird, "It is likely that neither Thomas of Hartford nor Thomas of Dorchester were here before 1638 or 39. There is no extant ship manifest that identifies either of these men as bening a passenger. Both persons begins to appear in colonial land records about Feb 1639/40. Finally there is no basis in any primary source (that I have seen)for a birth date of 1595 for Thomas Bird of Hartford.
Source of following: Goodwin-Morgan Lines" by F. F. Starr.
Also "Genealogical Sketch of the Bird Family, having its origins in Hartford, Connecticut", by Isaac Bird (1855).
An article on the family of Thomas Bird of Dorchester MA in NEHGR, vol 25.
From "Historical Remarks" The name of A Thomas Bird appears in different early Records of Mass., and some have suggested that Thoams B. of Scituate and of Dorchester, Mass., of 1642, might be teh same man with our ancestor of Hartford. But the Dorchester Birds seem to have been of a separate origin. Of that family are many of the Birds in Boston and New York, and of the same was the Rev. Samuel Bird, a pastor of a New Haven church just before the Revolution.
"Our ancestor came to Hartford some ten years after its first settlement, and was proprietor only of a small homestead south of the city limites, and of a parcel of land of about 14 acres constituting, the Records say, "an island in the great river over against teh Landing". Whether he removed with his sons to Farmington or remained and died in Hartford, is unknown." Note that his probate suggests he remained in Hartford.
"The Family of Thomas Bird".
On p 48 of part 1, 2nd edition, of the first book of Town Records of Boston from 1634 to 1661, an etnry from Feb 12, 1639, granting to Thomas Bird of Monaticott, at Mount Woollystone, a great lot, for 4 heads, and 20 Acrs more, there being in all 36 Acrs, upon teh same Covenant of 3s.p. Acre.
In May 1640 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted town privileges to the inhabitants of "Mount Woollaston" and decreed that "the towne is to be called Braintree". The first volume of Braintree town records as rpinted in 1886 and the early volumes of Suffolk County Deeds to not contain any record of the sale fo these lands by Thomas Bird.
Nothing is known of his life while a resident of Braintree and just how long he remained there is uncertain, but by May 1644 he had evidently become a resident of Hartford, Connecticut.
"Sketch" says he was first known at Hartford in 1644.
On p 478 of the "Book of Distributions", the earliest volume of land records of the town of Hartford, is this entry:
May 1 1644
"Land in Hartford vp on the River of Coneckticott belonging to Thomas Burd & to his heirs for euer -- viz One parsill on which his dwelling house Standeth with other Outt-houses yerdes or Gardins thare in being Contayn, by estma one acre be it more or Less Abutting on the Hyway ledding toword wetheresfilld on the west & on Andreu Warnors Land on the East & on the South & on Thomas Osmors Land on the North--"
Following this entry is the record of an island on the east side of the Great River "against the Landding palc", containing fourteen acres more or less
"Abutting on the Grett Riuer whare the brim of it was at ordanary watter in the yeare one thousend Six hundreth forty & fouer".
Just when he purchased this island is uncertain but at a Town meeting held April 11, 1659, it was voted that
"the Townsmen & Jno Crow & Edward Stebing & m r westwood are desired to view Goodman Birds Island & Stake it out to him:"
Also April 23, 1660.
"the towne by their vote ordered and Apoynted that mr steelle of farmington and Will Wadsworth and Joseph miget should apoynt Thomas burd the bounds of his Iland ouer gainst the town on the est sid the great Riuer".
He also purchased one and three quarter acres of swamp and thirteen acres in the South Meadow.
Nothing is known as to his business, though the inventory of his estates mentions a "Lathing hammer".
He does not appear to have been prominent in public affairs, but we learn that he was one of four persons chosen in February 1653 "ffor Veweinge ye Chimneys".
In Dec 1659, Dec 1660 and May 1661 he was the defendant in suits brought before the particular court. (Conn. Particular Court Records, vol. 2. pp 129, 143, 144, 155.)
There is no record of his death, though it probably occurred in the summer of 1662.
An inventory of his estate, taken August 10, 1662, was presented to the court September 4 following, which showed real estate amounting to 149 pounds - 109 in property.
Among the articles inventoried was 1 Kettle at Northampton - 8 shillings - whether that is a clue to him or his wife is not known.
The estate was distributed to the widow, who John Beldin promised to look after, James Bird, Joseph the House and Land and 40%, Mary North and Hannah Scot.
There has not been discovered any record of the marriage of Thomas Bird. From teh fact that John Belden promised the court "to look to her to see her provided for", it is surmised that the widow was the second wife of Thomas Bird and perhaps mother of John Belden. Nothing further is known concerning her.
Steven Bird discussed at great length several passages of the above on the Bird forum at GEnforum, on Jan 17, 2004.
He says " I had never quite understood why Starr ATtributed this land entry to Thomas Bird of Hartford", but thinks it was because of the "4 heads" entry. It is unclear if this referred exclusively to the number of male members of the household, or counted his wife, and daughters still living in the household?
"First, we can eliminate two other Thomases as our candidates for the Thomas Bird of Mt. Woolystone". Thomas the tanner of Dochester, MA (1613-1667) had no children in early 1640; his eldest son, Thomas, was born about three or four months after the land record's date, adn Thomas of Scituate, MA never had children.
"I am only aware of two other Thomas Birds who were in the New World in 1639/40 - the mysterious Thomas Bird of Ipswich, MA and our own Thoams Bird of Hartford. Most importantly, Thomas Bird of Hartford is knwon to have had atleast two boys in 1640, James and Joseph. This would seem to confirm Starr's identification of Thomas Bird of Braintree, MA (1639) as the same person as Thomas Bird of Hartford.
"The fly in the ointment is the 'fourth' head in the household; once we have counted Thomas, James and Jospeh, who is the third male? Am I interpreting the term 'head' correctly here? Could this have been his wife? (I am assuming that the two daughters, Mary and Hannah, were not counted, or might have been already married by this time.) Or, alternativesly, is it possible that Thomas of Dorchester is actually the son of Thomas of Hartford, adn was still living with his father in early 1639/40?
Another "fly" is that a parcel of land in Hartford is identified in Feb. 1639/40 (the same month as the record from Mt. Wollaston, MA) as being adjacent to land "in the occupancy" of Thomas Bird. This would tend to suggest that T. B. was in Hartford BEFORE Feb 1639/40. Maybe he owned the land but didn't live on it?
Mount Wollaston became Braintree and is now Quincy, MA.
Thomas Bird's Y DNA is remarkably similar to that of George Hubbard of Middletown, Connecticut, and to William and John Goodrich, brothers from a well to do family of yeomen and minor gentry in Hegessett and and Bury St. Edmonds, England. Their father was a clothier, and their uncle was a minister. They were possessed of multiple land holdings and houses, plenty of money, and late medieval bourgeois attitudes, and sometimes the title "Mr.", which was applied to minor gentry. Wills many pages long and probate documents a little bit shorter connect John and William Goodrich to their family back home. Thomas Bird's and George Hubbard's origins are unknown. This gives greater than normal weight to the origins of the family whose origins are known. Steven Bird, whose life's work has been to pin down these families, thinks that they were part of some sort of general movement of East Anglian families of "Saxony" ancestry to New England - though Edmund Rice, who came from the same set of villages as the Goodrich family, had distinctive Norse Viking Y-DNA. It would be remarkable if the East Anglian participants in the New England migration were disproportionately of Saxon ancestry, but it would hardly be the first time hidden historical roots of mass migration resulted in genetic selection in who migrated. Usually hidden historical roots of the Protestant and even Catholic migrations to the northeastern United States are more recent and possible to explain; for example, people of Moorish and Jewish descent who had become Christians, sometimes in time out of memory, are known ot have particicipated disproportionately in these migrations, and DNA analysis is surprising people with their true origins on a routine basis. It is not hard to explain logically how that happened in most cases.
The Y DNA haplogroup is E3b1a2, of an eastern European and middle Eastern type found in low numbers in Britain. The one thing we do know is that sometime around the time of Christ or the first centuries AD, the male line ancestor of these families lived in eastern Europe or the Middle East. It is known generally how this haplogroup got to England, and there were only a handful of likely ways to get to England from Eastern Europe, particularly without leaving behind a visible genetic trail in central and western Europe; but it is not specifically known what path the ancestors of these families took to get there. Theirs is an uncommon haplotype for England. Only the aristocratic Satterthwaite and Lancaster lines, found mostly in Lancashire, are otherwise even close to their Y DNA, and not that close. The three families probably have common ancestry between 500 and a thousand years further back than the beginning of the 17th century, and they all ended up more or less near Hartford, Connecticut, all of which seems rather remarkable, though not impossible, if they never even knew each other in England. Bird (Brid), Goodrich (Goderic), and Hubbard (Hobart) are all Saxon names - though Hubbard and variants are also attributed to followers of a Danish Viking. It matters to this discussion that Saxons and Danes came from the same general area at different points in time, both empires were centered in Jutland, and they cannot be distinguished from each other genetically, though the Saxons had a larger empire and more of their descendants have genetic markers typical of central Germany. Steven Bird, who runs the E3b DNA project and has put alot of work into E3b1a2 and its roots, thinks we can be certain only that the Bird, Goodrich and Hubbard ancestors were in England before the Normans, and since we know of two E3b1a2 Norman families in England and one of them is not all that genetically distant from the Birds, Goodrich's and Hubbards, we cannot even be sure the common ancestor was not Norman or a group of Normans from the same village. Normans are thought of as Norse Vikings but they are actually more likely ot have been Danish Vikings, when they invaded England they had ruled a powerful under-kingdom in northwestern France for six generations, and most participants in the invasion were not Norse. That they came with the Saxons or were Roman slaves or soldiers and descendants had Saxon names is equally likely. Alternatively they could have been Jews. Either Jews or descendants of Roman soldiers or slaves could have lived in places that became Saxon territory before descendants migrated to Britain, and probably more Jews converted to Christianity over time than did not. Nonpaternity events were even more common in medieval times than now, and surnames were adopted only slowly after the Norman conquest. It is also possible that the three families are illegitimate spawn of wandering Norman aristocrats like the Lancaster family; they would hardly have taken their names.
Looking at these and particularly comparing them to the modal values for E3b1a2, it is actually not clear that they did not each diverge from the modal (assumed ancestral) haplotype itself. The most distinctive characteristic is DYS 390 = 25 in all three cases.
The study of Y HRD in the border reivers web site lists an uncommon haplotype of the first nine markers of trhe first 12 of this haplotype as found most often in the Balkans, followed by Spain, Poland, and Switzerland. He thinks some of these are Jewish in origin, and some in Spain might also be North African. Jews actually dispersed far and wide at an early point in time, often converted to Christianity, and could have come to England with any migration, though transportation directly from the Balkans or eastern Europe, or the Middle East, by the Romans, remains the most likely.
On the other hand, Cruciani, in his latest (2007) paper on E3b subclades, finds that E3b1a2 apparently evolved in western Asia around 11,000 years ago, migrated to the Balkan penininsula, and then diffused outward from there, decreasing steadily in all directions across Europe, western Asia, and Asia Minor and somewhat in the Middle East, around 5000 years go, probably propelled by Bronze Age technology and population expansion. This is based on his own study, and hte data I saw that it was based on was entirely from Eastern Europe and points south and east. He argues that the incidence of E-V13 (E3b1a) moves outward in a clinal fashion from the southern Balkan peninsula and possibly from points east, rather than hopscotching across Europe with Roman slaves or soldiers or Jews. Archeologically, Asiatic people did live in the Balkan peninsula before the Myceneans and then Indo-European peoples arrived there, and the Greek defeat of the Myceneans may have been accomplished mainly by indigenous people of hte area and of the Balkans, after a critical buildup of tensions between teh people of the region and their foreign overlords.
See also George Hubbard.
Bird Goodrich Hubbard
393 13
390 25 25 25/26 moderately fast mutating 24 is modal ***
19 13
391 10
385a,b 18/19,19 16,19/20 16,16/17 Fast mutating markers modal 16,18
426 11
388 12
439 11 12 13 relatively fast mutating modal is 12
389 1,2 13,30
392 11
458 16 15 15 relatively fast mutating
459a,b 9,9
455 11
454 11
447 25 26/27 25 moderately fast mutating modal is 26
437 14
448 20
449 32 33/34 32 relatively fast mutating Modal is 32
464a-d 15,16,17,17 14,16,17,17 15,16,16/17,17,18 fast mutating and prone to reading errors
Modal 14, 16, 17,17
460 9
GATA H4 9 9/10 12 moderately fast mutating Modal is 11
YCA II a,b 18,21 19,21 19,21 slow mutating ? Modal is 19,21
456 15 15 16 relatively fast mutating Modal is 17 **
607 12
576 17/18 18/19 (1) 18 slow mutating Modal is 17
570 20 19/20 (1) 20 relatively fast mutating Modal is 19 **
CDYa,b 30/31,36 32,34 30,35 relatively fast mutating Modal is 31, 34
442 11
438 10 11/10 10 very slow mutating Modal is 10
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