The Curse of the Naramores - Part 4

Joshua Naramore, the last child of John and Tabitha (Newell) Naramore, was born on September 18, 1784 in the little hamlet of New Britain in the town of Chatham, Columbia County, New York.  Although by then living in New Baltimore, Joshua returned to Chatham to marry Anna Carpenter, daughter of Oliver and Joanna Carpenter, on December 26, 1823.  Not long after their marriage, they moved to the town of Lee, in Oneida county, where they remained for nearly thirty years and where their four children, Mary, Samuel, David and Elizabeth were born.  In the 1860s, they moved to the nearby town of Westmoreland.  Anna died there on January 11, 1866, while Joshua, conspicuously escaping the Curse of the Naramores, lasted another seventeen years, dying in Westmoreland on April 4, 1883 in the ninety-ninth year of his age.

His eldest son, Samuel, was not so fortunate.  Like his uncle of the same name, he took up the miller's trade, but with more success, and worked for many years at the Ridge Mills in Rome, New York.  In 1868, he headed west and became the foreman of a flour mill in Owasso, Michigan.  On the evening of October 24th, 1877, after all the workers had gone home for the day, he took a lantern in hand and went up to the second floor to investigate  what appeared to be a clogged spout.  On his way back, he attempted to shortcut a path between an elevator spout and a gear-wheel that was running about four feet off the floor.  The space between them was very narrow, and his clothing became caught in the gears.  He soon found himself inextricably wedged there, with the wheel revolving against his side, grinding off the flesh from his hipbone and over the abdomen.

Alerted by the strange sound of the machinery, the owners, who were in the office, soon shut everything down and extricated Samuel from where he had been trapped, but they were too late.  Samuel was horribly lacerated across his midsection and had been partially disembowelled.  He lingered for only a week, dying on the 31st of October, 1877.  He left a widow and five children, the youngest of whom was only nine.

• Thomas (ca. 1640 - ca. 1690) -> Samuel (ca. 1680 - ca. 1754) -> Samuel (1706 - 1789) -> John (1735 - ca. 1815) -> Joshua (1784 - 1883) -> Samuel (1827 - 1877)