Conversation with a Cousin, Part One: Thomas Narramore (c. 1640 - c. 1690)

      I was recently contacted by a cousin from the "Kansas line" (Dr. Willard Parker Naramore - Ezra - Alpheus - Samuel - Samuel - Samuel - Thomas) who is interested in the early colonial history of the family.  She prefers discussing family history over the phone, while I make "Silent Cal" seem loquacious by comparison.  On top of that, it occurred to me that it's been quite a while since I've given much thought to any of it, and as a result was simply not prepared to extemporize on the early generations of the family in North America.  What follows, in pseudo-conversational style, is my attempt at getting back up to speed on all this.

Q.  When was Thomas born?

A.  We don’t know.  We do know that he was admitted as an inhabitant in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1664 and so was likely of legal age by then.  We also know that he got married in about 1670 and had at least seven children over the next sixteen years.  Taken together, these suggest that he was born before 1644, but probably not too much before.

Q.   Where was Thomas born?

A.   Also unknown – but he almost certainly came from Devonshire.  Devon is the ancestral home of the Narramores, and apart from a handful of 14th and very early 15th-century mentions in neighboring Somerset, there is absolutely no record of any member of the family outside of Devon -  save for a single maritime parish marriage record in London in 1628 - until Thomas shows up in Massachusetts in the 1660s.

       This interactive map shows the geographic distribution of the Bynorthemore/Northmore/Narramore surname from 1290 to 1660.

Q.   But what about all those family history sites on the internet that say Thomas was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1640?  Many of them also give his parents as Samuel W. and Margaret (Sims) Narramore.

A.   You know, the Weymouth bit at least has a kernel of truth to it:  Thomas’ wife, Hannah Smith, was the daughter of James Smith Sr., who was an early settler of Weymouth.  Beyond that, it comes down to pure carelessness in indiscriminately pulling in data from other online family trees.  Yes - there was a Thomas Narramore who was the son of Samuel  W. Narramore and Margaret Sims, but that Thomas was born in Tennessee shortly after the American Civil War.  We're talking here about the Thomas Narramore who was born about the time of the English Civil War, not the American one.

Q.   If he wasn’t born in the Massachusetts colony, then when did he emigrate?

A.   There is no record of his passage.  Prior to becoming a resident of Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1664, he may have been in the area for at least a couple years.  There is an abstract of a Middlesex County court proceeding from 1674, in which Samuel Ward of Charlestown secured a judgment for debt against Thomas.  A witness in the case testified that in 1662, Thomas Narramore, a weaver of Boston, had bought a loom from Ward (absent a transcribing error in the extract, it would seem that Ward was a very patient man and/or the loom was purchased on a very long installment plan).

Q.   So Thomas was a weaver?

A.   Among other things, yes.  A 1681 deed refers to him as “Thomas Narramore of Boston in New England Fisherman . . .”  For a string of years in the 1680s, he was also regularly elected to the minor town office of “corder of wood”, the duties of which were to inspect and certify the proper size of cords prior to their sale.  Whatever his financial difficulties in 1674, he seems to have been among the ranks of respectable, middling tradesmen, a property owner with sufficient standing in the community to be chosen for an office of public trust.

Q.   If there’s a deed, does that mean we know where Thomas lived in Boston?

A.   We most certainly do.  The Narramore home was on what is now the southeast corner of Hanover and Prince Streets in Boston’s North End.  Or rather, given the significant widening of the streets in the intervening centuries, it would be more accurate to say that a good part of the home site now lies under the pavement and sidewalks there.  The remaining portion of the Narramore property not swallowed up by the street expansion seem to correspond pretty well to the sliver of a building now occupying the corner address of 331 Hanover Street.  The original property bounds would have extended several yards from the current building in both the Hanover and Prince Street directions.   

       As an aside, determining location from late 17^th-century Boston deeds can be a fearful and wonderful thing.  The naming and regularization of street names was still a generation in the future, and so we read in Thomas’ deed that the front edge of the property being sold was “next the narrow lane that runneth along by the dwelling house of Mrs. Winslow” (who, thanks to that century’s irregular spellings of just about everything, appears in other records as “Winsley”, “Wensley” etc.)

       I once spent far more time than I should have researching the history of Boston street names and digging into all deeds relating to the adjacent property owners referenced in Thomas’ deed (frequently extending through several outwardly expanding layers of such “adjacent to’s”).  The end result of all this labor was a reasonably coherent map of the neighborhood in Boston where Thomas lived and which could pinpoint the location of his corner property.  Well-pleased with my efforts, I then almost immediately discovered that the work had already been done about a century earlier by a dedicated Boston civil servant named Samuel Chester Clough.  Have a look at what he put together here.  The image, a snapshot of Boston property owners and boundaries in 1676, is divided into six squares; focus on the bottom right and expland by clicking until you can clearly see the rectangle marked “2^nd Meeting House”.  Then look at the properties just above that, specifically the ones numbered 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43 and 46.

Q.   I’m looking, but I don’t see Thomas Narramore’s name anywhere.

A.   Clough’s work is fantastic, if not downright fanatic, in its detail, but he wasn’t perfect.  John Snell, a Boston shipwright, did indeed own property #38 on the map, but Clough was clearly focused on property deeds and failed to note from probate records that Snell had died late in 1668.  The property then passed to his widow, the former Hannah Smith and soon-to-be Hannah Narramore and was thus in Thomas’ hands in 1676.

      That it is the same property as referenced in the 1681 deed is beyond doubt.  To the right of #38 on the map there is a narrow, unnamed alley, the other side of which (#46) is marked “J. Winsley”.  John Winsley’s widow, Elizabeth Paddy Winsley, is the “Mrs. Winslow” of Thomas’s deed, whose “dwelling house” was “next the narrow lane”.  You can even see a portrait of her here.

      In the deed, Thomas sold a strip of land (possibly the unattributed parcel #39 on Clough’s map) at the back of his property to Arthur Kind, and the deed identifies Kind (#42) and land of “Goodman Barker” (#43) as bordering Thomas’ on that side.  A “Mr. William Rowse” (#s 35 and 36) completes the list of Thomas’ neighbors identified on the deed.  An early Boston silversmith, you can see some of Rouse’s work here.  He was married to neighbor Arthur Kind’s daughter Sarah.

Q.  You mentioned earlier that Thomas was married in “about 1670”, which makes it sound as though no marriage record exists.  So how is it that we know so much about his wife’s family and previous marriage to John Snell?

A.  The will of John Snell of Boston, ship carpenter, made two days before his death in November 1668, gives custody of his son John to his “Father in Lawe and mother in Lawe James Smith and Jone Smith” and states that his wife Hannah “shall haue one third part” of “my Estate in Land, House and household stuff”.

      The will of James Smith, Sr. of Weymouth, proved in 1676, mentions his wife Joane and his daughter Hannah Narramore. By the way - although not a direct descendant of James, it appears that Abigail Smith Adams was a member of this same extended clan of Weymouth Smiths.

Q.   Who were Thomas and Hannah’s children, and what do we know about them?

A.   There are birth records (all in Boston) for four and baptism records (all from Boston’s 2^nd Church – see Clough’s map) for three more:

• Hannah, born September 23, 1671.  Probably the same Hannah Narramore who was baptized on May 29, 1681.

• Sarah, born September 26, 1672.  Probably died young.

• James, born May 4, 1674.  Probably died young.

• John, baptized May 29, 1681.  Possibly the same John Narramore who was a shipwright’s apprentice in Boston in 1697 and in London the following year.

• Samuel, baptized May 29, 1681.  Our direct ancestor.

• Nathaniel, baptized February 11, 1682.  Probably died young.

• Sarah, born August 10, 1686 and baptized August 15, 1686.  Probably the Sarah Narramore who married John Not (or Nutt) on April 17, 1718.  The ceremony was officiated by the Reverend Cotton Mather (yes, that Cotton Mather).

Q. I see that three of the children were baptized on the same date: May 29, 1681. What’s the significance there?

A.  Records of the Second Church show that Hannah Narramore (Thomas’ wife) was admitted to membership on that date.  In keeping with her newly-expressed faith (church membership required public testimony of a conversion experience), it’s not surprising that she would have had her surviving children baptized.  Son Samuel was admitted to the church on January 30, 1703.

Q.  Was Thomas a Puritan?

A.  Unlike his wife and son, there is no record that Thomas ever made the required public profession of faith and became a member of any Massachusetts congregation.  That said, going to church wasn’t exactly optional in those days – member or not, you were expected to attend and support the colony’s established Congregational church and its pastors.

      For the Narramores, living in Boston’s North End, that meant attendance at Boston’s Second Church, helmed successively from 1664 until 1728 by the father-son duo of Increase and Cotton Mather.  In fact, the Narramores and Mathers were practically next-door neighbors, as the Mather home was located just around the corner (see parcels 26 and 27 on the Clough map).

      That changed in 1676, when the Great Fire of Boston swept through and devastated the area.  The Narramore home was on the edge of the destruction zone and survived, but both the Mather parsonage and the church were destroyed.  The church was rebuilt the following year (it lasted until the Revolution, when the besieged British garrison made firewood out of it) and the Mathers relocated within the same general area, to Hanover Street.  The former parsonage site remained empty until 1680, when a spacious new townhouse was built there for the well-to-do merchant Robert Howard.  That house still stands today and is the oldest building in Boston.  In the ninety-ninth year after the Great Fire, the then-owner of this house collected his boots and overcoat one April evening and headed out the door, on his way to begin a famous midnight ride.

      The Narramore connection with the Mathers actually goes back a generation earlier, to Increase’s father, the Reverend Richard Mather.  Richard was the pastor of the church in Dorchester, and shortly after Thomas’ arrival there in 1664, Mather drafted up a petition to the Massachusetts General Court which was signed by virtually all of the men in town, including Thomas.  The reason for the petition was Puritan angst:  the short-lived Cromwell dynasty had come to an end, a Stuart was restored to the throne, and a royal commission was on its way to New England.  In the short run, their apprehensions were misplaced, as the commission was given a hearty welcome and then stonewalled at every turn.  But while the commission was stymied diplomatically, four warships it had brought in tow sailed off and engaged in diplomacy of a more direct kind, capturing a little Dutch port then known as New Amsterdam.

Q.  What became of Thomas and Hannah?  I read somewhere that Thomas moved to New Hampshire.

A.   Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England states of Thomas that “prob. he rem. to N.H. and early in 1690 pray. for the jurisdict. of Mass.”  Savage based this on the purported signature of “Thomas Naramo” on a “General Petition of Inhabitants and train soldiers” from New Hampshire to Massachusetts to set up a temporary government.  The petition was dated February 28, 1690.

       There are two problems with Savage’s assertion:

1.       There is other documentary evidence showing that Thomas was still in Boston at this time.

2.       Subsequent examinations of the petition led to several corrections of the transcriptions of the signatories’ names.  Of interest to us is the note in Libby’s Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire that “Thomas Naramo” was in fact a misreading of “Thomas Wacomb”.

In other words, Savage was wrong.  Thomas never moved to New Hampshire.  He remained in Boston.

Q.   OK, so what became of Thomas and Hannah?  When did they die?  Where are they buried?

A.   By now, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that we just don’t know.  No death, probate or gravestone records have been found.  However, we can make some reasonably educated guesses as to what might have happened and when.

      What with deeds, baptisms, tax assessments, and town meetings, there is virtually unbroken testimony as to the Narramores’ presence in Boston throughout the entire decade of the 1680s.  The very last record we have of Hannah is the birth of daughter Sarah in 1686, by which point Hannah was likely in her early forties and had probably borne close to a dozen children from her two marriages.  The very last record of Thomas is his election (for the sixth time) at a March 11, 1690 town meeting to the office of “corder of wood”.

       Beyond this, silence.  A 1695 census of Boston heads of household has no Narramores on it.  That the children were still around is evident from several references already cited above, but the parents were clearly no more.  The most likely place of interment would have been the Copp’s Hill Burial Ground in Boston's North End.

Postscript (adapted from a genealogical message-board post I made many years ago)

       

      It may only be coincidence, but it seems worth mentioning that 1690 saw a terrible outbreak of smallpox in Boston.  As related in the first (and only) edition of the newspaper Publick Occurrences, published in September of that year:

The Small-pox which has been raging in Boston, after a manner very Extraordinary, is now very much abated. It is thought that far more have been sick of it than were visited with it, when it raged so much twelve years ago, nevertheless it has not been so Mortal, The number of them that have died in Boston by this last Visitation is about three hundred and twenty, which is not perhaps half so many as fell by the former. The Time of its being most General, was in the Months June, July, and August, then 'twas that sometimes in some one Congregation on a Lord’s-day there would be Bills desiring prayers for above an hundred Sick: It seized upon all sorts of people that came in the way of it, it infected even Children in the bellies of Mothers that had themselves undergone the Disease many years ago; for some such were now born full of the Distemper. 'Tis not easy to relate the Trouble and Sorrow that poor Boston has felt by this Epidemical Contagion. But we hope it will be pretty nigh Extinguished, by that time twelve month when it first began to Spread.

The epidemic was brought to Boston with the arrival of a slave ship from Barbados.  Although quarantined on arrival in October 1689, the quarantine was ineffective.  Shortly before Thomas’ election as corder of wood early the following year, Boston held its first public fast; a second would follow in July.

In any event, whether through complications of late-life childbirth, epidemics, or other means, it is all but certain that both parents were out of the picture by 1695 at the very latest, and most likely five years earlier than that.  This would have left the young family in a precarious situation.  In 1690, none of the children could have been older than nineteen, with the youngest only four.  The likely outcome, as had already happened with the children of Hannah’s earlier marriage to John Snell on his death in 1668, would have been the breaking up of the family, with the children parceled out among relatives and friends where possible, taken in as servants in more fortunate households, or perhaps, if old enough, apprenticed to a trade.  The house and land would probably have been sold to pay off any debts due from the estate, as well as to provide for the upbringing of the children.

There is no known record of such a sale, but that it must have taken place is evidenced by a deed of August 11, 1697 in which John Goodwin, mason, and Martha his wife sold property in the North End of Boston (the boundary descriptions of which make it clear that it was the former Narramore property) to Joseph Wadsworth, mariner.  In itself, there is nothing remarkable in this transaction, but there is an interesting story connected with the sellers.

John Goodwin was a prosperous mason who likely would have gone completely unremarked by history had it not happened that in 1688 four of his children began suffering from terrible and agonizing fits, “beyond those that attend an Epilepsy, or a Catalepsy”.  With the doctors unable to discover a physical cause, the sensibilities of the time demanded that a spiritual one be found instead – and, in due course, one was.  It was remembered that the eldest Goodwin daughter, Martha, had questioned their Irish laundress over the matter of some missing linen that it was thought might have been stolen, and had in consequence been given a tongue-lashing by the laundress’s mother, Goody Glover.  When young Martha’s fits began shortly thereafter, the opinion rapidly developed that Goody Glover was a witch.  The “Hag”, as Cotton Mather referred to her, was soon taken into custody, accused of witchcraft, tried, found guilty and hanged on November 16, 1688 to the jeers of a Boston crowd.  Her death did not immediately bring an end to the children’s fits, but in time the situation returned substantially to normal.

      All of Boston’s ministers had been called in to do battle with these manifestations of Satan at the afflicted Goodwin household, but it was Cotton Mather who took a special interest in the case, at one point even bringing young Martha Goodwin to live in his household for a time, during which he made a careful study of her condition. The Goodwin case figured prominently in a book he published the following year, entitled "Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions", to which John Goodwin added his own account (Mather: “'Tis in his own Style; but I suppose a Pen hath not commonly been managed with more cleanly Discourse by an Hand used only to the Trowel ; and his Condition hath been such, that he may fairly have Leave to speak”). In any event, the Goodwins clearly gave substantial credit to Mather for the deliverance of their children. They became members of his church in 1690, as did their children after them. Their son Nathaniel was later an administrator of Mather’s estate.

This article notes that there was some confusion about where the Goodwins lived; in Mather's telling, they resided in the South End of Boston, but according to Hutchinson's later account, it was the North End.  The answer may well have been both.  The Clough map shows a "J. Goodwin" property on Blott's Lane in the South End, but if my hunch about the effects of the 1690 smallpox epidemic is correct, then the desire of the Goodwins to beome members of Mather's North End church and live in proximity to their spiritual guide may have been resolved in seemingly providential fashion by the sudden availability of the Narramore property and the need to provide for the orphaned children of Thomas and Hannah.


 

Those Morbidly Obese Old Men and Their Flying Machines

Andrew Naramor, born in 1836, was the son of Nathaniel Colton and Nancy Baker Naramor, and the grandson of Dr. Nathaniel Naramor.  He was a farmer who evidently had a mechanical bent and had gained some success as an inventor, patenting an improved hay rack, for example.  He also seems to have dabbled a bit in poetry, although here his efforts are perhaps more charitably judged relative to the Vogons.  Interested readers may decide for themselves, below.

When he was sixty years old, some seven years before Kitty Hawk, he sought to get ahead of the Wright brothers with his own human-powered flying machine.  Surviving newspaper accounts attempt, and fail, to paint a picture of it, but one is left with the impression that it must have looked rather like a meeting between Icarus and Big Bird:  it had two large wings, which were strapped to the arms, and two "sails" (described as being "somewhat like the feet of a duck") which were strapped to the feet, as well as a large rudder for steering.

The test flight took place in the middle of February, in Michigan.  The intrepid inventor climbed up to the roof of a barnyard shed, cautiously crept to the edge, spread his wings and . . . discovered that gravity's not a beach, but it sounds something like that.

It is at this point that the newspaper accounts mention that Andrew weighed some 300 pounds.

Incredibly, although he spent time in the hospital with injuries that were originally feared to be fatal, he survived the ordeal, and in fact lived for another eight years, although he never attempted flying again.

 
 

We Won the Revolution, So Let's All Move to Canada

One of the odder and lesser-known postscripts to the American Revolution was the brief attempt to heal divisions between the British Empire and her former American colonies by making large grants of land in Quebec (then called Lower Canada) available to American settlers.  The program was instituted in 1792 by the new Lieutenant Governor of the province, Sir Alured Clarke, and originally had two aims:  (1) to reward Loyalists who had fled to Canada as a result of the Revolution, and (2) to increase settlement there as a deterrent to any American designs on its northern neighbor.  However, under the influence of William Smith, chief justice of Lower Canada and chairman of the Executive Council’s land committee, most of the warrants to survey new townships under this program ended up being issued to Americans, many of whom had displayed anything but Loyalist sympathies in the previous conflict, in accordance with Smith’s belief that American settlement was the surest way to patch up the recent rift in the Empire.

From the Americans’ point of view, the prospect of a free grant of 200 acres of land (1,200 acres for the leaders of the settlement) was a powerful inducement to swear allegiance once more to George III.  As has been recounted elsewhere, Nathaniel Naramore twice fought on the side of the Massachusetts militia during the Burgoyne campaign of 1777.  But almost before the ink was dry on Alured’s proclamation, he and Jonathan Fassett (also a man with less than sterling Loyalist credentials, having been an early associate of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys) were petitioning to have a new town, to be named Ponsonby, surveyed and granted to them and to their associates.

These associates, numbering 190 in all, included a number of Nathaniel’s former neighbors from Goshen, Massachusetts, as well as his two younger brothers Joseph and Alpheus and his cousin Justin Naramore from Pittsfield.  Conspicuously leading the list, and called out for special attention to “His Excellency and Council” were the “good Loyalists” Abijah Hawley, and the brothers George and Gould Buck.  It is unclear whether Abijah was related to Justin Naramore’s Hawley in-laws, but the Bucks were intermarried with some distant Parsons cousins of Nathaniel’s sister-in-law Rebecca Parsons Naramore.  Whether these relationships played any part in the drafting of Abijah and the Bucks for the cause is unknown, although it makes for interesting speculation.  Another point of interest is that Gould Buck is a direct ancestor of John Wayne – his great-great-great-grandfather, in fact.

In any event, as might be expected, the project to promote a closer union with the United States by opening the doors to settlement by former rebels soon ran into serious headwinds from many on the council, and by 1795 the scheme was effectively dead.  But Nathaniel already had other plans.  After marrying Molly May in Goshen in 1789, he had brought his new bride north to the newly-founded town of Georgia, Vermont, where she was one of the first members of the Congregational Church and he was the town’s first constable.  But despite being “universally esteemed, both as a physician and a citizen” (as a history written more than 70 years later would recall), in 1795 the young family picked up stakes and headed for what was then the frontier country of the Genesee in western New York state.  In January of 1796, Nathaniel bought the western half of lot no. 61 in what is now the town of Avon, and bought the remaining half in 1803.  The property is still a working farm in the town, located on the north side of  Route 20 just a little ways east of the locally famous Tom Wahl’s restaurant.

Nathaniel makes two appearances, in quasi-Natty Bumpo guise, in the Eli Granger diaries (http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4045).  Granger records a geese-hunting trip to Braddock’s Bay on March 18, 1797 with “Parks and Dr. Narrimore”, and  on August 3^rd of that year records that “Dr. Narrimore came to visit Dan [Rowe]” who had been “taken with a Fevor that is common to the Country”.  Very likely this was the so-called “Genesee Fever”; the early settlement of the Rochester area was plagued by malaria from the swampland around the Genesee River.

In response to a 1797 New York law, Nathaniel, who had most likely apprenticed with a country doctor in the Goshen area, was required to prove that he was qualified to practice medicine in the state.  As a result, Timothy Hosmer, the Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, filed the following certification:

These may Certify that Doct. Nathaniel Naramor has Resided in This Town upwards of Four Year and has been in the Practice of Phisic and I am perfectly Satisfyed with his abilities as a Phisician

Coming from Judge Hosmer, who had been a surgeon with the Continental Army on General Washington’s staff, this was no faint praise.

The last known record of Nathaniel is from May 30, 1804, when his name appears on a jury list for the town of Hartford (now Avon).  He died from unknown causes in 1809 and is buried in the main Avon cemetery.  The stone is now gone, but its former presence is attested by a 1946 cemetery survey, which recorded the grave marker for one “Doots” N. Naramor (even then, the stone must have been seriously weathered, with the transcriber evidently mis-reading “Doots” for “Doctr.”)  After Nathaniel’s death, his oldest son Chester assumed responsibility for the family, moving one town over to Caledonia, where they remained for the next 25 years or so.  Chester was one of the New York militia who were taken prisoner at the ill-fated Battle of Buffalo in June of 1813.  In the mid-1830s, Chester and his family went west to Kangley, Illinois, where his son, Elisha Gilbert Naramor, became a prosperous farmer.

The next-oldest son, Horace Naramor, appears never to have married, and eventually settled at Batavia, NY where he was a well-known manufacturer of grain cradles for many years.  He died sometime after 1868.  Although there is a Naramore Drive in Batavia today, it is in a newer development, and its name has no connection with Horace.

The third son, Jeremiah Naramor, also seems not to have married, and died in Utica, Michigan in 1836, where he had moved with his younger brother, Nathaniel Colton Naramor, and their mother, Mary (May) Naramor, who died there in 1840.  Nathaniel C. Naramor married Nancy Baker and had several children.  They have numerous descendants today in Michigan and elsewhere, and the distinctive spelling of their last name marks them out as descendants of Dr. Nathaniel.

• Thomas (ca. 1640 - ca. 1690) -> Samuel (ca. 1680 - ca. 1754) -> Samuel (1706 - 1789) -> Samuel (1730 - 1777) -> Nathaniel (1757 - 1809)

What's in a Name?

The internet has no shortage of theories on the origin of the Naramore name.  Some of them are even right.  The rest fall somewhere in between "close, but no cigar" and "seriously?".

Topping the list in the latter category is a very slick website that offers for purchase all sorts of surname-related merchandise.  You can get an extended family history, plus your family coat of arms, suitably framed or emblazoned on pretty much anything emblazon-able:  you name it, they surname it.

The Naramore coat of arms they show is indeed quite impressive, with a rampant golden lion against a bright red background.  But a hint that all might not be well in the company's research department comes from a look at their list of spelling variants, all of which seem to cluster around Narbonne.  Provided, of course, that you can somehow make the leap from Naramore to Narbonne, it's only a short skip and a hop to their conclusion that "this great aristocratic family" originally had its seat in Languedoc in the south of France.  Sacre bleu!

If by this point you haven't left their site in bewilderment, you might try salvaging the situation by noting that although Narbonne may not be a Naramore spelling variant, Narramore is.  And what a difference that additional "r" makes!  The website now solemnly informs us that Narramore is a habitational name from Cornwall, deriving from the Cornish words "nans" (valley) and "carow" (stag).   The family has somehow given up its ancestral seat in Languedoc and instead become lords of the manor of Nancaroow, all because of an additional "r".  At least the new coat of arms is still impressive, with three stags and a chevron.

But if Naramore is no more Nancarrow than Narbonne, we have at least crossed the English Channel and gotten closer to home.  In fact, there were Naramores living in Cornwall, as the entry in Bannister's 1871 Glossary of Cornish Names makes clear, although Bannister is incorrect in his speculation, however intuitively pleasing it might seem, that Naramore comes from narrow-moor.  It is also incorrect to assume that being a Cornish name implies a Cornish point of origin.  Naramore is only Cornish in the same sense that it is American; that is to say, Naramores came from elsewhere and settled in both places.

The "close, but no cigar" prize in the Naramore category of surname origin websites goes to surnamedb.com, which has the following to say:

This interesting name is of English locational origin from either Narramore in Devonshire, Northmore in Oxfordshire, recorded "la Mora" in the Pipe Rolls of 1195, and "Mora" in the Curia Rolls of 1208, or Northmore in Cornwall. The place name may be a topographical name for someone who lived on the northern part of a moor from the Medieval English "north", North and the Old English "mor", a moor.

Here, at last, we have the truth of the matter, although the website loses points for including the false trails of "(la) Mora" and Cornwall.  Naramore does in fact derive from "north of the moor" and is closely associated with the place-name of Narramore, which to this day is still a working farm in the village of Lustleigh.  Lustleigh is near the northern edge of Dartmoor in Devonshire, in southwest England.

As it turns out, the one who had it right all along was Percy Hyde Reaney, the late British historian whose 1965 Dictionary of English Surnames attributes Narramore to "dweller north of the moor" and who cites as an early instance of the surname a Reginald Bynorthemore who was in Lustleigh in 1318.  However, while Reaney's scholarship may have been impeccable, his exposition was a tad sparse.  So how do we really know that his is the right explanation of the family's origins?  

We'll look more at that in Part 2.

Captain Richard Narramore (c. 1650 - c. 1698)

 [Note:  significant updates have been made at the end of this article]

Although this blog was supposed to concern itself only with the descendants of Thomas Narramore (c. 1640 - c. 1690), there was another Narramore who swashed and buckled his way across the late 17th-century colonial stage and who now refuses to be ignored.  This is the infamous Captain Richard Narramore, who is commonly supposed to have been the brother of Thomas and the progenitor of the Southern branch of the Narramore family in the United States.  There's also that little matter of piracy on the high seas, which briefly landed him in trouble with the royal governor of Massachusetts in 1687.

In point of fact, I don't happen to believe any of these things about Richard.  He may indeed have been Thomas' brother, but the evidence is at best circumstantial:  they were both about the same age, appeared in Boston records at about the same time, and were engaged in maritime occupations.  The same could probably be said about a large portion of Boston's population at that time, which is another way of saying that their shared surname is the only significant connection between them; the records themselves give no hint of any interaction between them or their families.  On slightly firmer evidentiary ground, rather than being the ancestor of a large and vibrant group of American Narramores, it seems more likely that he was a genealogical dead end.  And as for being a pirate - well, it's a colorful story, but the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) that the records have to say about it is that he didn't exactly hang out with the Sunday-go-to-meeting set.  Probably not unique to a merchant ship-captain of that time and place.

A recent query about Richard on the World Narramore Family Facebook group prompted me to pull together all of the miscellaneous pieces of information I'd acquired on him over the years and to give some thought as to how they might fit together.  To be frank, the facts are few, and how they fit together is anyone's guess.  What follows are the facts I have and the guesses I've made from them.  If anyone has additional facts or different interpretations, please feel free to make use of the comments section.

Richard's first documented appearance in the colonies is in 1676, when Boston records show the birth of a son, John, to Richard and Ann Narramore on September 10th of that year.  As with Thomas and Hannah, no record of Richard and Ann's marriage exists, but also as with Thomas and Hannah, probate records supply key pieces of the missing information.  Specifically, the will of one William Waters, made in Boston in 1684, mentions real estate "which I have already made over to my three daughters for my life".   The daughters in question were Mary, wife of John Sellman; Urith, wife of John Nicks; and Ann, wife of Richard Narramore.  Keep the Nicks name in mind, as it will show up again later.

In November 1678, both Thomas and Richard appear on the list of those who took the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles II in Boston.  For what it's worth - possibly nothing - their names are greatly separated on the very long list.

Richard is in Boston tax records for both of the years 1687 and 1688.  It's hard to say without further research, but it doesn't appear that he lived in close proximity to Thomas (nor, again, is that necessarily significant).

Our first knowledge of Richard's occupation is gleaned from Suffolk county deeds, where he is mentioned in passing as being a ship captain.  Book 14 of the registry of deeds records that one John Bond, as surety for a debt owed to Nicholas Paige, pledged his half-interest in the ketch Sparrow to Paige.  The debt was to be repaid by the last day of May, 1687, or sooner, "if the ketch Sparrow, of which Richard Norrimore is master, returns before that time".

The return of the Sparrow to Boston in the summer of 1687 turned out to be a matter of great interest not just to Messrs. Bond and Paige, but to the royal authorities there as well.  The original records of what befell Captain Narramore and his passengers are to be found in the Massachusetts Archives (the so-called "Felt Collection", after the Rev. Joseph Felt who organized and assembled it), portions of which have appeared in various print sources, but the full story is best told in Dow and Edmond's "The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630 - 1730".  They do such a good job, in fact, that there is no need to attempt to retell it here, and the interested reader is instead simply referred to Google Books.   A reading of the events makes it clear that Richard was never himself suspected of piracy; instead, he was a ship-captain who in at least this one instance tried to make a little extra money on the side by providing discreet passage for a group of shady characters and their very probably ill-gotten gains. It is also interesting to note that two of the supposed pirates were said to have been dropped off at Damaris Cove, an island off the coast of what is now Maine, and the place from which Richard's in-laws hailed.

In any event, nothing of substance ever came of the matter and Richard was soon back at his normal trade.  Boston port records show the departure of the two-gun brigantine Resolution, captained by Richard Narramore with a crew of five, for South Carolina in October 1687.  But it may be that the piracy matter had left a bad taste for Richard in Boston, as the 1688 tax list is the last record we have of him there.

It is also at about this time, or just shortly afterward, that he begins showing up in the records of the then relatively new English settlement at Charleston, South Carolina.  Volume One of The Proprietary Records of South Carolina records a bill of sale from Edward Rawlings of Berkeley County, vintner, to Richard Norramore, mariner, for "a negro woman named Rose"; the sale price being thirty pounds and ten shillings sterling.  The date of the sale appears to have been in late 1690 or early 1691.

On June 15, 1693, Richard Norrimore and William Baker, mariners, sold the ketch Bristol, formerly called the Elizabeth, and "now lying before Charles Towne in Ashly River in Carolina, whereof . . . Richard Abram is now master" for the sum of 150 pounds.  It seems that Richard may have been moving up in the world, going from being a captain of vessels owned by others to a ship-owner himself.  Perhaps flush with this cash, Richard purchased (more of a long-term rental, actually) lots 143 and 144 at "Charles Towne" the following year.  In modern Charleston, these lots front on King Street, and comprise much of the area between Price's Alley and Ladson Street, including Weims Court.

One curiosity here is that although Richard is referred to as "of Carolina" and "of the county of Berkley in the said Province" in these records, his wife Ann seems never to have left Boston.  In any event, there is no record of her in the Carolinas, and in early 1692, right in the middle of the period that Richard was setting himself up in Charleston, we find Ann buying land on Hanover Street in Boston.  This is the last record we have of her until the settlement of her estate, in Boston, in 1700.

Another curiosity from this time period is the marriage of a Richard "Narrennore" and Ann Burden in Barbados in 1691.  Based on the long correspondence in the comments section below, I am pretty well persuaded that "Narrennore" is a mis-spelling of "Narramore", but am doubtful that this was the same Richard.  For all we know, he may well have had a woman in every port, but adultery seems far more likely than bigamy, especially given the close ties between Charleston, Barbados and Boston at that time.  Still, with the death of "Hannah Narrennore" (presumably the now-married Ann Burden) in Barbados early in 1692, there is no further mention of Barbados Richard, so the possibility that he and Charleston Richard were one and the same, though slim, still exists.

Following the ship sale and lot purchase, Richard makes two minor appearances in South Carolina court records, both in 1697.  In the first of these, he is described as "Commander of the Bridgateen Carrolina", while in the second, "cash monies received from Capt. Richard Norramore" are mentioned in an inventory of the estate of Robert Rhimer.  It is at this point that Richard exits from the written record.

Somewhere out on the internet (so of course it must be true) there is a supposed 1725 census of Charleston showing Richard Narramore as living there at that time.  Don't believe it.  Rather than being a 1725 census, it was instead taken from a list that was compiled in 1725 of the owners of the original lots in Charleston.  By 1725, only Richard's ghost would have been walking the streets of Charleston.  The evidence strongly suggests that he died not long after the last (1697) mention of him noted above.

This evidence is buried in amongst the probate records of Suffolk county, Massachusetts, where there is a sadly truncated file containing only a single document:  a petition of Urith Nix, sister of Ann Narramore, "late of Boston, widow", asking that administration of Ann's estate be granted to Ann's brother-in-law, John Dollen.  The petition is dated May 14, 1700.  The simplest explanation is that Richard died in 1698, give or take a few months, and that his widow Ann, who had probably remained in Boston with her sisters' family, herself died shortly afterwards.   That there is no mention of any children in the probate record is not conclusive, but it does tend to support the theory that the couple's only known son, John, was either himself dead or out of contact in England by that time.

It would thus seem that the first Narramore migration to South Carolina was of short duration, lasting only through the 1690s.  By the time of the Revolutionary War, there would be a new family of Narramores, headed by Edward Narramore, in the Kershaw District of the state, but that line's migration has now been definitively traced as being southward from North Carolina, where a William Narramore (probably Edward's father) can be found in records going back to the 1750s.

[Update:  10/31/2020]  So, it appears that Richard may not have been a genealogical dead-end after all.  A commenter who is the 7th-geat-grandson of a William Axson (1675 - 1733/4) of Charlestown SC notes that on June 17, 1730, William made a deed of gift to his son Thomas, chairmaker, of Towne lots 143 and 144, which his wife Mary had inherited from her brother, Richard Narramore.  These are the same lots that Captain Richard Narramore had originally purchased nearly 40 years earlier.  Based on this and information supplied by an earlier commenter, it now seems likely that Richard and Ann Narramore had at least three children:

• Richard.  Probably born c. 1670, married Ann Burden (or Hannah Borden) in Barbados in 1691.  She died there the following year.
• John.  Born in Boston in 1676.  Possibly died young; possibly the London shipwright "originally of Boston" who shows up in English Admiralty Court records in 1697/1698.
• Mary.  Probably born 1675 - 1680.  Married William Axson of Charlestown, SC, with whom she had at least one child, Thomas.  Died in Charlestown in the early 1730s.
  

This also seems to me to give more credibility to an alternate reading of the evidence:  namely, that the Richard Narramore who begins showing up in South Carolina and Barbados records in the early 1690s is actually the son of Richard and Ann (Waters) Narramore of Boston.  At the very least, it seems to provide a better explanation as to why the widow Ann Narramore remained in Boston.