Abigal Darling

https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LVGT-MKL/abigail-french-1709

Abigail French
Female
13 October 1709–Deceased

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Brief Life History of Abigail

When Abigail French was born on 13 October 1709, in Salem, Essex, Massachusetts, United States, her father, Humphrey French, was 46 and her mother, Abigail Hodgkins, was 43. She lived in Massachusetts, United States for about 16 years.

Parents

Humphrey French
Male
1662–1711

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Male

Abigail Hodgkins
Female
1665–1723

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Female

Siblings (11)

Abigail French
Female
1686–1693

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Female

Mary French
Female
1690–1696

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Female

Abigaile French
Female
1693–1708

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Female

William French
Male
1697–Deceased

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Male

Elizabeth French
Female
1698–1767

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Female

Deliverance French
Female
1701–1738

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Female

Mercy French
Female
1702–Deceased

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Female

Abigail French
Female
1708–Deceased

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Female

Humphrey French
Male
1708–Deceased

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Male

Abigail French
Female
1709–Deceased

•

Female

Elizabeth French
Female
1712–Deceased

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Female

https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LZBN-QPS/abigail-darling-1708...

Abigail French
Female
13 October 1709–Deceased

•

Brief Life History of Abigail

When Abigail French was born on 13 October 1709, in Salem, Essex, Massachusetts, United States, her father, Humphrey French, was 46 and her mother, Abigail Hodgkins, was 43. She lived in Massachusetts, United States for about 16 years.

Parents

Humphrey French
Male
1662–1711

•

Male

Abigail Hodgkins
Female
1665–1723

•

Female

Siblings (11)

Abigail French
Female
1686–1693

•

Female

Mary French
Female
1690–1696

•

Female

Abigaile French
Female
1693–1708

•

Female

William French
Male
1697–Deceased

•

Male

Elizabeth French
Female
1698–1767

•

Female

Deliverance French
Female
1701–1738

•

Female

Mercy French
Female
1702–Deceased

•

Female

Abigail French
Female
1708–Deceased

•

Female

Humphrey French
Male
1708–Deceased

•

Male

Abigail French
Female
1709–Deceased

•

Female

Elizabeth French
Female
1712–Deceased

•

Female

An amazing story about her and her family:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/175065094/abigail-french

Abigail French

BIRTH 27 Feb 1698 Deerfield, Franklin County, Massachusetts, USA

DEATH unknown

BURIAL Body lost or destroyed, Specifically: Could have been interned at any of multiple cemeteries

Caught up in the Deerfield raid which killed her mother and infant brother, she and two other sisters (English names Freedom and Martha) chose to remain with their captors and assimilate into their captors' cultures. A brother and her father, both named Thomas, instead returned quickly once allowed to do so (a ransom had been paid). Another sister delayed, waited for a while, then returned.

Of those who chose to remain, two sisters were adopted by French families. Abigail was instead said to have been adopted by the Kahnawake. They were a Mohawk "First Nation", which has cemeteries in the Montérégie area of Quebec, Canada. The southeast end of the Kahnawake cultural region, at the time of the capture, included parts of upper New York, NH and Maine.

The British later took over French Canada, marching the French soldiers out, with the native populations then going further into Canada. That could have happened in her lifetime, but we are not sure, as no one tracked the date of her end. Definitely after her life ended, the Americans would fight the British twice, in the Revolution and the War of 1812. The Americans firmed the shape of the Canadian border. They took final control of Detroit, fought for in both wars, as it had had an important fort that guarded a military route. Again, the wars by the Americans with the British occurred over a century after her birth, so she did not see them.

The Kahnawake Native Cemetery is also called the Caughnawaga Iroquois Cemetery. A Catholic cemetery is found as Cimetière Catholique de Kahnawake, County LaPrairie, Québec. That portion of Canada was under French control at the time, had a French population,plus considerable intermarriage between French men of a trapper/hunter/trader sort and native women who often were multilingual, able to assist their spouse in trading. The intermarriages produced a mixed people called Metis. However, Abigail never married.

Sources for birth dates and for the dates of the Deerfield raid story are covered at her sisters' links and her father's, so will not be repeated here.

Some on the French side said the sisters' adoptions were motivated by both the Native tribes and the Canadian French having lost so many of their own children from sicknesses brought in by the British settlers. Not all of the natives and allied French were as violent as seen in the raids. That view would be needed to account for the three adoptees not wanting to return, as the three were well-treated.

Assimilation was two-way. To get an idea of her mixed life, we can look at better-known people inside her adopting tribe. Their assimilation took a religious form. On the Protestant side was Joseph Brant. Unless Abigail died quite young, Jospeh's life as an early adult would have overlapped Abigail's ending years. On the Catholic side was Kateri. Daughter of a tribal chief, she died four decades before Abigail's birth. Busy setting new examples that others would follow, members of her churchwould honor those examples by calling her Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.

Chief Joseph Brant, following both Kateri and Abigail in time, was seen as an American enemy in the Revolution, due to his family siding with the British. Reared to be a Protestant missionary to the NY Indians, he was well-educated, at what became Dartmouth.

Kateri's ministers would hsve been those Jesuits who had learned the Mohawk language. They had developed a 12-letter alphabet to write things in Mohawk, everything from family wills to church songs. They had produced a Mohawk-French dictionary, handwritten in a time when printing presses were rare and expensive. Preservers of Mohawk today regret that no copies were published mechanically, the French government having been kicked out by the British, so no copies survived.

Kateri's style as a saint was neither the more typical martyr for her faith nor a caretaker of the young or sick or poor, though she did some caretaking. Her main style was that of the mystic saints, a type also seen among other long-lasting religions, for instance, some of the Buddhists. The mystics typically endured poverty and deliberately fasted, said to bring on inner thoughts that brought a healing of the soul, experiencing, often, a greater contentment afterward.

Due to poor vision, Kateri could not read or write, Braille not having been invented yet, so was the opposite of the later Capt. Brant. Thus, she left no journals behind, as done by some mystics. It was easy, then, both to twist things she was reported to have said, and also to know nothing that she said.

Those in her own faith wrote down her words to remember them. They saved remarks along mystic lines about having faith and making personal sacrifices to achieve a better state of mind.

Can you endure just about any disappointment "life throws at you" if you achieve the right state of mind? She had had much to endure.

When little, her mother was not known to her for long. Her people called the little girl Tekakwitha. If from her mother, the name possibly meant "one who puts things in order", a hope for the daughter's future. Her name could also have been imposed by her people after her mother's death, as it also means "one who gropes to find things" (one cause of a need to put things in order, to help her handle her newly poor eyesight).

Her baptismal name of Kateri, taken after rejecting a marriage proposal, was for use when among fellow Christians. "Kateri" was her people's way of saying Catherine. Since she chose her Christian name, we imagine her emulating a mystic Catherine. Was it Catherine of Sienna, who had set a much earlier example that Tekakwitha might have admired?

Kateri's mother was a Christian Algonquin captured by the Iroquois and given to a chief as his wife. As their daughter, of a Christian captive and of a non-Christian Iroquois chief, Tekakwitha was born in upstate NY in 1656. Had her parents lived past her fifth birthday, she might have "walked a precarious line" if trying to please two opposites.

Abigail French was also said to have lived in upper NY, for at least a time, among Chief Brant's future tribe, very near the future town of Fonda, where Kateri's uncle had moved. Was Abigail traded to them by her capturing tribe? None of Abigail's locations given by tradition are verifiable by surviving records after 1710 or so. The Deerfield raid and capture is documented, as well as a ransom attempt to pay for their return two years later, as were stories saved about her and two sisters' refusal to return. Did they like life better where they had gone?

Abigail had much to endure earlier. She was captured at age 6-7, depending on how the old dates are counted, taken away with other Puritans, young and old. Those not able to walk were killed rather than leaving them to starve or freeze, but that was felt as brutality by both the young and old eyes watching, as something horrifying, not merciful.

They were taken away from their home, which was Deerfield, Mass., on the Connecticut River, north of larger Northampton. A tad closer to Canada, Deerfield was accordingly a more dangerous place. None of the Massachusetts towns along the Connecticut River were totally safe, however. According to French Canadian historians, five of the Puritan towns had been "plopped down" on still active native villages left temporarily empty by their rightful owners. Garden land was used seasonally by natives, who were off hunting and trapping in the hills in off-seasons. Had land already been cleared by them for planting on their return? The sites wrongly appeared empty when settlers arrived? If so, both sets were surprised in an unpleasant way.

Wasn't the year 1704? Heavy snow drifts and a sleeping guard let the native attackers climb over defending walls and into the sleeping town. Those caught, not killed or escaping, were forcibly marched through snow to Canada. She would have seen people die in the raid and along the trip to Canada, including her mother and her infant brother.

Tekakwitha had lost her parents and brother as well, also while young, at age four. The cause was smallpox, brought in by the British whites. Luckier than the rest, she was able to survive. The disease did not kill her, but left her scarred and semi-blind.

An uncle followed her father in the position of chief. Not Christian either, the uncle chief reportedly despised the Jesuit missionaries, or Black Robes, as they were called. Her uncle honored treaties made with the French, however, so could not ask the French clergy to leave. He was kind when consenting after one missionary asked that they instruct her in her mother's faith.

A mere nine years before her birth, before the treaties, their Iroquois warriors had scalped two Jesuit fathers, so kindness was not always an option. The number converting quickly to Christianity was thus noticeably small at the time, grew later. Tekakwitha's continued conversion took courage in the face of her uncle's on-and-off opposition. She would take a stand later, by refusing her uncle's request for her to marry a Mohawk brave she did not love. Following her mother's old example, she soon after asked the missionaries for baptism. Trying to abide by new laws, she refused to work on Sundays. In retaliation, her family refused to feed her on Sundays. In further retaliation by her tribe, they treated her as a slave. However, one of those training her in her new Christian ways was an older Iroquois woman (left unnamed), so she was not totally alone.

Perhaps not liking the idea of arranged marriages, perhaps for religious reasons, Tekakwitha decided never to marry, forever to remain virginal. That decision was not then common among native women.

To fully live the life she chose, she had to flee.

The semi-blind young woman left in July to head to Canada. Able to sense sunshine and some shapes, it took her much longer than it would others with full sight. She must have had a natural liking for the woods, having sought solace there before, knew how to gather food and find drink along a familiar path traveled before with family? She must have had help from fellow travelers or trappers/hunters along the way? Perhaps she could feel markings left in tree trunks intended to guide travelers along a trail?

Not able to travel quickly, reports by others say it took her two months to travel from the Fonda area of NY, where her uncle had relocated, through wilderness, headed for a Catholic mission at Sault Saint-Louis. That mission was near to the city of Montreal. She would take her first communion bread there. That was 1677. She died there, April 17, 1680, perhaps weakened by too much fasting, not the first among the mystics to die unexpectedly young.

Two decades later, Abigail's surviving family was taken to Montreal. After an added decade, her two sisters remaining there married French men. They married well by their day's standards, with at least one person in each couple able to read and write. In one case, both husband and wife were well-educated beyond that level. If taken to upper NY, was Abigail French able to return to Montreal to see her sisters? Not having nuns who taught, were they not yet to the point of letting young women teach young girls? Were letters sent from Canada's New France read to her by someone else? Were letters dent from New England?

Sons of one sister by a French husband later made a visit southward. They went, not to NY (had she already died?), but to New England, to see Puritan relatives. Was mention ever made of the New Englanders making a similar visit to Canada? We hope that was done, in the spirit of reconciling differences.

Abigail was captured two generations too late to have grown up with Tekawitha. She could have met people remembering her and saw in Kateri's life something worth copying. Remember, neither married, even though that was expected in the native culture.

Varied Mohawks/Iroquois assimilated in varying degrees to European ways. They were exposed to different Europeans, so had different ideas. Those closer to Montreal became Catholic due to French influence. Some others, well below the Great Lakes, or down by the Ohio River, became Protestant instead, due to British influence. Whether or not they chose to assimilate, their survival then became increasingly difficult as the settlers' frontier moved west.

If Abigail went to live with Chief Brant's people soon after capture, it was four decades before that Chief's birth. The religious influence would be Calvinist. He was born along the Muskingum River (in the larger Ohio River Valley?) in March of 1743. Thy lived in what became Ohio until his widowed mother took her children eastward, perhaps along the Great Lakes or the Ohio, to upstate NY. He was not born a Mohawk chief, too low in status initially. His parents had descended of Wyandots enslaved by the Mohawks, perhaps in his great-grandparents' era.

However, adapting to a different culture was something already familiar to his parents, said to have already turned Christian, with European names Peter and Margaret. He was sent to a school in Lebanon, Conn., of a Puritan/Calvinist nature, highly segregated, just for boys, specifically just for native boys. Due to distance , it was boarding school, like the monasteries of old, like the colleges of the future. Some say the bright Joseph Brant was sent there by Sir William Johnson, the local large landlord, of which upstate eastern NY had too many. Others say the future Chief Brant was brought to the school by a its organizing minister. Some said the minister's church would be Congregational once the British Puritans split apart and began naming denominations. Others said Brant converted to the Church of England while there (routinely called the King's Church in some places then, called the Anglican Church), Brant's school was called Moor's Indian Charity School. Was "charity" used in the condemning way that some moderns see it today, treating students as inferior "charity cases"? Or, was it meant in the original sense, as caritas, a love or caring for others that meant valuing them and wanting the best for them and not just yourself? If he converted, it seems likely the latter was the case.

What boded well? Under that minister, the school began turning into modern Dartmouth. Brant learned, not just to read and write, but to reason and to communicate with intellect. He could talk to British diplomats and govt. officials at their level, while "walking a line" in order to stay accepted by his own people and British-loyal commoners and tenant farmers.

A British minister had given the NY Mohawks a prayer book in their own language by 1769, according to some old history books. It appeared maybe 100 years later than the Jesuit's Mohawk-French dictionary and song-writings? It could be slowly and laboriously machine-printed and bound and then distributed? Even though books in 1769 were still expensive, so novels might be broken apart into printed leaflets and purchased in a series of installments, it was now not impossible for each native camp to own a full hardbound prayer book written in Mohawk?

Abigail French, if still living with his NY tribe, would have been 70-ish by then. He would have been 26.

He was obviously brilliant at war, earned the title of chief in the "Seven Years War" of the Brits against the French, endorsed /financed in part by the big landlord in the local county, Sir Wm. Johnson. Called Chief Thayendanegea by his own people, the blossoming young man would be known as Capt. Joseph Brant to the British. Brant had already made close friendships with Johnson's sons and son-in-law. He could go back and forth between both worlds, native and British, giving him more power than normal. Sir William Johnson would become his chief ally militarily. Ties and military alliances strengthened further after widower Sir Johnson married the Chief's sister, as his second wife. Called Molly as her British name, the Mohawks knew her as "matron of the Wolf clan".

Johnson died in 1774, when Brant was 31. His sister Molly made herself "an Iroquois leader in her own right". The emerging Americans were making fighting noises as they intruded in to upper class British land, plantation like in size but with tenants instead of slaves, land more like fertile Pennsylvania than the too-rocky stuff dominant in New England?

With their more diplomatic father gone, Johnsons' sons began to declare sides. One refused to join the local "Patriot militia" of the emerging Americans and fled to Canada to avoid the retribution.

Chief Brant, or Thayendanegea, has been described as a missionary among his other roles. While Capt. Brant served as a military strategist, was he simultaneously expected by his church and boyhood teachers to be a missionary to the other Indians? Some (not all) among the New England Puritans regularly mixed war with religion. (Those in Roxbury, Mass., were among the exceptions, sponsoring and protecting the Praying Indians on a small reservation until they could no longer do so, as the rest would not allow it. The rest gathered many up to ship them off as slaves in the Caribbean, as part of the Revolutionary effort to gain land along with freedom.) Most (not all) saw and heard no admonition "to turn the other cheek" when selecting the Bible lines they preferred. They could be seen in a modern light as being selective inside their very own religion, citing too much from the Old Testament and ignoring too little from the New. Did Brant do the same?

According to some historians, the NY Mohawk natives divided by age about what to do next. The older sachems wanted peace and neutrality in the coming war between Brits and Revolutionaries. The young of warrior age had become angry and wanted changes, to stop encroaching settlers from taking more of their lands and thus their children's futures. Yet, they were not sure of the British govt.'s loyalty to their cause. Using Brant's fighting strategies, the young Mohawk natives would be on the British side, against the emerging Americans in 1776, by which time Capt. Brant was 33. The young war parties were a mix of British-loyal settlers and of natives, some or many of the latter at least partly Europeanized. They worked, for example, with a British commander stationed at Niagara. Their war party lost status with everyone, however, after making too many errors at Cherry Valley, NY, judged as unnecessarily brutal by many, native and British. Brant had personally tried to prevent the massacre there, so would be able to rebuild his own status later.

They did lose, however.

Once the British side started to lose the Revolution, clear around 1782, its terms of peace were not negotiated until spring, 1783. People who had stayed obviously loyal to the King was declared "inimical" by the patriots. Many retreated back into Canada. His tribes' farms and towns in upstate NY, many European in style by then, were lost due to confiscation by the Americans.

Thayendanegea would die decades later, at the head of Lake Ontario, on the Canada side, in a place to be called Burlington later. Inside Canada, he thus lived nearer to English-speaking Ottawa and Toronto than to French-speaking Quebec and Montreal.

The British government compensated them afterwards for their losses. The amount dictated by perceived loyalty to the Brits, not by the size of a native tribe's total loss. More British-loyal, the Mohawks would be compensated better than were others among the original Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. He died, not as a saint, as he had not rejected violence as a solution nor died for his faith. He was, in that way, an ordinary man. Yet, he was still a chief, brave and smart, the one who tried to stop the Cherry Valley massacre, perhaps guided by his faith then, a man that history remembers for those reasons.

Abigail French's death date and place and assimilated Indian name are unknown. If her native parents adopted her after their own children had died, then took good care of her in her youth, causing her to not return, we can imagine her caring for them in their old age. Being their sole caretaker might explain her not marrying? Was Kateri's choice described to her? Or, did Abigail simply die young?

SOME GOOD SOURCES

On assimilated St. Kateri: Kateri.org/saint%20kateri.htm

On assimilated Capt. Brant: (1) OhioHistoryCentral.org/w/Thayendanegea (simple) (2) WampumChronicles.com/josephbrant.html (complex*)

On Mohawk language: Kanienkeha.net/the-mohawk-language-standardisation-project/

• Note on Wampum Chronicles article:

"THE MYTH OF THE LOYALIST IROQUOIS: Joseph Brant and the Invention of a Canadian Tradition"

by James Paxton, Queen's University (Presented at the Iroquois Research Conference on October 6, 2002)

Parents
Thomas French 1657–1733

Mary Catlin French 1666–1704

Siblings

Mary French 1684–1684

Thomas French 1689–1759

Marie-Francoise (Freedom) French 1692–1757

Marthe-Marguerite French 1695–1762
John French 1704–1704

4 OF ABIGAIL FRENCH

Abigaile4 FRENCH

Abigaile4 was born in 1709 in Salem, Essex co., MA

and was baptized there in December 1709[12]. It looks like this one lived. 11. x.

Abigaile3 FRENCH

Abigaile3 was born on 22 June 1708 in Salem, Essex co., MA[7]

and died before December 1709 when Abigaile4 was born. 10. ix.

Abigaile2 FRENCH

Abigaile2 was born on 28 September 1693 in Salem, Essex co., MA[7]

and died before 22 June 1708 when Abigaile3 was born. 5. iv.

Abigaile3 FRENCH

Abigaile3 was born on 22 June 1708 in Salem, Essex co., MA[7]

and died before December 1709 when Abigaile4 was born. 10. ix.