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Dobbs Family Genealogy By Margaret Lane

Below is a link to the Lane Genealogy of the Dobbs family of Dobbs Ferry.     Please note that she incorrectly starts the story at Barren Island Brooklyn.  The family was never there.   The family first shows up in the historic record in Manhattan in 1680, applying for a liquor license and leasing a salt marsh on the East River near William Merritt’s farm.  Merritt was Mary Dobbs’s brother.   The Dobbses probably operated a tavern at his farm, since it was on the main road north out of lower Manhattan and since that’s what you do with a liquor license.  Merritt himself did not live there, but bought the farm around the time of the liquor license application.  He had his “great house” on Broad Street and was a major player in the city’s political and economic life.  The farm was near today’s China Town, north and a little east of today’s City Hall, near Collect Pond.

Lane also was unaware of the family’s connection to Great Barent Island (today’s Wards Island) in the East River.   Confusion between the “Great Barent” name and the “Barren Island” name led to the myth that the family came from Barren Island.   The “Great” was often dropped and “Barent” morphed into “Barn” as it passed from ear to mouth in a time of much less written communication, non-standardized spelling, great language diversity (Dutch and English) and bad handwriting.  And the bad handwriting in old records written by Dutchmen made “Barren,”  “Barent,” and “Barn” indistinguishable.   Making matters even more confusing, Barren Island was sometimes called “Barn Island” also, for all the same reasons.

What actually happened is that two of Mary Dobbs’s sons (Walter and William) married two of the Parcell family daughters.   The Parcell family owned Great Barent Island.   The marriage records misled historians.   And the fact that William’s wife was identified as Catherine Slot, not Catherine Parcell (or Parsell), also helped to hide the connection.   “Slot” must have been a married name and she must have been a widow.   But, I found a deed for land in lower Manhattan from daddy Parsell to William and Catherine where he identifies her as his daughter.

In her old age, Mary Dobbs moved to “Barn” Island in the East River with Walter and his wife and that’s where she was identified as having lived when her death notice reached the newspaper.  Historians leaped to the wrong conclusion about which island was referred to.  They probably didn’t even know Wards Island had been called Barn Island.

But the whole Barn Island thing, even once I untangled which island that was, turned out to be a side show.  One son lived there and Mary moved there only in extreme old age.    The main events of the Dobbs family saga in the 1600s played out on Manhattan Island, as shown by many many sightings in the historical record   (the lease, the liquor license, Walter Dobbs being a constable in Manhattan, Mary owning a house in Manhattan and marrying a second time after Walter’s death, again in Manhattan to a man who then became a constable in Manhattan as Walter had been, Mary owning a house in Manhattan, and son William owning property in Manhattan as well).

With those corrections now summarized, I give you the link to the Lane document:   http://quickreference.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Lane-DobbsGenealogy.pdf

Jim Luckett

 

A Dobbs Eye View of Dobbs Ferry by Margaret Travis Lane

Dobbs Eye View

In this article, the late Margaret Travis Lane, a descendant of John Dobbs (the first Dobbs man in Dobbs Ferry) details a lot of family history, particularly the story of Capt. John King and his wife Eliza Ann Dobbs.  Please click the link above.

The Story of the Dobbs Family and their Ferry (With Sources) – Part 1: The Barren Island Myth

By Jim Luckett   About The Author

Introduction

Dobbs Ferry, NY is a village on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 20 miles north of midtown Manhattan, with a long and interesting history.   It is named for the ferry service from there to Palisades, NY (a.k.a. Snedens Landing)  on the west bank, directly opposite.  The ferry began sometime around 1700 (no one knows for sure when) and ran through at least 1944. The end date is also murky — the boat sank in 1944, but records indicate the operators were at least trying to operate it in 1945 and only gave up completely in 1946.  Among its passengers were John and Sam Adams (for sure), Martha Washington (most probably) and Laurence Olivier (likely, since he took flying lessons at Dobbs Ferry while living at Snedens Landing)

Members of the Dobbs family started the ferry.  Yet for most of its life it was Snedens operating it, based on the west bank.  The two families were intertwined and perhaps joined by marriage.  I set myself the task of researching and writing the history of the Dobbs family and their ferry, starting as far back as possible, well before they came to the site of the future village .  The result is a series of articles in the village historical newletter, The Ferryman, that begins with the Fall 2019 issue.

There isn’t room in a newsletter article to say much about sources.   So in this online article, and others to follow, I will provide the references to back up what I say in The Ferryman articles.  I’ll also use this space to elaborate on some of the storylines and fun details that would not fit in the newsletter.  There is not an exact correspondence between the articles here and the articles as they appeared in the Ferryman.  You can go to the table of contents on this site (Quickreference.info) and see the listing of Dobbs historical articles I have written here.    In addition, I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet, sorted by date, which just lists sources, with links.

I’ll do the references in these articles with hyperlinks rather than sending you to the library, so you can just click on a link to jump right into the source. I hope you catch some of the thrill of research and discovery that I felt as I amassed this information and figured out the many puzzles it presented. Please leave a comment!

Of course, others have researched and written up the same subject before me, but I found much that others have written is incorrect. And no one before seems to have pieced together the story I unearthed of their lives in Manhattan and elsewhere, in addition to Dobbs Ferry.  This makes it doubly important that I show my sources. Unfortunately, most previous writers on this subject have not revealed their sources.

For the work of others on Dobbs History, see below (bearing in mind I don’t agree with some of the facts they present):

Historian Jean Fritz in the 1990s wrote a 3-part series in The Ferryman on the Dobbs family and the ferry. Wonderful articles, despite some inaccuracies, including the Dobbs-on-Barren-Island myth. http://dobbsferryhistory.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/026-1993_November.pdf and http://dobbsferryhistory.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/027-1994_March.pdf and http://dobbsferryhistory.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/028-1994_May.pdf

The Dobbs Ferry Register newspaper in the 1950s published a history of the village and it is available online at this URL (note: This website is frequently down, so keep trying): http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper%2017/Dobbs%20Ferry%20NY%20%20Register/Dobbs%20Ferry%20NY%20%20Register%201954-1958/Dobbs%20Ferry%20NY%20%20Register%201954-1958%20-%200076.pdf

Robert Bolton, a 19th century historian, is the source of much misinformation on the Dobbs family and the ferry. If you read somewhere that John Dobbs (or more likely “Jan Dobbs”) was a Swede, and that his son Jeremiah Dobbs was the first ferryman, those errors trace back to Bolton. See: pp 181-182,  https://archive.org/stream/historyofcountyo01bolt/historyofcountyo01bolt_djvu.txt  (highly inaccurate!) Margaret Lane (see next entry) took on the task of debunking of Bolton in her article “They Say Dobbs Ain’t Melodious.” [You’re going to land in a fanciful poem about Dobbs Ferry when you open this link. The Lane article comes after that, on p. 77].

Margaret King Lane was a Dobbs descendant who wrote in the 1970s about the family history based on oral tradition in her family and on her own genealogical research. She died in 1997.  See: Lane Dobbs Genealogy. Her grandfather was Captain John King, who operated a sloop on the Hudson, based at Dobbs Ferry, and her grandmother was Eliza Ann Dobbs. The sloop was named the “Eliza Ann.” [Interesting sidelights — Dr. Harold A. Storms, beloved physician of Dobbs Ferry who practiced medicine there for nearly 40 years, until his death in 1957, was also a grandchild of Captain King and Eliza Ann, and therefore Margaret Lane’s cousin.  (I remember raising money as a child in Dobbs Ferry for the Dr. Storm’s Memorial Fund by having a lemonade stand on Grandview Ave. and Bellwood Ave.)  In addition to operating his sloop, Captain King had a pickle factory in Ardsley. Ardsley was originally named “Ashford” after Capt. King’s birthplace in England, but that name now only survives on the name of the avenue connecting Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley.   More on this: http://www.ardsleyhistoricalsociety.org/assets/pdf/ArdsleyHistoricalSocietyVol26No2.pdf and https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/king/13865/]

Grenville MacKenzie researched and wrote about Westchester history, including Dobbs, in the mid-20th century. His work is  in the files of the Westchester Historical Society and is frequently cited. Unfortunately, he gives no sources and there are errors in his work. I think it is quite likely he was the first writer to make the mistake of placing the Dobbs family on Barren Island, and the myth propagated from there. See: “The Settlement of Phillipsburgh” and “The English Families of Philipse Manor in Westchester County, New York” of which I here make available the cover page and the pages covering the Dobbs family (pp. 216-218).  Margaret Lane wrote that MacKenzie was at one time a Dobbs Ferry resident, and so my mind immediately sought to connect him to James Cameron MacKenzie, who founded the MacKenzie School for Boys in Dobbs Ferry in 1901 (sold to Mother Cabrini in 1913), but my research finds no such connection and in fact places him in Connecticut for almost his whole life.

Snedens Landing history is covered by Alice Munro Haagensen, in this 1986 work: http://www.hudsonrivervalley.org/library/pdfs/articles_books_essays/palisades_and_snedens_landing.pdf

A Story of 3 Islands

The true story of the Dobbs family before Dobbs Ferry is a story of three islands:

(1) Barren Island in Brooklyn, where they were not, but where most writers mistakenly say they were in the 1600s.

(2) Barn Island in the East River off Harlem, where some of the family went in the early 1700s, when others went to the future Dobbs Ferry and the future Sneden’s Landing on the opposite bank of the Hudson from Dobbs Ferry. The Barn/Barren name similarity gave rise to the myth that they had been on Barren Island. Barn Island is today’s Wards Island.

(3) And Manhattan Island, where they definitely were living, from at least 1680 until about the end of the 1600s (and for some, much longer), and where a richly detailed story lay waiting for me to discover in land records, city council meeting minutes and other historic documents. It was my pleasurable adventure to discover this story and piece it together and will soon be my pleasure to share it with you as more articles in this series are published.

So, the first task here is to prove with sources that they were never on Barren Island, Brooklyn.  Everyone else says they were.  I say they were not.  Check my sources and my logic and see if you agree with me, or with the consensus of other writers.

It’s not easy to prove a negative. The best method would be if I could prove they were somewhere else, which I can do from 1680 onward, when they first appear in Manhattan records, but I have to use other methods to prove they were not on Barren Island prior to 1680. Fortunately, that’s possible, because I can cite sources indicating Barren Island was uninhabited in the 1600s. Moreover, it was owned by one man, Elbert Elbertsen, living in the nearby town of Flatlands, who brooked no trespassers and had no tenants on it. It is our extraordinary good fortune that Elbertsen left clear documentary evidence of these facts.

A. References Debunking the Myth that the Dobbs Family Once Lived on Barren Island in Brooklyn:

1) Barren Island in modern times was incorporated into Floyd Bennet Field, a naval air station. The following reference is a master’s thesis tracing the history of the area and the following quote is from page 5:

“Floyd Bennett Field is located in the tidal estuary of Jamaica Bay. Prior to construction, the area of Floyd Bennett Field was comprised of approximately fifteen small islands separated by several creeks, bays and channels. Barren Island was one of the largest in the coastal island system of Jamaica Bay. As its name suggests, Barren Island was a flat, expansive island. While
settlers occupied the city of Brooklyn, Barren Island went uninhabited until c. 1800, when a private resident opened a hotel to accommodate local fishermen. Industrial development emerged soon after.”

The island was uninhabited until 1800, according to the above. Therefore, the Dobbs family did not live there in the 1600s and 1700s, if this writer is correct.

http://www.esf.edu/cclp/documents/Cody_Balancing_Past_Present.pdf page 5 This is admittedly a secondary source, but it is a scholarly work and a good overview.

The early facts as told in the above reference are corroborated by this source:

p. 14 – 15. Begin at the subhead “Barren Island” toward the end of p. 14 https://archive.org/stream/historyoftownoff00dubo#page/n33

(Above) Map showing where Barren Island was. I say “was” because it has been substantially altered and connected to Long Island with land fill to make Floyd Bennet Field, a naval air station.

Story of the Dobbs Family and Their Ferry Part 2 (with sources)

Below we resume the story of the Dobbs Family.  Part II focuses on the family members who moved to Barn Island (today’s Wards Island), giving rise to the mistake historians made placing them on Barren Island.  See Part 1 elsewhere on this site.  Note that the division into parts here does not line up with the division into articles of my series in The Ferryman newsletter.   I had to divide these online articles based on technical constraints.  Just to be crystal clear about chronology, the events in this section are happening simultaneously with young John Dobbs and/or his offspring operating the ferry in its early years.  A topic we will cover later.   If you are enjoying this series, please leave a comment!

B. References Showing Some of the Dobbs Family Moved to Barn Island In the East River (Wards Island)

Overview

If I were going in chronological order, I would be giving Manhattan references before Barn Island references. But I focus next on Barn Island, because the natural question after disproving the Barren-Island-Brooklyn myth is, “If they weren’t there, why do so many writers say they were?”

Let me give you a highly-condensed summary of what took place:  The Dobbs children grew up in Manhattan while their uncle, William Merritt (brother of their mother Mary Dobbs) rose to wealth and power in Manhattan society. He was on the anti-Leislerite side in Leisler’s Rebellion which gripped the province 1688-90 and was even jailed for a time.  After Leisler was hanged in 1690, Merritt  resumed his  rise to power, attaining the mayor’s office 1695-98.  When the Leislerites returned to power with the appointment of a pro-Leislerite royal governor in 1698, Uncle William left the city for Orange County (today’s Rockland County) and much of the Dobbs/Merritt family dispersed.  Mary’s husband Walter had died on Manhattan and so had her second husband Nathaniel Pittman. Her son John Dobbs moved to the future Dobbs Ferry, opposite his uncle William Merritt.   Merritt built his house “Cheer Hall” at the future Snedens Landing (Palisades, NY).  John’s sister Mary also moved to the future Dobbs Ferry as Mary Dobbs Hughson. John’s brother William stayed in Manhattan, working as a shoemaker, Sexton of Trinity Church (the Episcopal Church his Uncle William helped found), street cleaner and public bellman (watchman). John’s other brother Walter Jr. moved to Barn Island and married Eda Parsell, of the Parsell family that owned that well-located and fertile island in the East River off Harlem. His brother William (the shoemaker I just mentioned) married another of the Parsell girls, Catherine, who was by then Catherine Slot, a widow. Their boys’ mother Mary Dobbs went to live on Barn Island with, or near, Walter and Eda, and that is where she died in 1737 at age 104 (or so it was reported in the newspaper of the day).

Historians saw the marriage records listing brides from some island that looked on the page to be variants of “Barren Island,” and listing Walter as being from that same island, and saw the newspaper story about Mary’s death on “Barn Island,” and leaped to a wrong conclusion — wrong on two counts:

(a) Where these marriages and this death took place in the 1700s is not where the family lived in the 1600s (they lived in Manhattan, as I will show in Part 3) and

(b) the island in question was today’s Wards Island in the East River off Harlem, not Barren Island Brooklyn.

Barren Island was sometimes called “Barn Island.” Probably, those making this mistake did not know there was another “Barn Island” in the 1700s, and so did not hesitate to place the family on Barren Island. Had the East River Island kept the name “Barn” instead of being renamed “Wards” historians probably would not have made the mistake.

Of course, I can’t just tell you all this. I have to prove it with citations to primary sources. I am up against many respected historians whose writings contradict what I have just told you, placing the Dobbs family on Barren Island in Brooklyn as their first landing spot in the New World and their home many decades thereafter. To prove them wrong, I have to show a strong connection of the Dobbs family to the Parsell family and a strong connection of the Parsell family to Barn Island in the East River, and show all the clues that led other writers to Barren Island, actually lead more plausibly to Barn Island (Wards Island).  I have already shown (in Part 1) the story of them being on Barren Island is highly implausible given other facts about that desolate place.

The Sources:

(1) Let’s begin this story of the Dobbs Family on Barn Island at the end, with Mary Dobbs’s death notice. The article appeared in the New York Gazette with the dateline of March 22, 1737 but in an issue that is indexed online with the date March 15, 1737 (go figure!). Here’s the link to the beginning of the article (very bottom of page 3 of the newspaper) http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84024358/1737-03-15/ed-1/seq-3/ And here is the link to the continuation at very top of page 4 of the newspaper http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84024358/1737-03-15/ed-1/seq-4/
The article is so fascinating, I want to reproduce it below and save you the trouble of clicking through on the links:

The sister who is 102 years old and who can walk from one end of New York City to the other “without a stick in her hand” would be Sarah, first married to Ed Meekes and later to Henry Crabbe and widowed again. Sarah appears regularly in our story, getting remarried in Manhattan at the same time Mary does in 1689, moving to Orange County with her brother William Merritt around 1698, and withnessing baptisms of some of the Dobbs children who were her grand nieces and grand nephews at the Tarrytown Dutch Reformed church. That she is back in Manhattan, at a spry 102 years old going about her daily outings, is interesting. Also note the reference to Sarah’s and Mary’s brother William Merritt, former mayor.

(Above) Screenshot from a distance-measuring website shows Wards Island is 7.1 miles from downtown Manhattan (today’s City Hall). In Part 1 we showed the equivalent map for Barren Island, with a distance of 13 miles.

Note: The article says that Mary died on Barn Island, 7 miles from the city, not Barren Island, 13 miles from the city. We know “Barren Island” was sometimes called “Barn Island,” but no slip of the tongue is going to move Barren Island 6 miles closer to Manhattan to make it fit the location this 1737 Newspaper article assigned to her abode.  Also note that, while legally New York City incorporated the whole island of Manhattan and Barn Island as well, in common speech and writing at the time, “the city” was the urban area at the tip of Manhattan.   Most of the rest of Manhattan was either wild or farms, with small village-like settlements at the Bowery and Harlem.  As late as 1749, there were only about 1800 houses on the entire island of Manhattan, and fewer than 10% of those (131) were north of the Bowery.

This seems like a good spot for some pictures of old New York in the 1700s to help you put yourself in the scene, and appreciate why “the city” meant only the southern tip of Manhattan.

(2) Now let’s look at the marriage record for Walter Dobbs Jr. and Eda Parsell:

This is a record in the Manhattan Dutch Reformed Church for Nov. 21, 1707. Please note something I will have to say repeatedly in later installments: Church records (and many other records of early New York) were written by Dutchmen, and whether written in Dutch or English, these men heard names through Dutch ears and processed them through Dutch brains that Dutchified the pronounciation and therefore the spelling. Spelling was anarchic back then, even of names — even of your own name. You didn’t spell your own name the same way every time your wrote it ( 6 signatures of Shakespeare survive and no two are spelled the same way, not even the three of them that appear on his will, and none are spelled the way I just did) and you certainly did not correct anyone else’s spelling. So “Dobbs” in original historic records is rendered “Dopse,” “Dops,” “Dob,” “Dobs,” “Dop,” etc. and island names are similarly free form.  (This certainly lessens the value of electronic word search and this one factor alone probably doubled the time it took me to do the research for this project!)

You can find these marriage records in the original image like this on Ancestry.com (membership required), bearing in mind the caveat above about name spellings. https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=6961&h=2577396&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=uoh449&_phstart=successSource

I will translate the above marriage record for you: “Walter Dobbs, single man (J.M.), of Barn Island and Eda Parsell single woman (J.D.) of Barn Island”
(For how to translate Dutch marriage records see https://www.olivetreegenealogy.com/nn/trans.shtml )

(3) How do I know this is Walter Dobbs jr. and Eda Parsell and that Eda is the daughter of Thomas Parsell who owned Barn Island? Many ways, but let’s start with

(a) the abstract of the will of Thomas Parsell, which confirms Walter Dobbs married Eda Parsell :

” Thomas Pearsall.

“Of Spectacle Island, otherwise called Harts
Island.” Leaves Legacy to son Nicholas. Leaves
to son Henry, “a certain Island called Spectacle
Island or Harts Island, situate in the Sound, in the
Manor of Pelham.”

Legacies to son John, and daughters Eda wife of
Walter Dobbs, and Hannah wife of John Lanyon.
Makes Thomas Pell and Hermanns Rutsen, and son
John executors.
Witnesses.
johanes roelofsen
Jane Francis
Dated April 20, 1723.
Proved April 6, 1732.
Liber 1 1. P. 229. “

You can find the above here, in the Abstracts of wills of Early Westchester: https://archive.org/stream/earlywillsofwest00pel/earlywillsofwest00pel_djvu.txt

Don’t be confused by the reference to Hart’s Island (a.k.a. Spectacle Island) in Long Island sound. He liked islands. After raising his kids on Barn Island in the East River, he bought and moved to Hart’s Island and left the adult children to have Barn Island.

So the above corroborates my translation of the marriage record.

(b) The above-named son John Parsell’s 1751 will, in New York Will Abstracts, is instructive because he identifies his home as “Barn Island.”
Abstracts of wills on file in the Surrogate’s office: city of New York page 371, Liber 18
https://books.google.com/books/content?id=Aj8GAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA371&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U06WVp1sU23d26ki-gCIq8aXF8d5g&ci=95%2C1320%2C749%2C126&edge=0
And we know from other sources that John Parsell bought the northern half of today’s Wards Island from his father, while the southern half went to a Parsell daughter and her husband.

(c) And here we have the 1705 record of William Dobbs, brother of Walter Jr., marrying the widow Catherina Slot, whom I discovered was Eda Parsells’s sister, through deed research on a transaction between her father and her. The Dobbs brothers marrying Parsell sisters reinforces the inference that the boys’ mother, Mary Dobbs, would live on the island the Parsells owned, surrounded by family, not on desolate Barren Island.

Translation: William Dobbs, single man of New York [City] Catherina Slot, widow, lives on G. Beer Island [not sure what the symbols at the far right of the first line mean, but I think they mean “married June 12”, the date in the far left margin being not the wedding date but the date the banns were published]
The image is from Ancestry.com (membership required) and if you are searching for it, here’s a tip: It is indexed under “Catharina Stot” and “William Sops”
https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/6961/43103_356289-01164/902577282?backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.com%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3fdb%3dNYDutchChurch%26gss%3dsfs28_ms_db%26new%3d1%26rank%3d1%26msT%3d1%26gsln%3dstot%26gsln_x%3d0%26msydy%3d1690%26msypn__ftp%3dNew%2520York%2520City%252C%2520New%2520York%252C%2520USA%26msypn%3d1652382%26msypn_PInfo%3d8-%257C0%257C1652393%257C0%257C2%257C0%257C35%257C0%257C0%257C1652382%257C0%257C0%257C%26msypn_x%3d1%26msypn__ftp_x%3d1%26MSAV%3d1%26uidh%3dve6&backlabel=ReturnSearchResults

What is the “G.” in the name of Catherina’s home island? It stands for “Great.” As we will get into later, the island was first named “Great Barent Island” after a very big Dane named Barent who tended livestock on it. The “Barent” morphed into “Barn” but was variously written as “Baron,” “Baern,” “Barnes,” etc. along the way. Today’s Randolph Island was smaller and, being right next to Great Barent it became “Little Barent” or “Little Barn” and that reverberated into Great Barent sometimes being called “Big Barn Island.” And so it went in an age with many illiterate people, and many people of many different native languages and accents living in close proximity, and no standardized spelling of anything.

So this further cements our perception of a strong connection between the Dobbs and Parsell families. It is also interesting because history has a keen interest in a son of this couple, another William Dobbs, because he served George Washington well as a spy and ship’s pilot during the revolution and was praised by General Washington in letters. No writer has previously to my knowledge figured out that his mother was a Parsell and his father was a shoemaker (as we shall see below).

I discovered Catherine Dobbs was a Parsell while reading old deeds in the deed office on John Street in Manhattan. I came upon deeds between Thomas Parsell and William and “Katherine” Dobbs that identified “Katherine Dobbs” as daughter to Thomas and wife to William. Images of parts of two of these deed are below, and I have underlined the relevant phrases.

You can also see that another Parsell daughter, Hannah, and her husband Jeremiah Redding were involved, if you read farther in this deed excerpt.

Here is another deed in which Thomas Parsell “of Bearin Island in the County of New York” gives “in consideration for the natural love and affection which I bear to my beloved daughter Katherine, wife of William Dobbs” some land on Manhattan. In this deed we learn William’s occupation is “shoomaker.” See sections of the text that I underlined. (From other sources we know he was also sexton of Trinity Church, and at times a city bellman and scavenger — watchman and street cleaner.)

The deed goes on to identify the parcel as being 81 feet x 21 feet and being in “Smith’s Valley,” outside the gates of the city (meaning north of Wall Street) and lying between a parcel owned by Thomas Parsell and another owned by Jeremiah Redding. Smiths Valley was at Maiden Lane, leading down to the East River. When I sat at the microfilm reader discovering this deed on the 13th floor of 66 John Street, I was within a very short walk of this parcel. Smiths Valley was near (or perhaps overlapped with) a 17-acre area known as Shoemaker’s Pasture because it was a center of hide tanning activity and was owned by shoemakers. In some of the deeds involving the Dobbses, the Parsells and the Reddings there are references to the “tanning pitts of the shoemakers.” In the early 1700s the shoemakers subdivided Shoemakers Pasture into 163 lots to be developed for homes and businesses. A number of these were willed to the Dutch Reformed Church of Manhattan and are now worth about half a billion dollars. See http://haconservationwork.com/images/Collegiate_Church_Vision_for_New_Amsterdam_History_Center.pdf for history of this area of Manhattan. Whether this is one of those lots, I don’t know.

(Above) Artist’s conception of the Smiths Valley section of lower Manhattan near the East River where William Dobbs’s wife received a small parcel from her father Thomas Parsell by the nearest deed above.

Deed references: Lib. 30 Page 23 & 24 dated 1708 recorded 1719. Also relevant are Dobbs to Redding Lib. 30 page 78

(Above) The old deeds office on John St. in lower Manhattan.

The old deeds are on microfilm, in hand-lettered boxes, jumbled in drawers in no particular order.

Scrolling through the films in search of Dobbs family history.

(d) More examples of the many names and spellings of Barn Island, and the many connections of the Parsells to that island:

(i) When Eda’s and Catharina’s brother Nicholas Parsell married in 1700, the church record said he lived on “Beeren” Island. http://longislandgenealogy.com/Marriage/MARR.HTM

(ii) When “Jeremias Reddin” marries “Anna Paersils” she is said to be of “Baeren Ylant” (In English, he is Jeremiah Redding and she is Hannah Parsell, sister of Eda and Catherina who married Dobbs brothers. http://longislandgenealogy.com/Marriage/MARR.HTM Soon after, it is recorded that William Dobbs and Catherine attended the baptism of Jeremiah’s and Hannah’s first baby:
https://archive.org/stream/baptismsfrom163922evan#page/n23/mode/2up/search/redding p. 341

(iii) When in 1712 “Nicholas Parcell” (brother of Eda and Catherina) is appointed a pilot for Hellgate, he is said to be “of Great Barn Island.” See Calendar of Historical Manuscripts if the Office of the Secretary of State p.411 Hellgate is the treacherous channel between Barn Island and Queens, to the east of the island. Today, it is less treacherous thanks to removal of many rocks. A pilot is someone who is expert in the navigation of particular waters and who goes aboard ships just to take them through that area. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z1PLXTZk1eUC&lpg=PA145&dq=william%20merritt%2C%20piratical%20vessell&pg=PA411#v=snippet&q=nicholas%20parcell&f=false

(Above) Map shows Hellgate. Today, Barn Island is Wards Island and it has been joined to Randalls Island (a.k.a Little Barn Island) to its north with landfill.

Here is how Jasper Dankaert, the Dutch traveler we have quoted before, wrote about Hellgate in 1679:

“6th, Friday. We remained in the house during the forenoon, but after having dined we went out about two o’clock64 to explore the island of Manathans. This island runs east and west, or somewhat more northerly. On the north side of it is the North River, by which it is separated from the main land on the north; on the east end it is separated from the main land by a creek, or rather a branch of the North River, emptying itself into the East River. They can go over this creek at dead low water, upon rocks and reefs, at the place called Spyt den Duyvel. This creek coming into the East River forms with it the two Barents Islands. At the west end of these two running waters, that is, where they come together to the east of these islands, they make, with the rocks and reefs, such a frightful eddy and whirlpool that it is exceedingly dangerous to pass through them, especially with small boats, of which there are some lost every now and then, and the persons in them drowned; but experience has taught men the way of passing through them with less danger. Large vessels have always less danger because they are not capable of being carried along so quickly. There are two places where such whirling of the stream occurs, which are on account of the danger and frightfulness called the Great and Little Helle Gadt. “

(3) Background on Barn Island, a.k.a Great Barent Island, a.k.a. Wards Island.

This quote from the 1923 Annual Report of the American Scenic & Historic Preservation Society (p33) will get us started on the histor of this island:

Delaval had been mayor of New York City and crossed paths with William Merritt several times. For example, Merritt captained a ship Delaval owned, The Rebecca & Sarah, which sunk in Westchester Creek off Long Island Sound, not far from Barn Island, sometime before 1673 https://books.google.com/books?id=KEU4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA778&lpg=PA778&dq=william+merritt+was+late+skipper&source=bl&ots=PqWFEg-acC&sig=jWQH6vBpqLjIvlAGKir-8ONNcr0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis8_yjw6vYAhWBY98KHdumADMQ6AEIQDAI#v=onepage&q=william%20merritt%20was%20late%20skipper&f=false But so far as we know, this is just coincidence.

In a further coincidence, Delaval’s bookkeeper had been Jacob Milbourne, and Milbourne arranged the sale of the island to Thomas Parsell after Delaval’s death. The coincidental part is that Milbourne was Leisler’s number 2 man in Leisler’s Rebellion, which Merritt opposed, landing  Merritt in Leisler’s jail. Milbourne was hanged with Leisler in 1690.

Until Parsell bought the island it was undeveloped. But it had lots of potential and Parsell apparently did a bang-up job of realizing that potential. Now we’ll let another published source pick up the story:

The above is quoted from Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals …
By James Riker, Henry Pennington Toler, 1904, Appendix I (pp. 809-810) Revised History of Harlem, by Riker, 1904

Today, Wards Island has parks and walking paths. The best access from Manhattan is a footbridge at 103rd St.

Map for visitors to Wards island.

Wards Island seen from the 103rd Street footbridge joining Manhattan and Wards. There are no historical markers to tell you the Dobbs family was there, back when it was called Great Barent Island, or more commonly Barn Island. Maybe we should start a petition?

The author, Jim Luckett, far right (with beard); author’s wife, Betty MacKenzie; and friend of the author from back in the 1960s when they both hailed from Dobbs Ferry, Alan Pakaln.

(4) Did the Parsell connection go futher than Barn Island? Loose ends!

What follows is a collection of loose ends that suggest more connections between the Parsells, Dobbses, Snedens and Slots than we know. I’m getting ahead of my story, but just so you have context, a brother of William and Walter Dobbs named John moved to the future Dobbs Ferry and he or his descendants started the ferry that gives the town its name. The ferry was taken over by Robert and Mary Sneden in the mid 1700s and we believe Mary was a daughter of John Dobbs. The Snedens operated it from the west bank, and it is believed the occupied the house that William Merritt had built there, Cheer Hall. The Dobbs surname also made it across the river.

There were Parsells in Snedens Landing opposite Dobbs Ferry and there were Sloats in the area too. “Slot” was Catherine Dobbs’s surname in her first marriage, before she was widowed and remarried to William Dobbs. “Slot” and “Sloat” are variant spellings of the same family name. Did the Parsells and Slots of Barn Island go with the Dobbs family members who settled at Dobbs Ferry and Snedens Landing?

This Parsell family tree website says Nicholas Parsell had business in New Jersey (Snedens Landing is in New York, right at the New Jersey line, so perhaps some Parsells got to Snedens Landing by way of New Jersey). http://www.littlewalkerscreek.com/id36a.html

Here’s another loose end: Nicholas Parsell married a daughter of Rip Van Dam. Rip Van Dam was an ally of William Merritt in opposing Leisler’s Rebellion. Coincidence? Or were political alliances and marriage alliances running in parallel channels?

This website says Delaval bought some of Barn Island from one Jan Pietersen Slot in 1669, a Dane. It talks about the immigration of Slot and Jan Sneden in the same sentence, and about connections to Orange and Rockland County: http://www.adprose.org/Frank%20Sloat-web/SloatHistBook_PART%20INewHarlem.wpd040407.pdf The mention of Sneden is on p. 2 and the claim that Slot sold land on Barent Island to Delaval is at the bottom of page 5.

The above photo, from the Palisades, NY Free Library, is identified as a 19th century photo of “Parsells House at Snedens.” https://www.hrvh.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/larc/id/660/rec/1

In later installments we will see the surnames Parsell, Dobbs, Sneden among the people living at Snedens Landing.  We’ll also see connections between Snedens Landing  and other characters in the Dobbs family saga — characters who will be introduced in our installments on the Dobbs family in Manhattan.   Be on the lookout, in particular, for the Corbetts and the Lockharts, who enter the story in its Manhattan chapter but play important roles in Snedens Landing later.

Continue to Part 3, Click Here, about the Dobbs Family in Manhattan

The Dobbs Family and Their Ferry – Part 3 – Manhattan Early Years, 1664 – 1689

We’ve seen the Dobbs family was never on Barren Island, and we’ve seen that the Barren Island myth got started because some of them were on Barn Island (today’s Wards Island).   We jumped over the Manhattan years and dealt with Barn Island, just to kill that Barren Island thing once and for all and show how it got started. Now we circle back and start the true story of the Dobbs family from the beginning.  If you are enjoying this series, please leave a comment!

The year is 1664. The English have just taken New Netherlands colony, including the city of New Amsterdam, and renamed them both New York. We have no idea where anyone in the Dobbs family lived prior to that date. We have no birth records, no immigration records and no marriage records prior to that date. We know they were English, but we don’t know when they came to the New World, nor where they settled first. Perhaps they had already been here for a generation in 1664. Or at the other extreme, perhaps most of them didn’t come over until well after 1664. Perhaps they came first to Massachussetts, or one of the other New England colonies, and then found their way down to New York. This was a common sequence for English settlers. The religious intolerance of the Puritans who dominated New England drove many non-Puritans to the more tolerant New Netherlands/New York.  However, I have searched, and not found any trace of them in New England before they turn up in New York.

Our point of reference for keeping the characters straight is John Dobbs. He is the Dobbs person who came to the future Dobbs Ferry around 1698 and either started the ferry or sired a son or sons who did, and, we believe, a daughter who continued it. John’s mother is Mary Merritt Dobbs; his father is Walter Dobbs Sr.; and he has brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. His most important uncle is William Merritt, his mother’s brother.

William Merritt is the first family member to hit the historical record. He is among the signers of the Oath of Allegiance in which residents pledged allegiance to their new English rulers. There are many historical documents after that placing Merritt in the colony and in the city in the 1670s. These documents tell us he was a sea captain, a businessman, a buyer of real estate and a man interested in government contracts and public office.

Then in 1680, suddenly Walter Dobbs Sr. and another uncle of John Dobbs, Ed Meeks, plus William Merritt obtain liquor licenses at New York’s city hall. At about the same time, William Merritt buys a farm in the Bowery on the only road north to Harlem and beyond, and this farm probably had a tavern. The first European owner of the site, Wolfert Webber, apparently ran a tavern there. So I surmise that buying that site and having the three men buy liquor licenses indicates a Dobbs/Merritt/Meeks tavern was planned on Merritts farm in the Bowery.   Merritt also had a house downtown and it seems doubtful the farm was primarily for him.   My guess is he bought it with the dual purpose of making an investment and creating a home for his two sisters and  occupations for their husbands.

William Merritt will receive a lot of attention in my telling of the Dobbs story. And well he should: He appears to have been the leader and benefactor of his extended family. And he bought and moved to the land opposite Dobbs Ferry at the same time young John Dobbs leased the land at the future Dobbs Ferry. The ferry itself and the choice of location for young John to settle in 1698 may have come from Merritt.

Sources for these facts, and for some I haven’t mentioned that relate to the above:

(1) The earliest mention of anyone named Dobbs in the New World that I could find is an unverified secondary source saying a man named Dobbs who was very industrious was on an early Dutch ship that brought Protestant Belgian colonists (Walloons) to the future Albany and New York City. We have no idea if this is true or, if true, whether he was any relation to our Dobbs family. https://archive.org/stream/historycitynewy05lambgoog#page/n59/mode/2up/search/dobbs (History of the City of New York: It’s Origins, Rise and Progress).  The author, Martha J. Lamb, does not tell us her sources.  She also does not tell us why she featured Mr. Dobbs in this paragraph, nor what became of him.

(2)  William Merritt, uncle of John Dobbs, signs Oath of Allegiance, 1664.  No one named Dobbs or Meeks signed.

(3)  We’re going to see Merritt frequently in public records after 1664, but I could find no mention of him or others in the family  by electronic searches of earlier records.   Try for yourself if you like.  I won’t list every source I searched unsuccessfully for them in the Dutch period, but examples of early sources that don’t mention them are  here  and here.   I also search Ancestry, unsuccessfully, for records of their births and their marriages, here and in England.  In 1665 the English made up a list of everyone in the city, planning to quarter troops in their houses.  The residents protested and negotiated that they would be taxed to pay for lodgings for the troops, and lodging arrangements would be bargains freely entered into by landlords and soldier-tenants.   None of the protagonists of our story, not even William Merritt, are on this list.

(4)  In 1668 we have just our second sighting of William Merritt in public records.  He sues someone. This will be the first of many lawsuits involving him in Manhattan and environs. In later cases, we see him in many roles in these court documents — plaintiff, defendant, juror, witness and friend of the court assigned to investigate or mediate.

to be continued

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