“November. N. 22. Married. I having long been of Opinion that the married state would be productive of more happiness & Satisfaction than the unmarried; and having made choice of; and gained the approbation of Miss Catherine Littlejohn, We are joined in Matrimony in St. Pauls Church Baltimore Maryland; by the Reverend Mr Thomas Chase- Sunday 2 oClock PM – 10th November 1776. Present Mr Robert Johnston of Baltimore and Miss Sally Littlejohn sister to my Bride. My age 26 years 6 months, 18 days. bring born 23d April 1750. my Bride near the same age.”
Like many, I’ve been long thinking about 2026 and the opportunity to mark 250 years of the United States’ own birth in revolution. Among other things, I pick up bits and pieces of 1776 commentary, as people then lived their lived much as we do now, with family and the orindary events of our lives taking place often within the context of extraordinary political, social, or economic upheaval around us.
I pick these up from materials in the library where I work, in the extensive research materials I’ve collected over many years, but also as I travel to visit new to me collections or revisit some I’ve spent time with before. Because I do try to carve out a bit of time for research when I’m traveling, even if just a couple of hours. Last week I was in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins for meetings– it’s my graduate alma mater, and I am always glad to be on campus and especially to be at the library. The folks at Special Collections very kindly were able to accommodate me for a morning of research before I left for home. The upside is obvious: after checking out the catalog before traveling, I can almost always find materials associated with early American genealogical work. The downside is that I’m often rushing through those materials, even if I’m able to take decent notes and images.
At Hopkins I worked (quickly) through the John Weatherburn collection. Weatherburn (1750-1811) was from Kent near London, and after serving an indenture to a shopkeeper in Newcastle in the north of England, immigrated to the British North American colonies in 1772. He carried letters of introduction, including to the Governor of Maryland, and settled quickly in Baltimore opening a shop there. Weatherburn was an adroit businessman; he was also, by the time of the 1790 census, enslaving at least six individuals.
Weatherburn was an inveterate keeper of records of all kinds. He kept business records, but he also accumulated information about community and political developments. He then made digests of this information, as chronologies. He did the same for his own family, with genealogical chronologies that look to have been created, in fresh notebooks, as summative accounts. The register of his own marriage falls into this category, within the notebook headed as “Private Reminiscences.” The collection also includes more conventional and familiar 18th century genealogical recordation, with scraps of paper and folds listing names and dates. But Weatherburn’s proclivity for record keeping, for writing and accounting, was inherent in all he did–including his family history. I’ll be writing and talking more about this material as I work through it.