Sources of "Genius and mental illness run in the Raymond FAmily"
John Balch emigrant early 17th century. Family were prosperous yeoman
farmers and gentry Somerset County, England, from 11th century. ACtive
in local government and schools. John married in England Margery Lovell/
Lovett/Levitt of unknown identity. John was a staunch though not
fanatical Puritan and a founder of Salem, MA and of his church. He was
good at arbitration and negotiation and actively used these skills in the
leadership roles he played.
i
i
i---John (He and Freeborn are often confused) married Mary Conant,
i daughter of Puritan clergyman and one of the leaders of the
i original Cape Anne colony, They had one daughter. John
i was drowned while trying to cross the river near home in a
i storm in 1662, and his one daughter Mary died 1663. His widow
i then remarried a Dodge.
i
i---Freeborn disappeared. May have returned to England or died on a
i ship while returning to England. Ten years later his self-styled
i executor, possibly an employer or creditor, settled his estate,
i signed his share of his father's land to Benjamin, the deed
i temporarily allowed for the possibility that Freeborn might not
i be dead, and it was finalized two years later.
i
i
i----Benjamin Balch m daughter of Thomas Gardner
i m 2 widow of Damaris Shattuck, a prominent Quaker
i of a dour Quaker family. (What was
i the attraction?)
i
Freeborn Balch
i
----------------------------------------------------------------
i i i i
i i i i
i i Freeborn i
i i i to Emily
i i i Green Balch
Tabitha Balch Abigail Balch John a farmer (see below)
m m died in an insane
Paul Raymond Daniel Raymond asylum
i i
i i
i to Barb Petty
i
i
William Raymond m Mercy Davis (see below)
i
i
i (Begin chain of first cousin marriages)
---------------------------------------------------------
i i i
i i i
Asa Raymond Lucy Raymond Daniel Raymond
m m i
--Huldah Rice Hezekiah Walker ----------
(see below) i i i
i i An extr successful i
i i inventor and i
i i entrepreneur, i
i i meandered around i
i i Canada i
i i ------------------
i i i i
i Tabitha Walker m Asa Raymond Amos Raymond
to Carl Flegal, i i
tracing genius and i i
mental health problems Henry Morgan Raymond m Almira Raymond
in Raymond family i
i---------------------------i
i Marion Frances Raymond
i Spent her daughter's childhood
Willie in house behind locked doors and
Supposed to have windows constantly convinced
been a genius, someone dangerous was outside
drowned age 19 trying to get in; may be one of
two of my mother's grandparents
to die in Northampton State
Psychiatric Hospital (at age
60 with little previous family
history of death before old
age and no subsequent history of
Alzheimer's).
i
i
My grandmother
Extremely bright,
intense, high strung,
strong-willed, phobia
prone, taught herself
to read age 3.
i
---------------
i i
my aunt my mother
i strongly appears
i to have had
i depression when I
my cousin Joe was a child.
member of Mensa i
perfect score on SAT i
schizoid and odd, My brother
pleasant but changeable me treated
and a bit egomaniacal, for anxiety
patented a high tech disorders
invention, now heads a and
start-up firm trying to depression.
market it, travels alot.
Emigrant Edmund Rice, a land speculator in semi-feudal l7th century
Southeastern England, where such attitudes to land and behavior were
distinctly odd, and backwoods MA, he repeatedly after a long period of
being qutie statidfied with his good positions and further prospects in
the land speculation business, and achieved status and respect in the
community, as he had leadership ability, got fed up with everyone and
everything in that place and abruptly moved to another place just like it,
often founding another new town. No matter where he was, in England or a
tiny backwoods Massachusetts village, he bought, sold and traded land like
he thought he was at the New York Stock Exchange, and typically
accumulated both land and wealth rapidly. He married Thomasine Frost,
whose family can be at the least said to have been emotionally intense.
Rice's are characteristically extremely bright.
-------------------------------
i i i i
i Nathaniel Henry Samuel --Carl's and my Rice lines picked
i i i up an entire flock of similar birds
to Myrrha - ------------------------on their common route of
genius - migration
Mensa membership and from Sudbury, MA, and toward our
mental illness run Raymond lines. These birds were
in her family, Dolor Davis birds, and George
incl manic depression Hubbard of Connecticut
and no DAvis, Hubbard (> John > Jonathan) birds. THey
or Raymond blood. formed a whole large extremely
i inbred clan, with a marked interest
i in missionary work in general and
Mental illness particularly panic in Africa in particular. Whole
disorder seems to be in several groups flocks of them flew right across
of Rice lines including atleast two the Atlantic.
lines of descent from Edmund. i
Uncertain who the group on Kentucky i
descended from. Though Rice and i
his allied families were characteristically i
extremely migratory birds. Mercy Davis
I've heard from about two dozen of m
them. William Raymond, above.
I came across a branch of the Dolor Davis family six generations removed
from Dolor Davis by a brother of Carl's and my SAmuel, that is so like my
mother, aunt, grandmother, cousin Joe who belongs to Mensa and is head of
a high-tech start-up company to market the innovation he invented, and me,
that I looked to see if perhaps they were more closely related. This
group of families formed a closely related inbred clan.
Ethan Davis Sr, or Squire Ethan, "like his father, he was an extensive
land owner. He seems tohave been born with a propensity for trading in
real estate, in live stock, or in anything in which he could indulge his
taste for speculation. His dealings in cattle often occasioned remarks
and now and then were the basis of jokes." And I can't even find Edmund
Rice ancestry for him. It could be there; I have only his direct line of
descent; just no obvious inbreeding. He would seem to have inherited it
from Dolor Davis.
"He was quite rigid in business affairs, but tried to render to all their
just dues...his charities wre considerable...though inclined to austerity,
he was never unkind, and was an excellent neigbor, a steadfast friend,"
etc.
Many of Dolor DAvis's descendents were cited as equalling is record for
moving about. It wasn't that he was a carpenter; it was in the DAvis
constitution. They wre migratory birds.
EThan DAvis married Sarah Hubbard, who was a perfectly inbred member of
the Rice/Davis/Hubbard clan. They had a son, Rev. Elnathan Davis, a
Congregationalist (not Baptist) minister at HOldern, a missionary to South
Africa, which he resigned over a difference about infant baptism, home
missionary work in Indiana and Michigan, worked for the American Peace
Society, was an officer for them. Also an officer for American Missionary
Society. He preached against social evils he perceived, like alcohol and
slavery. He was said to be cheerful, congenial, and popular, and outspoken
in his views.
"A granddaughter of Ethan Davis, Sr, ...severl years ago went to one of
the territories alone, and took up a quarter section of prairie land, and,
far from friends, with only one neighbor, and that more than one mile
away, lived there alone for eight months in order to secure her title.
Having accomplished that, and being very much afraid of her only neighbor,
who was, in her opinion, a barbarian, she made haste to get back among
civilized people. Though she confesses that one experiment of the kind is
sufficient, she is still given to travel and looking about the country."
Three of Ethan's eight children besides Elnathan were missionaries to
Africa, and large numbers of the rest of the clan did the stint in Africa
thing, too.
And of course, I had to have a relative executed in the Salem witch trials
as a witch, too.
"It was sometime before 1690 that John Willard married Margaret Knight of
Salem Village. Willard's origins, like those of most of the other witches
we have investigated, are frustratingly obscure. Circumstantial evidence
liks him to Majr Simon Willard, one of the most prominent Massachusetts
land speculators, town founders, and politicians of the mid-seventeenth
cnetury: for a time during his youth John Willar4dd lived in Lancaster,
where Major Willard owned a trading post (indeed, it was to Lancaster that
he fled when accused of witchraft in 1692); in the 1680's, moreover, he
resided with his wife in Groton, a town founded by Simon Willard; and he
was frequently associated, in his land dealings in both communities, with
men known to be Simon Willard's sons. But published family histories have
suppressed all reference to the man [an alternative explanation is he was
a son of Simon Willard's brother who kept farther east], and the best
efforts of local historians and genealogists have failed to establish his
precise connection to Simon Willard. If he was a relative -- perhaps even
a son?--of this rich and prominent man, he was an obscure and somehow
ill-favored one [I've actually not known too many families that include
people centrally involved in the Salem Witch trials to admit being related
to that person].
"Her kinfolks' uneasiness about John Willard must have been intenssified
when it became clear that he was interested in land speculation as well as
in farming. In March, 1690, with three partners, he purchased from the
widow of George Corwin a large tract of land--"by estimation four or five
hundred acres," as the deed rather vaguely has it, lying just north of the
Salme Village line. I the succeeding months at least two substantial
portions of this tract were sold off to new purchasers."
The Wilkins family that John Willard married into particularly resented
everything to do with the emerging capitalist economy that threatened the
survival of the small farmers of Salem Village. The Witch Trials were
partly about resistance to the development of capitalism and the end of
their semi-feudal, traditional way of life. They also stuck particularly
vigorously to the notion shared by most of the faction of Salem Village
that they belonged to that one's place was in the socio-economic stratum
to which one was born, and the related belief that a family should hang
onto its land and not sell it. The Wilkins' were among the staunchest
members of the "anti-Parris" faction, and were themselves, en masse, among
the principal accusers against John Willard.
More information is contained in testimony against him at trial. When
John Willard lived at Groton, according to Willard and Knight relatives
and in-laws, one morning his wife came running over to the farm where
two sons of Simon Willard lived, I think with a wife who was sister
to John's wife. She said her husband had beaten her very badly for no
reason, then spent the night hiding in a small space under the stairs!
Come morning, he suddenly got up and ran out of the house and up a large
hill at a speed she found not within normal strength, and was gone.
Two of the Willard men went to find him (notice their immediate concern
for his welfare, which supports he was close kin), and found him
wandering in a state of complete distraction. And nothing was said
about him being drunk, a common problem.
Willard's Salem in-laws were out to get him, but in among the usual
possession of people by proxy and reports of black magic, was an
emphasis on wandering in a state of distraction and also making odd
noises and howls, not contained in testimony against any other
suspected witches.
Another direct ancestor of mine, Phillip English, was targeted for the
same reason; he was a wealthy merchant of Salem Town whose Quaker
affiliation and connections made him an attractive target for these people
who thought that "wrong thinking" came from the Devil and that people who
thought wrongly were by definition witches.
"The experiences of Salem Village in the late l7th century had made one
thing only to clear; no one could count on ending his career adhe had
begun it. It is no accident that the events of 1692 were set off when some
young peopl ebecame interested in fortune telling:...and they had turned
to these occult rituals for a single purpose: to predict the future
course of their own lives, and particularly the identity and occupatiosn
of their future husbands. ...five of these girls, remember, lived in two
Village househods--those of Samuel Parris and Thomas Putnam, Jr.--that
were experiencing with partiuclar intensity the consequences of social
dislocation. Thie girls' divinations were a specific reaction to urgent
fears which obsessed their own families and which to a degree preoccupied
the entire community. AFer all, the identity of their furure husbands
--"what trade their sweethearts houdl be of'--would determine their own
future status."
..."It is striking how many of the accused witches from the Salem Village
area had careers which testified to the power of unfamilar economic forces
to alter and reshape a life. The accused were, in many cases, people who
had not bee born to their 1692 standing, high or low, but who had reached
it through force of circumstance, in the course of lives characterized by
economic as well as geographic flux. John Willard, Alexander Osborne,
Daniel Andrew, and REbecca Nurse, for example, were all outsiders who had
moved both IN and UP."
Mental illness also seriously afflicted the family of Emily Greene
Balch, an extremely intelligent and quite remarkable Boston woman who,
after becoming a Quaker, taught economics at a university early in this
century, participated in the international peace movement as well as
the settlement house movement that my grandmother, Helen Lowe, also
participated in, and in 1946 she won a Nobel Peace Prize. She was an
intense woman who took herself extremely seriously.
Her Balch lineage is Emily - Francis Vergnies - John - Nathaniel -
William - Freeborn - Benjamin - John the emigrant. In other words,
hers is a third line of descent from Benjamin's son Freeborn.
Here is her family record; (From Improper Bostonian)
Joseph Balch of Newburyport MA, a wealthy marine insurance ageent and
"a rather severe and reticent man", married twice. By the first wife
hehad 5 daughters and a son. Nothing on them. By his second wife,
Ann Lathrop Noyes, who was an extremely strict and exacating woman who
when she lived with Emily's family had them all on strict schedules and
rules for everything, and who was descended from Nicholas Noyes
clergical critter of Salem witch trials above, someone never too kind
to repentant sinners and liked to eat accused witches for breakfast,
Joseph Balch had Eunice Ann, who never married and became the Balch
children's Aunt Nanny, John, who after a brilliant college career
permanently "lost his mind", and Francis Vergnies Balch, b Boston,
2/3/1839, d Jamaica Plain 2/4/1898, a brilliant and quiet man with
very frail health, looks a bit wild and disheveled as well as intense
in his picture, was a prominent Boston attorney and worked for a U.S.
Senator at one point very early in his career.
I thought that both of Emily's parents wre Congregationalist ministers,
too. That's, BOTH of them.
Dr. Frances Vergnies Noyes, sister of Ann Lathrop (Noyes) Balch, of
Newburyport MA, an easy going doctor, married someone not identified
who died when Nelly was 17. He had Nelly (Ellen Maria) Noyes, b 1837,
d 1884, who became Emily's mother, Catherine Porter Noyes d 1924, and
others. Nelly was emotional, quick-tempered, and prone at times to
night-time panic attacks, and developed a horror of Evangelical
Christianity after being exposed to it at "Uncle Withington's house".
Francis Vergnies Balch married Nelly Noyes, and they had Emily Greene
Balch, Bessie, Annie, three other girls, and a boy. Annie had a
"nervous breakdown" which is an old mythological term for an acute
disabling episode of mental illness, often depression, and Bessie had
repeated "nervous breakdowns" and often wasn't in sound mental health.
Emily seemed fine but showed signs that she wasn't quite. She was a
very intense person in looks, manner, manner of speaking and actions,
she took herself extremely seriously, she thought herself plain (poor
self image) and never married. She had ordinary good looks; her best
physical features were things she may not have seen in the mirror;
she projected intellect, emotional intensity and New England good
breeding - and she dressed the part, in a modestly and properly
attractive way.
One thing that strikes me is that this fifth or so cousin of my
grandmother was very like her in both intellect and personality.
See my grandmother's biography . Genius was said to run in my
Raymond line. I don't know from how far back. It, too, may have been
a Balch trait.
One thing I noticed while zeroxing town records is that of 16 Raymonds
and Balches who died in Salem before 1850, two died of intemperance.
Alcoholism is a common consequence of untreated depression and anxiety
disorders, and untreated mental illness is the most frequent cause of
alcoholism. I suspect Alcoholics Anonymous works because its twelve
steps read like a basic how-to guide of how to cope with mental illness!
I also had some deaths from "nervous fever" jump out at me. My sister's
husband has a particularly high-strung family group where someone died
of "nervous fever".
Go to my main Lowe genealogy section
Email me at tiggernut24@yahoo.com
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