The Barbour Name Change

     Several few years ago, Amy Johnson Crow, a certified genealogist and family history podcaster, issued the “52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge” on her blog. Write a story about one ancestor per week. Her old blog featuring the challenge is called “No Story Too Small.” That’s my philosophy too. Everyone has a story, in fact, many, many stories. I’m interested in even the smallest details of people’s stories, and they can be “tiny stories,” a brief vignette. So of course I’ve accepted this challenge. Here is the first:  

Story No. 1 -  The Name Change

     

     My grandmother’s maiden name was Barbour, and she made a point of telling me it was the French spelling. We were French. That was fancier than English. But actually, that’s a family myth. We descend from Thomas Barber, a young Englishman who immigrated to the Connecticut Colony indentured to a carpenter. 

     Five generations later, John Barber III decided to change the spelling of the family name. A nephew of his said it was done to “look French.” His sons all went along. Other branches of the family made their own decisions – go along, or to stick with the original, unpretentious ‘Barber.’ Even within a family, brothers made different choices. So in the case of my third great-grandfather, for example, Myron Fitch Barbour chose the new spelling. His brother, Milo Roswell Barber, did not.

     So the story got a bit turned around over the generations. The Barbours were French! Only they weren’t.

     Here’s a little bit more about John Barbour III:

“Deacon” John Barber/Barbour III (1782-1865) New York Pioneer, Congregational Church Deacon, Father of 13, Changer of the Barber Name

Where He Connects In My Tree: John is the brother of Elizabeth “Betsey” Barber, my fourth-great-grandmother. (Therefore he is the uncle of Myron Fitch Barbour, my third great-grandfather.) 

          John III was born and raised in Simsbury, Connecticut, like generations before him. Like most people then, he came from a large family, one of ten children. He married Delight Griswold Case in 1803 at age 21 and they had three children before her death. He married Fanny Hunt a year later and they had ten children. Around 1810, a colony of Simsbury relatives and neighbors went west to the newly forming town of Sheldon in Genesee County, New York. John’s sisters Betsey and Cynthia were part of this group. John joined them a few years later.

      John was a farmer who by 1850 owned 150 acres in Sheldon. I love seeing what people owned on the census non-population schedule. In 1850 he had six horses, four “working oxen,” six “milch” cows, 17 other cattle, 24 sheep and six pigs. He had 20 tons of hay, 80 bushels of Indian corn and 170 bushels of oats. He had 100 bushels of Irish potatoes, an impressive 200 pounds of maple sugar and two gallons of molasses. This was similar to his neighbors. By this time, only two of his children were still living at home, and a 15-year old hired hand lived with them as well.

      John was named a deacon at their Congregational Church. It was carved on  his gravestone at Humphrey Hollow Cemetery where he was buried in 1865. 

     

Sources:

     Wilson, Lillian Mae and Edmund Dana Barbour. Barber Genealogy in Two Sections, Section I. Descendants of Thomas Barber of Windsor, Conn., 1614-1909, Haverhill, Mass.: Press of the Nicholas Print, 1909.