John Adams

I have started watching the John Adams miniseries on HBO and was inspired to look at the Adams family tree. Since John Adams had connections to Weymouth, MA; where many of my ancestors are from, I thought it would be fun to see if our families were connected, even if only distantly. From my memory of doing research some years ago, there is at least one connection of my family to Abigail Adam's family in Weymouth. The Reverend Samuel Torrey (who's relationship to my family I will look into in my next entry - but I believe he is some sort of great grand uncle - generations back!) built Abigail Adam's family's house. Samuel was the Reverend of the First Church of Weymouth preceding Abigail Adams' father Reverend William Smith.

Getting back to John Adam's family though, I found a family tree for John Quincy Adams online (click on view tree), and looked for names that were similar in my tree. (I also found another Adams family tree from the Massachusetts Historical Society.) There was really only one surname, White, that may connect our families, so I went to ancestry and tried out their "find famous relatives" link under the One World Tree database. I first had to find one of my White ancestors in One World Tree, so I searched for Jeremiah White (my 6th great grandfather) who married Hannah Canterbury. I found him, clicked on the famous relatives link, and hoped for something interesting to come up. (side note - "find famous relatives" is a search function that links your family with famous people, but uses data that has been entered by other users, so further research would be involved to verify the accuracy of data.) I browsed quickly and did not see a John Adams link come up, but did see his cousin, Samuel Adams, on my famous relatives page. According to this data, Samuel Adams is my 6th great grandfathers (Jeremiah's) 4th cousin, 2 times removed. Kind of neat. Of course this led me to do some other research on my White family - so I started looking into Jeremiah White's parents. I have found in many family trees online that Jeremiah is the son of Samuel White, a deacon in Weymouth; I guess I was looking for more verification - such as a reference to a probate record or something. The closest I came to such a reference was on google books website; page 373 in the book: The Vinton Memorial : Comprising A Genealogy of the Descendents of John Vinton of Lynn, 1648, which states Samuel White died intestate and insolvent, August 18, 1760, age 84 - so if this source is accurate, there is no will to find. Perhaps land records will lead me to prove that Samuel White is Jeremiah's father. If this is Jeremiah's line of descent - the immigrant ancestor is Thomas White of Weymouth who came to Massachusetts around 1635. I did a quick look at the Great Migration project to see if a sketch had been done on Thomas. At this time the Great Migration series is only up to The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England: 1634-1635, Volume V, M-P; so I will have to wait to read about Thomas White.

To Do
1. Look into the Torrey line again - find the link to Rev. Samuel Torrey in Weymouth
2. Find out what county Weymouth was in for early 1700s - I think it was Suffolk County.
3. Find any deeds on Samuel White which ties him with Jeremiah White (at probate court - or indexed in this book Suffolk County, MA deeds, 1639-1885 [microform] at NEHGS library and FHL. Also the Massachusetts State Archives has this book Record books, 1629-1800.

Links On Topic
1. John Adams timeline from the Massachusetts Historical Society
2. John Adams manuscripts from the Massachusetts Historical Society