Foster Family

A Case for the Parentage of Ruth Foster Sharp Dunham (Part 1)

I hate having empty branches on my family tree. Empty branches mean unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries. A few years ago I was able to break through a brick wall to find the parents of Harriet Elizabeth “Libby” Sharp Ehle and that breakthrough led to a line of ancestors leading all the way back to the Mayflower. Several other new branches also lead to some very early immigrants to the shores of Colonial America – BUT – I hit another wall with Ruth Foster.

Ruth was the wife of Benjamin Sharp (they are the great grandparents of the above mentioned Harriet) and after Benjamin’s death she married Elisha Dunham. Ruth and Benjamin were married in Pomfret, Windham, CT on 26 September 1771. Unfortunately no parents are named for either of the couple. Ruth appears in the will and probate papers for Benjamin after his death in 1787 in Pomfret. She married again in Pomfret to Elisha Dunham on 13 December 1791, and she appears in the final settlement of Benjamin’s estate with Elisha as late as 1796. These few records are the only ones that definitely tie Ruth to her 2 husbands and to her children. So how do I begin to find Ruth’s family of origin?

Since I had no parent’s names to work with for Ruth, it seemed logical to look at Benjamin’s parents and family again. Many times these Colonial families intermarried with cousins and neighbors. Often groups of families migrated together to new areas where land and resources were opened up. Many of these families had strong ties and were of a similar religious and political view. I needed to look for Foster families in the areas where Benjamin was born and where he and Ruth married.

Pomfret has quite a good collection of compiled church records and luckily many of our Sharp family members are listed. Benjamin’s parents were Solomon Sharp and Sarah Goodell. Solomon and Sarah were married in Pomfret and all of their children were born there. However the Fosters are less represented in records in Pomfret. The only mention of a Ruth Foster is the marriage to Benjamin Sharp.

Benjamin Sharp served in the Revolutionary War so I was hoping that military records might shed some light on the origins of his wife Ruth. Unfortunately neither he nor Ruth appear to have ever filed for a pension so I hit another road block there.

The next step was researching all of Benjamin’s siblings for Foster family ties. None of Benjamin’s siblings married into the Foster family so I needed to branch out to communities near Pomfret and look for Ruth Foster or other Foster family members. There was a Foster family living in Ashford, Windham, CT who had several children including Ruth born about 1749/50. There was also a Foster family living in Willington, Tolland, CT with a daughter Ruth born in 1746. Each Ruth fits nicely into the age range of a first marriage in 1771, but there was no further information to be had in the vital records for Ashford or Willington. I had no idea if either Ruth ever married or even survived childhood. I needed to look into their parents and siblings to see if there were any connections to Sharp family members.

Ruth Foster born at Willington was the daughter of Isaac Foster and Abigail. There is no surname given for Abigail in the records at Willington, and no information about Isaac’s parents. Isaac and Abigail had children Isaac (1741), Mary (1743), Ruth, and William (1750) in Willington. There is no marriage recorded here for Isaac and Abigail and there are no deaths recorded for any of the family in Willington.

In searching for this couple and their children, I found an Isaac Foster and Abigail buried in Hillsdale, Columbia, NY who could be possible candidates for this couple, however none of the children listed as born at Willington are buried with them. There is a son named Perla (Parla, Perle, Pearley) that is also attributed to this couple who is buried in the cemetery at Hillsdale.

Perla is listed in Tyringham, Berkshire, MA in birth records for his children. Perla’s oldest child was born at Tyringham in 1784, and mention of Perla’s birthdate as 1 March 1759 in Brimfield, Hampden, MA is also recorded there. In looking at records in Brimfield, there is a Perley Foster baptized there on 18 Mar 1759 and listed as the son of Isaac. Perla was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and states his birth date and place in his pension application. Land records in Brimfield record a land sale between Isaac Foster and Isaac Foster Jr in 1771. Isaac Jr would have been about 30 years old at that time.

A William Foster is also living in Tyringham with his wife and children – including a son Perla – at the same time as the older Perla Foster in the 1780s. Assuming that this is the William born in Willington to Isaac and Abigail, he would be about 10 years older than Perla and that seems likely as the births of his oldest children are 10 years earlier than Perlas. Perla the elder named two of his children Isaac and Abigail.

I have been unable to locate a will for either Isaac or Abigail, so these few records are the limit of the information I can uncover for this family at this time. Assuming that Isaac and Abigail’s daughter Ruth lived to adulthood, she most likely would have moved from Willington to Brimfield with her parents before her brother Perla was born in 1759. She would have been about 14 years old at the time of his birth. Perla states in his pension application that he remained living in Brimfield until his enlistment in 1776 at the age of about 17 years. It seems unlikely that Ruth would have stayed behind in Pomfret to marry Benjamin Sharp in 1771, or even that she would have moved back to Pomfret after leaving since the two areas are about 25 miles apart.

As a last resort, I turned to online family trees to see if anyone had a record I had missed, or even a story or explanation to give as to why they assigned parentage to Ruth Foster Sharp. There are many people who have assigned this Foster family to Ruth, but not one I could find has a source attached. The trees for Willington Ruth were quite problematic for me because most of them have Ruth and her siblings Isaac and Mary all living to the age of 100 years. While I am sure that is not an impossible feat, the odds are very small and I would think that there would be a story somewhere of these incredibly long lived siblings. Most have assigned death dates and locations to these siblings with no sources. Additionally most of these trees do not include mention of Ruth’s second husband Elisha Dunham.

I can’t completely rule out this Ruth Foster as the wife of Benjamin Sharp, but at this point she seems an unlikely candidate. In Part 2 of the search for the right Ruth, I will look at what can be found for Ruth Foster born at Ashford, CT.