Introduction
The main purpose of the Leonards in America series is to provide a way for family researchers (mainly in America with a Leonard connection who are researching their family) to expand the identification of their ancestors and to know more about the people and times in which their ancestors lived. In my research, I started with the names of some Leonards who arrived early, in the 1600s.
Those early arrivals, “the patriarchs,” provided a starting point in my research. They were plentiful enough so that the family researchers would be likely to come across the patriarchs’ descendants in some part of America in the 1600s.
This Leonard Origins book begins in England, but I am using James Leonard of Taunton, Massachusetts to demonstrate how the research began and how it evolved.
There are at least seven Leonards who arrived in British North America during the period from 1630 to 1750. They are:
The starting point I used for research into the origins of James Leonard of Taunton 1620-1691 is what we know of his ancestry, best summed up by a deposition on the Leonard family history that his granddaughter, Hannah Leonard Deane, gave to his great-grandson, Judge Zephaniah Leonard:
“February 2, 1732-33, Hannah Deane, sister to Capt. James Leonard late of Taunton, subscribe the follow account of her relations, etc. –
1st Namely her Great Grandfather’s name was Henry Leonard
2nd Her own Grandfather’s name was Thomas Leonard
3rd Her Father’s name was James Leonard
Her Grandmother’s name was White
Her Mother’s name was Martin
Her Father’s brothers’ names were the eldest, 1. Henry Leonard
Margery
Joan
Sarah
James, her father, lived and died in Taunton, New England
Thomas was drowned at Piscataway
Henry went to New Jersey
Philip lived at Marshfield and died at Taunton
William and John never came out of England
Margery married Henry Samson of Ireland, Lt. of the City of Gallaway
Sarah died at New Salem
Joan never came out of England
Said Hannah said her eldest brother was Thomas Leonard, next James, Joseph,
Benjamin, John, Uriah
The sisters were Abigail and Rebecca
They all had children, save John, who died at about 20 years of age
Henry, who removed to New Jersey, lived and married his wife in Lynn in New
England, from thence he removed to Topsfield, then removed by way of Taunton
to the Jerseys. When he was in Taunton, he had seven likely children:
The eldest Samuel married Sarah Brooks
Nathaniel
Thomas married his wife in Virginia
Henry
John married A. Almy (originally)
The daughters, the eldest married Throgmorton; next Mary
So far Hannah Deane, originally Hannah Leonard, gave me an account.
Zephaniah Leonard”[2]
All of the above has been verified by other references[3] and are not in dispute. What is impressive is that this telling of a family history covers 5 generations over about 170 years, from the birth of Henry about 1550 to Hannah’s telling of it in 1732 and a rather wide dispersal of family members during a period when postal contact would have been minimal and the level of literacy in earlier years probably marginal.
Bill Barton, a descendant of Henry, pursued and collected available information on the origins of Henry and James.[4] He identified the parents of Henry, James, and the rest of the children as forgeman Thomas Leonard and Elizabeth White, listed in church records as their parents.
Barton did not find birth records for Henry and James.
He did find a baptismal record for James’ son Thomas, 8 Aug 1641 in Kinver, Staffordshire, which conforms to the Leonard Bible date of 3 Aug 1641.
He did not find a baptismal record for James’ second son, James, who must have been born in England, ca. 1643.
Thomas and Elizabeth’s third child was Margery Leonard, baptized 13 March 1624/5 in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire. According to Hannah Leonard Deane’s account, Margery married Henry Samson, Lt. Gov. (?) of the city of Galway, (?), Ireland.
May/Mary was baptized 12 September 1627 in Cleobury Mortimer and died the same year, daughter of Thomas Leonard.
William Leonard was baptized 30 November 1628 in Cleobury Mortimer, buried there the same month, son of Thomas and Elizabeth Leonard. Thomas was listed as “of the forge, fyner.”
Barton did not find a birth date for a second William abt. 1630. Hannah Deane said that he never left England. He may have been the William Leonard born in Crewcorne parish, Somersetshire.
Barton did not find a birth/baptism date for John Leonard. Hannah Deane reported that John never left England.
Philip Leonard was reported by Hannah Dean to have lived at Marshfield and died at Taunton.[5]
Barton did not find a birth/baptism record for Joan Leonard, b. abt. 1632. According to Hannah Deane, Joan never left England.
Sarah Leonard was baptized 23 February 1633/34 in Publow parish, Somersetshire, daughter of Thomas Leonard. Sarah settled with her second husband, John Thompson, in Elsenburgh, Salem Co., New Jersey, and died in New Salem. Her will mentions brothers Henry and James and confirms Hannah Deane’s assertion that Sarah died in New Salem.
Thomas Leonard was baptized 20 Apr 1636 in Publow parish and probably died in 1682-3 in New Jersey. He had no children.
The first Leonard to appear in New England was Solomon Leonard who arrived about 1637 and appears in the records of Duxbury and, later, Bridgewater. He is said to have come from Staffordshire and sometimes from Pontypool, although he is not related to the “iron” Leonards (different haplogroup).
The second Leonard to arrive appears to be John Leonard, whose name appears in the 1638 records of Springfield, MA. He was said to have been from Bilston, Staffordshire, England[7] He was followed by the ironworker brothers James and Henry in the 1640s who may have come from Pontypool. None of these records what ship brought them, where they came from in England, or who came with them, answers to all of which might provide clues as to their origins. Other speculative suggestions have Henry, James, and John arriving earlier than 1645 due to records of a Mr. Leonard having land set aside for him in Providence, Rhode Island in 1642. Another account gives the father of Henry, James, and John as a Nathaniel Leonard who was a sea captain and appointed over Avalon in Nova Scotia in 1624. This Nathaniel Leonard is also identified as the progenitor of the Maryland Leonards who set up iron works near Leonardtown, Maryland.
Philip Leonard, brother of Henry and James, arrived on a date unknown in early New England. He and his wife had no male children, although there may be living descendants whose ancestral origins can be verified through autosomal dna testing.
Rice or Richard Leonard settled in Rehobeth, MA, in the 1640s. He and his wife had several children, but the male line died out before 1700. There is no evidence indicating whether Rice Leonard was related to James or Solomon Leonard.
Several Leonards apparently arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1620 or 1630s. There was an effort to establish an ironworks near Jamestown in the 1630s, but the effort was terminated in 1635 after an attack by the Native Americans destroyed the works and killed most of the workers there.
……………..
There is a challenge for Leonard family researchers, and that is epitomized in the chapter here concerning the multiple Josephs in Middleborough in the late 1700s. There was a lot of duplication of given names among the early descendants of James, and that was compounded by the descendants of Solomon Leonard of Duxbury and John Leonard of Springfield, not to mention the descendants of James’ brother Henry. So just because you find that George and Hannah had a son Benjamin born about the right time, it doesn’t mean that the Benjamin you found is the Benjamin you’ve been looking for. You need to find further confirming information to be sure you have the “right” Benjamin with “correct” parents and the “correct” wife and children. The multiple Josephs chapter illustrates the problem and also some of the solutions available to resolve it.
If you search the Internet, you will find many erroneous entries where children have been ascribed to the wrong parents or where husband and wife are mismatched. In most cases, these are not deliberate attempts to mislead others nor to claim famous forebears. They are usually honest mistakes that one might expect in a swelter of identical names and incomplete information. At some point you will be faced with making a decision about what line of descent is yours, based on whatever incomplete information is available.
I have found numerous examples of earlier genealogies where some children were left out. Leaving out a child could potentially lead to missing a substantial branch of Leonards. It is likely my work has also missed some children, so please be aware of that possibility as you examine your own branch of the family.
Another challenge for researchers is the multiplicity of spellings of the name Leonard, particularly if one goes back into old English records. There was no virtue found in uniformity of spelling, and it depended upon the idiosyncrasies of individual clerks and how they translated to letters the local pronunciation of the name. Since most of our ancestors before the 1600s were illiterate and could not spell or check the name themselves, they were at the mercy of the clerks and their phonetic transcriptions. Here are some of the variations that appear in the records:
Leonard, Léonarde, Lennard, Leanerd, Lenard, Lenarde, Lenerd, Lennerd, Lennord, Leniyard, Lonard, Loneard, Linard, Linnord, Linett, Linatt, Lynett, Lennett, Lennett, Leanott, Lenot, Lennott, Lennit, Lenny, Lynny, and Linny.[8] Other variations the compiler has come across are Lienart, Lyonnarde, and Linyard. Sometimes the same person is referred to in the same church register by two different spellings. In US records, the most frequent spellings are Leonard, Lennard, Lenord, and Lenard. The Learned family of The Isle of Wight and Woburn, Massachusetts, use the same given names, but they are definitely not Leonards.
Imaginative spellings of our name do also occur in Colonial vital records in the 18th Century and in the United States Censuses.
Another problem for Leonard family researchers is that definitive proof of ancestry has not been found for certain branches of descendants. Perhaps the classic example is that of the parentage of Seth Leonard (1729-1774). ECL and GML spent time researching Seth, as did Harriotte Leonard Standish, a descendant. More recently, Wardwell C. Leonard, Jr. and I have spent years checking for definitive proof. Seth could be the son of Seth3 (Uriah2, James1) or William3 (Uriah2, James1) or perhaps someone else. Descendants should be on the lookout for definitive proof. Y-DNA results from several descendants verify that he was, indeed, a descendant of James Leonard.
Another Leonard mystery involves the William Leonard who married Sarah Bolton in 1709. No parentage has been proven for William, despite much research by ECL and GML. The above Seth Leonard has been ascribed to the couple, although I found no evidence to support that other than the Chesebrough family history. The couple’s other children appear in the Bridgewater VRs, but not Seth. The one direct male descendant of William and Sarah who’s been tested so far is in haplogroup R1b.
Job Mason Leonard, an entrepreneur and ironmaster in1900 and active in establishing a Leonard family organization at that time, traced his ancestry back to a Russell Leonard about the time of James Leonard’s sons or grandsons, but no record of a Russell Leonard can be found. It would appear he’s a descendant of William Leonard and Sarah Bolton, but that is by no means certain. His ironworking profession would seem to put him in the James Leonard tradition.
Constantine Leonard, who lived in Sussex Co. near the New York-New Jersey border is another mystery person whose parents have not been identified. He died in a forge accident, which makes one suspect of an ironworking Leonard origin. There’s a George Leonard who appears first in Pennsylvania in the late 1600s and has many descendants whose origins remain unknown.
Where I’ve found conflicting information or identified potential problems with a lineage, I’ve tried to include a flag in the notes section and some background to help with further research. As a family researcher with a concern for accuracy, one lives in fear of both perpetuating the errors of earlier researchers and perhaps creating some new ones.
This compilation also includes material from another manuscript, “The Leonard Dictionary” by Lois Leonard Badger and Harriot Leonard Standish (hereafter, The Leonard Dictionary).[9] Lois and Harriot did a wonderful job of collecting pieces of the Leonard puzzle and laying them out to use in putting the puzzle together.
Because of the prevalence and importance of iron refining and allied occupations among many generations of Leonards, I’ve included a chapter on some of the Leonards involved in specific ironworks. More research is necessary to identify them all, partly because old records tend to focus on ownership of ironworks rather than who was actually working there. Also, it is more difficult to find out information that was once common knowledge about people long since deceased, simple things such as skills or occupations. What’s dull about genealogy is a plain rendition of birth, marriage, and death dates, without information about what the people were really like, how they handled life’s problems, how they related to their communities, and what historical events were occurring that affected them.
Every Leonard should have a place in this compilation. In tracking Leonards, I’ve tried to use an “all present and accounted for” approach. That is, I’ve tried to resolve as many loose ends as possible. If they lived to adulthood, I’ve sought whether they married or died unmarried and had children. If a Leonard name appears, I try to find where it belongs in the genealogy, but not always successfully. There are, of course, some loose ends and, worse yet, dead ends.
Consistency in spelling was not a virtue practiced in America or England in the 1600s and 1700s, and perhaps not even well into the 1800s, not only for Leonard, but other names as well. I’ve tried to be consistent in using modern spellings of names like Phebe (Phoebe), Abigail (Abagail), Dean (Deane), Wetherell (Witherill), etc. The reason is not obstinacy on my part, but uniformity for search purposes in my own database. There is a concern, however, because Phebe, for example, may really have preferred to spell her name as Phoebe.
In the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, the Leonards regularly intermarried with some of the same families, such as the Kings, the Fields, the Deans, the Halls, the Hodges, the Whites, the Williams, the Drakes, the Cobbs, and many more. I’ve added one or two generations of these families where Leonard daughters connect because they often married into a later James Leonard line. Therefore, some of them appear twice in the genealogy, so I’ve cross-referenced the longer narratives about them to appear only once. The shorter narratives I’ve left doubled to avoid unnecessary thumbing back and forth.
There are also cases where James Leonard’s descendants married Solomon Leonard’s or John Leonard’s descendants, so there are people out there who share family trees and score a “double or triple Leonard.” If you keep copies of Manning Leonard’s work on descendants of Solomon Leonard of Duxbury and John Adams Vinton’s work on the descendants of John Leonard of Springfield, you’ll find it easy to track both Leonard lines.
Our usual approach to genealogy might be termed “vertical genealogy,” that is, we go “up the tree” from son to father or “down the tree” from father to son. But we miss the richness of “horizontal genealogy” as it was practiced in New England towns of the past, describing the interrelationships of those currently living next to or with one another. I was reminded of this last summer when I visited a childhood playmate who lived next door to where I lived and still lives there seventy-some years later. Fred Bodington is a walking encyclopedia of information about the townsfolk, just as many people were in my youth. He knows who the grandparents were of most of our contemporaries and who their grandchildren are, who’s related to whom by marriage, what family quarrels have led to people moving away or no longer on speaking terms, who worked where and for whom, etc. It’s something we’ve lost in mobile modern America, where our youth go off to college or the military and then wherever work opportunities, marriage, and happenstance take them. Genealogically, if we could reconstruct the “horizontal genealogy” of the time and place, we might solve some of the dead ends and mysteries we find in our research and sample the richness of life in those times. I’ve tried to do this in portions of my own ancestry, but it is very time-consuming to accomplish.
What impresses one in researching families back a few generations is the high rate of infant and child mortality in the years before 1900. It is sad to think of all those children who never reached adulthood and never had a chance to live, love, and leave their mark on the community. I have tried to include all children, whether they reached maturity or not, as a silent memorial to them and the sadness their parents felt.
There are, of course, stories that earlier generations tried to suppress and that some current generations might not want to revisit. After all, no one wants to find out great-great-grandpa was a horse thief or abandoned great-great-grandma for a younger woman or our favorite aunt was born less than nine months after her parents were married. When I was a child, my grandfather Leonard told me our ancestors were “pirates and worse” and that I shouldn’t delve into the family history. So I didn’t, until I got older and got curious about what was worse than pirates (I’ll never tell...). I’ve tried not to censor the past, but simply present whatever I’ve found. This is not meant to disrespect the deceased, who, after all, no longer have the opportunity to present their side of these matters. We have to start with what we have and dig deeper, if the situation seems to call for it.
Something new on the horizon is genetic genealogy, the tracking of family lines through codes and mutations in human dna. It is going to take time before this resource is fully developed to where it can provide definitive clues across one’s ancestry. We need a huge amount of data linking genealogy and dna patterns, and that will only come with time. Already, Y-DNA -- the direct male variety -- can be helpful in indicating which general family of Leonards one belongs to. James and Henry’s descendants test in haplogroup J2, while Solomon’s descendants test in haplogroup I2b. We’ve yet to find a direct male descendant of John Leonard of Springfield to be tested, and once several are found and tested, that may be an invaluable tool in deciding where to look for one’s Leonard ancestry. I’ve included a chapter specifically about dna testing in hopes later writers will be able to build upon it.
One of the pitfalls of genetic genealogy -- or Y-DNA, at least -- is that some people with non-Leonard surnames are testing as James Leonard descendants and other cases where Leonards have carefully documented their ancestry back to James, only to find that their Y-DNA pattern is not that of James Leonard descendants. The probability is that a “nonmarital event” occurred at some point in the past, perhaps adoption of orphaned children when both parents died or could no longer care for them or perhaps as the result of a nonmarital relationship. For this book, if the genealogy traces back to James Leonard, they’re members of our family, irrespective of dna. Tradition and family ties rule! We can’t undo what may have occurred five or ten generations back.
Genealogy is definitely a collaborative effort, a “wiki” if you will, but it does contain errors and perpetuate myths. One of my least favorite myths is the connection of James Leonard to the Sampson Lennard Dacre family, which ECL denied after communication with his British counterparts from that family and which just about every reputable genealogist has also denied over the years. There is always the chance someone will come forth with supporting evidence of a Dacre connection, but in the meantime many Leonard family researchers are misled by this oft-repeated myth. In any event, every researcher should check and double-check every link in their genealogical chain, particularly checking any authority that can’t indicate sources. Indeed, where you find listings in this compilation that aren’t tied to a source, you should treat them as hints and hypotheses until proven by documentation.
I am in touch with other Leonards working on their families’ histories -- Robert Leonard 1745 of Scotland, George Leonard 1688 of Pennsylvania, Samuel Leonard 1700 of Bristol, Somerset, England, Valentine Leonard of Virginia and North Carolina, etc. Perhaps, someday, there will be a whole shelf of books on Leonard families in libraries or a monstrous database of them in some central location.
The early Leonards in British North settled in a few areas, mainly Massachusetts and New Jersey. They migrated widely as the country expanded. A Leonard in a place like North Carolina can easily be a descendant of one of the early Leonards in Massachusetts. Because they used many of the same given names and their descendants lived in some of the same places, there can be errors in assigning people to descendants.
The attempts to trace these Leonards’ origins back to families in England are fraught with difficulties. Early records are not as available and are in more fragmented formats. Because they used many of the same given names and their descendants lived in some of the same places, there is a great possibility for error.
The Leonard Series has individual books on those Leonards in America where I have compiled an extensive amount of data from many sources. They are James, John, Henry and Solomon. The current book, Leonard Origins is Book 1 in the series and provides an overview of genealogy research and a more detailed look at Leonards in England and America.
Leonard Origins Book 1 in the series has three main sections.
First, starting with the Leonards, provides a background on the way research has and continues to be done by briefly describing the initial efforts on documenting James Leonard of Taunton, 1620. This section then expands to look at the different techniques and approaches to genealogical research.
Second, Leonards in England and Wales, compiles some of the available documentation on Leonards throughout England and Wales in the 1600s and 1700s. These records come from multiple sources including town and family histories on the web and church records on births, marriages, and deaths. They are organized by location and family when available. But they are mainly small clusters of names without a documented ancestor or listed children. It will be up to the interested reader to do more research on these names.
Third, Leonard Lines and Branches, provides more complete genealogical data on a number of Leonard families which do not have enough data to warrant their own book in the series. They may fit into the Leonard lines described above, but the data is not there to prove that. These family listings are organized by location.
[1]His research can be found on http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bart/LEONARD3.htm.
[2] NEHGS Journal, Vol. VII, 1853, p. 72. The information was supplied by John B. H. Leonard of Providence and Samuel Leonard of Philadelphia who at one time had the original papers.
[3] William Barton, “Pre-American Ancestry of Our Leonyard Ironworkers,” http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bart/LEONARD2.htm, downloaded 6/8/2004. A professional genealogist’s assessment of this can be found at Carl Boyer, 3rd, “Ancestral Lines,” 3rd edition, Santa Clarita, CA, 1998, pp. 371-376.
[4] Ibid.
[5] His life and times are reported in Winifred L. Holman, Descendants of Samuel Hills” A Supplement to the Hills Family in America (1957), pp. 67-71.
[6] W.D. John and Anne Simox, Pontypool & Usk Japanned Ware with the Early History of the Iron & Tinplate Industries at Pontypool (1953/1966), p. 9.
[7] Samuel Leonard Parsons, Genealogical Record of the Families of Parsons and Leonard,1867, p. 32. “Supposed to have emigrated with two brothers…” From the records, he appears to have come alone. His descendants test in haplogroup J2, with James and Henry.
[8] Robert Leonard, The Origins of the Leonards, undated manuscript. Robert lives in Bitten, Somersetshire, near the town of Bristol. He’s traced the Leonards in his family in that part of England from the 1600s.
[9] Lois Leonard Badger and Harriot Leonard Standish, “The Leonard Dictionary,” two volumes, typescript, 1930, the Old Colony Historical Society, Taunton, MA and also on microfilm at the LDS Library, Salt Lake City, UT.