A P.O.W. from Tripoli

This week, I am honoring my ancestor Peter De Lozier, my 4x Great-Grandfather in my father’s maternal line. Peter De Lozier, also written as Delozier and DeLozier and d’Lozier, was the son of Oliver DeLozier and Eleanor Erkells, the grandson of Peter “Petrus” Lozier and Fytje “Sophia” Zabriskie, the great-grandson of Nicholas “Claes” LaSueur, the great-great-grandson of Francois Le Sueur, a civil engineer from France who immigrated to New Amsterdam, and Jannatje Hildebrand Pietersen.

Peter was born in Clinton, Connecticut in 1786. He was a marine, serving aboard the U.S.S. Philadelphia when it ran aground in Tripoli harbor during the First Barbary War in October of 1803. The Americans found it impossible to keep the ship afloat while under fire. The crew, along with their captain, William Bainbridge, were all taken and held as hostages. The U.S.S. Philadelphia was anchored in the harbor as a gun battery for the Tripoli.

According to a letter from Captain Bainbridge to the Secretary of the Navy, dated the first of November, the crew made every attempt to keep the boat afloat by offloading the stores of guns and water but the ship was still too heavy. They cut the mast but that was of no help as well. After four hours of fire from the Tripoli gun boats, and seeing their own reinforcements approaching, the Captain and Officers lowered their ship’s colors and submitted to the enemy. Just after sunset, the ship was taken and the men were carried to shore after dark.

In his letter he states that he and the Officers, and their attendants, were quartered within the American Consular House and confined there during their imprisonment. Bainbridge expresses upset over the confinement inside the walls of the house, despite having given their word, their “parole of honor.” He says, “the remainder of the Crew will be supported by this Regency.” Peter DeLozier was one of those men. He was 16 years old. The men were held in the dungeons of an old castle fort in Tripoli, where they were fed 15 ounces of bread a day.

On the night of February 16, 1804, a small contingent of Marines got into the harbor and set fire to the U.S.S. Philadelphia so that the enemy could not use her against them. My ancestor was still being held hostage. On July 14, 1804, an attempt was made to destroy the enemy fleet, but the ship to be used was destroyed before it achieved it’s goal, with a total loss of the Captain and the crew. And still, the crew was held hostage.

In April and May of 1805, Ex-Consul William Eaton, a General, and U.S. Marine First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon led a force of 8 Marines and 500 mercenaries, made up of Greeks from Crete, Arabs, and Berbers, on a desert march from Alexandria, Egypt to Derna, in Tripoli. They captured the city and, for the first time, the U.S. flag was raised in a foreign land. This move led Yusuf Karamanli to sign a treaty to end hostilities.

According to Article 2 of the Treaty, the Bashaw of Tripoli agreed to return the Americans in his care to America as long as America agreed to return the captured subjects of the Bashaw to Tripoli. Tripoli held “Three Hundred Persons, more or less” and America held “One Hundred more or less” Tripolino Subjects, The Bashaw also required $60,000 in payment for the difference in numbers, which President Jefferson agreed to pay on June 10, 1805.

In this Treaty, the Jefferson administrative made a clear line between paying tribute as opposed to paying ransom. Some felt that buying sailors out of slavery was a fair way to bring end to a war, but General Eaton and others believed that the capture of Derna should have been used as a bargaining chip to obtain their release without payment.

At his release, my 4x Great-Grandfather Peter had been held in captivity for 30 months. Most of the captives had been used for hard labor in extremely foul conditions, exposing them to both vermin and disease. He was about 18 when he returned home in 1805.

He married Lucy Raymond four years later. The next year, their only child, Ordelia, was born in Whitestone, New York. By 1820, Peter De Lozier is listed as owning a cabinet-making business on Richmond Avenue in Lockport, New York.

From what we can gather, sometime between 1820 and 1825, at the age of 33, Peter De Lozier abandoned his family in Lockport and returned to life at sea. In 1825, Ordelia married Bailey Harrison Whitcher, her father’s apprentice in the cabinet-making business; it is likely that Ordelia married Bailey in order to keep the family business going as she was only 15. It’s also possible that Peter saw a connection between his apprentice and daughter and left feeling the family would be taken care of. And possible still that the engagement was already determined. The truth may never be known.

I don’t know what it would have been like to be a prisoner of war at such a young age, for so long, and then try to readjust to a normal life. We know enough about post traumatic stress disorder now that I can imagine the difficulty of surrendering to the expectations of a society that did not have to experience what you did. I don’t blame him, as some descendants might, for the darkness of what the family might have suffered by his absence. Sometimes life deals us hard cards and we do the best we can.

 Peter De Lozier died July 30, 1849 of cholera in Connecticut, where he was listed as a mason worker. He was 63. His wife Lucy lived with her daughter and son-in-law in Lockport, New York until her death in 1874.

The Story in the Life

Painting of Lockport NY, 1839, artist W.H. Bartlett

 For the last few weeks I have been writing out what I know about each of my ancestors into a chronological timeline. I have been doing historical research into the towns they lived in, as well as what was happening in the world-at-large. I enjoy the repetition of writing out information. It’s how I learn. It’s how I remember, puzzling names and dates into history. Their history is my history.

Slowly I am building flesh onto bone and adding tissue and shading where the information is weak or lacking. There are so many names and so many lives that stretch out behind me, so many human beings with dreams and wishes, hopes and regrets. People like me.

I am weaving the moments of their lives that are known with moments from history we can’t forget. I’ve been plugging in world events: wars, natural disasters, new discoveries, etc. I am witnessing the generations that saw the introduction of the telephone, or the first commercial airplane use for travelling. I am seeing the generations that survived or succumbed to plague and lost children to warfare. The emotional context is thick and rich and I can almost reach through the layers and touch them, hold their hands.

The World of Bailey and Ordelia Whitcher

Bailey Harrison Whitcher, my three-times Great-grandfather, was born in 1799, at the turn of the century, in Danville, Vermont. At the time, America was comprised of 16 states and John Adams was our second President. In 1810, Ordelia DeLozier was born, daughter of a man who survived being held hostage at the Battle of Tripoli, a man who owned a cabinet-making business in Lockport, New York.

During their childhoods, at the end of the War of 1812, after the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, in 1815, the world knew a year without a summer, where frosts and snow in the New England area through July and August devastated crops. New York declared that all slaves must be freed by 1827 and Mary Shelly published her work Frankenstein.

Bailey’s father died in 1817, and I assume this is when he began his trek to the West, seeking his own life in a new frontier. He was the third son of 12 children. The next time we see him is as an apprentice of Peter DeLozier, the cabinet-maker in Lockport, a town along the Erie Canal.

In 1821, Dr. Isaac Smith settled in the village as its first physician. Construction began on the locks that would master the 60’ drop in the Erie Canal in 1822 and a riot of lock workers resulted in the very first murder in town of a man named Jennings. A year later, the village of Lockport recorded its first earthquake, and two slave hunters from Kentucky came to town to arrest a black barber named Joseph Pickard. Instead, a mob of Irish canal workers drove them out of town empty-handed. The Quakers had a strong anti-slavery hold in Lockport.

Bailey was working as an apprentice for Ordelia’s father, which is where they must have met. They were married June 13, 1825 when he was 25 and she was 15 years of age. The year of their marriage, construction ended on the Erie Canal and the first boat went through the new lock system in October with great fanfare. Lockport was a stopping-point for General LaFayette’s tour, and he made a four hour visit to the village where he received a hero’s welcome for his part in aiding the colonies struggle in the Revolutionary War. In 1832, an epidemic of Asiatic cholera swept through the village.

By 1835, the small village had a population of 6,000 people and had bought its first fire engine, which held a barrel and a half of water. Its first hospital was constructed around the same time as, elsewhere in the country the Cherokee were being forcibly relocated from Georgia to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. The village population went up to 9,000 in the next five years. Elevated water tank toilets were commonly found in homes, not just hotels, and the world saw the first mass-production of vulcanized rubber condoms. Niagara County had it’s only hanging, after the first murder conviction of the County occurred in Lockport.

In the first thirty years of their marriage together, Bailey and Ordelia had sixteen children.  Their son Albert Tracy died at the age of 7 in 1836 and the twins, Edward and Edwin, died the same day they were born in 1838. My Great-great-grandmother, Emma Angeline Whitcher, was born in 1845. She was the twelfth of sixteen children.

The year of Emma’s birth, a telegraph office opened in Lockport and news of the Great Irish Famine was spreading. The famine killed a million people and led to the emigration of 1.5 million Irishmen. Soon after, the California Gold Rush boomed and Ordelia’s father and Bailey’s former employer, having abandoned his family to return to the sea, died of Cholera in Clinton, Connecticut, his birthplace.

In the 1850 census, Bailey Whitcher is listed as a shoemaker. During this year over 30,000 boats passed through the lock system to finish their journeys to Buffalo. The Village of Lockport had a population of 12,000 people and made use of gaslighting. A great fire swept the town in 1854, destroying 26 buildings and 10 acres of land. One of the buildings that burned was Bailey’s store, the first brick building in Lockport. Bailey was 55. His wife Ordelia was 45 and my ancestor Emma was 10. Lockport was a center of industry, thanks to the canal.

In the larger world, the first dirigible was invented by French engineer Henri Gifford and the first packaged toilet paper was sold right around the time that construction of Big Ben was finished in London, in 1858. The next year, Charles Darwin published his controversial work, On the Origin of the Species.

In 1859, Birdsill Holly, famous patent-holder and inventor of municipal tap water, fire hydrants and steam heating, moved to town. He was a friend of Thomas Edison, who visited Lockport often. In the 1960 Census, Bailey, age 61, was listed as a retired shoemaker. His mother-in-law, Lucy DeLozier was living with the family. His daughter Emma was 14. Susan B. Anthony spoke in town at the Universalist Church against slavery, while elsewhere in the world Louis Pasteur was proving his discovery of bacteria, of germs. Things were changing.

Then my forebears saw the start of the American Civil War. Lockport became the first official volunteer regiment to answer Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers. The same year, unrelated yet in tandem, the first condom advertisement appeared in the New York Times newspaper. Bailey and Ordelia’s son George Harrison Whitcher, joined the Michigan 7th regiment. Their son Orville Bailey Whitcher joined the New York 8th regiment. In 1862, Emma exchanged letters with Capt. Charles Johnson, George’s brother-in-arms, mentioning that the town’s first dead soldier returned home. It resulted in the first funeral procession through Lockport, with the fire engines draped in black fabric as they accompanied the body on a hero’s welcome home through town.

On July3, 1863, George Harrison Whitcher died at the Battle of Gettysburg. His body was never recovered. Lockport had grown enough to become the first city in Niagara County the following spring. A year after his brother’s death, Orville Bailey Whitcher died as a result of wounds he received in action in Virginia on July 14. Bailey and Ordelia lost two of their sons to the war.

Four months later, Emma Angeline Whitcher married Hiram King Wicker, a man who would become a prominent merchant and citizen in Lockport. 1865 saw some major changes. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth and the end of the Civil War came. Two months after the last battle, Bailey Harrison Whitcher died at the age of 65, having seen the death of four of his children.  

In the last 23 years of Ordelia’s life, her children and their families were flourishing. Her son-in-law Hiram King Wicker, my Great-great-grandfather, owned a Flour and Feed Store with his brother, served as Fire Chief for the city and was a high-ranking Mason in his lodge, denoted as a Past Eminent Commander. Ordelia’s mother died in 1874 at the age of 84. She had still been living with her daughter. Two years later, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

In Lockport, Birdsill Holly used his own home to prove his patent of central steam heat in dwelling spaces and was able to build a boiler large enough to heat 50 homes and one large school building. The City Council decreed an end to segregation in the school system. In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, the Nestle chocolate company formed and the first motion picture camera was invented.

Before her death, Ordelia remarried a man, surname Niles, as his fourth wife, but he died a year later. Lockport was wired for the use of incandescent lights, electric street lights were installed and the first door-to-door mail delivery began. At the other end of the state, construction on the Statue of Liberty was completed. Ordelia died two years later at the age of 77, in 1888. She outlived her first husband by 23 years. Neither Bailey nor Ordelia lived to receive the letter about the bit of rifle that had been dug up in Gettysburg belonging to their son, George Harrison in June of 1889. At the time of Ordelia’s death, there were 38 states ratified and Grover Cleveland was the 22nd President of the United States.

Relevant Post:

Emma’s Letters (published February 22, 2012)

The Zabriskie Mystery, Part 3




Zabriskie means "beyond the Birch."

 
The Polish Princess and the Frenchman

            I heard stories as a child, that we were Polish on my father’s mother’s side and that we were descended from the last King’s granddaughter, who fled to the new world in the wake of his execution. She fell in love with a Frenchman in Hackensack, NJ and their descendants slowly made their way to Western New York. While the story itself turned out not to be true, there was much more than a kernel of truth in it that I discovered in my genealogical research… connections I might not have made without having the story to push off from.

            In the previous two parts, Albrecht Zabriskie, Elusive Immigrant and Francois Le Sueur and the French Connection I wrote biographies for the men who immigrated to America in the 1600s and married here, setting the foundation for the story that would unfold. There is something about taking a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit right, that doesn’t make sense, and finally finding the key piece that changes everything that makes the journey worthwhile.

ZABRISKI

Albrecht Zabriskie was our ancestor from Poland, who befriended and lived among the Native tribes in New Jersey and was the interpreter for their trade with the Dutch. He and his wife Machtelt, married in the New World, had five children. Their oldest child, Jacob Albertsen Zabriskie, was baptised April 12, 1677.

At an early point in his childhood, Jacob was raised by the native Indians to learn their language and customs. This way, he would be able to act as interpreter for them in his father’s stead when Albrecht’s health declined. It is recorded in other documents that the Indian sachem had taken a shine to the young boy, through his friendship with Albrecht, and kidnapped him, though it was later a consensual exchange. In Rev. David Cole’s History of Rockland County he writes: “The oldest son, Jacob, was, with the consent of his parents, taken, when a small lad, by the Indians, to their settlement at Paramus, called in their dialect Palamah, signifying ‘wild turkey’ and grew up among the red men.”

In 1679 there is record of a very large acreage of land being given to Albrecht in exchange for an unnamed debt the Indians owed him, which very well may have been the kidnapping of his young son. Whether or not Jacob was willingly given or snatched will never be known, but the fact that he was raised among the Indians is a certainty, and history says he lived with them for 12 years.

When Jacob returned to his family, he was given his own bit of land. On September 20, 1706, Jacob married Ann Terhune, born in 1648 on Long Island to Albert Alberts Terhune and Hendricke Voorhis.  Jacob and Ann resided at Upper Paramus on part of Albrecht’s vast estate, on the land where the young boy had been raised by the Indians. Jacob Albertsen Zabriskie died in 1858, still living in Upper Paramus. Jacob and Ann had ten children. I am descended from their second child, their daughter Sophia, also called Fytje, born January 1707 in Hackensack, NJ.

LOZIER

We are also descended from, Francois Le Sueur’s fourth child, his son Nicholas, born in Esopus, NY. The child was baptized on June 10, 1668, an event witnessed by Jacob Barentszen Kool and Marritje Simons. Nicholas was only three years old when his father died, after which he was raised by his Dutch mother and her family, sharing their Dutch customs with him. He took the name Lozier, the Dutch pronunciation of the surname Le Sueur.

On May 10, 1691 Nicholas married Tryntje Slot in Bergen County, NJ. She was a daughter of Pieter Jansen Slot, former mayor of New Amsterdam, and Marritje Jacobse. After the wedding, Nicholas and Tryntje moved from Harlem to Hackensack, NJ where Nicholas had purchased a farm from agents of King George of England. This farm stayed in the Lozier family until 1930 and is shown on the Erskine maps used by General George Washington as Lurziers house and Lurziers hill.

Nicholas was admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church on April 4, 1702 and became a church deacon in 1713 and an elder in 1723. Nicholas and Tryntje had eight children. After her death he married Antje Direcksee Banta and had five more. He left a will in 1745 and is listed as a farmer and a shoemaker as well as a founder of the First Reformed Church in Hackensack. At some point he also owned a farm in Teaneck, NJ. His estate was probated on April 8, 1761 in Hackensack, NJ.

I am descended from Nicholas and Tryntje’s second child, Petrus, born June 7, 1697 in Hackensack, NJ. In records after his birth, he goes by the name of Peter.

ZABRISKIE MEETS LOZIER

Fytje Zabriskie was the granddaughter of a man who fled to a new world to escape military service and befriended and worked with the Natives. She was the daughter of a man who was raised by them. Peter Lozier was the grandson of a man whose brother-in-law had been killed by natives and who himself fought the Esopus Indians in defense of the colonial village built on their land.

They met somewhere in Hackensack and married on March 2, 1723 in NJ when she was 15 and he was 25. I like to believe that they were in love, but at the least I like to believe that they were happy, that the core of the story was birthed out of the relationship they had together. There must have been something special about them, that they launched a folk tale that survived down the generations of Loziers, Whitchers, Wickers and Rustons, to fall finally on my young ears.

The Zabriskie Mystery, Part 3 of 3

The Zabriskie Mystery, Part 2



Harlem, circa 1765, with Dutch Reform Church.

Francois Le Sueur and the French Connection

By uncovering our relation to the Polish immigrant Albrecht Zabriskie, and realizing the truth behind the story I had been told about the Polish princess who married the Frenchman, I discovered our unknown roots in France. We had another immigrant ancestor who was an early colonist in America, Francois LeSueur. The surname means “to toil” and in the sixteenth century, the LeSueurs were well established clothmakers in Rouen, France.

Francois was a civil engineer and surveyor, born in 1625 in a small town 3 miles south of Dieppe, Normandie, France. He was born in a town called Challe Mesnil that doesn’t exist on a modern map. There is a small farming village eight miles south of Dieppe called Colmesnil-Manneville that may be some evolution of where Francois was born. His parents are listed as Jean LeSueur and Marye Gruter, though that remains unverified.

On April 10, 1657, Francois and his younger sister Jeanne arrived in New Amsterdam and settled in Flatbush, Long Island. He was 31 years old. When they came to the New World as Huguenots, they were better accepted by the Dutch colonists than the English. The Huguenots were French Protestants whose belief in salvation through individual faith and an individual’s right to personally interpret scriptures threatened the hierarchy of the Catholic church. For centuries they had been persecuted and burned for their faith. In the 1600s over 200,000 French Huguenots fled the country, though emigration was illegal.

Francois was among twenty men, heads of families and freeholders, who, so that they might continue the language and customs of their homeland, applied to the Council of New Netherlands and the Directors General to be allowed to purchase land adjoining the Harlem River. On August 14, 1658, they broke new ground and named the settlement New Harlem, per request of the Dutch Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. I also want to add that much of the land for New Harlem was cleared, laid and built by African slaves who were employed as labor force for the Dutch company.

In 1659 Francois married Jannetje Hildebrand Pietersen in the Dutch Reformed Church. She was born in 1639 to Hildebrand Pietersen and Femmetje Albertse. In 1661 the civil engineer helped finish the engineering of New Haarlem. Francois, his wife and his sister moved to Esopus, NY early in 1663 because of high taxes in New Haarlem. From the book Harlem: its origins and early annals, authored by James Riker, 1881: “The three years allowed them (the people of Harlem settling on Montagne’s Flat) in which to pay for their lands had nearly expired, and with not a few it became a difficult problem how they should provide the 8 gl. per morgen which the government must have… It was plainly owing to the difficulty of raising this morgen-money, or morgen-gelt, as called…that a number of persons quit the town during this year (1662), to try their fortunes elsewhere; as well landholders as well others designing to become such. Of these were Coerten, De Pre, Du Four, Gervoe, and Le Sueur.”

From Harlem: its origins and early annals, by James Riker, “Francois Le Sueur, who left the town early in 1663, was the anc[estor] of the families of Leseur and Lozier, now mostly seated in N.Y. City and Bergen Co., N.J. Francois first lived in Flatbush after coming to Manhattan, and in 1659 m[arried] Jannetie, d[aughte]r of Hildebrand Pietersen, of Amsterdam; in which year Jannetie’s brother, Pieter Hillebrands, was captured by Indians at Esopus, but this did not deter her from removing there with her hus[band] Before going from H[arlem] he sold some of his effects, and his w[ife] bought “a little bed,” etc. at Sneden’s sale. Le Sueur’s s[iste]r Jeanne went with them to Esopus, and there m[arried] Cornelius Viervant, with whom she returned to H[arlem].”

Francois was a soldier in Captain Pawling’s Company during the Esopus Indian War. The Esopus were a tribe of Lenape Indians. The land they lived on, and shared with the colonists, was named after their tribe.

While in Esopus, Francois shows on record as being involved in a physical altercation with another colonist. On November 8, 1667 in Schout Beekman, Plaintiff vs. Francoys Le Shier, Defendant, “Plaintiff says that defendant has behaved very badly against Michiel Verbruggen, and had badly pushed and beaten him, and has hurt his ribs, on which account he has lodged a complaint, and demands a fine, in consequence of 100 gldrs. Defendant admits to having beaten Michiel Verbrugge with a stick so that he fell to the ground. The hon. Court orders defendant, for his insolence committed against Michiel Verbrugge, to pay a fine of 50 gldrs.”

 In a second case soon after, we see the end of the case in Michiel Verbrugh, Plaintiff vs. Francoys Le Schier, Defendant, “Plaintiff demands payment for doctor’s fee, pain, and lost time for seven days, on account of the maltreatment committed against him without reasons. Also demands wages for having taken care of the cows, alone, for seven days at six gldrs. per day. Defendant (Francois) also demands proof of his having killed Hend. Aertsen’s calf, of which plaintiff accuses him. Plaintiff says that he did not say that he killed said calf, but that he hung up the pieces of a skin. Defendant agrees to prove his assertion. Plaintiff is ordered to bring in a specified account of the doctor’s bill at the next session.”

Francois and his family moved back to New Haarlem in 1670 because his health was failing. He died the next year. From Harlem: its origins and early annals, by James Riker,“Le Sueur was living in 1699, but on Nov. 30, 1671, his wid[ow] bound out her son Hillebrand, eight years old. He was engaged by the deacons in 1673 to ring the bell at 3 gl. a year. Afterward the wid[ow] m[arried] Antoine Tilba, and by him had ch[ildre]n also…” Thusly, it is assumed that Francois died in 1671. Jannetje died in 1678.

I am descended from their fifth and last child, Nicholas (Claes) Lozier, born June 1668. The name Le Sueur changed with its descendants. Soma variations are Lozier, Leseur, Lesier and Lazier.

One last note: There is a persisting rumor readily found on the internet, that Francois LeSueur and his sister Jeanne had another brother, the painter Eustache Le Sueur. Eustace was one of the artists who founded the French Academy of Painting. It is possible that there is some familial connection, as the Le Sueur clothmakers sold fabric in Paris, Dieppe, and Rouen over the centuries, but Eustache was born and lived his life in Paris, while Francois and Jeanne were born outside of Dieppe and seemed to spend their lives there until they left for the new world.

The Zabriskie Mystery, Part 2 of 3