Surname Saturday ~ Rose of New York and New Jersey

My immigrant Rose ancestor is Joseph Rose. It has been theorized that he was born about 1735 in England. I have been contacted a couple of times through my tree on ancestry.com asking me about his parentage but I don't have any information about where in England he was born or who his parents are.

NYC Directory for 1786, page 68
(NYC: H. J. Sachs & Company, 1905)

I also don't have information on when he immigrated to America, but he was in New York by 1786, when he is listed as a distiller in the NYC Directory for that year. (I don't know who "Rose, J. hair-dresser" is listed below "Rose, Joseph, distiller.")

It is said that he was a sea captain and a merchant.

His wife was Barbara Egburson / Egbertse, of Dutch ancestry. They were married in New York City on July 31, 1766.

His will can be found at FamilySearch.org under New York, Probate Records, 1629-1971. (Liber 46 p. 513 fol. old numbers, or p. 473 fol. new numbers.) (Thank you to fellow geneablogger and distant cousin, Leah, of Leah's Family Tree, for letting me know about this will.) The will was signed on March 20, 1805. He mentions his "beloved wife" Barbara and children, Mary (widow of Francis Lynch), Joseph, William, Isaac, Elizabeth, Ann, and youngest child, Samuel (who appeared to be the only one not yet 21 years old). His will also mentions that he has "certain claims against the British and French Governments" which he hopes will become part of his estate for his heirs.

Joseph Rose died February 28, 1807, less than a year after his wife, who died on April 13, 1806. They are buried together in New York City's Trinity Churchyard. See the Find A Grave memorial for Joseph and Barbara.

I descend from their son Joseph, believed to be his eldest son.

Generation 2: Joseph Rose was born about 1770 in New York and died on November 21, 1852, in Matawan, Monmouth County, New Jersey. He married Frances Stanton (daughter of Lodowick Stanton and Thankful Stanton) and they had six children. His wife died in November 1815. Her death is noted in the November 18, 1815, issue of the Weekly Museum, a New York newspaper (1788-1817) found at GenealogyBank.

Matawan is in red; Monmouth County
is gray and its location in NJ is at right.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

This Joseph was a merchant in New York, but by 1850, he was in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where I found him, 80 years old, living alone in Raritan in the U.S. Federal Census for that year.

It appears that he and his wife had six children who were all baptized at St. Mark's in New York City on April 4, 1816: Frances Maria, Joseph, William (or Willet?), Cordelia, Mary, and Lodowick.

Joseph died in 1852 and has a memorial at Rose Hill Cemetery in Matawan, New Jersey.

I descend from their son Joseph.

Tombstone Tuesday ~ Aunt Lukie

My second great aunt Ruth Lyman Greeley Copeland died on November 21, 1975. A kind Find A Grave volunteer had set up memorials for my Copeland family members in Calais Cemetery, Calais, Maine, where my great-grandfather Lowell Copeland is buried with his siblings and parents. See Ruth Copeland's Calais Find A Grave memorial. The following photos are courtesy of Find A Grave volunteer Susan E. and were taken at Calais Cemetery, Calais, Maine.

Charles T. 1860-1952

Lowell 1862-1935

his wife

Ethel G. 1875-1931

his wife

Ruth G. 1878-

Katherine 1874-1924

wife of

Wm. H. Dunbar 1862-1935

Note that Lowell's second wife, Ruth G., is noted with a birth year and not a death year.

Well it turns out that she is actually buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois, with her parents. See her Chicago Find A Grave memorial.

Photo courtesy Find A Grave volunteer R Lerch

Ruth Greeley

Copeland

July 14, 1878 - Nov. 21, 1975

I previously wrote about the plot card for this lot. If you didn't know the family, you might wonder why a Copeland was buried in the Greeley lot in Chicago. Well, now you know: Samuel Sewall Greeley (1824-1916) was her father.

Matrilineal Monday ~ Aunt Lukie, Part 2

Aunt Lukie in my
grandparents' wedding photo

I summarized the records I found about my second great aunt, Ruth Lyman (Greeley) Copeland, in last week's post. As you may remember, she married her sister Ethel's husband, Lowell Copeland, after her sister died, becoming not only my second great aunt, but my step-great-grandmother.

My mother has many memories of her step-grandmother, whom she knew as Aunt Lukie, who died when my mother was 40. She is remembered as a somewhat odd and not particularly nice woman.

When my mother was growing up in Pittsburgh, Aunt Lukie would periodically come and visit the family. My maternal grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland, was Aunt Lukie's nephew and step-son. After her sister Ethel died, Lukie agreed to come to Princeton (N.J.) and "keep house" for her brother-in-law, my great-grandfather Lowell Copeland. She said it didn't "look good" for them to live together, so they got married.

My great-grandfather, Lowell Copeland, died on Christmas Eve, 1935. Every Christmas after that, Aunt Lukie would write her step-son, my grandfather, a letter. I don't know what was in these letters, but my mother remembers her father saying that "Aunt Lukie drove my father to an early grave."

When Aunt Lukie came to visit, Grandfather would have a golf game... or would go out to weed the garden... or prune the rose bushes... or anything to get out of the house. "He found every excuse in the book to be as far away from Aunt Lukie as possible" as my mother remembers it. He did not like his step-mother and wanted to spend as little time with her as possible. As my mother told me: "Grandfather couldn't stand her."

My mother's maternal grandmother, Marguerite Lysle, whom I have written about before, was born in 1876, and therefore only two years older than Aunt Lukie, born in 1878. (You can see both of them in my grandparents' 1931 wedding photo.) However, after Marguerite had a heart attack in 1952, every time Aunt Lukie would ask about Grandmother's mother, she would ask in such a way that implied that Marguerite was a great deal older, but she was only two years older than Aunt Lukie, which infuriated my grandmother Helen.

My mother remembers Aunt Lukie telling her and her sister when they were young that "You girls don't have to worry about spilling any secrets to me, you talk so fast and you mumble so much I can't understand a word you say."

Aunt Lukie spent her later life in Framingham, Massachusetts, close enough for my mother and her to visit with each other. She died in 1975 at 97 years old.