Thursday, August 21, 2014

Treasure Chest Thursday - Post 228: Quaker Church Birth Record for Martha Gach

It's Treasure Chest Thursday - time to look in my digital image files to see what treasures I can find for my family history and genealogy musings.

The treasure today is the Birth record of Martha Gach (1729-???) in the Quaker record book for woodbridge, New Jersey.


There are 29 entries on this one page in this Quaker record book from the Rahway/Plainfield, New Jersey Monthly Meeting in the 1720-1740 time period.  25 of the entries are for Woodbridge families, plus two entries from Philadelphia, and two from Piscataway. 

The item of interest to me is on the left-hand page of the image above.  The columns and their entries are:

*  Name of child:  Martha Gach
*  Parents:  Daughter of Thomas & Mary
*  Place of birth:  Woodbridge
*  Time of birth:  11 Mo 29 1729
*  Sex:    F  

I actually have about ten persons in the entries on this image in my database - Gach, Bloodgood, Fitz Randolph and Smith, but Martha is my only ancestor!  

The source citation for this record is (using the RootsMagic source template for "Church Records *(online image copies):

U.S. Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1994, Rahway and Plainfield [N.J.] Monthly Meeting, Births 1705-1901, Deaths 1705-1908, Marriages 1712-1885, Births, page 8, Martha Gach entry; indexed dataase and digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 3 July 2014).

The record gives the birth date as 11 Mo[nth] 29 1729.  Ancestry.com indexed this as 29 January 1729.  Other books I've seen record the date as 29 November 1729.  For this Quaker record book, i'm not sure which date is correct.  The Gregorian to Julian calendar conversion didn't occur until 1752 for English records.  Are there any Quaker  record experts in Genea-Musings land?

There are two other Gach birth records on the image above - Sarah Gach (born 12 Mo 25 1727) and Annah Gach (born 12 Mo 18 1732).  The mother of Martha and Sarah is given as "Mary" but the mother of Annah is given as "Elizabeth."  Thomas Gach married Elizabeth Bloodgood on 17 August 1721 in Woodbridge, and they had 12 children from 1722 to 1744.  I think that the record for the mother of Sarah and Martha should be Elizabeth, not Mary.  

Martha Gach (1729-????) is my 5th great-grandmother, daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth (Bloodgood) Gach.  She married Samuel Fitz Randolph (1730-????) in 1750 in Woodbridge, and they had two daughters, including my 4th great-grandmother, Tabitha Randolph (1752-1841), who married Stephen Cutter (1745-1823) in 1768.

The URL for this post is:

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver



No comments: